Roll for the Caller: Using Initiative for Faster Group Decisions

Delta’s D&D Blogspot has posted a session summary of Saturday’s expedition into Dwimmermount. He notes:

Tavis may have more courage than I do, because he had something of an open call out to players, and once we had dinner, piled into the Brooklyn Strategist, and set up to play around the custom gaming table there, he had no less than nine players ready for the session… About the first thing that Tavis said to me was, “You can have 4 henchmen, does that appeal to you?” Does it!? (I’m semi-infamous for gleefully playing multiple characters. Here I would get to play a whole crew of 5 dwarven plate-armored fighters. This was a very good sign.) With similar rulings around the table, we had a total of eighteen characters assembled and marching up to Dwimmermount.

I'm glad Stefan insisted that we actually put all the miniatures into the layout; the work he put into wrangling them was well worth the visceral sense we got of just how insanely stretched-out our marching order was.

This weekend there is indeed an open call for players at the Dwimmermount sessions I will be running on the evenings of both Saturday 3/17 and Sunday 3/18. After that, the expeditions will continue every Saturday until 4/14, but I will be passing my spot at the big Sultan gaming table on to other GMs.

I am famous for running groups of up to 15 players, but normally those are shambolic affairs in which we are glad to spend six or eight hours chatting and chewing the scenery and not getting much done. The Dwarven Forge scenery we have at the Brooklyn Strategist is so appealing that it begs out to be played with right now, so I evolved a way to get this big group moving faster than I normally do. I hope this house rule will be useful to those who come after me.

Because we were using the Adventurer Conqueror King System, when combat occured I would ask everyone to roll for initiative at the start of each round by holding up a d6. This part is standard, and with the possible exception of the kobold massacre, each of the fights on Saturday was sufficiently complicated and high-stakes to make it worth paying close attention to who got to go before the monster(s) and who didn’t.

When we weren’t in combat and the next course of action wasn’t obvious – basically whenever the flow of action seemed to pause a little as people wondered what to do – I would hold up a d20 and ask everyone to “roll for the caller”. (Actually I said “roll for initiative” here too but that led to confusion. Do as I say, not as I did.) Only the high roll counted, so once I heard a pretty high number I’d say “OK, can anyone beat an 18?” I didn’t have the players modify the dice roll by anything, so that all participants had an equal chance of winning. I don’t think it makes sense to have charisma modify the roll – this is a procedure for the players, not their characters – but it might be interesting to keep track of how many times this call for callers had been issued, and tell everyone who had not yet been a caller to add that number to their roll.

Once a high roller had been established, I would find a way to describe the scene to explain why that player’s character now found him or herself in a position to set the next course of action for the party. The first time I called for a roll was in town as soon as everyone had a character sheet ready. Stefan and Peter tied with an 18, so I said “OK, Father Roy and Dewdrop Morningwood, you were the survivors of the previous expedition. As you’ve been here in the Fortress of Muntsberg healing and re-equipping, you become aware that news of your exploits has brought a new crop of adventurers who are looking to repeat your success. Do you want to lead them to the dungeon right away, or spend more time in town seeking out special equipment or pursuing the truth behind some of these rumors?”

It was intentionally implicit in this setup that all the new and old characters would form a party together, but I think Pete picked up that it was not actually covered by anything we’d roleplayed, so he had Dewdrop’s henchman Lafonte Shimmersky give an elaborate recruiting/motivational speech, and then Stefan and Pete read the mood of the group and decided to head for the dungeon right away. (This was what I thought everyone wanted, and also what I wanted myself – all that Dwarven Forge terrain begged to be marched upon – so the caller procedure worked!)

At the top of the landing, we rolled for caller again and the dice chose Miguel. His character was a prestidigitator named Obed Marsh, so I said “As the group reaches the head of the stairs and the metal Thulian doors, a feeling of eeriness settles over the party and they unconsciously look to Obed for his expertise in arcane matters. How do you direct your fellow adventurers?” Miguel chose to have his characters take the lead and investigate the situation, asking questions that let me feed the group information. But just as you can see in historical accounts of parties using callers like the example of play in the AD&D Dungeon Master’s Guide, the caller was the decision-maker but not necessarily the spotlight player. Other players might speak up to contribute – when Obed learned that the mountain was protected from tunneling by some kind of enchantment, Dan said “My dwarves put away their axes and picks, disappointed that their plan is shot” – and sometimes the caller would designate another character to perform a task, whose player would then take the spotlight (for example, Carl’s thief who led the exploration of the rockfall that exposed the gorgon cave).

