I really hate to ask so much since i've still not properly set my roots in this wonderful and helpful community, but once again i must beseech you for help and advice. I have a bunch of monster pictures i want to use, but they are about 3-4x too big for the battle scene. The next problem i have with resizing the images tot he point of being usable, is it distorts the images to the point that its too hideous to use. Does anybody have any advice or help they can give me regarding resizing images?

I'm sorry if this is the wrong place to put this, but i'm using the images in XP, and i didn't see an art section.

What programme are you using to resize the images?
Generally you "gain" quality by reducing an image's size. However I can think of a few programmes that decrease the quality any time changes are made to an image.
My suggestion would be to use Paint Shop Pro, Photoshop, or GIMP to resize images.

If you still can't get the quality you want, you may have to sacrifice a little of the image itself. (For example, just keep the most important areas of the image - unless you don't want to or it's a map-like image where it isn't feasible.)

If you're using billinear filtering to reduce image size, the quality will not decrease too much, but the borders will merge with the background color. You'll need to retouch manually the borders afterwards.

....MS paint
/shame/

Go to www.picknik.com (it might be picnik or picnick) and resize your picture on there. There is zn option to keep the ration (or something like that) so keep that ticked!!