The recent media obsession over The Print Shop has me flashing back to the 80s when I used to put together materials for my gaming group using combinations of The Print Shop (for banners and simple props), Bank Street Writer (so much text), and Newsroom (broadsheets about our games & events).

So the first thing I did is push a few maps through 8 Bit Photo Lab (a mobile app) to see how they turned out.

This small one turned out nice and useable, but it is only 18 squares x 18 squares in size… larger maps are a bit rougher…

While this one is less useable, I do really like how the program picked up the scrawled text in the lower right of the background.

And when we get to my larger maps, we pretty much lose most of the usability – no grid, markers are hard to read, and even the text labels are getting too mangled to be useful.

But, based on these experiments, I started laying out a simple zine structure based on the Dungeon of the Goblin Lotus map I posted a few months ago…

(Click on individual pages to zoom in)

The design is a US digest-sized zine – so 5.5 inch wide x 8.5 inches tall. I might go through and do the whole thing (adding room numbers to the level maps and descriptions in the text), or it might just wither on the vine at this point. We’ll see…