Welcome to Elf Water

The next step in the campaign prep stage was establishing the PCs’ “home base.” This was a much easier phase than settling on a region in which to set the campaign—largely, because I cheated.

I’ve always enjoyed and appreciated maps, even before I discovered RPGs. One might even argue that my fascination for this hobby stems from that love. I still recall a map from the interior of some children’s book I owned that showed the protagonist’s journey through a forest, diagramed in dotted line fashion like a “Family Circus” cartoon. For me, the attraction wasn’t what adventures were documented, but what possible events might occur in the areas unvisited by the hero. Maps still have that effect on me.

The “cartographilia” has manifested in a peculiar habit of mine. I find it incredibly relaxing to sketch maps of small towns and sylvan areas, rending such landscapes in either regular or colored pencil. My mind wanders during the process, pondering who lives in these imaginary places and what life must be like for them. It’s a wonderful way to de-stress when something’s bothering me. As a result, I have a number of little maps tucked away in various stages of completion. When it’s time to introduce a new community into a game, I check this collection first to see if anything fits the bill. In this case, I had the perfect map.

Coming up with a name for the community was a quick chore. I imagined that the settlement was situated on a place where the elves and humans first came into contact, a place to trade and negotiate the accord that ultimately led to the human settlement of the outskirts of Southwood. Picturing a forest glen along a riverbank, a place where elves once danced graceful waltzes underneath a summer moon, the name “Elf Water” sprung to mind as an appropriate human-given name for that place and the community that arose on that site would share that moniker.

In the past, I’ve gone to great lengths to detail most of my home bases before play begins. The pages accompanying my old Ashabenford map is a good representation of how much effort I’d expend before the game started. But this time, going along with the “this is supposed to be fun” mantra, I whipped up just two pages of notes documenting a few important NPCs and buildings to guide me. I plan to flesh Elf Water out as future play dictates. I know who’s in charge, what temples are in town, who has their fingers in quasi-legal (or outright illegal) pies, the major wizards, and a few other colorful individuals. That’s all I needed to get things rolling.

The final step was to scan my village map and key the important buildings for the players to consult as needed. A quick trip through Photoshop and—viola!—Elf Water was ready for PC inhabitation. With plenty of space to add new material, I can get a lot of use out of this community, now and in the future.

Yes, I know what "festhall" really means.

That’s it for this week. There’ll be a post on Elf Water’s outskirts and some actual play reports next week as I continue to ramble on about the Realms. 

Choosing a Backdrop

To say the Realms is large place is an understatement, even if I’m confining myself to regions covered in the Gray Box and some of the supplements. Those poster-sized maps only hint at the scope of Faerûn and it’s not until you put down the transparent overlays and start counting hexes that you realize how much an area even a small section covers. Needless to say, I was going to have to zoom in on but a small part of its grandeur for the campaign.

My usual choices for campaigns are the Dalelands (Mistledale in particular; see my original campaign map of Ashabenford here), the Western Heartlands along the Trade Way, or somewhere in the Savage North. One of these years I’ll tackle Tethyr or the lands east of the Sea of Fallen Stars, but since this was an exercise in fun, I decided I’d keep to my old haunts. Having a backlog of previously-generated campaign materials for those regions doesn’t hurt, either.

Since I was coming off of Kingmaker, and as an old school DM I have a preference for such, I wanted to keep the campaign on the fringes of civilization, thus allowing me to play with some of the plot ideas I had in mind. This crossed the Dalelands off the list and I wasn’t feeling like managing the constant stream of traders and costers rolling along the Trade Way. Plus, I personally like mountains and forests. A return to the Savage North was in order.

Breaking out my copies of FR1 Waterdeep and the North and FR5 The Savage Frontier, I started re-reading them and looking over the landscape. Although a Waterdeep-based campaign would be fun, running an urban game requires a lot of work, and I discarded that idea. The same reasoning also removed Silverymoon, Neverwinter, Luskan, and other large urban sites from the list. Then my eyes fell on the Loudwater environs and the creative wheels started churning. A nearby fallen Elven empire, a large town, the biggest forest in all of the Realms, a Zhentarim-controlled village, an abandoned dwarven kingdom, and Hellgate Keep all in close proximity to one offered more potential adventure seeds than I could count. This had potential.

