One of the many contributions that roleplaying has made to my life is that it is a form of escape. When things aren't going well and I want a break from reality for a few hours, I can immerse myself in a world of dice, tables, magic and evil sentient mushrooms that are 1000 times nastier than whatever I'm going through.
Today I wanted an escape for a few hours, so I decided to work on beginning to create maps for my campaign. It hasn't gone so well… quite frustrating actually.
First off, I decided I'd use the ACKS hex-maps. The four levels of zoom is really cool. I go to the ACKS section on constructing campaign settings. The text of ACKS only calls for two levels of zoom; it's frustrating to me that the ACKS hex-maps and the ACKS text aren't, as far as I can tell, strictly compatible; that is, the ACKS text's directions are for a "standard sheet of hex graph paper, 30 hexes wide and 40 hexes long," while none of the ACKS hex-maps have exactly those dimensions, though two of them come close with 32x48 hexes. I do wish the ACKS text was written to fit hand-in-glove with the ACKS hex-maps.
So I print off the two hex-maps that have the middle two levels of zoom, as they seem to correspond to ACKS' campaign map and regional map sizes. The first step, ACKS says, is to come up with a map, so I go to Fight On! #2, where there's a set of terrain generator tables. I grab some colored pencils and start rolling on the tables. I get about four columns of hexes colored before I decide that too many types of land are looking like columns oriented along the North-South axis and scrap that idea. To be fair to the tables in Fight On!, the articles that accompany the tables indicate that these tables are intended to create settings on much smaller scales than I was generating; still, frustrating.
So then I remember that Trollsmyth has this really cool series on creating a hex-map for a sandbox campaign, and that I'd been meaning to use it whenever I got around to, well, doing what I'm doing today. I go over and check it out. First step, Trollsmyth says, in creating a map is to get the shore-line. Hmm.
I end up printing out and staring at the most zoomed-out ACKS hex-map for at least 15 minutes, which felt like half an hour. Then I remember the awesome Free Map Monday maps over at the Labyrinth; I look through the ones I've downloaded and settle on this one, as it seems like it would fit on an 8.5x11 piece of paper pretty well. I print one off in grayscale at 40% the size of the actual image and hold it up alongside the most zoomed-out ACKS map- looks like they'll fit together really nicely!
How to do that, though? Unfortunately, I have absolutely no experience with Photoshop or GIMP or anything of the sort. A low-tech solution, though, is to print the ACKS map out on a transparency, then scan/copy the map with the transparency over it. Should work great, right?
Off I go to Staples to buy a few transparencies; I know I won't be able to buy just one, but I figure buying 10 transparencies won't be so bad, since I'll probably come up with more uses for them in the future. I get to Staples and find the transparencies… and they only sell them in 100-packs and 50-packs. And the cheapest cost $50… yeah, not worth it… very frustrating.
So now I'm back at home, typing this out. While I've been typing I've figured out that the best plan is probably to tape the map to the back of the hex-map and trace the map onto the hex-map. I'm not a very good tracer, so I'm not happy about that, but I'll give it a shot.
Anyway, sometimes game-prep can be frustrating. I shudder to think of what I'd be up against if I didn't have all the resources I've mentioned in this post, and I think it's important to point out that the reason I've been encountering frustrating delays isn't because these are bad resources (quite the opposite; they're great!), but just because I haven't ever really done this before and so I'm figuring out what works for me, which is slow and difficult work. On most days that makes things like this "hard fun," but today, when I really wanted to be able to distract my brain from problems by following directions and rolling dice, because I wasn't in the mood for "hard fun,"it was just frustrating. Thanks for reading.
Also, if anyone has any suggestions, I'm open to them, as I'm still trying to figure out what works for me.
Exploring games that were published before I was born - and the games inspired by them.
Showing posts with label Maps. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Maps. Show all posts
Saturday, February 11, 2012
Saturday, January 28, 2012
Player Map of the Mews of Methas
The mapper in the Skype campaign I run sent me this after tonight's session. It's the map of all of my megadungeon that they've explored. It makes me very happy to see just how big my megadungeon is; I've never taped my pieces together like this before. ^__^
Two other important bits from tonight's game:
- I've run enough sessions since I added Carcosan influences to my game to be able to say that Carcosa definitely improves it.
