Cartomancy: On the use of isometrics (Temple of the Moon Priests)

​  Today I’m going to talk a little bit about isometric maps in general. I’m going to use the beautiful Temple of the Moon Priests, winner of the One Page Dungeon contest in 2017, as an example here but it’s not going to be primarily about that. I’m seeing isometrics fairly often in my itch.io delves, some are good, some are bad, but in general I think they’ve been woefully misused. I’m going to pick on the example dungeon a little bit here, but this is more about the style as a whole than this particular dungeonlet.
  I guess I should talk first about what isometric maps even are; basically, you take a grid and make the squares into diamonds, allowing for mappers (and draftsmen) to easily make 3D maps of multi-level buildings and other structures (like caves). I enjoy sketching isometric maps myself, and there really are some astonishingly pretty works out there with 3D maps. There being X, Y, and Z-axis portrayed means a complex structure can be conveyed quickly and efficiently…unfortunately, also uselessly. Because 99 times out of 100, it’s not made for the players.
  Let’s begin by looking at the truly gorgeous piece of art that is Temple of the Moon Priests:
 

 
 
   I don’t want to go in depth on the review of the dungeon-qua-dungeon here, but I’ll say it’s a perfectly fine one-page-dungeon, better than most. Some decent exploration potential with multiple means of ingress and egress, a rival adventuring party, nifty traps and tricks, a decent puzzle…beyond the baseline objection that is “nine-room low-level dungeon grants immortality”, and dodging the annoyance that comes from the system neutral plague, this is a quality product for its size…easy potential for a good one-shot or an adventure site. Three stars, endorse it. But the lovely map makes me sad.
  Ignore the warm and fuzzy feelings generated by the pretty art. Let’s instead sit down at the table collect all your dice, and work on actually running the adventure. How are you describing the initial entry point? You certainly can’t show them the pretty picture. But it’s a waterfall-with-rope, camp-plus-spellcaster over the water, cave with waterfall, and open(?) door leading to the illusory chest. You…really need to sketch this out on your battlemap. Uh oh, they want to go up the rope? Now we have to show elevation change. And that’s a big forest to convey. Uh, now they’re going down to the idol room, do we have a method of showing its elevation vs. the lower door? And how exactly does that relate without a graph mark…
  If we’re in a VTT, there’s an even worst temptation, to cover rooms with black squares and reveal as the PCs go. If you have the map on the GM layer then it might look okay on a let’s play livestream, but boy that’s a hard and wonky task to convey it to your players.
  What has happened in this scenario is that our shining-eyed dungeon master, armed with this one page dungeon, is attempting to run a dungeon delve and discovers that what he’s equipped with isn’t in fact a map, but instead an object of art. An object of art just complex enough to make running this nine-room dungeon theatre of mind impossible…the worst of all worlds. All the lush purples and deep blues, all the sharp art, it’s all for the benefit of the buyer (the potential DM), and it’s all missed by the audience (the players). They have to use the same old tools as usual, graph paper and imagination. Which is a real pity.
  If you’re following my Crapshoot Monday series (and seriously, you should), then you recently saw a boring but not hateful little adventure, Ruins of the Immortal Warlord. Although its map has nowhere near the artistry of Temple of the Moon Priests, what I really appreciated was that there were two sections of the map…one a player version, one for the showrunner. Although the titular ruins aren’t a complex environment, they are something that can be given to the players, allowing them to point to one spot or another saying, “we go there”. It adds a lot to the running of the game.
  All of this leads me to concluded that isometric maps aren’t maps, they are game art. Maps exist to center players in a concrete geographic location, to enable tactical and strategic choices…they are an essential portion of the game part of the Role-Playing Game. Art, on the other hand, exists to evoke mood, to show what the characters are seeing, to make everyone involved feel like they’re in the world, a great part of the role part of the Role-Playing Game. I’m not dismissing art at all. Good art is a wonderful enhancement for your play, grounding imaginations for everyone by ensuring they’re all on the same page. There’s also nothing wrong with having DM-only art…I should want to look at an adventure and feel inspired. But if you’re like the author of Temple, you’ve handed me something that makes me really want to run, while at the same time making it hard for me to share it with all my friends at the table.
  I myself draw isometric maps. My own adventure site, The Observatory, had an isometric outdoor view. You want to know how I used it? I slapped that bad boy down on the table for all my players to see. And point at things. And ask questions. And make plans. And then when I wrote the rest of the module, I keyed the three levels with standard top-down grid square maps. Because the isometric sketch was my own slightly wonky (but definitely useful) art, not something for the running of the bulk of the game.
  In an admirable reaction to the dense text blocks and paid-by-the-word overwriting of adventure modules in the nineties and the aughts, most indie modules now are formatted to within an inch of their lives, loaded down with bullet points, bolding, and high-density writing as well as colorful charts, tabs, and spacing tricks designed to convey as much information possible to the longsuffering dungeon master. All too often, though, these hyper-formatted modules become so thick with information that they’re almost impossible to parse on a read-through. There’s something similar that happens with busy, complex isometric maps, the firehose of information conveyed by them is a real translation problem when brought to the table. Ultimately, even the best-made isometric maps are delivering their artistic payload first, the tactical data a distant second.
  It’s not strictly isometric, but the go-to example for “theoretically good but too much muchness” is the Tower of the High Clerist from Dragonlance. Huge map, shows every single room, every single hall, all the connections and stairs and everything else…and yet practically it’s never designed to be used in a key-by-key dungeon delve. That’s not to say the High Clerist’s Tower map is bad…the ideal use is to hand the whole beautiful thing over to your players, let them look over every nook and cranny of it, and tell them to defend it with their lives. In short, it’s perfect for the use of every isometric map:
  As a player handout.

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