I felt like this procedure worked very well for speeding up decision making by giving the power to the dice. As the Judge, I didn’t have to think “how can I get the players to start moving and stop debating; I only had to recognize when it was time to call for a roll, and then hand off the problem to the randomly appointed caller. A key part of the method was to set up the caller’s authority by setting the scene for their character. By describing to everyone how and why Obed had emerged as the leaders for the other characters, I was encouraging everyone to start thinking in character as well, which thus included accepting that their character was going to be regarding the caller as the natural leader for the moment.

I think the caller procedure would work even for smaller parties. If you try it out in your games, let me know how it goes!

Everything is Flowcharts

Stop this recursive madness before it is too late.

Paul Hughes has launched a Kickstarter that must not succeed. If funded, he will turn the AD&D procedures for generating random dungeons into a dungeon, a section of which is shown above. Sure, it sounds innocuous enough in his description:

This intricately illustrated 36″ by 24″ playable dungeon map poster encapsulates the Dungeon Master’s Guide’s complete rules for generating random dungeons: Appendix A’s four pages of charts are rendered into a flowchart WHICH IS ITSELF A DUNGEON. It’s like the Platonic dungeon: from it, all other dungeons may be generated. Or maybe it’s the Dungeon of Ouroboros.

What he conveniently leaves out is that as adventurers go through this dungeon, there is a chance that they will randomly generate the same dungeon that encodes the procedures for generating new dungeons, creating an infinite loop. Being a known proponent of the $10,000 backer reward and idealistic bonus goal, I have been recommending that Paul combine these such that Wizards of the Coast could pick up the top pledge level and get enough posters to send some to every game store that will be carrying the AD&D reprints, or we could help him raise the necessary funding to do so just for the good of gaming. While this would hasten the process, the recursive nature of this project makes one thing clear: sooner or later we will be awash in endless, procedurally-generated nightmare mazes filled with gold, glory, and Paul’s inimitable illustrations.

You know what that means, don’t you? Yes, it means one reason we don’t embed music videos more often is that some of us can’t be trusted not to use them for cheap rim-shots.

Fortunately, there is a solution to this impending crisis. We need to fight dungeons with dungeons.

Holmes Character Creation as a Dungeon Map, by Doug @ Blue Boxer Rebellion

Compare to the 2e and 3e versions for a fantastic visual essay in how the complexity of chargen increases over the years, and become a follower of Blue Box Rebellion and pester Doug to dungeonize 4e’s Character Builder and map the planar nexus of Sigil from which those wishing to follow D&D Next’s ambition to unite the editions must certainly depart.

But that’s not what we’re here for. Our goal is to convince Doug to launch a Kickstarter to create dungeons to act as automatic spawners for adventurers to go into Paul’s dungeon and generate more dungeons, until every piece of paper in the world is covered with maps in which you can see little people making maps telling them which way to go to create a dungeon in which the Cave You’ve Been Living In Since 1977 connects to the Pool of Fluff.

Speaking of titles, the name of this post riffs off of Everything is Dolphins, which you should be interested in because:

• the fact that the Play-Generated Maps and Documents Archive (PlaGMaDA) is starting a publishing arm is made of awesome and promises many other things of interest to old-schoolers, like reprints of old fanzines and homemade modules like Habitition of the Stone Giant Lord
• the game part of Everything is Dolphins represents an interesting example of someone coming into RPGs cold in his twenties from a whole other world of music geeks, discovering OD&D, and running with it to make his own system to reflect a particular set of concerns and inspirations
• said someone ran Everything is Dolphins at Games that Can’t be Named and a good time was had
• the approach taken here – presenting the original handwritten notes and play materials, and then doing an exegesis of the text and the visions it’s inspired in others – is a promising model for how to publish lost RPG projects like Robert Kuntz’s Kalibruhn or Dave Arneson’s “Bluemoor” notebooks without losing the historical value under a layer of polish

It is an article of faith with me that the character sheets for the original Blackmoor were this cool. One of many ways that First Fantasy Campaign is awesome is that it publishes maps of the castles that characters in Dave Arneson's game built; let's get a new edition that has the architectural plans the players drew up!

