Tabletop Review: Into The Pit 9 – Pits and Traps

Into The Pit 9 – Pits and Traps

Publisher: Forever People
Size: 26.95 MB
Cost: $5.98
Release Date: 2/25/2012
Get it Here: DriveThruRPG.com

Into the Pits 9 is a collection of 19 trapped rooms and pits that look quite promising. My favorite trap is a room where the floor slides away over the course of five map tiles. Some of the maps have swappable parts and two maps are spread across two files. Included is an interesting crossbow trap along with a set of passage-blocking walls. All the rooms and traps, save the one file of 6 “Assorted Pits”, are named:

  • Crossbow Trap
  • Passage Blockers
  • Five Diced Fingers and One Hidden Lever
  • Flooded Chamber
  • Guardian of the Key
  • Lair of the Flesh Eating Fish
  • Mezzanine of Enchanted Weapons
  • Submerged Room
  • Surprising Pit in 5 parts
  • The Bridge of Scalding Steam
  • The Burning Well
  • The Chittering Guardian
  • The Daemon Pit
  • The Fragile Floor
  • The Hungry Pit
  • The Watery Tunnel Trap
  • Trap of Tiles
  • Stairs to Nowhere
  • All these files are made available as 72 DPI .PNG files. Forever People advertises, in their supporting documentation, that the files are ready to be printed at 100%, but since they are sized initially at 11 inches by 15.569 inches, you have to tell your printer to fit the picture into the frame. This gives you a decent print that end up being less than 100 DPI. All of the files are far too dark to print in a black & white format and printing them full-color works, but isn’t as good-looking as it would be if they went with a higher resolution .JPG file format.

    These files look great on the computer though and could be a great asset for a GM running a game on a virtual table top, like MapTool. The Surprising Pit in 5 parts room practically calls out for virtual table top use. The only problem with using these files on a virtual table is that every one needs to be edited before they can be used. The GM will need to crop the file to the usable portion and then resize it appropriately. I tested this out with one map where I could easily count out the grid squares and after cropping the picture I had to resize it to 99.6 DPI to get it to the same resolution it was when it was oversized. That only worked for one file. I tested to see if the separate files at least used the same sized grid squares, but they do not. Many virtual tabletops will let your resize the grid used in-game to match the grid on the map, but since it would difficult to match the grid on these traps to whatever map you are already using, this will only suffice if all the GM is showing the players is the trap.

    Each file seems to have registration marks, as if they were originally destined for commercial printing. It seems that these files were simply reduced to a standard 11″x 15.569 size and saved as 72 DPI .PNG files. While the files look great on the computer, they are a bit more trouble than they are worth for regular use by most GMs.


    Posted

    in

    , ,

    by

    Comments

    Leave a Reply

    Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *