Just some unsolicited free advertising for a software I bought this weekend: Ronyasoft's Poster Printer costs $19.95 for a home license. It is a software that takes an image and prints it at any size you want over multiple pages of paper. You can crop the image to print just the part you want. And if you print over multiple pages, you can add helpful guides on how to glue the whole thing together to give a good-looking poster. The software is quite user-friendly and it was easy enough to figure out all the options. And I'm quite happy with the results.

Obviously I am using the software to print out battlemaps for my Dungeons & Dragons campaign. Specifically this weekend I am printing the battlemaps for Madness at Gardmore Abbey. I still had the images from the Cartographer's Guild from the last time I played. But at the time I thought I'd never play that adventure again, and threw away the printouts, so I had to print them again.

If you followed my posts about battlemaps you might notice that this is somewhere a step back in quality. For my last 4E campaign I didn't print the poster maps myself, but sent them out to a poster printing website. Great quality, no need to glue pages together, and better water-resistance of the final product makes those poster maps really nice. However they cost between $10 and $20 per map, depending on size. And for Gardmore Abbey I need 24 maps. That's a bit too expensive for my taste.

In a way there is a difference in the economics of this between 4th edition Dungeons & Dragons and 5th edition Dungeons & Dragons. My recent experience with playing 4E adventures in 5E shows that 5E is about three times faster than 4E. Madness at Gardmore Abbey in 4E took my group 18 sessions to play through over a whole year. In 5E I can probably do it in 6 sessions or so. So with a lot less time spent on any single battlemap, I am less willing to spend too much money on one. However I do plan to play the Zeitgeist campaign, which is the only one that I have a complete set of poster maps for, in 5th edition somewhere next year. I'm just waiting for the official conversion.