Five new Rooms

[Anderas]

I made three new rooms, based on a great draft that I found on Maike05's web page due to the Inn Fire.

They are deliberately left completely empty, so that they do not have a prescribed theme. In that they are different from most of the other overlays we find in the HQ expansions.

They are there for two reasons:

1. Most modern dungeon crawl games have bigger rooms to allow for a better tactical fighting experience. Having tested some, I had to agree that good fights need good rooms.
2. We change the layout too rarely. This is why my rooms have finely visible white borders: You can introduce them wherever you like on the board and you will clearly see wall borders.
3. The center room is overused. The final fight could be anywhere, but a good fight need a good room, so everyone puts the final fight in the center room or very rarely in one of the 5x4 rooms. Everyone uses a potion before entering the center room. Do you use a potion before entering one of the side rooms?

So I made two colors of 8x4 rooms and one 8x8 room

The 8x8 room:
The 8 squares wide is the biggest size you can fit on A4 paper; given that you play on the original board. I think it even fits on letter sized paper, but not sure. It could be longer in one direction, but I feel 8x8 was enough. For being completely empty that is.
It can be used to cover one of the quarters, to have a decent boss room for the evil ritual in a surprising location.
As it has white borders, you can also use it to cut out an even bigger middle room.

The two 8x4 rooms
There was once, a long time ago like 2010, a "blue room" to download from some of our french forum members. It has disappeared, also it wasn't neutral, it had some clutter inside.
Another great room is the one of Jonathan; it has even a symbol in heroscribe (I think it is called 8x4 room or something like that)

I have learned a lot about photoshop the last few weeks, so I tried myself and made those beauties here.
They can be used vertically or horizontally nearly everywhere on the board. They have the white border so they mark finely that there are new walls on the board.
Target is that the heroes never know when and where they enter a small or a big room - please use them as often as possible in as many creative places as possible, so that the gaming experience with our old board is refreshed as good as is possible.

Long talk, here you are. I will make a PDF for printing, too. If you want to ask a professional printer, you better download all five of them here in a decent resolution as zip. If you just print and play at home, with the original Heroquest board, you could use my HQ25 material PDF file that has the tiles scaled ready for print.




And as Mohawk rightly said, we can perfectly use a 8x5 tile to either overlay the big 4x5 rooms or to overlay two 4x4 rooms and use the neighboring hallway.
Also a 5x6 tile does this nicely, by eating part or all of the double hallway. So I added those two, roughly based on the green room of Heroquest, but with additional cracks and light.
Again i made white borders so that they can be used everywhere you like.

Ah by the way: They are free for use and change, even commercially just in case you want to sell them, it's ok for me.
The only right I do not give away is the right to reserve the right on them. They are free and stay free.

[Maurice76]

I like them! Nice work!

[lestodante]

Thank you, they are very good!!
I also think the board need some new big room for final conflicts, infacts few days ago I did a 4x8 room for an expansion pack I am working on (but it is not neutral) and I will use it as the final boss room.

[Count Mohawk]

When it comes to using bigger rooms as Boss Rooms, I sometimes like to scale up one extra row or column and overlap the adjoining hallway space. A 6x8 tile is good for that sort of thing if you place it on top of the two 3x5 rooms at the top of the board, for example. 5x8 rooms are also ideally-sized to overlay the two adjacent 5x4s on the bottom half of the board. And so on!

[Anderas]

I made those 8x5 and 6x5 variants now.
I stop here It costs the better part of a day to make them in high quality; and I didn't even put clutter in them this time.

I also added a pdf with the right scalingfor the original heroquest board

[Maurice76]

I stop here It costs the better part of a day to make them in high quality; and I didn't even put clutter in them this time.

Not to discredit or disrespect the effort you put into them, but which tools do you use? At first glance, it would seem a reskin and some cutting and pasting is all that's needed to craft new rooms ... so where's the catch? I never tried this myself, so I guess I am oblivious to those finer details . I'd wager it's the shadows in the corners.

[Anderas]

I stop here It costs the better part of a day to make them in high quality; and I didn't even put clutter in them this time.

