Cartomancy: Thoughts on the Adventure Site Maps

  I’ll be doing a new series here covering maps; I’m going to start reviewing adventure maps, starting with classics like Keep on the Borderlands and Caves of Thracia, but moving on to newer adventures as well. As a bridge, I think I’m going to talk a little about the Adventure Site Contest maps. Cartography is something I really love about this hobby, and a quality map is what I focus on first in almost any product…but it’s easy to over-focus on it, just like it’s possible to focus on things like art, formatting, or even prose quality over the value of the adventure content itself. The Adventure Site Contest results are a prime example of this.
  First of all, look at the maps of first and second place…there’s a mostly linear tomb, or a r-r-r-random procedurally generated “branch-style” map with only one loop. That’s completely fine for an adventure site. A map isn’t the be-all, end-all, but rather exists to serve the adventure being played, and in the top two adventure sites the maps were properly scaled and designed for the adventures written. In Lost Vault of Kadish it would have been strange and nonsensical to have looping corridors for a lost king’s vault. In Fountain of Bec, the main treasure room should be off on its own little branch, otherwise the trolls who’ve taken over the dungeon would have smashed and looted it. The top two adventures weren’t really helped by their maps, but neither were they hindered. Other finalist adventures like Glen of Shrikes and Etta Capp’s Cottage were similar, with relatively simple maps that didn’t provide much of an exploratory gameplay experience. That’s fine, they were good adventures.
  Now I don’t want to minimize the importance of maps either. An adventure like Legacy of the Black Mark didn’t live and die on its very solid map but having multiple directions to explore undeniably helped the adventure it was trying to foster, an exploratory delve. Likewise, Barrow Shrine of Corruption was a very simple and direct site much like Lost Vault or Fountain, but unlike those two its entire flow depended on the main loop, which incorporated a lot of verticality in a vital way. There’s some great atmosphere in both of those entries, but I really think their more complex geography was essential.
  Probably the two very best maps in the contest did make themselves seen in the other two finalists, of course. The large orphanage/reformatory of St. Durham’s Home for Wayward Youth elevated it masterfully, giving an extremely detailed location with lots of exploration for heist adventures, lots of defensive features for a siege scenario, as well as logical and functional day-to-day flow which is needed for verisimilitude in a site just visited to investigate to negotiate in. Similarly, Lipply’s Tavern as a complex mutli-faction dungeon delve had to have a good map, with verticality, multiple routes of ingress/egress, and secret passages detectable with good mapping. A bad map would have made the site completely fail, while it managed to get up to finalist despite one judge being unable to score it largely because of the quality of the dungeon. So, good map is good.
  It’s increasingly clear as I go through this exercise that maps are something that must fit the adventure, both in scope and in theme. Starting with a map can be fine, but the map must then be centrally integrated into the themes and scale of the adventure (see half a dozen of my saddest Crapshoot Monday reviews). Starting instead with the concept, plot, or theme and then making a map custom fit to the adventure is probably the best bet…although I recognize that’s a lot more effort to many. Again, the second place adventure site used a random dungeon generator. As an aside, an example of the mismatch situation is Frostfire’s Durance Vile, which had a fantastic set of maps for a module 300% longer. If Stripe does release it as a full module of 8 pages, I’ll snap it up in a heartbeat and the maps are a big reason for that…but maps have to fit.
  So going forward in this new series, I’m going to be looking at maps, not just as they are by themselves, but also in how they support the module, adventure, Dungeon issue, etc as well. I’m not going to ignore the presentation, because that is an important part of what is first and foremost a method to convey information to the struggling DM…nor will I ignore artistry, because that’s an important part of getting the DM excited about actually running the game. But more than anything else, I want Maps That Work. How do 3-8 buzzed and/or caffeinated players negotiate these things? Because that’s how we put the Dungeons in Dungeons & Dragons.