• the illustrations Tim assembled for the book to show what visions the game inspired include old-schoolers (Charlie Loving who illustrated the Bunnies and Burrows first edition in 1976), artists who were part of the Dungeons & Dragons in Contemporary Art panel last year (Casey Jex Smith and Sean McCarthy), and Tarn Adams of Dwarf Fortress who is like the patron saint of neckbeards who care way too much about imaginary worlds that procedurally generate adventurers who build their own dungeons
• if the Dwimmermount Kickstarter makes its bonus goal of $20,620, James Maliszewski will donate his original campaign notes to PlaGMaDA; we hope the well-deserved immense popularity of his blog Grognardia will make this a notable a precedent for others to make similar donations and show that making the originals free to the public is not inconsistent with a successful commercial release expanding these notes into a form ready for others to use
• Tim has an art show opening at the I-20 Gallery in NYC on March 22nd, which should be of interest to those who were interested in the stuff Tim had to say at the above-mentioned D&D art panel, and is planning a book launch party for Everyting is Dolphins in April, which may well also include the Adventurer Conqueror King System; details to follow.

On that tip and with the last of my breath, I should mention that there is also a Kickstarter for the Player’s Companion that expands ACKS with a host of new classes, procedures for making new classes, a bunch of new spells, procedures for making your own spells that characters can research (if Bonus Goal #3 is met, which seems like it will happen soon), and lots of the the ACKS class templates that Brendan at untimately calls “the apotheosis of the Second Edition kit idea“, presumably in a nice way.

Rumors of Dwimmermount

Here is the rumor chart I made to bring events from the inaugural G+ session of the Dwimmermount Kickstarter campaign into the continuity of the game I subsequently ran at the Brooklyn Strategist. The idea is that Locfir having gotten busy with other projects, Locfir’s Man (formerly known as the candlemaker Ungril Ungfarm) escaped from being charmed. Scuttlebutt is now echoing from the tales he brought back from the dungeon expedition he participated in with Pigfoot the Hog (human fighter), Burgoth the Mage (human you-guessed-it), and Locfir the Astrologer (elf). These are a little Locfir-centric because Locfir’s Man is making out like a bandit on his association with the elf and in fact refuses to answer to the name Ungril any more.

Photos by David Ewalt, aka Old Axehandle, from the last Brooklyn Strategist session

1. Pigfoot discovered material components that make the ventriloquism spell lethal AND merchants are buying up all the fortress-town’s supplies of chain, caltrops, oil, and torches.
2. Locfir made Burgoth lick a Thulian pillar of submission AND Burgoth is now hemiplegic and enslaved in Locfir’s sanctum.
3. The party all cast charm person on one another to protect themselves from outside influences AND when they returned from the dungeon one of them had been turned into a gnome nonetheless.
4. The bearded face of a Man spoke to Locfir AND taught him how to initiate himself and others into Thulian wisdom.
5. Locfir filled a wineskin with a fluid he found very interesting AND pouring it on Burgoth brought him back to life.
6. The party was attacked by metal skeletons AND Burgoth controlled them using a lever.
7. The party found the petrified body of Turms Turmax’s courtesan AND she revealed to them the secrets of the Thulian doors.
8. The party found a renegade Dwarf AND the others of his kind are searching for a cemetary of their kind that is being desecrated.

All of these are potentially knowable to characters in the Fortress of Muntsburg. I had the players roll a d8 apiece to see which rumor they had heard just because I didn’t want to read them all out at the start of the session, but I don’t think any of these are spoilers at least for my own approach to embracing meta-knowledge. If you read this post and then play in my game that’s awesome you saved some reading rumors aloud time. We’ll work together to imagine the reason that your character is particularly well versed on what’s being talked about in Muntsburg’s taphouses.

Step one of my approach involves acknowledging meta-information the players might have – some of the stuff above you can guess at if you’ve read Zak’s post. The reason the the map of the first level can be seen in the picture to the right is that I placed it in the dungeon as treasure, knowing at least one of those present had seen it in the Dwimmermount teaser in the Adventurer Conqueror King rules we were using.

Step two is then using this to screw with the players. James beautifully set the stage for this by changing the dungeon since the ’09 PbP game, so that the first time Locfir entered after three years away he freaked out that none of his maps were quite right. Part of the reason these aren’t spoilers is that each has two parts, separated by AND. Either part could be true or false. The idea is to give players some ideas about things that might be interesting about the dungeon – in this case, things that our group of players actually was interested in (well OK maybe just me, Locfir was always either running away or having to be dragged away from things only he cared about). Then if and when they do encounter something that might relate to the rumor, their dread and paranoia is entertainingly multiplied by the bad things they’ve heard or the likelihood that I made a false good rumor to trick them into doing something foolish.

