RPG Superstar 2010 Top 16
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In his recent blog post, Joshua Frost gives "would-be future Paizo authors and current Paizo freelancers" some advice about mapping. In previous interviews and columns, both Erik Mona and James Jacobs have mentioned that "bad maps" was their number one reason for rejecting solicitations when working on Dungeon magazine. Every so often, a terrific cartographer will let slip a little about what makes a good map, like Chris West explaining how his recent swamp poster map was designed to cut down on the long straight lines-of-sight that would make blaster pistols too handy. And Chris also offered kind comments on last year's mapping challenge.
I'm a firm believer in avoiding the time-tested rookie mistakes, so that I can make newer, better mistakes.
Aside from clarity and detail, what makes a good map?
One thing that comes to mind: Think in three dimensions!
It's very easy to fall into the habit of mapping out everything in neat, flat little squares. But the world is anything but flat, and thinking in all three dimensions tends to add a lot of interesting possibilities for maneuvers and the use of skills like acrobatics, fly and climb.
Interactivity...things that the characters can utilize to change the battlefield or affect it. Areas should be dynamic and it never hurts to put some "easter eggs" (for lack of a better term) in there-- a fire spell here does this, the rope here can be cut, the crates there can be toppled. Areas that are regularly used for certain activities should reflect that-- consider the contents of a garage, a church lobby, a busy side street (and the adjoining alleys) in a city, an active section of waterfront.
What was happening before the adventure came to the scene-- was there construction? Is it in a state of disrepair? What has the upkeep been like? It's going a bit simulationist, but even if you don't include those details on the map, you might want to have them in your head for descriptive purposes in the text.
The environment can be fun to play with, too-- spraying water, smoking vents, loose rubble...it depends on what you're creating the map for and what the intention is. Is it a lair? A previous battlefield? The scene of a robbery? How much of a role do you want the setting to play, because it can simply be dressing or it can be another character in the scene.
-Ben.
Make sure that you treat the map design in the same way you treat adventure design. Make sure that you don't railroad your players into one course of action. If the dungeon has only one route through then the adventure will feel linear no matter how many plot twists you throw in. On the other hand, make sure that you place choke points in the right place. If the PCs can take 3 routes to the finale, make sure they come back together and they don't bypass important clues/events on the way.
If it's a single encounter battlemap then the same applies. Give them 2 or three routes they can take to get to their goal - but not so many that they spend forever trying to decide between them. Make each route actually different. So one route might utilise concealment for the rogue. Another is a straight dash across open ground into the front of the shield wall for the fighter. The third could be blocked with difficult undergrowth but be passable to the ranger/druid.
Add in rolling barrels, damns that can be burst, rope bridges. And yes, make sure that the bread and butter stuff works. Don't make it possible for someone to walk into the castle and go straight to the treasury. Make sure the guard room is beside the front door and close to the barracks. Put the stores beside the kitchen. Make sure that a dungeon with large creatures has large passageways and doors... You'd be amazed how easy it is to forget to put 10' wide doors in when you're dealing with ogres.
RPG Superstar 2010 Top 8
aka AWizardInDallas
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A good dungeon also considers the basic necessities of life: food, water, ventilation, even waste removal and whatever other things creatures need to live. A good dungeon map also feels organic too, not artificial, not contrived. Every passage, every door and every trap feels as though it was meant to be there. :)
Tiny pet peeve of mine - extraneous map detail. Asking "is that rock there?" and getting a different answer from 3 DM's shows a lack of foresight. Personally, I prefer that for grid-enabled maps, that the grid is removed around actual details - like that big rock. If something isn't "really" there, it doesn't need to be drawn in. If it is there, tell me about it =).
Creative Director
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My pet peeve is unnecessary circles and curves.
If your map contains more and weirder shapes than I can draw precisely on a battle grid in 30 seconds or less, your map is dead to me.
Heh... conversely, my pet peeve is maps with rooms that are all squares and always precisely conform to the grid. Square rooms are boring!
And not being exact and perfect when drawing the map out on a battlefield is okay. The players won't notice if your battlemap map doesn't exactly match the map in the adventure.
A key or legend. I do not know how many times I have had to guess what those little blue dots, no wait the brown triangles, I think it's a tree.
Secondly is a sense of intelligence. Like the ogres mentioned earlier. Or a gold dragon will pass through water and fire to get to bed. Or a blue is going to have a lair with lots of 5x60 hallways (probably ones with illusionary ceilings above them when it is actually open enough for wingflight. :)
What works for me is to picture the map in use. If you are making a castle, picture the inhabitants living in it and try to fill every of their needs, like living quarters, storage, eating, training, relaxing, everything conected properly, etc.
Also try to put a few "odd" stuff like a tiny room, an odd angle in a building, a lone rock on a field, etc., these add "realism" to the maps, for nothing is "perfect" or "square".
An old computer game named Dungeon Keeper makes a fine excersise for maping, since the whole point of the game is a dungeon, and your minios will make sure to teach you that they need lairs, food supplies, training rooms, guard room and even casinos to relax, and of course, everything on its right place in order to be efficient (or useful at all!)
Heh... conversely, my pet peeve is maps with rooms that are all squares and always precisely conform to the grid. Square rooms are boring!
And not being exact and perfect when drawing the map out on a battlefield is okay. The players won't notice if your battlemap map doesn't exactly match the map in the adventure.
Amen, James. I am with you on this big time.
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My pet peeve is unnecessary circles and curves.
If your map contains more and weirder shapes than I can draw precisely on a battle grid in 30 seconds or less, your map is dead to me.
Heh... conversely, my pet peeve is maps with rooms that are all squares and always precisely conform to the grid. Square rooms are boring!
And not being exact and perfect when drawing the map out on a battlefield is okay. The players won't notice if your battlemap map doesn't exactly match the map in the adventure.