Not to discredit or disrespect the effort you put into them, but which tools do you use? At first glance, it would seem a reskin and some cutting and pasting is all that's needed to craft new rooms ... so where's the catch? I never tried this myself, so I guess I am oblivious to those finer details . I'd wager it's the shadows in the corners.

Yes, I thought so, too. That's why I started with the green room in the first place.
Well. First it didn't scale very good to printable sizes.
I could apply a comicfilter, then it is scalable as you like,but then it loses it's unique look. So that wasn't a solution.
Then I tried to extract just the lines and work from there. If you have the lines in black and the rest in white, you can freely design colors and surface and everything.
Turns out, the lines don't have enough contrast and the shadows near the wall have more contrast.
Even after I lighted the shadows and dimmed the lights, it was still crappy. I extracted from there nevertheless and corrected manually.
Sadly the "correction" ended up re-painting manually all the lines. I saved that pattern as mask and in several layers as black and white pattern.
I made one layer with the original color;
then a layer with cloud effect to have lights and shadows on the tiles. You can apply any black and white pattern to any picture with "overlay" or "multiply" or "negative multiply". If you do it right, it becomes a beauty.
Then it was too clean for my taste, so I added a layer with noise that I low-passed with a gauss function. From the result I made a relief for the stone effect, that I once again overlayd with the original.
Then I was disappointed that it looked entirely like the original (only, 10x the resolution), so I hand-drafted some additional cracks into the floor.
Once I was finished, it looked boring, so I applied some light-and-shadow rendering to have some more interesting tile.

So yes Maurice, I started from your assumption, too, and used the original to save time. Then I ended up investing more than half a day.
Most of the work was redrawing the lines. The rest was quick, after I did the other tiles it was just repeating what I did over there.

[Maurice76]

Ouch, yeah, that sounds laborious. Still, most of the initial work was in finding the proper methods, so hopefully whatever you make after this will be faster than half a day each . The result looks very good, though!

[StratosVX]

Yes, I thought so, too. That's why I started with the green room in the first place.
Well. First it didn't scale very good to printable sizes.
I could apply a comicfilter, then it is scalable as you like,but then it loses it's unique look. So that wasn't a solution.
Then I tried to extract just the lines and work from there. If you have the lines in black and the rest in white, you can freely design colors and surface and everything.
Turns out, the lines don't have enough contrast and the shadows near the wall have more contrast.
Even after I lighted the shadows and dimmed the lights, it was still crappy. I extracted from there nevertheless and corrected manually.
Sadly the "correction" ended up re-painting manually all the lines. I saved that pattern as mask and in several layers as black and white pattern.
I made one layer with the original color;
then a layer with cloud effect to have lights and shadows on the tiles. You can apply any black and white pattern to any picture with "overlay" or "multiply" or "negative multiply". If you do it right, it becomes a beauty.
Then it was too clean for my taste, so I added a layer with noise that I low-passed with a gauss function. From the result I made a relief for the stone effect, that I once again overlayd with the original.
Then I was disappointed that it looked entirely like the original (only, 10x the resolution), so I hand-drafted some additional cracks into the floor.
Once I was finished, it looked boring, so I applied some light-and-shadow rendering to have some more interesting tile.

So yes Maurice, I started from your assumption, too, and used the original to save time. Then I ended up investing more than half a day.
Most of the work was redrawing the lines. The rest was quick, after I did the other tiles it was just repeating what I did over there.

Aside from the line drawing, a lot of that can be saved as an action so it all gets applied when you push a button. If you don't already know.

[Anderas]

Yes, with the good version.

I have a version of photoshop that is older than the witch lord and does not have all the spells becaues it is a legal "you don't pay so you can try" version. I can't afford a monthly fee for my hobby.

I can resize, color-correct and export to png automatically. That's more or less it, for the rest I have to use the ink and feather myself.

Same goes for my excel. No want for monthly gold to be paid. So I keep that old laptop that was forged in the dwarven forge by some long forgotten ancestor; and my stone old license. If it ever breaks down I need a new laptop it will be a real loss.