Following my decision to only incorporate Realms canon as interested me, I started looking for what was actually detailed about this area. None of it is covered in the Gray Box, so it was time to move on to secondary sources, namely the above-mentioned supplements. Loudwater and Llorkh garner a paragraph or two each in Waterdeep and the North, while Hellgate Keep and the High Forest each earn three. Hardly a treasure trove, but exactly the amount I felt like dealing with. The Greypeak Mountains have a paragraph in The Savage Frontier, and more detailed information for Loudwater, Llorkh, and Hellgate Keep is provided. The High Forest earns an entire chapter, but by this point, it’s become beyond the scope of my focus for the initial campaign adventures, so I can ignore that material for now.

What does catch my attention is a small entry covering “Other Woods” in FR5. It reads in its entirety, “This is not the name of a single forest, but includes the Lurkwood, Southkrypt garden, Southwood, Moonwood, and Westwood. These [sic] edges of these forests are logged by men, though their dark depths are largely a mystery.” Southwood (or South Wood depending on if you’re going by the text or the map) is located just beneath Loudwater and seems perfect what I’m thinking about: A frontier area close to a bastion of civilization but offering unplumbed mysteries.

I decided to consult a tertiary source—The North boxed set—to see if there was anything further I could use in there. As much of the material in that set is based (or copied outright) from both FR1 and FR5, it might or might not provide additional glimpses or inspiration. Luckily, there was a little more, but the entry was still sparse enough for me to monkey with. I’ll decline quoting it in case it spoils any surprises for my players.

Next, I started brainstorming and came up with the following background for the campaign:

After the transformation of Ascalhorn to Hellgate Keep, the elven kingdom of Eaerlann fell, and most of the moon elves fled down the Riving Shining to either travel to Evermeet or join the Fallen Kingdom near Ardeep Forest. A few, however, lingered in the Loudwater area, either joining the small mixed-race community or occupying the Southwood. These displaced refugees harbored dreams of resettling the ancient kingdom if the forces of Hellgate Keep were ever banished. For centuries, the elves claimed the Southwood as their own, a small domain of displaced elves dreaming of their former glory. This enclave dubbed themselves “Lanymthilhar.”

In 1235 DR, the Year of the Black Horde, a never-before seen force of orcs boiled out of the Northern mountains, rampaging as far south as Calimshan. One tribe, the Black Slashers, charged down from the Graypeak Mountains towards the River Shining. Forging a tentative alliance, the humans of Loudwater and the refugee elves of Lanymthihar battled the Black Slashers, breaking their invasion near the northern verge of the Southwood. After this defeat, an accord was reached between the Lanymithihar elves and the residents of Loudwater. The agreement opened the outer edges of the Southwood to human logging and settlement, but the forest interior would remain sacrosanct and protected by the elves. So long as this compact was obeyed and the loggers didn’t become greedy in their yearly felling of timber, the two cultures would pursue their own agendas separately and in peace.

The PCs would begin the campaign in one of the few forest edge communities, caught between civilization to the north and forbidden mystery to the south. A decision to play up the mystery of elven culture and the phenomenon known as “The Retreat,” led me to prohibit elves as a starting race for the PCs as mentioned previously. While not actual enemies, I wanted to explore the “alien” factor of elves, rather than making them pointy-eared humans. I hope to have fun with this aspect of the campaign.

After a quick trip of the maps through my scanner and importing the scans into Photoshop, I made minor changes and additions to the canonical landscape of the region. I also took a look through Volo’s Guide to the North to see if I could use anything in that book, and decided I’d incorporate one of roadside inns mentioned therein. Situated to the east of Loudwater, “The Nighthunt Inn” might come in handy should the PCs ever decide to travel toward Llorkh. I now had my regional campaign map.

Loudwater and Environs as Ed never imaged.

The next step would be zooming in even more to detail the PCs’ home base of Elf Water and the adventuring opportunities in their own backyard.

New Horizons

I am without a doubt undergoing a sea change in my gaming preferences. I’ve lost all enthusiasm for level-based fantasy games in the last few months and I now realize that I’ve hit my saturation point. This doesn’t mean I’m done with them for good, but it will be some time before I’m running D&D in any of its myriad forms again. Playing the game is fine; running it is another story.

