Xev needs Photoshop help

[Xeviat]

My gaming group is going to enter the 21st century of gaming. Our roommate has a 62 inch LCDTV with a monitor input port, and we just got new comfy couches. I realized that I could make maps on photoshop, hook my laptop up to the TV, and use the TV as our battlemap. All of the players can relax on the couch with their character sheets in their laps, we can roll electronic dice (for the two players who believe they have terrible dice luck), and we'll even be able to manage spell areas and movement with ease. Plus, I won't have to stop the game to draw the encounter area whenever a fight breaks out, and players will have more mobility in that they can move into rooms that I otherwise would have errased if they feel they need to.

So, I've figured out how to make a rather plain looking map on photoshop, but I wanted to play with some textures and such to make things look nicer. Currently I need two tiles (ideally those kind of tiles that match on each side, I forget the term, so I can tile it without lines showing up). I would like a beige worked stone and a gray solid stone (like granite) tile so I can spice up the look of the map. I've poked around google, but as I've said in the past my google-fu is weak.

Thanks guys. I'll ask the Cartographer's Guild too.

[Xeviat]

PS: what's that term for when you can take a tile and repeat it in all directions and the image looks solid (you don't get lines between the tiles)? Ishy used it recently and I'm totally blanking.

[Poseptune]

PS: what's that term for when you can take a tile and repeat it in all directions and the image looks solid (you don't get lines between the tiles)? Ishy used it recently and I'm totally blanking.

Seamless.

Edit: You can steal some tiles from this if you do some screen captures and edit them in photoshop. Or you can right click and copy image through Firefox (never tried in IE). For outdoor tiles I suggest the "Ruins of the Wilds" set. Any set will work for the granite stone.

[Llum]

seamless? it wraps around in whatever direction?

[Xeviat]

Awesome, just knowing the term found me a bunch of resources.

[SDragon]

to get something seamless, you'll want to go to Filter > Other > Offset, and set the H/V values to half of the overall image size (ie, a 800x600 image would be offset by 400x300). This puts the seams right in the middle of the image, making them easier to work with.

I'd suggest taking an image with a transparent background, pant bucketing a single color through it at 10-20% opacity (alternatively, you can do it at 100% opacity, and set the layer to 10-20% opacity; this way, you can fiddle with the opacity later on), and running it through Filter>Render>Difference Clouds. This should give you some nice randomly generated shapes that you can work with, and still have a surprising degree of control over. the Fiendspawn map was done this way, although it seems to have degraded quite oddly when it was uploaded to the site.

edit- erm, that is, it works best for a worldmap. I imagine you could do quite a bit of overall texture work with it, though.

[brainface]

we can roll electronic dice (for the two players who believe they have terrible dice luck)

Lol. Just wait until they start telling you the random generator is "totally off like the random seed must not be working right it's giving too many runs."

[sparkletwist]

Or maybe it was intentional... ;) The nice thing about electronic dice is that you can stealthily insert a way to rig the outcome and so you can exert control as GM even when the players think you've done nothing. You can do it with normal dice, of course, but they -know- you've done it. It's more fun when they don't even know.

Not that I'd ever pull such trickery, of course. Oh no.

[Xeviat]

we can roll electronic dice (for the two players who believe they have terrible dice luck)

Then I'll just tell him Tymora or whatever god/ess of luck is in charge hates him.

And thanks Fritos for the tutorial. I'll give it a try. I found some sites with free textures made from photos, so I'll probably use a bunch of those.