The way I figure this works for the Judge is that if the players want to try to investigate the rumors further, they can spend some time (I recommend a week) in town rolling against an ability score or however you like to do this kind of thing. The results are, using an assumption that you’ll wind up with a range like the Apocalypse World-type system where a total failure is a modified 6- on 2d6, total success is 10+, partial success anything in between:

• Total success: you learn whether both parts of the rumor are true. (If you like to be more stingy with information, decide which part you want to pursue and you confirm or deny that half.)
• Partial success: you learn one false part of the rumor, Judge’s choice, or that no part is false. (Or maybe you learn it all at a cost or complication.)
• Total failure: the Judge gets to invent and spread a rumor about the investigating PC. (Or trigger a town adventure, rival party attack, etc. if your group is in the mood, or impose a penalty on the PC’s die rolls due to too much buying of drinks in town means bad hangover but no info.)

Judges, if you haven’t read the adventure yet just decide “true or false” depending on what sounds good to you. Discreetly make a note on the rumor table to help you figure out what you said later when the party finds that thing in the dungeon (if it even exists at all). Likewise if you are about to prep the dungeon, thinking about these rumors as you read should help you keep your eye out for cool stuff (even though James has hit on what is for me just the right level of evocative detail vs. easy to read). And if you think your players know too much about the dungeon, these rumors are meant to be a good guide to which switches to flip to change things up.

Finally, you don’t have to pay any attention to this continuity in your version of Dwimmermount. Pigfoot and Burgoth and Locfir don’t have to be in the setting at all, they are non-canon for sure and I am pretty sure it will make James frown thoughtfully if you start tossing canon around so don’t do it. If the party goes to investigate what’s going on with Burgoth and he exists he can be whatever you want, I recommend secretly a polymorphed dragon living in some kind of polyhedral melting pocket-plane.

Empty Kingdom if you are a home for media artists make it easy for me to credit this painting to Ryan Browning with name and year and stuff the way galleries do.

The one thing you should be sure to respect in your campaign is that if it has a Locfir he is fantastically wealthy but no PC will ever find where it is hidden, and he has like a million hit dice and just started that one HP rumor to tempt fools to disrespect him so he can do weird elf things with your still-beating heart.

I liked the way this worked and will be doing it for the Keep on the Borderlands events we’re doing with ACKS at Gary Con IV.

the Citadel of Defenseless Babies

That'll teach you to try to escape from the Citadel of Defenseless Babies!

Readers of the Mule may wish to check out a series of posts I’m doing at the Adventurer Conqueror King blog. These mini-essays appear over there because they grow directly out of my experience wrestling with revamping legacy D&D procedural generation systems like wandering monsters and treasure types for the ACKS system, but I often find myself linking back here because they also continue conversations we’ve had like

• why the Citadel of Defenseless Babies – the fabled goal of all adventurers seeking profit with no risk, which is to our murder-hobos what the Big Rock Candy Mountain is to ordinary hobos – is specifically comprised of dwarven babies
• why giving XP for gold is important (see also: murder-hobos)
• how unintended consequences, like fetishizing balance, arose out of decisions made by WotC designers in the course of overhauling legacy systems – something constantly on our minds as we work on ACKS
• wonky analysis of the mathematical underpinnings of Basic/Expert D&D, or at least reporting on what happens when you get actual mathematicians like Delta on the scent of these problems
• how to fill in the gaps left in older editions of D&D without reducing their flexibility for individual takes on the material

Also there are many excellent posts by people successfully overcoming the disadvantage of not being me, including insightful analysis by ACKS lead designer Alex Macris and art by Ryan Browning like the awesome griffon above. If you read the Mule via Google Reader or similar subscription service and you haven’t added the Autarch blog’s RSS feed, what are you waiting for?

Infographic Poster of OD&D Encounters

A tiny detail from the 18x24 OD&D Wandering Monster poster, from the Blog of Holding site which has a cool script to randomly generate these. Dig the beard on that ferret; Paul has nailed the beardliness of everything in the LBBs.

When I helped the Gygax Memorial Fund create  a presence at the Old School Resource Group’s booth for Gen Con 2011, one of the things I did was to come up with things that could be sold there to raise money for the memorial. Some of these did come to pass as planned, like Cheers, Gary. Others didn’t materialize for one reason or another, like Crystal Caste dice with Gary’s face in place of the 1’s pip. Fortunately, other stuff I didn’t even dream of came along to fill its place.

Some of these may never be available again. The New York Red Box’s own Jedo did a set of old-school character sheets that he ran off on an old-fashioned mechanical printing press, with the type palpably embossed deep into the paper; another run of these would have to wait until he visited the distant lair of this press, which I imagine to be in the basement of the Temple of the Frog along with the pipe organ no one now living knows how to repair.