This also doesn’t mean that I’m finished with writing for them either. In fact, I just finished up my work for another level-based fantasy game and have another contribution in that vein on my schedule. However, when it comes to my personal life, it’s time to change things up.

The downside of this realization is that Stonehell is effectively in stasis for the foreseeable future. I hate to do it, but my lack of interest in writing dungeon adventures is blatantly obvious when I look over what I’ve written so far. I have high expectations for the sequel and I’m not meeting them. I’ll come back and write the second book once I can get excited about the dungeon again. My apologies to those of you who’ve been looking forward to the sequel, but I’m not going to take the sleazy route of writing a piece of shit and asking you for your money for it.

“OK, Mike, if that’s how you feel, what’s next?” I’m glad you ask.

Unless something gets changed (which is entirely possible), the next issue of Fight On! will feature the first of a series of articles I’ve written aimed at “modern” horror and fantasy. I use quotation marks because the default period is the 1920s (all the better to fit classic Call of Cthulhu) rather than the 21^st century. I’m extremely proud of this series, more proud of it than anything I’ve done for my own enjoyment in some time. The article features a map (a glimpse of which is below)done by cartographer Ravi Shankar who I met over at the Cartographer’s Guild. Ravi does some excellent work and I encourage you to check out his portfolio—especially if you’re looking for a good cartographer.

The series details a quaint little portion of upstate New York located in the Hudson Valley region. In real life, the Hudson Valley has a great deal of folklore attached to it. One finds stories of everything from headless horsemen to Bigfoot to UFOs. After I’m done with it, there will be even more weird goings-on reported. The purpose of the series is to present a sandbox setting in which referees can place their own historical horror games. Tired of Arkham? Come visit Wildwyck County. If I do my job correctly though, the place can be used for more than just Call of Cthulhu. It’d make an excellent Colonial Gothic campaign if you roll the clock back or a World of Darkness setting if you advance the timeline ahead. One could even remove all the serial numbers and turn it into a fantasy-based campaign using Lamentations of the Flame Princess or Realms of Crawling Chaos.

The series has personal connections for me, which is one of the reasons it has me so excited. Wildwyck County is based on real life portions of New York State where I had many happy experiences. The chance to return to that place (even in a fictionalized and highly spookified form) is a great pleasure. In fact, it’s even inspired me to return there in real life for a few days to engage in some R&R&R (rest and relaxation and research). I plan on taking some photos to use in future articles to support the artwork I’ve already contributed (chosen, but not created by me, thankfully) for the initial article. 

Connected to the ‘Wyck (as the locals call their home)are the eternal autumnal lands of the October Country. I’ve been rambling about and designing for the October Country for over two years now on the blog Secret Antiquities and it represents my second big project. I’ve got enough material to begin playtesting the setting and I hope to assemble the finished material into a book once I’ve worked the kinks out. If I had to pick a work that I’d consider my magnum opus, the October Country would be it. I call it my Rosetta Stone setting because any story I want to tell—fantasy, horror, intrigue, pulp, or weirdness—can find a home in the October Country. It’s a personal place, but one I hope has enough common touchstones to be universal.

I’m not sure how I’ll handle that setting in the future. I’d like to see it in print, but I’m not certain I want to go down the road of self-publishing again. I’ve gotten lazy and like it when all I have to do is string the words together and let somebody else worry about the art, the editing, the layout, etc. Unfortunately, I’m hesitant to relinquish ownership of the material, so self-publishing may be the only course. But that’s all carts far, far in front of horses for now.

This brings me to my last concern: the future of this blog. My original plan was to keep it up until I released the Stonehell sequel and then quietly retire it. Now, with the sequel on hold for the foreseeable future, I’m at a loss at what to do. I have no interest in writing more about fantasy games like D&D here for now, but this blog draws a lot of traffic and has a robust following. Do I mothball the blog until I come back around to level-based fantasy games again or do I repurpose it to reflect my new interests? And if I do that, what happens to Secret Antiquities? Frankly, I don’t know.

