Spire Development Log 1 - Maps

Coming up with adventure sites and altering existing ones to fit better for actual play was a critical skill I'd been trying to perfect in the past few decades. I only concerned myself with with all that mattered was what happened at the table. Writing it all down in a digestible format, for others to read, has been an insanely valuable experience.

Thanks to No Artpunk II, and Prince of Nothings urgings and call to arms, I decided that I would attempt to formalize an adventure for someone else to read. I've been writing, to all degrees of experience, adventures for 34 years at this point. Other than one lame MS Word attempt in the 90s, I never tried to make campaigns full of adventure design something than anyone else would, or could, read. 

That experience let me do not just one pass at Carcass of Hope, but two. I started expanding the module a little more each iteration until I ended up with too much. There were contest limitations and I had to start trimming excess and converting some creatures and items to core book simulacrums. Just one week before submission, I ripped the entire adventure out of the world that was born of those efforts and condensed them down into something more modular. The result isn't very apparent, but some of the ways the parts fit together in the contest version seem off.

Please forgive me, for I have committed AI sins.

As a result the Carcass of Hope found in No Artpunk II is not the version I ran or use. The dungeons are mostly the same, the connective tissue is much different. I tried to get a runnable format down, which was playtested. And even after running it a few times and the contest being over, I still had things that I wanted to change. However, the original version would expand to a campaign setting that is mostly all written and has gone through about 40 sessions as of this writing.

Challenge 1: Maps

On top of that, my mapping has either been freehand scribbles or graph paper to help me DM games. Since I started DMing online, I had done an entire campaigns worth of increasingly better VTT maps. However, as a critical person, there are things I look for in maps in adventures that I read. 

I didn't want the maps to be too busy with labels, which is something I regrettably did for the submitted version of Carcass. I didn't want to use high-texture VTT maps, because they're hard to read zoomed out and actually distracting to use for players as their focus will emphasis what's shown on the map versus what isn't. Finally, I didn't want anything that looked so artificially sterile in a way that it was obvious to what mapping program was used. Subconsciously, at least with me, there's a visual exhaustion to seeing a lot of common usages of commonly used mapping methods. No sleight to people who make use of those tools available to you, but mapping is always something that I've viewed as a hobby within the hobby.

This is the progression I used for Carcass' maps, which absolutely hurts for me to look at:

Just draw something. Doodle it the fuck up and see where you land.

The first draft map. Experimenting with brush hashing, poorly.

The No Artpunk II submitted map. Settling on making my own hash brush. Cleaner but damn ugly.

10 months later, here is where I've landed for most dungeon maps.

Ultimately dissatisfied with it, I decided to take what I liked about it and create a new map with new content to better pace it. This was a mixture of my own insecurities with the dungeon, mixed in with the grain of salts from Prince, Melan, and Bryce reviews. Two floors, a smattering of new rooms, more conducive to faction play, and egress that puts the whole place more into a 3 dimension axis than before.

Hex maps were an entirely different thing. I had run previous campaigns doing a map on Wonderdraft and putting down hex lines at a large scale and then key things after. It wasn't long until expanding the hexcrawls that I wanted a more granular approach, which meant using Hexographer.

Thanks, I hate it.

Remember that exhaustion thing I spoke of before? Seeing hexmaps in a ton of modules in Hexographer/Worldographer, hextml, and hex kit gets old after the first few times of seeing them. Are they, like the dungeon design apps, functional? Absolutely. Does it help an adventure or setting stand out for the DM to be curious enough to look deeper? I don't think so. It could absolutely just be me, but looking at a big ass full page spread of Hexographer maps sort of kills my curiosity. 

You've seen this hex map 50 times before.

So the next experiment was to draw the entire hex map, hoping that there would be a charm to the imperfections. It worked to a degree, but zoomed way out, it looked terrible. The numbers being added wouldn't help the clarity, but instead hamper it. The implied hex lines also looked strange. 

Finally, I decided to draw the maps and put them on a Judges Guild replica and I knew I was on to something.

There was the hand drawn aspect, which caused a lot of wrist soreness. But the clear borders, numbering, and labeling really elevated the map to being a bit more interesting and very usable in play. There would still be more work to do, more plains to fill, roads to thicken, and with the help of the Surprise Segment discord, fonts chosen.

When I had been fleshing out the adventure around Carcass of Hope, I had to stop somewhere. The result was a Ziggurat, a bandit outpost, details on towns (including maps) that never made the No Artpunk version.

Those initial versions all got pushed off of the project scope and the hex map started taking form. As Carcass was a level 3-4 adventure, I wanted some lower level content to make it more complete. I created the melted keep, a few smaller hexes that would range in difficulty and interest, and a dungeon called the Tower of Exiles. But with those came more towns, which leads me to the last bit of the mapping blog.

The first map was made for my own use and shows a version of the town that wasn't fully realized. There was an issue in using this map outside of my own play in that in Carcass, it's possible that a fight is done here and while this could inform it, it was definitely an afterthought. Also, this uses DungeonDraft with the Forgotten Adventures asset pack which you can't just distribute. Finally, it's extremely unattractive to me. 

 

The next set of town maps were a bit more informed as to the highlights of the town and it was certainly enough to run games out of. I used WonderDraft then added notes later with Gimp. It was very low effort and the campaign setting would sit like this, for every town and city, for half a year before I changed it.

With roughly drawn pieces that were intended to break up the text of the adventures, I kept working on improving on my sketching to get back to being able to provide a bit more fitting images for the adventures. I was operating on the assumption that this would be something that more than just myself would use. I started drawing the towns based on how my evolved sense of the world had taken shape. Then I would scan the drawing and color and label them in GIMP.

This was far closed to what I was looking for. It's not the best town map I've ever seen, but it's mine.

With maps out of the way, I can happily never talk about them again until I figure out another preferred method. The next part will be the hexcrawl contents and world functionality itself.