Hey, this is a link that might help you
You can upload images and than dowload a file where the image is spread out over multiple A4 papers which can afterwards be taped together. This make it easier to make A3 sized maps from home
I presently use Photoshop. Their Creative Cloud can now be paid for on a monthly subscription model (though requires a contract). If you're looking for something free, GIMP (https://www.gimp.org/) is open source and has a comparable tool set to Photoshop.
You say "besides Photoshop," but do you mean you don't want to use any image editing software? There are free ones out there that are just as good, and in many people's opinion, even better.
I use GIMP. It's a poor man's free version of PS. There should be dozens of online tutorials.
Did you try downloading it a second time? I downloaded the file, and it works for me. Nevertheless, I will upload it to another place for you. Stand by, I'll edit this comment with a mirror.
They are free for an other 6 hours or so, if you miss the deal there is still a "10 free map pack". In the PDF version you can choose which kind of grid you want (in the layers menu). You can print them as a "poster" to get them on a 4 A3 sheet.
The artist as a Patreon account if you feel inclined to contribute.
give your thanks to /u/Rushmik for those!
https://foundryvtt.com/packages/parallaxia/
I've never used it but I've heard a lot about this. I realize it's not a gif and may not be what you're looking for.
It's supposed to be tiny. Map was requested by my nephew - "i need a small map for brawl outside of tavern" . It's a part of bigger map, i just need change some textures etc. Have no time. You can check later (maybe week) here or here
It's not that hard to produce larger maps and slice them up for home printer use. Posterazor makes it dead easy.
Awesome map, by the way. Fire effects are hard to do well.
Glad you like it! I used a free Photoshop alternative called "Krita" though any similar software (Gimp, Photoshop) should be able to handle it.
For the color scheme I found a picture that had the general atmosphere I wanted and ran it through a pallet generator called "colormind". I then only used these colors and black only for the line art.
I made a custom brush in Krita that was essentially just the default brush with a hatched texture to make it feel like a pencil. I used this for all the line work. The line work is on a multiply layer with 100% opacity. The walls, floor tiles, rubble and stairs lines are all different layers.
I then began coloring by creating layers filled with each color and adding a transparency mask. The mask makes it very easy to blend layers. I created the shadow by using the darkest color from my palette and adding box gradients to the transparency mask.
I added texture by using brushes on the transparency masks. I built up the detail with multiple layers.
I used a (cheap) Wacom tablet but it was mostly for the line art, if you don't have access I suggest sketching by hand and then scanning!
Haha, I used GIMP, which is a free photoshop alternative available here: https://www.gimp.org/. It's pretty easy, just find some base texture files, put them on new transparent layers, erase stuff to make roads, floors, etc. Then populate the map with decorations. The "drop shadow" filter is really helpful for adding depth to walls and other stuff. You can find some tutorials online for a lot of it.
I don't mean to be negative, Reddit is a public forum and I was steering you to the creator's own words. Here's the specific copyright they list:
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/
Sounds like OP is an accomodating guy though so I hope it works well for y'all!
Like this map? It's included in our pre-release module on Patreon at https://www.patreon.com/stevesscenes for testing and feedback. We've also included Hither random encounter maps from Wild Beyond the Witchlight.
Also worth checking out our free module at https://foundryvtt.com/packages/steves-scenes which includes many Waterdeep and Wild Beyond the Witchlight maps, as well as a few other D&D module maps
All feedback is welcome!
Most art assets I've collected mainly are from Dundjinni boards/forums which people placed up for other to use freely (back when dundjinni was the only tool other than photoshop). Also noticed users still post there (see link below).
Now you should give credit if possible as it is appropriate, but the Dundjinni users I knew/know would not mind users re-using their art work for maps.
But it's still nice to give credit.