That’s my future, folks. One which may or may not be of interest to you, but I thought you deserved a heads up as to where I’m headed. Things have been very, very quiet here as of late and this is the reason why. I hope this glimpse at where I’m going and my future plans sparks some interest and you hang around here or follow me where I’m going, but I understand if you’re more comfortable remaining where I’ve been. It’s all good either way.

Stonehell from the Party's Perspective

Or at least how they perceived Level One before they noticed that the layout had undergone...changes...since they last ventured inside.

Topographical Mapping Help Wanted

At the risk of biting off more than I can chew, I’ve had an idea for a project in my head now for several months. This would not be a for-profit piece, but rather a submission for one of our beloved fanzines. I’ve already talked with Iggy of Fight On! and got the go ahead to submit it, but I got sidetracked and had to put the piece on the backburner. Now, to give me an outlet from Stonehell 2 when one is needed, I’d like to continue to tinker with it for eventual submittal.


Without going to much into it, the piece really needs a map to accompany it and I have the perfect topological map for it. I’ve taken a stab at it, but I’m not satisfied with my efforts. The map I’m working from is an old U.S. Geological survey map so it is quite detailed. What I’m now looking for is a gifted mapmaker who could render such a map into one more suitable for a roleplaying aid, but retain the character and sense of realism found in the original. It would end up being a large map, roughly 11” x 17”, suitable for a two-page spread and lots of room for adventuring locales. This is not necessarily for a fantasy world, so an eye for the realistic is a plus on this. If you could give it a 1920’s feel too, that’d be even cooler. In return, I’d gladly share the byline on the eventual article with you.

If this sounds like something you’d be interested in, please drop me an email at poleandrope AT gmail DOT com. If you’ve got a sample of your work or a link to some, feel free to include that as well.

The Siege of Fort Wolf’s Head

Last Sunday saw the players in my Labyrinth Lord campaign defending a remote frontier settlement against a horde of goblins. The scenario was lifted directly from Night’s Dark Terror, although the events leading up to the siege were a result of the players’ own actions. Putting them in charge of the fort’s defense was a great way to shake up the game for a session before returning to the dungeon crawl that seems to be the preferred style of play. I almost, almost sent out an email to players to suggest they watch Zulu or Assault on Precinct 13 before the game, but decided to not tip my hand ahead of time. Michael Caine references were made nevertheless.

The biggest problem in preparing for the battle was that I didn’t have a map of the frontier fort that accompanied the module. My copy of B10 is secondhand and is missing the big map and counters. If I was dealing with people who maintain a reasonable business model, I would normally have the option to buy a PDF version of that adventure and print out the map in pieces to tape together. Alas, Hasbro has an interesting method of doing business. Thankfully, someone was kind enough to provide me with a copy of the map so I could reproduce it on a sheet of Gaming Paper ahead of time. I’m attaching a photo of that reproduction to this post—just in case anyone else out there was wondering what the map of the outpost looks like.

Stonehell Campaign Map

Over at The Savage Sword of Scadgrad, there has been a player’s map posted for scadgrad’s online MapTool campaign. Done in the style of “your crazy, adventuring uncle left this to you on his deathbed,” the map shows just how easy it is to drop Ol’ Stony into any campaign world. Check out the post here.

And speaking of megadungeons, Kesher’s posted a great quote over at the Original Dungeons & Dragons Discussion forum, having found it at The Alexandrian. Having been working on and running Stonehell for more than two years now, I both identify with this remark and heartily agree with it.

In many ways, I feel like a megadungeon becomes the DM's character. And I play my megadungeon much like I would play a PC. Before play begins, I don't really know what my megadungeon is going to do: But my random encounter tables generate 2d4 anubians just after the PCs raid the depths, and I know the anubians have sent a team of assassins to hunt them down. Black-eyed cultists are holding a ritual on Level 2 and I suddenly know the sin day they're celebrating. Lizardmen show up in the anubian sections of the dungeon and I know tensions are erupting between their tribes. Then the minotaur shows up to determine why tribute is not being paid and... and... and...

And a story gets told.

