DriveThruRPG Wishlist Sale results

Well, the DriveThruRPG Wishlist sale was, by any measure, a fair success.  I have had fairly good sales on the Quick Decks products (not so much on the Technical Manuals - oh, well, so it goes).  Since I've had the weekend mostly to myself (yay!), I started working up what's next for DSL Ironworks - Quick Decks 4: Frontier Starports.  Originally, I thought perhaps that this would be another tile set, but I've spent the day playing with the way Acrobat X can rescale and tile a source PDF, and I think I've got it figured out how to much larger installations (and ships, too!) from one source page.  First, though, here's a sample of some of the tiles from QD4, arranged to show a simple (Class D?) port, with a couple of security checkpoints, a fuel pumping station, some dorms for visiting crews, and a couple of warehouses.  Oh, and a smallish landing pad sized more for small craft.  Just a quickie design, but still fun.  Apologies for the dark lighting.

The other thing I'm playing with today is the Kankur-class Frontier Courier, a 200 ton ship I had the deckplan already worked up for.  So, I printed out both the 25/28 mm (24 pages worth!) and the 15 mm (8 pages) maps for comparison, using some Cardboard Heroes I had laying around.

First, the 25/28 mm version.

And then the 15 mm version.

These were both created from the same pdf source file, which was scaled 1/4" = 1.5 meters (and gives one roughly 51 meters x 66 meters per 8.5x11 inch page).  The 25 mm version is printed at 400% and tiled; the 15 mm is printed at 240% and tiled.  It does a pretty decent job at both scales since the original is vector format.  You can also print it at 100% so it fits on a single page.  Gotta love vector graphics.  Here's a jpg version of the original as well.

So, I think this is the future for the Quick Decks line.  Sure, I'll probably still put out some additonal tiles from time to time, but I'm now leaning towards PDFs aimed at a particular target (starports, for example), which, in addition to the tiles to build your own ports, would probably contain complete designs on a few pages, which could then be printed out at whatever scale tickles your fancy, as well as supporting text descriptions, game stats, and whatever else seems to fit.  In all honesty, doing battle maps this way is a heck of a lot easier for me to do, and ship design has always been my first love.  So, ships, starports, highports, restaurants, clubs, bars, shops, virtually anywhere can be easily mapped at whatever scale the GM might need or want.

If you've got any thoughts or opinions on the matter, I'd love to hear them.  On that note, I'm going to go trim up the printouts that I have and see how well they make a poster when taped up.  More pics on that later.  Thanks and TTFN.

Donavan Lambertus
DSL Ironworks@gmail.com