First of all: Have you taken a look at the tutorial in the sidebar? https://www.reddit.com/r/battlemaps/comments/4020zy/creating_your_own_battlemaps_a_simple_tutorial_v2/ It might help you, if you are starting out with creating maps in photoshop and gives a few hints about where to find the ressources you need, especially if you are starting from the ground up.
For pirate ships, I would recommend your first step should be a simple google image search of "ship dundjinni". There's a ton of very good images there that you might be able to use. Personally I like the one from here: http://www.dundjinni.com/forums/uploads/Bogie/53E_PirateShip-Labeled_bg.jpg but there are a lot of other good options. If you want to add cannons and stuff, just google "cannon dundjinni" and add them in photoshop.
Mostly collected from here: http://www.dundjinni.com/forums/forum_topics.asp?FID=8&PN=0 I think. There's a big asset pack you can find called CUSAC or something. I can't recall and can't find it ATM.
Have you already tried all the resources / image packs I've described in step 1? There really are quite a lot of images around. Although, good buildings for a town are somewhat harder to find. At least if it's just roofs you're looking for (and for a typical city this is quite fine), you can try here http://www.dundjinni.com/forums/forum_posts.asp?TID=8929
If you are just starting with photoshop, I'd recommend to start simple. Use only premade images, scale them (ctrl+T) to your needs and mash it all together. Also, play around with the layer effects for some surprising results :)
Photoshop CS5 and on have a feature call content-aware fill. It excels at automatically removing items from an image. Some of them will need some touching up, but it can do great things.
To use it, use the lasso (or whatever selection tool is appropriate), to select the item to be removed with just a little bit of a buffer. Then right-click and choose fill. Select Content-Aware from the fill dialogue, and press okay. If it doesn't look good you can try it again, it is a bit random so sometimes you'll get different results. Generally, even if it isn't quite right, it is much easier to patch up manually than it was before.
The icons are not mine - they are taken from the excellent game-icons.net site, which offers them for free with a very permissive license. You can search for specific ones there, or just download a huge image with them all.
Color theory is something usually learned in art school, but some people just have a great sense of it. OP's color choices demonstrate they have that talent.
If you look at his palette of greens, the shades he picked all work together, as do the hot colors for the fire. Then the fire / light hot colors and foliage / water cools all work together as a larger set. Then the floor colors (colored greys / browns) work with the warms and cools tying the whole piece together visually.
I imagine there's good resources online to learn it, but I'm not sure what they are. You can kind of see it visually on an app like this: http://paletton.com/#uid=1000u0kllllaFw0g0qFqFg0w0aF
Good luck!
Map made with Dungeondraft using assets from 2-minute and Forgotten Adventures
To download this map please visit my website where I have over 60 Free Battle Maps.
For other LMoP battle maps I have available to download:
Cragmaw hideout, Cragmaw Castle Goblin Ambush, Redbrand Hideout, Old Owl Well, Agatha's Lair, The Wave Echo Cavern, Sleeping Giant Tap House and Wyvern Tor
I don't have any paywall for any of my Battle Maps so please consider supporting me by purchasing my Fantasy book, The Tome of Syyx, so I can keep providing more free content for RPG Fans.🙂
Wyvern Tor: Lost Mine of Phandelver Battle Map | 37 x 37
Map made with Dungeondraft using assets from 2-minute and Forgotten Adventures
To download this map please visit my website where I have over 60 Free Battle Maps.
For other LMoP battle maps I have available to download:
Cragmaw hideout, Cragmaw Castle Goblin Ambush, Redbrand Hideout, Old Owl Well, Agatha's Lair, The Wave Echo Cavern and Sleeping Giant Tap House
Coming soon: Thundertree Ruins
I don't have any paywall for any of my Battel Maps so please consider supporting me by purchasing my Fantasy book, The Tome of Syyx, so I can keep providing more free content for RPG Fans.🙂
The Sleeping Giant Tap House: Lost Mine of Phandelver Battle Map | 30 x 30
Map made with Dungeondraft using assets from 2-minute and Forgotten Adventures
To download this map please visit my websitewhere I have over 60 Free Battle Maps.