Other things that were at the booth, like Ethan Gilsdorf’s excellent Fantasy Freaks & Gaming Geeks, were available before and are still. This is awesome, but not newsworthy.

This post, however, is about something that was at the booth at Gen Con (although it may have been overlooked), sold out, but is now available again – Paul Hughes’ infographic poster showing all the dungeon and wilderness wandering monsters from OD&D, along with the procedures for generating encounters thereof. You can get this useful and eyeball-kicking item through blogofholding for just $7.50 plus shipping. Paul says:

Put this on your rec room wall, and you can use it to generate random encounters without having to flip through books, or just stare at it glassily while descending into a spiral of madness.

Cheers Gary is the other item Paul was invaluable in creating, and the one that was done specifically for the Gygax Memorial Fund rather than just having some copies donated for the booth. I hope to have an announcement soon about when a new print run of this will be available soon. The T-shirts and buttons for the Gygax Memorial Fund are still potentially available, and will be actually so as soon as I do an inventory count and help the talented & hard-working Jason Hurst get them set up at http://www.gygaxmemorialfund.com/.

Anomalous Subsurface Environment

Behold the awesomeness. Yes, it's kind of small.

I am using ASE1: City of Denethix and Dungeon Level 1 in my White Sandbox campaign because it is awesome. If you are playing in my game, please do not read it. This is the only permissible excuse for not doing so, and White Sandbox players are encouraged to pick up copies but not read them; putting them under your pillow may cause some of the awesomeness to seep in.

Here is a bit of the module in actual play, from the summary of session #50 by myself and Ookla’s player flyingace:

Inside they found an octagonal room with three doors marked “Barracks”, “Main Generator Core”, and “Colossus Research Facility”. They decided to explore the latter, but as they did they were followed by a number of automatons in the shape of dwarves, who insisted that they identify themselves and requested that they follow them to speak with the Sargent who would know what to do with them. Ookla asked whether the Sargent was expecting them, trying to ascertain whether they were in some sort of mystical/mechanical communication with the entity. They replied that he was not and inquired after Ookla’s identity. Yelling “My name is Jimminy Cricket and I’m here to make with the rescue!” the previously invisible Ookla became visible as he launched into an attack of one of the mechanoids. Ookla, Tobias, Rolzac, Nolgur and the tuxedo-bedecked gorilla who resembled Groucho Marx dispatched the automatons, but not without the loss of the gorilla. Thirster noted that he was unable to draw forth any souls from the mecha-dwarves.

I have seen ASE described as gonzo, but in a campaign where players (Jedo, to give credit where it is due) have researched spells to procedurally generate monkey butlers according to which species of great ape they are and what comedian they resemble it is actually a reasonably realistic backdrop for adventure.

Hexomancy: Making the perfect maps for Adventurer Conqueror King

Using the ACKS hexmap format for my personal campaign mapping. If you can squint, you can notice the random village names from Judges Guild tables like Duck Oracle and Concealed Van.

More so than most other tabletop rpgs, “wilderness travel” and hex mapping of the sandbox world is integral to the resurgent old school style of play. In a game where the players can possibly take off in whatever direction they desire, geography holds an even footing with elements like story threads as drivers of fun at the table. Having an easy and logical way to record that visual geography is a key to verisimilitude in ongoing play.

Having been tasked with cartography work for Autarch’s new Adventurer Conqueror King System (ACKS), I found myself in the delightful position of organizing the game’s hex mapping format that we would use in published material. On one hand, I knew that I would use a type of hex-map among the many used by sandboxing players out there, but I also felt that my method should lend itself to play as best as possible. In short, I wanted to make the type of map sheets I would want to fill up and detail myself if all I had was just a pencil and an eraser and not the crazy gadzooks of watercolor, scanning and photoshopping that I sometimes overdo maps in (see above).

Another concern that I had was with ACKS’ increased emphasis on the middle and high end of play for an OSR fantasy game, the need to “zoom” from local geography to regional and continent geography was self-evident. The higher the character levels that the PCs achieve, the more of the surface of their world becomes their concern. The high end campaign would begin to rely on hex maps as much as the low end adventures would rely on graph paper for dungeon mapping.

So knowing that campaign-usability weighed heavily on my shoulders and also reminding myself of the fact that I was sweating over dinky hexagons of elven glades, I lifted design heavily from previously published campaign maps (Traveler, D&D Gazetteer, Judges Guild) and set about making three different hex maps for use in a campaign that featured three different levels of play.