- One of my players started a new character tonight. To my delight, Flynn decided to have his Magic-User be a member of the Order of the Green Hand.
Thursday, September 15, 2011
Foray into Dungeon Building, Part 10
On Tuesday I made this:
And today I made this:
These are Level 1, Area 5 and Level 1, Area 7 of my megadungeon.
These are the areas of my megadungeon my players are likely to explore tomorrow. I've begun stocking them, but there are quite a few rolls on tables left before they're totally ready. Fortunately, rolling on tables is almost all that's left.
The one other thing is my first placed encounter. These are the second important part of stocking a megadungeon, the first being randomly generated and placed encounters. I want this area of the first level to be inhabited by the Coeurl.
The first thing I'm going to do is have the Coeurl be an item on the wandering monster list for this area. If I roll a 1 on the chart, instead of using a Random Esoteric Creature, I'll use the Coeurl. Per Paladin's suggestion, the Coeurl won't attack, instead covering himself in darkness and telling the PCs about a monster that owes him somewhere a few levels down. What kind of monster? I'm not sure yet. I'll have to add figuring that out to the list of things I have to do between posting this and the game tomorrow.
Then I have to place the Coeurl's lair. I think I'll place him in room 6 of Area 7. He strikes me as the kind of character that would want multiple escape routes if attacked. That also means that the Coeurl's lair cuts off access to the right side of this area. I don't know what all of the implications of that will be, but it should be interesting.
I've also got some news to report on the "big ideas" front of the megadungeon. I woke up from a nap this last week with "the Mews of Methas" going through my head. I think my subconscious was probably trying to say "maws," but I looked up "mews" and found out that it means either a stables or a place where bats roost. Combining these two ideas, I figure one of the purposes of the dungeon (if not the original purpose) was to house the warbeasts of Methas, whoever that was. Three-headed, four-winged, genetically altered mammalian monsters sound pretty cool. I think I'll have them turned to stone. If the PCs can figure out how to un-stone and tame one, they could have a pretty sweet mount. I'm not sure if I want to have just one or a few left behind after the Mews was cleared out, or if I want it to be fully stocked. This will be quite deep, though, so I have a while to figure out the specifics. It's a good idea to start dropping hints as to the history of the Mews right now, though.
Tuesday, April 26, 2011
Monday, February 21, 2011
Foray into Dungeon Building, Part 4
Having preliminarily established the three essentials of the dungeon (random tables, underlying ideas and mapping), now it's time to start mapping level 1.
Now, obviously, the Old School thing to do is to "Jaquay" my dungeon, which is to say, try to make it as non-linear as possible, in all three dimensions. The way I see it, that means both a myriad of entrances and exits and a myriad of ways to go when actually inside the dungeon itself. It's also important that there be "choke points," for two reasons; one is that an overabundance of choice is disorienting to the players- I know this from experience- and the other is that it provides challenges- if players want to get somewhere, there are only going to be a few ways to do it- if the passages on this level are too well guarded, they might have to go a level or two down and see if they can come up in the middle of the area.
The Alexandrian has written a few posts on Jaquaying an already-created-but-too-linear dungeon, but how can I go about creating a non-linear dungeon from scratch? The key, to me, seems to be to work with circles, not lines. Overlap a lot of circles and I'll get a lot of intersections; the lines correspond to passages, the intersections to rooms, and there's no one "start" or "finish" to the whole affair.
Something like this:
This, in turn, can be reduced to this, which, for me at least, is much easier to work with:
(Telecanter could probably swipe this for a really complex version of his faction hierarchy charts if he wanted to. No sense in not re-using stuff, right?)
Now, I can't have too many passages running all over the place; I need some choke points. The way to do that is to eliminate some lines. The simplest way is to get rid of each of the "outermost" lines, leaving exactly 30 lines remaining. The important thing isn't really which lines I arbitrarily remove, but that I get to a number of lines that corresponds to the possible outcomes from the roll of one or more dice, in this case a d30.