For other LMoP battle maps I have available to download:
Cragmaw hideout, Cragmaw Castle Goblin Ambush, Redbrand Hideout, Old Owl Well, Agatha's Lair, and The Wave Echo Cavern
Coming soon: Wyvernr Tor, and Thundertree Ruins
I don't have any paywall for any of my Battle Maps so please consider supporting me by purchasing my Fantasy book, The Tome of Syyx, so I can keep providing more free
Map made with Dungeondraft using assets from 2-minute and Forgotten Adventures
To download this map please visit my website where I have over 60 Free Battle Maps.
For other LMoP battle maps I have available to download:
Cragmaw hideout, Goblin Ambush, Redbrand Hideout, Old Owl Well, Agatha's Lair, and The Wave Echo Cavern
Coming soon: Wyvernr Tor, Sleeping Giant Tap House, and Thundertree Ruins
I don't have any paywall for any of my Battel Maps so please consider supporting me by purchasing my Fantasy book, The Tome of Syyx, so I can keep providing more free content for RPG Fans.🙂
Map made with Dungeondraft using assets from 2-minute and Forgotten Adventures
To download this map with High resolution please visit my website where I have over 50 Free Battle Maps.
For other LMoP battle maps I have available to download:
Goblin Ambush, Redbrand Hideout, Old Owl Well, Agatha's Lair, and The Wave Echo Cavern
Coming soon: Cragmaw Castle, Wyvernr Tor, Sleeping Giant Tap House, and Thundertree Ruins
I don't have any paywall for any of my Battel Maps so please consider supporting me by purchasing my Fantasy book, The Tome of Syyx, so I can keep providing more free content for RPG Fans.🙂
Map made with Dungeondraft using assets from 2-minute and Forgotten Adventures
To download this map please visit my website where I have over 50 Free Battle Maps.
Please consider supporting me by purchasing my Fantasy book,The Tome of Syyx, from Amazon so I can keep providing more free content for RPG Fans.
Map made with Dungeondraft using assets from 2-minute tabletop and Forgotten Adventures
Day night and ground/2nd/3rd floor available
To download this map please visit my website where I have over 50 Free Battle Maps, 20 pieces of fantasy art, and a free-to-use VTT token maker,
I don't have Patreon/Paywall for most of my content, so if you like my free resources, please consider supporting me by purchasing my Fantasy book, The Tome of Syyx, from Amazon so I can keep providing more free content for RPG Fans.
Map made with Dungeondraft using assets from 2-minute tabletop and Forgotten Adventures
Day night and ground/2nd/3rd floor available
To download this map please visit my website where I have over 50 Free Battle Maps, 20 pieces of fantasy art, and a free-to-use VTT token maker,
I don't have Patreon/Paywall for most of my content, so if you like my free resources, please consider supporting me by purchasing my Fantasy book, The Tome of Syyx, from Amazon so I can keep providing more free content for RPG Fans.
Map made with Dungeondraft using assets from 2-minute and Forgotten Adventures
Footprints and no footprints version available
To download this map please visit my website where I have over 50 Free Battle Maps, including maps of The Old Owl Well, Red Brand Hideout, and Wave Echo Cavern.
I don't have Patreon/Paywall for most of my content, so if you like my free resources, please consider supporting me by purchasing my Fantasy book, The Tome of Syyx, from Amazon so I can keep providing more free content for RPG Fans.
Last Stand Battle Map | 30 x 25
Map made with Dungeondraft using assets from 2-minute tabletop and Forgotten Adventures
To download this map please visit my website where I have over 50 Free Battle Maps, 20 pieces of fantasy art, and a free-to-use VTT token maker,
I don't have Patreon/Paywall for most of my content, so if you like my free resources, please consider supporting me by purchasing my Fantasy book, The Tome of Syyx, from Amazon so I can keep providing more free content for RPG Fans.