The first type of map would be the smallest “local” scale containing a grid of hexes that are the traditional six mile size in diameter. This scale would be familiar to most people playing OSR games as the standard wilderness travel hexes that you could get lost in while navigating and encounter nasty wandering monsters in. I wanted these hexes to fit on a letter size page for publishing and also be used by GMs to print and use in their own campaign so I went with a map that was 25 hexes wide and 16 hexes tall. This would make hexes that were roughly half an inch across on the printed page and allow players and GMs to draw their own details in as well as give some room for some pretty map art to be published in any future ACKS campaign or adventure books. Readable details at the local level is what is needed. I also added a larger 24 mile hex-grid over the top to provide an easy way of zooming in and out of the larger map scales shown below. I put coordinate numbering on the small hexes similar to the Judges Guild/Traveler sector maps so any text reference could point to an exact 6 mile hex in the game-world. This resulting “local” size map is roughly 90 miles tall and 150 wide, giving a surface area that can encompass of a couple US counties.

The next standard map would be the “regional” map comprised of four of the smaller “local” maps at. This size map gives a good feel for the DM planning of the relationship between local areas and for mid-level journeys by player characters. The 48 x 32 hex-grid fits precisely into the suggested “starting” sandbox area that many DMs create at the outset of a sandbox campaign. The GM just has to provide the rough geography or fill the hexes with quick icons reminiscent of the old Basic D&D Gazetteer and then pick out one of the quadrants for mapping out the level 1 character’s home base and dungeons at the local scale. This regional map is 192 miles tall and 280 miles wide, giving the total surface area of a typical US state.

The last and grandest map is the “continent” hex-map made up from 24 mile hexes in a 48 x 32 grid. This map is It is roughly 768 miles tall and 1152 miles wide and has the surface area of roughly half of the continental United States. It contains 16 of the region size maps and 64 of the small local maps. It features a coordinate grid so you can effectively specify any small 6 mile hex location on your continent by listing the coordinates of the local map and then the numeric hex coordinates. For example:
Dungeon of Pain – C7-0535
Very nice in a Traveler UPP sort of a way.

In the end, It is all a very modest organization on a simple convention used by players over the last 30+ years but the little extras made a tight system for zooming in and out of the campaign world and it also gave the the right hex sizes for drawing pretty maps for both publication and the play table. It all might be a bit too obsessive by some player’s tastes but we all know in the OSR that rules and standards are there to help player and not hinder fun. So please use and abuse them hexes as you will, they are free to download from Autarch’s website here.

The Post Where I Give You Awesome Map Graphics

That is, if you think that by awesome I mean a recreation of the art and design methods of late-seventies RPG game maps. Awesome in a way that Red versus Blue of the generic cold war armies on a Tactics II game board are awesome.

If you will recall from my last stint of map posting, I explained the whole process of generating a random and unique regional hex map for use in a starting sandbox style campaign. It was a homage (copy) of the same style of region maps that were put out by Judges Guild in the late seventies for their Wilderlands of High Fantasy series.

Towards the end of the process, I bemoaned the fact that I couldn’t exactly replicate their graphic style in my final map iteration. The designers at Judges Guild used a combination of hand-inking on a full size sheet and screen tone to produce their textures and shapes on their large 48″ x 36″ maps.

Photo-mechanical printing to capture a full size drawn map seemed a little severe for my purposes and screen-tone is generally only used in Japanese manga as a carry over from pre-digital illustration days. I had already found some digital textures on the internet that someone had lifted off of old wargame designs that would take care of my forests and rough patches. Those were good, but there were still a bunch of tone patterns that were impossible to locate, to say nothing about the mountains and hills that were hand drawn directly on the old JG maps.

So to satisfy my own obsessive sense of needless design (it is a DM eyes only map, no one will get to see it.), I created a bunch of repeating digital patterns to simulate the inking and screen-tone that I could find on the old maps and loaded them into my imaging software for my personal mapping enjoyment.

And the good news is that I am giving them all to you.
They include such top hits like:

• Forest
• Grasslands
• Coast and River Rough Patches (sand)
• Rolling Hills
• Rough Hills
• Mountains
• Swamp
• Desert (I am quite proud of all the little palm trees)

And a couple different encounter symbols for :

• Villages
• Castles
• Lairs
• Ruins

All the patterns are scaled to perfectly fit the 48″ x 36″ 150 dpi hex region map that I am also including in the attached zip file.

Here is the link.

Or try here.

Or maybe here.

See the included readme for further instructions about how to use them in your graphics program. However be forewarned, it still takes a lot of fiddling with layers and brushing and erasing hills to get it to look good. It is no Campaign Cartorapher. It looks particularly good when you lay the whole business over your enlarged watercolor painting. But it also looks just fine in B&W like the old Judges Guild maps.