“Roont Urt”

The mental auditions to choose what game I intend to run after Watchfires & Thrones runs its course continue. It was my original intent to run Gamma World, but, although that continues to be the front-runner, a few dark horses have entered the race. Whether these go the distance or are mere phantoms conjured by Gamer A.D.D. remains to be seen.

Assuming I continue with the Gamma World plan, I intend to run it as a wide-open sandbox. My re-acquaintance with the rules has shown me not only how suitable Gamma World is for this type of campaign, but it actually seems to be the default setting for the game—something that escaped me in my youth. With more wisdom and greater experience in this type of campaign, I foresee a heck of a lot of fun in exploring a post-apocalyptic sandbox.

I’ve started doing the initial planning for a Gamma World sandbox by following Rob Conley’s incredibly useful step-by-step process. Although certain other projects got in the way of progress, I have completed the first step: the initial conceptualization of the larger world in which my sandbox will be located. Although a simple one-page sketch map is suggested, I’m more of a poster paper/colored pencils man. After all, why settle for sketching when you can create art!

I didn’t worry too much about pinning down scale at this point and size. This map is more in preparation for the day the characters find a bubble car and start zooming around the lower atmosphere (intentionally or not) and set down in some unknown region of the world, henceforth known as “Roont Urt” rather than the more prosaic “Gamma Terra.” If things look a little askew, that’s completely intentional…and part of the fun of exploring the campaign world. The initial sandbox would likely be set in the orange region in the lower left-hand portion of the map, right around where that mountain chain ends in a “Y”.

Next step: Naming regions.

Modern Map Suggestions?

In light of my own advice, I’m giving some serious second thought as to what RPG I’d really like to run after (or even before) my Labyrinth Lord game winds down. There are a few candidates, all of them having the common factor that they are not fantasy-based titles. I need a little break after living, breathing, and most importantly, writing fantasy stuff for the last two-plus years.

Strangely enough, when it comes to modern setting games, my biggest hang-up is mapping. My modern games are more character-driven than location-based, and I’d prefer to spend time diagramming the relationships between various factions and individuals instead of detailing the office that the players operate out of. When such detail is needed, I can always draw upon real-life experience if necessary, quickly sketching out an old work place or what have you to use in a pinch.

The problem with that, however, is that, after a time, all the offices start looking the same, the churches have the same layout, and even the corner store get repetitive. So to combat this, I’m looking for suggestions on gaming resources filled with modern location maps. I see that there are a few such things on rpgnow.com, but the reviews on them are not great. Does anyone have something they can recommend based on actual use?

My only requirement is that it has to be either a PDF (I’m not buying actual books this year) or a web resource. It should also have the widest range of locations possible from the mundane (convenience store) to the uncommon (funeral parlor). I don’t need them to be usable with miniatures, but being able to print them out and keep on hand for the next time the PCs chase the bad guy into a construction site would be a bonus. Cheap or free is always appreciated too.

Any suggestions?

Can Anyone Identify This Brand of Graph Paper?

I'm in the middle of my first cold of the season and it's keeping me from the work I'd like to be doing. Instead, I'm nursing a strange obsession that I can't seem to satisfy. I'm hoping somebody out there might be able to help. It's a long shot, but here goes:

I have had a pad of a certain brand of graph paper for more than twenty years. Many of my earliest maps were drawn out on this type of paper (my version of Ashabenford being one of them) and it has served me well. The problem is that I'm just about out. For pure nostalgia's sake, I would love to get my hands on another tablet of the stuff. Unfortunately, the few pieces I have remaining have no brand identification marks and I have no idea where I bought the stuff back in '80-something. My search online has turned up nothing as I have little to work with.

I've attached a few photos below of the paper. It is double-sided with 10 squares to the inch on one side and 20 squares to the inch on the other. It features a .75 inch margin around its long edges and a .5 inch one at top and bottom. I have only seen one other person with this stuff in my life, and they too bought it a long time ago. The manufacturer might be long gone, but if it's not, I'm hoping that someone out there can either recognize it by sight or has their own stock of the stuff with a brand name still on it.

Does this look familiar to anybody?

UPDATE: The paper has been identified as Armory 1/10" x 1/20" Graph Paper. A very special thanks to Allan Grohe for confirming the identity of the stuff and thereby explaining why most people who have if bought it twenty years ago. Looks like I've got some auction trolling to do if I want another pad of the stuff.