Temple Ruins Battle Map | 37 x 47
Map made with Dungeondraft and assets from 2-Minute Tabletop and Forgotten Adventures
To download this map please visit my website where we have over 50 Free Battle Maps, 20 pieces of fantasy art, and a free-to-use VTT token maker,
I don't have Patreon/Paywall for most of my content, so if you like my free resources, please consider supporting me by purchasing my Fantasy book, The Tome of Syyx, from Amazon so I can keep providing more free content for RPG Fans.
Orc Territory Environs, Region Battle Map
Map made with Inkarnate
To download this map please visit my website where we have over 50 Free Battle Maps, 20 pieces of fantasy art, and a free-to-use VTT token maker,
I don't have a Patreon/Paywall for most of my content, so if you like my free resources, please consider supporting me by purchasing my Fantasy book, The Tome of Syyx, from Amazon so I can keep providing more free content for RPG Fans.
Eddie Munson's Trailer in the upsidedown Battle Map | 21 x 17
Map made with Dungeondraft and 2-minute tabletop assets.
To download this map please visit my website where I have over 50 Free Battle Maps, 20 pieces of fantasy art, and a free-to-use VTT token maker,
I don't have a Patreon/Paywall for most of my content, so if you like my free resources, please consider supporting me by purchasing my Fantasy book, The Tome of Syyx, from Amazon so I can keep providing more free content for RPG Fans.
Skull Pit Battle Map | 20 x 20
Map made with Dungeondraft and 2-minute tabletop assets.
To download this map please visit my website where I have over 40 Free Battle Maps, 20 pieces of fantasy art, and a free-to-use VTT token maker,
I don't have a Patreon/Paywall for most of my content, so if you like my free resources, please consider supporting me by purchasing my Fantasy book, The Tome of Syyx, from Amazon so I can keep providing more free content for RPG Fans.
Demon Gate Battle Map | 30 x 30
Map made with Dungeondraft and 2-minute tabletop assets.
Day and night versions are available.
To download this map please visit my website where I have over 40 Free Battle Maps, 20 pieces of fantasy art, and a free-to-use VTT token maker,
I don't have a Patreon/Paywall for most of my content, so if you like my free resources, please consider supporting me by purchasing my fantasy book, The Tome of Syyx, from Amazon so I can keep providing more free content for RPG Fans.
City Amphitheater Battle Map | 62 x 48
Map made with Dungeondraft and 2-minute tabletop assets.
Day and night versions are available.
To download this map please visit our website where we have over 40 Free Battle Maps, 20 pieces of fantasy art, and a free-to-use VTT token maker,
I don't have a Patreon/Paywall for most of my content, so if you like my free resources, please consider supporting me by purchasing my fantasy book, The Tome of Syyx, from Amazon so I can keep providing more free content for RPG Fans.
Map made with Dungeondraft and 2-Minute Tabletop assets. Light and dark versions available with and without grids.
To download 40+ free maps including this one, please visit my website.
I don't have a Patreon/Paywall for most of my content, so if you like my free resources, please consider supporting me by purchasing my novel, The Tome of Syyx, from Amazon so I can keep providing more free content for RPG Fans.
I know it's really cool to use ❤️
Roll Initiative DM Notebook on Amazon by A Couple of Drakes:
Thank you!
Roll Initiative DM Notebook on Amazon by A Couple of Drakes, fantastic value x
Link: https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/1659327482/ref=cm_sw_r_apan_glt_i_DQ6216WA512RV1KZTZMT?_encoding=UTF8&psc=1Roll Initiative DM Notebook on Amazon by A Couple of Drakes, fantastic value x
I got it from Amazon, at a really decent price too tbh.