Enjoy and map-on through your 70’s fantasy lands. Listening to Hawkwind helps the process along.

Digital / Analog Procedural Sandbox Region Witchcraft – part 6

So, this is my final part of a series of posts on creating a regional sandbox map. In brief, we have been using random (or even, dare I say, subconscious) systems of mapping and encounter planning to supply broad strokes of our campaign region. After this first step we have been thinking through the features that appear and fleshing them out with an eye on the narrative potential of the results.  Essentially, if you roll it on the Judges Guild tables, you have to explain it somehow in the fiction of play, across a whole region the size of New York State.

At this point in the process, most of the divining and reading of the oracles is finished. We have our hex-map that has formed a core of detail around where the players have been placed in the start of the campaign. There are still many other encounters on the map that are broadly painted and ready to be fleshed out as needed when the players approach, but for now we have all the pieces that are necessary for several weeks of table play, possibly months. The only thing that is missing is a map of the region that the players might acquire in a dungeon haul or civilized area, a map made within the fiction you might say.

I always pictured my campaign for this map as a place where the players would be plopped into the landscape via a magical portal. Once they found a city they could obtain a loose map of the area but they would have no prior knowledge of the lay of the land beforehand, thereby emphasizing the hex-crawling and exploration elements.

So I made this map as a something they could buy from behind a bar at an inn, something accurate for medieval-style knowledge but not quite accurate on scales or distances. (click to zoom in)

Two things are readily apparent on close inspection: I have a trouble with good place-names and my calligraphy is not up to snuff. I wanted to just bang out the map so some of the crudeness is intentional for the sake of speed, but also notice what a difference a bit of color makes. Instead of drawing a map in pencil, giving it to the players across the table and telling them “you receive this crudely painted map”, I can now just hand them a crudely painted map. It’s not professional fantasy cartography, but the feel and saturation of real painted paper is hard to beat for a game prop.

(In defense of my naming of places, most of the village names were generated in the Judges Guild Villages Book. Dolecherry and Silent Diamond are weird but they do make my Sleeping Giant Hills sound quaint/hackneyed.)

The obvious difference is that I have excluded any map reference to ruin or lair entrances as that would take the player exploration/tracking accomplishments away from them. I suppose it is reasonable to place those on your player map depending on your campaign style but I would prefer that my player’s get there by tracking down rumors and chasing trouble.

The physical steps for creating the map are pretty simple and favor the visually-skilled DM but well within anybody’s effort.

1. Take a thick sheet of watercolor paper and pencil in the locations of all the major features of your chosen map region taking into account the roads, rivers, and position of forests and mountains. You don’t need to draw in each mountain and tree, but you should outline the regions where they go. This is where you can get all odd with your distances to reflect the quasi-medieval sense of travel and distance. Emphasize the position of the larger cities and the close villages, the cartographic artists probably never left town anyway. Organize the shapes as something that is pleasing as an image and not really accurate to “life”.
2. Take a black pen, I recommend a technical marker like a pigma or rapidograph, and practice making some uniform symbols for each of the terrain features that will be in your map. Notice how some of my mountains or hills look crappier than others? That is because I did not practice enough and was adjusting my style as I drew on the map.
3. Draw in your symbols and features, paying close attention to the placement of your rivers, villages, castles, and cities. For example, make your expertly crafted city symbols first and then connect them with roads afterwords. Keep a look out for river crossings and mountain passes too.
4. Double the black outline on large or important feature like big volcanoes or skull-shaped mountain edifices.
5. Erase all the pencil marks off the page with a white vinyl eraser, the blank ink should all stay put.
6. Now the fun part, get out your watercolor kit and mix up some nice greens, ochres, grays and blues to color in your nice ink drawing. Watercolor is it’s own beast. It is literally the hardest painting technique to learn (seriously, even fresco allows you to paint over). But the whole point is to have fun. My advice is to paint with the tip of the brush hairs for the details, use a napkin to knock excess water off the brush, and try painting into pre-wetted area of the paper to see the color bloom out.
7. Let your map dry thoroughly for a bit and then place your painting under a stack of heavy books. (where will you get those oh gamer?) You can glue a little map-maker’s seal or a written legend in a empty area of the map.
8. Give the map to the players at the table and watch them crudely mark it up as they explore and get cheeto dust all over the fine elven woodlands.

Thanks for tuning into this little series of posts and I hope you have some fun making and playing on your maps soon.