My Next Project Needs a Cartographer and a Cover Artist

Late Friday night, I experienced one of those glorious moments when an idea comes into the head fully formed and ready to be unleashed upon the world. It was as if my brain decided to reward my single-minded determination to get my current book across the finish line after all the trouble it gave me at its inception. At least part of this new project hails from Bat Country and I’m positive that it’s not going to be to everyone’s tastes, but that’s the advantage of a self-published book—nobody but me gets hurt if it turns out to be a stinker. The suck stops here, so to speak. And while I fully expect some folks to turn their noses up at it, I suspect that others will embrace it for being unusual in regards to most of the projects that the OSR has produced up until now. There’s only one way to find out for sure.

Most of the weekend was spent poking and prodding at the idea, trying to see if it would break under rough handling and whether the cold grey light of dawn would reveal its hidden flaws. So far, it remains viable. Yesterday saw me working on the maps for the book, and the fact that they flowed so quickly and easily means that the universe is most certainly trying to tell me something. I see no other option but to just write it as soon as I put the final touches on my current book. It should go fast.

While I’m writing it, I’m going to need some assistance turning my maps into more detailed and attractive pieces. I’ll also need a color cover piece and possibly a logo. This is where you folks come in.

I need someone who can convert my hand-drawn schematics into four black and white maps for me. Three are full pages, one is a half page. They are all non-linear pieces. No straight dungeon hallways on this one. If there were, I could do it myself. Three of the maps are outdoor locations and consist of a fortification, a town, and a wilderness map. The fourth is the fortification interior. I also need someone who isn’t going to dilly-dally since the text is going to be churned out relatively quick.

For the cover piece, I have a particular style in mind, but the parameters are loose and I can relax them if your work impresses me.

This is a paying gig, albeit not one that pays extremely well. Money is tight all around for me, but I want to compensate you for your work. Unless I get really lucky and find someone who can not only do great cartography work but knock my socks off with a cover piece, I’ll likely be looking for two people on this one.

If you’re looking for a little exposure and a little cash, please drop me an email at poleandrope(at)gmail(dot)com expressing your interest and providing me with either samples or links to your work. We can take it from there.

A Long Weekend Put to Good Use

Stocking the Hexmap

Over the weekend, I prepared a rough hexmap of the immediate territory surrounding the campaign’s starting city. After placing the terrain, settlements, and dungeons, I now need to flesh out the map with lairs, ruins, and other interesting features. The problem is that I’m uncertain as to how to go about it. Looking through my books, I can’t find any guidelines as to how often these sites should be encountered, let alone a helpful Moldvay-style random stocking table.

In lieu of such tools, I’ve been experimenting with various types of dice to see what the results spread would be if I decide to randomly stock the map. I divided the map, which is 17 x 25 hexes, into five sections comprised of 85 hexes each (five columns of 17 hexes). I then when through the sections rolling a different type of die for each hex found within. On a roll of 1, I made a note that a ruin or something similar is found in that hex; on a result of a 2, a lair would be encountered. What follows are the results for each:

Method I (d6): 25 events (30% of the total hexes)
Method II (d8): 23 events (27% of the total hexes)
Method III (d10): 17 events (20% of the total hexes)
Method IV (d12): 15 events (18% of the total hexes)
Method V (d20): 12 events (14% of the total hexes)

Leaving out castle and citadels for the moment, I’m thinking that Methods III & IV give me the nicest percentage for a pulp sword & sorcery campaign. I don’t want the PCs tripping over something every few hexes, but don’t want to make overland travel uninteresting. Does 18%-20% of the map sound about right to you folks? Anyone know the Wilderlands breakdown off hand?

The random method has also produced a few groupings of results, where two or more lairs/ruins lie next to each other. I’m thinking about turning those results into a single, large ruin or lair rather than numerous smaller ones. Right now, however, I’m still experimenting with the results.

For those of you who have stocked hexmaps of your own, how did you go about it? Did you use a random method, perhaps one suggested in some rulebook that I’ve overlooked, or did you just place sites and encounters as you saw fit? Or maybe some combination of the two? I’d be very interested in exploring other options so please comment away.