+1! Something like the maps in 'The Whispering Cairn' or 'House of the Beast' are EXACTLY what I want -- as a player, you just can't wait to explore and draw the next room or passage (I'm a very visual type of person). Granted, you also need dungeon-dressing to actually make them *feel* interesting (something both of the adventures mentioned also manage in), but if the castle of the ancient vampire lord is square, and also consists of square rooms, I might lose interest in the whole adventure right at the beginning (both as GM and player).
And, as a GM, I rarely draw exact battle maps (just as I rarely provide the players with 100% accurate city or countryside maps).
A circle is just as much a boring, regular polygon as a square.
In just a few posts, this thread is giving me a lot to consider for possible maps. It's nice to get some more perspective on making maps that make sense and some more info from an architectural perspective.
<nitpick>However, circles aren't polygons. </nitpick>
Having recently put together several maps for my Kingmaker turnover and the Fellnight Queen adventure, I'd have to say I prefer injecting "credibility" into a map design more than anything else. Can you legitimately see the structure you're drawing serving its primary function.
For instance:
Dungeons - Typical "dungeons" in the gaming sense are usually ruins of some sort. So, I like to track back to what the ruin once represented. Then, I sort of mentally draw out the structure as it used to be before taking the proverbial wrecking ball to it.
Inhabited Structures - This goes for everything from castles to a wizard's tower or any building floorplan based off an urban map. But, it can also include inhabited caves or ruins, just the same. Regardless, you've got to sort out what creatures are calling that place home. Then, analyze what their physiology would require to make it a home...i.e., water, food source, lighting, breathable air, suitable defenses against intruders, etc. Working out that kind of stuff brings a map to life, in my opinion.
Tombs - Usually (but not always), I don't concern myself as much with the "living situation" of how a tomb got constructed. It wasn't built for any purpose other than containing the dead. I do however look for ways to still serve up livable conditions for creatures that have chosen to make such a place their home. But if it's all undead or creatures that don't require that sort of thing, I construct the tomb's map in such a way that it would serve its original purpose.
Overland Encounters - I almost always think in three-dimensions rather than a flat plane for overland encounters. Establishing climbable trees, elevated terrain, impassable or dangerous terrain, etc. can all make for more interesting scenes when the PCs interact with a given locale. Three-dimensional thinking can also be used to spice up underground encounters, too...particularly caves and cavern systems, where I like to play on the use of water a lot to explain how the rock got naturally carved in such unique and interesting ways...though, clearly, you could establish that someone chiseled it that way, too.
Anyway, that's just a few of the things I try and think about during map design. And for any location that will involve an encounter, I almost always try and envision the scene playing out in that particular room or location when the PCs get there.
But that's just my two-cents,
--Neil
My pet peeve is unnecessary circles and curves.
If your map contains more and weirder shapes than I can draw precisely on a battle grid in 30 seconds or less, your map is dead to me.
If it's a castle dungeon, I can understand this. However, if it's a system of caverns that has largely been left unworked by the inhabitants (whether through indifference or laziness), I'll take the intricate realism over simple every time.
If you have the chance, drawing such irregular shapes out ahead of time can thwart a lot of irritation. The only caveat is to be sure you have an effective way to keep from revealing too much of the map in advance.
An old computer game named Dungeon Keeper makes a fine excersise for maping, since the whole point of the game is a dungeon, and your minios will make sure to teach you that they need lairs, food supplies, training rooms, guard room and even casinos to relax, and of course, everything on its right place in order to be efficient (or useful at all!)
DK! Man, I still love that stupid game. :-D
I'll take the intricate realism over simple every time.So will I. My pet peeve is unnecessary complex shapes, not all complex shapes. If you're doing a wilderness or natural cavern map, go hog wild with whatever is truest to nature. And if you're mapping an amphitheater or some such, it should be circular.
Just don't go sticking random circular rooms in a dungeon because "rooms with straight walls are boring." Unless the people for whom the structure was design have the same gods'-eye-view as the players, making an overhead view of the building interior more aesthetically pleasing is not an architecturally valid justification for adding a circular room.
I get annoyed when hard-to-draw artistic flourishes are added to building maps for entirely metagame reasons. I'd rather see a building map with realistic (easy-to-construct, predominantly-rectangular) rooms that have interesting internal features (alcoves, balconies, pillars, stairs, etc.) than a building map with weird-shaped rooms whose only aesthetic purpose is to make the gods'-eye-view of the building more interesting.
Okay, I can certainly see that -- I think we've all seen plenty of those "skull-shaped-room-at-the-top-of-the-dungeon" maps to identify with what you mean here. And I agree that this sort of thing should be done sparingly, rather than as a norm.
Aside from clarity and detail, what makes a good map?
Can't really say much about an individual map, but as for collections, I still think the "Guide to Korvosa" was better organized than just about every following Pathfinder regional chronicle when it comes to geographic presentation. The individual sections had minimaps showing the portions of interest with labels for points of interest, which definitely beats flipping back 5, 10, 30 pages constantly to get bearings while reading sections.
(I also liked how there was a "shown/pictured" {I can't remember which for sure} blurb under just about every single picture like "shown: Acadamae Student," but that's off-topic.)
I hate it when the map is too big for the mapping mat. Having a really cool, giant dungeon complex that can't fit on the gaming table is kind of annoying, especially if you don't have time to pre-draw them out on separate sheets of giant map paper.
I kind of learned this the hard way with one of my campaigns....it took so long to go through a giant dungeon (even though 3 rather important campaign events occured in it), that the players kind of lost interest in the campaign. It literally took 6 months to go through since we only played once or twice a month in a good month, and the party was so big it was rare to go through 2 or 3 rooms in a single 5 hour session.