I have an unfortunate love of problem solving and tweaking, plus a high standard for the tools I work with, so when I was DMing a game of Dungeons & Dragons a few years back, I took it upon myself to create my own detailed battlemaps for combat. Drawing a map is one thing but I wanted a system by which I could do so quickly and which put most of the effort on the computer. Starting with grass and dirt, I moved through terrain features one at a time, building up my master battle map as I went and using it to create battle maps for encounters in my game as I did it.

Then, about a couple of years ago, I decided I should make them into a set of tutorials online for other people to use.

Er... And then I procrastinated for a bit.

Anyway...

The Premise

Photoshop has layer styles - special effects like shadows and glows which apply to a layer in your image. What is so useful about them is that they are calculated on the fly rather than applied just the once. So, if you apply a drop shadow style to a layer in Photoshop, everything you then draw on that layer will get the drop shadow.