Any Map Experts Out There?

I've been scouring several books for examples of "old time" maps. I'm thinking of doing up my hexmaps in a style other than the standard icons. In my search, I found this map of the Adirondacks:

Does anyone know if there is a specific name for maps rendered this way? I know I've seen others done in this fashion, so I'm assuming it must be a particular style. If anyone knows of a website or book that contains other similar maps, I'd be much obliged as well.

City-State of the Invicible Twelve-Year Old

As someone whose career involves the organization of information, I'm extremely lax to do so when it comes to my own files. However, with the new year here, I've been compiling and organizing my game notes from across the decades. These are strewn across various binders and folders, but it is my goal to create an organized filing system for them all.

Tucked away in the back of one of those folders, I chanced upon a map that I'd forgotten I still had. It is the first giant city map I ever drew and, while the exact year of its creation escapes me, it can be no earlier than 1985, as Gygax's depiction of Greyhawk in Saga of the Old City influenced a lot of this city's design.

The map consists of 6 pieces of 8.5 x 11 graph paper held together with Scotch tape and illustrated with a mix of pencil and permanent markers. All the buildings are numbered but I can't remember if I actually got around to detailing and stocking the entire city. In fact, I can't even remember the name of the place.

Like any good walled city, this one is composed of several different districts and quarters. The reason I know that Saga of the Old City influenced my design is because a few (the Slum, River, and Foreign) are taken right from the book.

The northeast section of the city, which is comprised of the Low District, the College District, the Slum District, the High District, the Magic District, and the Palace.

The northwest section contains the Garden District and the overlapping High and Magic Districts, and the Palace.

Strong defences ring the city's walls. Here we see a ballista and catapult perched atop a guard tower situated against the river.

The commercial area of the Garden District. When you have some coin to spend, be sure to peruse the shops along Tree Street, Watch Avenue, Buyers Lane, Owl Bear Lane, and, my personal favorite, Magic Hat Lane. I'm pretty certain you can find a magic shop or three along that stretch of road.

If you seek more exotic goods, a trip to the Foreign District is in order. There you will find a vast bazaar where merchants from around the world erect a maze of gaily-colored tents and stalls filled with delights. And if it's slaves you seek, auctions are held in the large hall against the western wall.

At the north end of the River Quarter, adventurers can find an array of taverns, inns, and shops catering to their professions. When the sun goes down, lights, laughter, and violence spill out from saloons, casinos, and bordellos that line The Avenue.

Every time I look back on this city, I remember the summer that I spent drawing it and the wide-eyed enthusiasm for the hobby that gripped me at that time. Some of that enthusiasm can never quite be replaced, but the map still gets me excited to visit it. While I wouldn't use this map as it is now, there remains plenty of details to re-purpose back into the campaign world--which is why I've kept it for so long. That and the nostalgia it gives me in looking upon it again.

Custom Handwritten Fonts for Your Campaign World

For many years now, I’ve been labeling the various maps of my campaign world with a specialized style of handwriting I call “Shaky Hand.” It is a purely creative adornment, but one which makes my maps easily identifiable as my own fantastical creations. In addition to Shaky Hand, I’ve created a customized alphabet or three to use in ciphers, lost languages, and other alphabetical conundrums. Like Shaky Hand, these alphabets reside in my commonplace books when not needed, requiring me to reproduce them by hand each time I need to create the various player handout or other props that I sometimes use.

Over the break, I discovered fontcapture.com, which converts handwriting into True Type fonts. The service is free and requires only that the creator have access to a PDF reader application and a scanner. With these, he can upload a sample of his own handwriting that is then quickly turned into a True Type version. Although intended for signatures and other personalized forms of correspondence, if you’re like me, you quickly see the role-playing applications this service provides.

Intrigued by the possibilities, I took fontcapture.com out for a trial run. The process from start to finish only took about five minutes, and I now have two versions of my custom alphabets available for use in Word and Photoshop, which is pretty much all I foresee myself ever needing it for. The more perfectionist-types might find the process takes a little longer as they fiddle with their handwritten font sheets to produce the cleanest and most uniform version of their handwriting, but even ten or fifteen minutes of fine tuning will leave you with a completely unique font for use with your own role-playing game creations for years to come. If you enjoy making maps and other player handouts, and want a little spice to flavor them with, you must give fontcapture.com a try.