Digital / Analog Procedural Sandbox Region Witchcraft – part 5

This is the fifth installment in my series of posts on making a sandbox-style region map using automatic drawing methods and vintage Judges Guild random tables. We have gone through these steps so far:

1. Create a nebulous outline of a continent map with scribbles and loose pencil drawing.
2. Use a cheap watercolor kit to randomly splatter our map with terrain colors and then paint in all remaining white paper with chosen color areas.
3. Make a high resolution scan of our loose painting and zoom in on a region to map.
4. Use free graphics software to place a hex grid on our chosen map region.
5. Use old Judges Guild random tables and maybe a computer script to roll our encounters for each hex and determine if they are a Village, Castle, Ravaged Ruin, or Lurid Lair.
6. Draw in loose roads to connect villages and castles with compatible alignments.
7. Start to think of the narrative reasons for differences in alignment and race between populated areas.

What we have so far is a map like this:

We have come to a loose understanding of an adventuring region of about the size of New York State or just shy of the surface of Oregon. We know where the major attractions and mysteries lay. We know which ones are bad/chaotic and which ones are good/lawful. We don’t have their names or their specific details, but these can be rolled up on the fly as the PCs travel  through the land. What we really need is a solid chunk of tight territory with more information that can serve as a home-base region for a new campaign.

I am in some old red-box style campaigns that have stretched for multiple years of play and I don’t think we ever got the itch to strike out overland, long distance, all at one go. It is always a gradual expansion of known territory. Maybe the big sweeping exploration is for level seven and higher, where you can fend off the frightening probability of OD&D wandering dragons,  but I know that a “Keep on the Borderlands” or “Nentir Vale” size area is a good starting point for a beginning campaign.

The time has come for us to draw in some hard features on a hex by hex basis. We need to name our places, determine our inhabitants, and find their relationships to drive the interests of our players that stalk the six-sided wilderness.

For this next step, we need to use our digital wizardry to zoom in even more. I picked a likely spot, as shown by the red outline above, and cropped down. Like my first printed region map that I used to mark encounters on before, I made a letter-sized inkjet print of my image. The numbered hexes are still in place from when I overlaid the main region map. I clipped a piece of clear acetate over the print-out and used a technical pen to doodle in my features. You can draw directly on the printout if you desire, I just drew on the transparencies so I could scan the doodles in again and layer it cleanly over my map in my graphics program. At this point you could even remake the entire map using your own digital cartography brushes in GIMP or other mapping programs of your choice. But, as you can probably tell, I like the touch of the hand so I went at it and came up with this:

The first thing that I did was to consult my main region map and find out where my encounters were. I made up a consistent little map symbol for Castles with a little tower , Lairs with a little cave, Ruins with some crumbling structure, and Village hexes had some square dots that seem to indicate a building plan. I admit that the villages look a little unclear but I was trying to ape the B&W cartography of the Wilderlands Of High Fantasy Maps and failed. I like my little towered city better in the center.

After the main encounter symbols went down, I connected villages and some castles with road systems represented by dashed lines. I tried to imagine the paths of least resistance while traveling through the splotchy terrain and then also started to put rivers, mountains, and forests in where I thought the color of the paper demanded it. Notice how I put a high pointy mountain symbol on all the dark gray watercolor spots and then the smaller hill features around the other rough spots. In the process, I saw a yellow patch of  earth on the south-east corner of the map and decided that some hills would form a rain-shadow over an arid section of the region. I guess I have some rudimentary weather patterns now.

The rivers should be placed so they are always flowing downhill in some manner, so I usually started them in mountains or hills and had them flow through or by villages on their way to the ocean. Creating the roads first reminds you to draw in a bridge or a ford in the waterways when you need to. It is better to put the information on the map so you won’t forget about it later. I made a shadowy outline of the forest and decided it would represent a real thick wood. There would be trees and sparse copses in many hexes but I wanted the big green spots to be unbroken forests. All the blank hexes would be either plains, or scrub, or grasslands, or gentle hills. I guess I could also come up with symbols for those hex types but I liked the effect of the color popping through the map.

So there, I had my complete home-base region all mapped out. All I needed to do now was make a dungeon or three, name some villages and inhabitants, figure out who occupied the ruins, castles, and lairs and then create some relationship maps to goad the PCs into investigation or activity. (Village A is bothered by lair B, castle C is guarding ruin D, etc.)

The drawing and symbols are not all consistent or neat, but I was doodling directly without practicing much so I think it came out alright considering. The information that the map contains is what is important. You shouldn’t have to worry about how your map looks unless your players are going to see it, like a handout map.

So tune in for the sixth and final part of my sandbox mapping posts… the Player Handout Map.