So, arbitrarily taking those six "outside" lines out, I'm left with this:
The numbering is somewhat haphazard, especially since I missed a line towards the bottom left on my first pass through and had to label that "30," but that doesn't matter because I'm only using these for random rolls anyway. The idea is that I'll remove whatever connections I roll on a d30. The number of times I roll is pretty arbitrary, but depends on how big or small I want the map to be. If I want a smaller map, I roll more times, eliminating more connections. Nodes with only two connections are streamlined away into just being part of the connection, making the map smaller.
I'm going to do a map not of the rooms of the first level, but a map of the areas in the first level, so I want a smaller map. I'll roll a d30 10 times.
[5, 7, 27, 30, 14, 19, 8, 6, 25,6, 21]
Actually, this is the third set of rolls I made; I didn't like the first two. That's the thing about random dice rolls- I'm totally allowed to discard results that I don't like. In this case, both of the dice rolls cut off the top "branch" from the bottom branches. I considered going with the dice and making this a split level, but decided against it because this is the first time I'm doing this and because there wasn't an even spread of rolls, resulting in large areas where no connections would be eliminated.
So, I eliminate these connections. I'm also going to eliminate those areas that now only serve as a stop-over between two other areas, but for now I'll just re-draw them as dots, so you can see what I'm doing.
So, now I can reduce that into this:
This is my "big idea" map for Level 1. Each area will be distinct and will have certain unique characteristics. Different monsters, different feel, different function, etc. I'll start filling that out in the next post.
Now, obviously, the Old School thing to do is to "Jaquay" my dungeon, which is to say, try to make it as non-linear as possible, in all three dimensions. The way I see it, that means both a myriad of entrances and exits and a myriad of ways to go when actually inside the dungeon itself. It's also important that there be "choke points," for two reasons; one is that an overabundance of choice is disorienting to the players- I know this from experience- and the other is that it provides challenges- if players want to get somewhere, there are only going to be a few ways to do it- if the passages on this level are too well guarded, they might have to go a level or two down and see if they can come up in the middle of the area.
The Alexandrian has written a few posts on Jaquaying an already-created-but-too-linear dungeon, but how can I go about creating a non-linear dungeon from scratch? The key, to me, seems to be to work with circles, not lines. Overlap a lot of circles and I'll get a lot of intersections; the lines correspond to passages, the intersections to rooms, and there's no one "start" or "finish" to the whole affair.
Something like this:
This, in turn, can be reduced to this, which, for me at least, is much easier to work with:
(Telecanter could probably swipe this for a really complex version of his faction hierarchy charts if he wanted to. No sense in not re-using stuff, right?)
Now, I can't have too many passages running all over the place; I need some choke points. The way to do that is to eliminate some lines. The simplest way is to get rid of each of the "outermost" lines, leaving exactly 30 lines remaining. The important thing isn't really which lines I arbitrarily remove, but that I get to a number of lines that corresponds to the possible outcomes from the roll of one or more dice, in this case a d30.
So, arbitrarily taking those six "outside" lines out, I'm left with this:
The numbering is somewhat haphazard, especially since I missed a line towards the bottom left on my first pass through and had to label that "30," but that doesn't matter because I'm only using these for random rolls anyway. The idea is that I'll remove whatever connections I roll on a d30. The number of times I roll is pretty arbitrary, but depends on how big or small I want the map to be. If I want a smaller map, I roll more times, eliminating more connections. Nodes with only two connections are streamlined away into just being part of the connection, making the map smaller.
I'm going to do a map not of the rooms of the first level, but a map of the areas in the first level, so I want a smaller map. I'll roll a d30 10 times.
[5, 7, 27, 30, 14, 19, 8, 6, 25,
Actually, this is the third set of rolls I made; I didn't like the first two. That's the thing about random dice rolls- I'm totally allowed to discard results that I don't like. In this case, both of the dice rolls cut off the top "branch" from the bottom branches. I considered going with the dice and making this a split level, but decided against it because this is the first time I'm doing this and because there wasn't an even spread of rolls, resulting in large areas where no connections would be eliminated.
So, I eliminate these connections. I'm also going to eliminate those areas that now only serve as a stop-over between two other areas, but for now I'll just re-draw them as dots, so you can see what I'm doing.