Hit me up on Discord, Dark-Lark#0742, but you might want GIMP_2.8 as that's what I use. I think it's very much like the new one, but I didn't like some things about 2.10 . If you don't want me to walk you threw it, you can Google "How to use GIMP" and I'm sure there are tons of YouTube vids on it.
https://www.gimp.org/downloads/ is super useful. I edit pictures all the time with that (mostly tokens, but sometimes maps), and if you take the time to learn it opens the door to a whole new level of kool things you can make.
In that case, GIMP is probably your best bet.
Anything else that includes tools specific to map making is going to be paid or subscription based unfortunately.
I’m currently waiting with baited breath for DungeonDraft to release a port to MacOS. The other one I hear consistently good things about and isn’t especially expensive is Dungeon Painter Studio on Steam. It’s only $14.99 USD, but unfortunately for me it’s also Windows only.
I don't use Inkarnate. I drew this entire map by hand, in Krita! It's just black pencil sketch with a bluish off-white painted underneath, covered with some light blue shading in the form of an Overlay blend layer.
I'm pretty sure VTTs can use JPGs, since that's what I use for all my maps (on the rare occasion when I use battlemaps myself), but if that's not what you mean, I'm not sure what a VTT file is. But I don't make my maps with Dungeon Draft (assuming that's what you mean) - I draw them all in Krita! Patreon just houses my subscriber content, including the raw .kra files with the intact layers and stuff.
I know this post is a bit old, but I wanted to add my process.
I keep my map names generic until l I need to use them in a campaign.
My naming convention is type-descriptor-size.So a map will be shown as battle-cave-24x28. I don't use folders and just rely on this naming convention. I then copy the map to my campaign folder and give it a cool name and keep the dimensions. So battle-cave-24x28 becomes Gorak's Cavern-24x28*.*****
I found that keeping the dimensions helps out immensely when importing the image to roll20.net or some other virtual tabletop.
I loaded it up in Pixlr (online photo editing suite) then created new empty layer where I just scribbled in white with the paintbrush tool set to max softness. Then I selected the layer, reduced its opacity until I liked it, and then did a second layer on top the same way for added depth.
To keep the fog from encroaching on the inside of the hut, once I was done I just used the free-hand selection tool and to delete any overlapping fog. Not perfect or ideal, but it works well enough.
Hope that helps!
If you have even just a little bit of artistic capability and a pen tablet, then Krita. It's free and pretty much on par with Photoshop for drawing capabilities.
I like hand drawing my maps but I don't have the time to make them too detailed. Gives them a bit if charm. You can find examples of lots of styles you can just copy for drawing your own so it's pretty easy even if you can't draw very well, like me. The pen tablet has a cost but if you go for a budget one they work just fine and you can find a used one for under $30 these days. Wacom is the long-standing top brand but Huion is the new contender who makes nearly as good of stuff for much cheaper. Their latest offerings don't use batteries in the pens now that Wacom's patent on that expired which is really nice.
Thank you!
I drew it all entirely within Krita, a free alternative to Photoshop.
I started with the line art and then painted in the colours and the details before doing some post-processing to get the final result.
Usually, I'll draw it on paper first and scan it in, but I wanted to try an entirely digital workflow on this one.
I don't have a storefront or anything so... I'll just send it to you. If you feel so inclined, you can send me a buck but it's not worth worrying about. Hope you enjoy it!
For something quick have a look at: http://maps.stamen.com https://openmaptiles.org/styles/
They both apply different filters and styles to open street map.
If not what you are looking for, they may help you with your searching.
Good luck.
You're bound to find something useful on the Dundjinni user forums. Try a search for "restaurant" in the thread title. Is this the sort of thing you are after?
I'm planning on running one too and trust me, Wuxia resources have been very hard to find. Personally I think Roll20's Village Tiles: Historic Japanese Village Pack is worth buying, as it gets you rooftops that are Japanese themed.
As for freebies, if you're not opposed to downloading and them uploading to roll20, I find the old Dunjinni Software Forums to be a great community resource. It had shut down for several years but it's back up again. Just searching in the User Creation forum with a keyword like Asian, Japanese/Japan, Oriental, China/Chinese etc will get you good results. Or just search for an item you are trying to find directly.