Megadungeon Megapixels

I'm easing back into the blogosphere today after a nice week off (of sorts). Rather than concentrating on three things at a time, it was a welcome treat to trim my usual workload down to two. I managed to get done what I needed to on the Dungeon Alphabet and also move the Stonehell draft closer to the finish line.

Like most of you, I kept a close watch on the developments in Indy over the weekend and I’m no longer dismayed about having to miss out this year. From the reports I’ve read, the big announcements won’t have any impact on my quiet corner of the hobby. So other than the having the opportunity to meet some people in the flesh, I don’t feel I missed much.

During my downtime, I finally had the opportunity to go over the various maps for Stonehell and make sure everything lines up between them and the draft. Since I had them out anyway, I took a few pictures of the assembled map. If you’ve had any suspicions that I might be blowing smoke about this whole megadungeon thing, hopefully these pictures will put those doubts to rest. Everything you see here is covered in the first Stonehell book, which is, as you’ll notice, quite a sizable amount of subterranean real estate. I’m hoping people will have fun with the final result.


For a sense of scale, I placed my battered print copy of Labyrinth Lord in the bottom left-hand corner of the pictures. As you can see, that’s a whole lot of dungeon to explore!



A slightly closer view of the whole upper half.

Mapping the Wilderness

Now that I’ve officially moved aboveground to finish the surface works of Stonehell, I’ve had to think about life outside of the dungeon. Back in February, I decided that I was going to keep to tradition and use the map from Outdoor Survival as the beginning wilderness setting for the aboveground portion of the game. I’ve since taken the time to examine that map more closely and I have settled on the most likely location to place the dungeon. I needed some rough terrain that could reasonably hold the box canyon that Stonehell is situated under, as well as requiring a swamp in close proximity to that location, since “canonically” there’s a tunnel which extends from Level Two of the dungeon to a nearby fen. Luckily, the Outdoor Survival map features a hex that qualifies for both of those two requirements.

I’ve done a rough draft of the wilderness map using Grim’s Blank Hex Sheet to get my thoughts in order. It’s a great sheet for plotting out the hex crawl portion of you game and I can’t recommend it enough. This beginning map was, in turn, adapted from Rob Conley’s Wilderlands treatment of the OS game board. So the evolution process looks something like this:

The orignal Outdoor Survival game board.

Rob Conley's Wilderlands treatment of the same area of wilderness.

My own rough map of the same area of wilderness.

Obviously, I’m the evolutionary throwback of the bunch. In my defense though, it looks much better in hardcopy and it’s still a work in progress.

My gut tells me I made the right choice in deciding to go with the Outdoor Survival map on this one. Looking the rough draft over, I can see that there is a variety of terrain types to play with and several of the little quirks of the map already suggest possibilities for adventures above and beyond that of Stonehell. If I had gone with my original intention to draw a wilderness map from scratch, I think I would have hamstrung my creative process too much as I attempted to pay lip service to real world geography and earth science. This way is much more liberating.

Spelunking 101

I'm getting the hang of using Photoshop and Dungeon Crafter together to come up with some pretty nifty maps. Even crazy cave systems are turning out OK with a little bit of patience.


I'd be a dirty, rotten liar if I said I didn't miss nice, straight dungeon corridors and rooms, however.

Mapping With Dungeon Crafter

I've been playing around with Dungeon Crafter v. 1.4.1 as I'm looking into options for redoing the maps of Stonehell in a more easy on the eyes format. I've had a lot of fun with the app so far and I'm finding it extremely easy to whip up new tiles to remain true to the handdrawn maps. I finished up this reworking of Level 1B today.

My sole complaint with it so far is that, although I'm working with tiles and a background that are all 300 dpi, the final map ends up being a 72 dpi image. I'd really like to keep at 300 dpi to ensure a fresh, clean printed image. I can resize the finished map into 300 dpi but the end result is a bit blurry. If anyone has any input as to what I might be doing wrong or a workaround to this issue, I'd be extremely grateful.