Spes Magna Games

So, I’m on holiday until a bit after the new year. At least for now, I’m pretty much done with my Tanelorn Keep Player’s Guide. I’m thinking about starting up a meet-online game to run some players through some of the dangers of the Tanelorn Keep’s environs. Not sure I really have the time for that, so I must mull.

Whilst shifting some of the debris in my library, I stumbled across a few maps I drew on index cards. For example, see the shoe map to the right of this paragraph. I like my shoe map. It’s not great art, to be sure, but it makes me giggle a little, and that can’t be a bad thing. The original shoe map did not include location numbers. The one to the right does.

“Why?” you ask.

Well, when I’m not working on curriculum maps or gracing the family with my presence, I’m working on a short 5E D&D adventure titled The Lady in the Shoe. When done, it’ll be intended for five 2nd-level heroes, but I’ll include notes about how to scale it for weaker or stronger parties.

“So, what’s it about?” you ask.

Well, not to give too much away, but the adventure starts when the heroes return to Schuhdorf to discover that a beautiful but cruel woman has polymorphed the village’s key leaders into goats and flew away with them in a giant shoe. To make matters worse, later that same night eerie music lured several children away from their beds and into Flussenke, the nearby wooded river valley.

Schuhdorf stands in dire straits. Their spiritual leader is a kidnapped goat. The knight who oversees the village’s defenses is a kidnapped goat. Several children have vanished into the woods. Now is the time for heroes!

I hope to have the adventure ready before this coming weekend ends.

Tags: 5E D&D, adventure design, maps

A couple of blogposts ago, I briefly mentioned Dungeon Master’s Book of Cartography (DMBoC hereafter), which is available over at Amazon for $7.99. Matt Jackson is a talented fantasy map-maker. I’ve used several of his maps, most recently this past Sunday as part of the 5E D&D game I’m DMing.

DMBoC includes several maps, each one facing a lined page on which notes about the map can be written. The maps include a variety of dungeon and wilderness locations. None of the locations are particularly large, making them suitable for short, site-based adventures. As always with Matt, the maps are clean and clear, and they have character. These are not cookie-cutter, computer-generated maps. The last several pages of DMBoC are mapless, featuring a sheet of graph paper with a facing page for notes, encouraging me to add my own cartographical efforts to the collection.

All in all, I’m digging DMBoC. It’s a fine addition to my collection of gaming books, and I’m looking forward to Volume Two, which I assume must be in the works since DMBoC is subtitled as “volume one”. I know the maps in DMBoC will get used, even though I doubt I’ll ever write in the book. Maybe I’ll add some maps of my own on those graph paper pages, but filling in the lines with dungeon details? Probably not. I work better with a word processor than with a pen.

Good job, Matt! Now get volume two done.

Tags: maps, Matt Jackson, reviews

In theory, this Sunday I’m hosting a dinner and gaming night at my house featuring hillbilly cuisine and an adventure for The Cthulhu Hack entitled The Strange Case of the Bell Witch Bootleggers. The adjacent map is my not-quite-done rendering of the first floor of the bootleggers’ home. If you click on the map, it gets bigger.

I’ve also drafted six characters for the players to choose from. You can take a gander at them by clicking here. Any unchosen characters become NPCs and probably will be among the first to go insane and/or die.

I still have to draw the house’s second floor, a small section of cave, and a map of the terrain around the house. After that, all that’s left is to flesh out some details in the adventure and fix dinner. I’m aiming for stew, maybe rabbit, maybe oxtail, with carrots and potatoes, some moonshine, either some greens or a salad, and dinner rolls. If I get really motivated, I might fix a sweet potato pie for dessert. I’ve not made a sweet potato pie in quite a while.

Of course, life being what it is, it’s starting to look like my gaming plans for the weekend are going to get pre-empted by other stuff. Say, “La vee.”

Tags: Dinner & Gaming, maps, NPCs, The Cthulhu Hack

Well, here’s my first attempt at a map for posting. I think I did an okay job. I mean, it’s nothing to jump and down about, but I think the lines are clear enough, it’s easy enough to read, and what not.

The tower and sea caves have things that I like in a map: variable environments (ruins, caves, aquatic), more than one entrance, and distinct zones. For me, the map is also sufficiently generic that it looks as if it would lend itself to a variety of histories. Who built the tower? Why is it ruined? Why is there a shaft dropping into the caverns? What lives in the water? Et cetera.

Regarding the map itself, I drew it on the back of a school letterhead note. I used a mechanical pencil I found on my classroom floor for the drawing, and the eraser of another pencil for the erasing (because the mechanical pencil was missing its eraser). I inked the map with a Bic felt tip pen I had in my shirt pocket. After I scanned the image, I erased a few mistakes, some stray spots, and places where the school’s letterhead could be seen in reverse through the paper. If you click on the map, it’ll take you to a larger JPG image.

Fancy, huh?

Tags: maps