You can also try doing this in roll20's Art Library Search, but honestly anything it pulls from the web is actually from Dunjinni's Forum, only with less results.
A useful post from Dunjinni is this one http://www.dundjinni.com/forums/forum_posts.asp?TID=12754&KW=asian Or this one http://www.dundjinni.com/forums/forum_posts.asp?TID=11295&KW=asian
You can also try Cartographer's guild as a free resource, although I haven't had as much luck with their search engine.
Finally, if there's something you're trying to find but can't, pm me. I've been collecting Asian themed item jpegs/pngs from around the web for several months now in preparation for the new campaign. I do like my maps to be as realistic as possible, so they're all pretty 3D and not artwork. Good luck!
You may want to try google "Dundjinni scifi maps" it will get you a bunch, along with art assets.
http://www.dundjinni.com/forums/uploads/supercaptain/D4D_scifi-corridor_sc.jpg
https://i.pinimg.com/originals/f8/70/5f/f8705f0676ca95b0ff2031bd3ad70760.jpg
Also tried google: spacestation scifi maps
I use the Roll20 editor. I made a empty campaign only to search for textures and pictures. Most of them are from Dundjinni Forum. The software is not free, but there are a lot of user made art which is free to download. Just search for something and you will most probably find it. You could also use CGTextures, which is also free (the quality is not perfect, tho). I use this for more realistic textures.
> A generic campsite just off the road, near a small river. Greytale made me a nice campfire (posted at his site "The Nook"), so I had to use it in a map right away! http://www.dundjinni.com/forums/forum_posts.asp?TID=9902&PN=1
This is a city that I made for a Dungeon Crawl Classics adventure. I have set the map dimensions to 46080x25920 with 50 pixel grid in Foundry. Hopefully the potato laptop one of my players uses can handle it. This gets it down to 5ft squares so I can have a battle scene anywhere on the map. My plan is to have the entire adventure in this one map. The funnel will start in the farms on the outskirts where they PCs are all peasants who live outside the city gates. They are getting off work and heading into the city for the monthly trivia night at the Lonely Lobster Inn. Unfortunately, most of them won't make it there as the guards have locked the gates per the order of Lord Hubelet and animated cornhusk spiders, giant demon-crows, fishmen and a scarecrow will attempt to kill them. Survivors will level up and get to look into how this all happened.
Made in Wonderdraft using mostly Cities of Schley assets. I played around with different ideas for the farmland. All of them were tedious.
The city is around 0.5 miles from the West to East walls. If my calculations based on medieval city population density are correct, the population would be around 10,000 with farms going out several miles from the walled area.
Hmmm - there is Wonderdraft - but that’s more for regional maps than battle-maps to my knowledge.
Some Patreon map creators make things like Trees, crates and other assets available as asset packs that you can download and then use in your own maps - some people build maps from these.
And then there are just a lot of people who really like that same style of map and seem to take inspiration from each other.
How is Affinity compared to Photoshop? I was having a look at that the other day.
This is absolutely excellent! Might I suggest having a map pack module that is built into the available Foundry VTT additional modules. I see some other successful map & token makers doing this and I would imagine it would help your exposure as a creator and you can link to your Patreon. See here: https://foundryvtt.com/packages/exclusive
I also know there is also a map pack that is only available if you are a Patreon so there's some cool options for Foundry integration I imagine.
Love the map work you do.
Lets see...
Parallaxia can take a 'tile' image type and make it scroll on its X, Y, or X and Y axis. I use that similar to the battlemap above, but for stars.
With the Multilevel Tokens module, you can create teleportation points that move characters from one floor to another, as well as clone the appearance of creatures on one floor on other floors (like if you're looking down a balcony. The gif on the module page shows it off quite nicely.