So, now I can reduce that into this:
This is my "big idea" map for Level 1. Each area will be distinct and will have certain unique characteristics. Different monsters, different feel, different function, etc. I'll start filling that out in the next post.
Foray into Dungeon Building, Part 3
So, we've got the random tables generally sketched out and the underlying ideas for the dungeon sketched out in an even more loose way. Time to actually start mapping.
First off, I'm going to see about mapping multiple levels, from the side. This is something even Swords and Wizardry, which doesn't have a single random table in the dungeon creation section, says to do- in fact, Swords and Wizardry devotes a whole page to a side-view map of a 10 level dungeon. I don't know how many levels I'm going to aim for in the end, but Gygax and Arneson say here that I should start off with at least three levels. I think I'll do one better than that and go with four levels to start off with.
I envision the foundation or centerpiece of this dungeon as a huge column of the teleportation complexes I talked about last time, with each dungeon level generally shooting off in one or more directions from that level's teleportation complex. This makes it pretty tough to map, but I'll take a shot at it.
Well, that wasn't actually so bad. I started by drawing a dotted-lined column down the center of the map. That is where the teleportation complexes will all be. Then I drew the levels in, having them rotate around the column, so Level 4 is between the viewer and the teleportation column, while the column is between the viewer and Level 2, if that makes any sense. I drew in the connections between the levels, but purposely drew them so that they made sense in 2D- there was room for them on the graph paper, but they don't necessarily make a whole lot of sense in 3D. The prime example is the stairway or chute from Level 2 to Level 4. In 2D, on the map, it looks great. Thing is, in 3D, Level 2 and Level 4 are on opposite sides of the teleportation column from each other. This means that the transition from Level 2 to Level 4 is going to be pretty long. I should probably make it a slide or chute, to hurry it along. This also makes it one way… I like that.
Then I remembered that I wanted this dungeon to be by a cliff, with some of the levels accessible from the cliff face. I decided to draw in the cliff, as well as the surface. It looks like every third level will have an exit on the cliff face. Drawing in the surface also gave me the idea of a tower rising up through the surface from the first level, so I drew that in as well.
So, now I've got a side-view map of the first four levels of my heretofore un-named dungeon. Next time, I'll see about mapping the first level itself and how I can make it "Jaquayed."
First off, I'm going to see about mapping multiple levels, from the side. This is something even Swords and Wizardry, which doesn't have a single random table in the dungeon creation section, says to do- in fact, Swords and Wizardry devotes a whole page to a side-view map of a 10 level dungeon. I don't know how many levels I'm going to aim for in the end, but Gygax and Arneson say here that I should start off with at least three levels. I think I'll do one better than that and go with four levels to start off with.
I envision the foundation or centerpiece of this dungeon as a huge column of the teleportation complexes I talked about last time, with each dungeon level generally shooting off in one or more directions from that level's teleportation complex. This makes it pretty tough to map, but I'll take a shot at it.
Well, that wasn't actually so bad. I started by drawing a dotted-lined column down the center of the map. That is where the teleportation complexes will all be. Then I drew the levels in, having them rotate around the column, so Level 4 is between the viewer and the teleportation column, while the column is between the viewer and Level 2, if that makes any sense. I drew in the connections between the levels, but purposely drew them so that they made sense in 2D- there was room for them on the graph paper, but they don't necessarily make a whole lot of sense in 3D. The prime example is the stairway or chute from Level 2 to Level 4. In 2D, on the map, it looks great. Thing is, in 3D, Level 2 and Level 4 are on opposite sides of the teleportation column from each other. This means that the transition from Level 2 to Level 4 is going to be pretty long. I should probably make it a slide or chute, to hurry it along. This also makes it one way… I like that.
Then I remembered that I wanted this dungeon to be by a cliff, with some of the levels accessible from the cliff face. I decided to draw in the cliff, as well as the surface. It looks like every third level will have an exit on the cliff face. Drawing in the surface also gave me the idea of a tower rising up through the surface from the first level, so I drew that in as well.
So, now I've got a side-view map of the first four levels of my heretofore un-named dungeon. Next time, I'll see about mapping the first level itself and how I can make it "Jaquayed."
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