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2011-05-24 I Want A Lot Of Labels On My Maps

http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3373/5754238599_ff1fd8a49a.jpg

I prefer my maps to be  dense. On the right you can see the treatment I give to a map published in Fight On! magazine. If there is whitespace on the map, it should be filled with text that saves me looking at the key. This is true for typical map keys stretching over many pages, but it’s also true for a One Page Dungeon. I really prefer there to be as little separation between map and key as possible.

I’m working on a dungeon map that hopefully illustrates my point. Too bad it takes so long to do, haha. In 2009 I created something like that for my One Page Dungeon Contest 2009 entry which I retracted when I got a position as a contest judge. These days the Water Temple (SVG) has many things I’d change:

  1. The map is too linear. I refer you to Melan’s discussion of dungeon maps for an illustration of what’s wrong with my map. This is the most important fault, I feel.
  2. There but a single named NPCs to interact with. Another one or two would be good.
  3. The NPC is hardly enough to be called a “faction” – this dungeon needs at least one more significant faction. Something cool like mole-men or crab-men, a wasp queen, or something like that.
  4. There are no allies to be found, unless you want to call the hard-to-find necromancer an ally. Perhaps if the dungeon clearly indicated that the party starts out with a dead companion and heard about a necromancer living around here that might be able to help (true or false?) then it might work much better.
  5. There is no opportunity, however small, to effect significant changes for player characters (unless you want multi-class into ghoul?).

Back to the maps I am annotating. The maps are from the Fight On! megadungeon The Darkness Beneath:

Level 2: Warrens of the Troglodytes by Calithena and D. Bowman was published in issue #5.

Level 3: Spawning Grounds of the Crab-Men by D. Bowman was published in issue #3.

I just realized that if I want to print out the remaining levels and mark them up (and not write in my printed copies) I will have to buy PDF versions of the issues I didn’t get contributor copies for (#1–#3 and #11); that would cost me $25. I think I need to figure out how photocopying at home works, ie. scanning and printing.

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