Base Foundry has a super robust dynamic lighting system. One of its best features is the Door wall. You can assign a wall to be a "door", which creates a small clickable icon. When that icon is clicked, the movement and perception restrictions toggle to off. So your players can click to open doors and navigate a map without you needing to swap between token and lighting layers to move stuff for them. You can always lock doors so they can't open them willy nilly, and you can pause movement by pressing spacebar, so it doesn't get out of hand.
Oh, base foundry can also create rather interesting dynamic lighting types beside doors. You can have them block movement but not vision (like a window), block vision but not movement (like a curtain), block both (like a solid wall), and you can set each of these to doors and it will retain its original status when clicked on and off.
That's what comes to mind immediately as the high impact map-building functions.
I'd recommend this method. https://newbiedm.com/2009/01/13/newbiedm-tutorial-printing-battle-maps-to-a-1-scale/
My problem was that I was always finding maps where the scaling wasn't made such that each square was an inch.
http://posterazor.sourceforge.net/ This I found more useful because the images I was using where bigger than 8mb and I cba uploading them to imgur
I don't use Patreon. The main reason is that the maps I release are what you see is what you get; there are no hidden 'gridless versions' and the like, that people would need to pay to use. So, in essence, there is no insentive to pay for a Patreon, if I had one. That saidI do have a Ko-Fi page, where people can donate, if they like (and if they can afford it). https://www.ko-fi.com/zatnikotel There's also my Deviant Art page, which I mainly use as a repository but also to monitor traffic and trends, so I can see what people like and concentrate of buildign more of that.
I'm using a program called clip studio paint and a drawing monitor. The program is similar to photoshop in many ways but was built specifically for drawing and painting.
Yup straight from the command line. If you're on a Mac, install brew first: http://brew.sh/ Then install ImageMagick with: $ brew install ImageMagick
If you're on Windows, I don't know. Probably something here: http://www.imagemagick.org/script/binary-releases.php
Just wanted to add that Paint.Net is a good alternative to Photoshop or Gimp. It has a smaller learning curve and is completely free like Gimp.
edit: added link
If you're running Windows 10, you could use the "Game DVR" feature (Windows Key + G).
If you have an Nvidia graphics card, the GeForce Experience software apparently includes something called ShadowPlay, which it similar.
This is such a good idea! I don't know why I never thought of it. Thanks for the post. Also worth noting: There are tons of free tilesets that could be used like this at OpenGameArt.org.
You can see if there is anything posted at OpenGameArt that meets your needs. It's hard to say whether anything will work for you when it is not clear what tile sizes you are intending to use.
You should probably focus on the public domain offerings.
Thank you, I found these on Amazon (as I live in Australia these don't seem to be sold at local retailers)
I believe they are the same as what you have suggested?
Also, another question - have you had any experience pre drawing maps and then transporting a chessex map rolled up? Is this something you can do or do the drawings smudge/rub off etc?
Hmm, ok. Maybe a tool like Camscanner (which I used to use to scan maps in) can do the same trick? (If you have Android look it up for taking pictures; I found it pretty handy.)
I just try not to deal with the lines at all by using engineering paper, which work by having the lines on the back so you can see through them, but the front is empty. Doesn't show up in scans or pictures at all. Nice now that I use a standard scanner for my maps to keep things relatively even and oriented properly.
This is a smaller version of the same brand of tablet I use and is generally what I recommend to anyone looking to get into it. Obviously $100 is still a significant commitment, but if you're into it enough to be making these images with a mouse, I would say you've earned the cost of paying for a decent first tablet. I've had mine for about ~4 years now.
How much does it cost you to print / laminate this? I'm guessing it will probably be more expensive than a simple flip mat such as this one: http://www.amazon.com/Paizo-Publishing-Pathfinder-Flip-Mat-Basic/dp/1601255381 (although it's just 24x30, so you'll need at leest two of those to get to your required dimensions)