If you ever have an afternoon free (and I recommend freeing an afternoon for this), just go walk out your door. Preparation? Comfortable shoes, correct weight of jacket, drink a glass of water, you’re not going hiking here. Just leave your front door, hit the street, and start walking. Walk to somewhere you’re not normally travelling past, find pretty paths. Take two hours, then turn around and amble back. It’s good for you, if you can avoid looking at your phone or listening to anything it might even be good for you spiritually, but however you do it, after getting back, pull up a map and look at how far you’ve gotten. Some of you are fit and used to walking and will have gotten six miles. Some of you might have only gotten three. Look at how tiny your jaunt looks on the map. It wasn’t a long drive. But then think about how big everything looks when walking, and remember that you could have taken dozens of different paths.
  This is the perspective of most humans for most of human history, you’re walking with your own two feet. If you have horses, that’ll speed you up…briefly. Unlike in most movies, games, and books, in the real world horses aren’t going to drastically speed up your long-distance treks, although they’ll definitely increase your carry capacity. Sailing ships are faster, but they take you from one place you walk around to another place you walk around. If you’re running a campaign for D&D or something similarly medieval-inspired, you’re probably using a map that’s too big.
  I avoid RPG subreddits normally, but there is a subreddit I love to visit regularly: r/mapmaking. Large numbers of very talented amateur cartographers are spending hours and hours making their worlds, often with very detailed plate tectonics, climate models, and histories. I admire these artists’ work, but I always have to wince when I see someone say “this is my D&D world”, because if they’re asked about where they’ve actually had play…it’s “well, I just plan on this someday”. These are huge spaces, too big. A newish poster on the subreddit posted his own campaign map, something the size of Germany, as “small”. He has a pretty good post about it too on his blog…but I think you could go even smaller, for wild lands (his own is settled, with pockets of darkness).

  This is my current campaign’s region, the Skyshadow Isles (real-world geography, Franz-Josef Land). I have been running an ongoing open-table campaign here for nearly half a decade, playing an average of 4-5 times a month. Now, there’s a kilodungeon in here, as well as dozens of little sub-dungeons, but these are also ten mile hexes, 184 of them, each keyed for adventure and interest. It’s only because I’m running an islands map that the hexes are so big; six-milers are what I’d use for overland. This whole area is only a little over a hundred miles wide, but it’s going to supply adventure for another couple years as it is. My next campaign, set in the same world, will be in an area based on the Shenandoah Valley slightly smaller than West Virginia. Such is a human-scale campaign map.
  I love cartography, I love world maps, and I love worldbuilding on every single scale. But don’t expect you’ll need a continent-sized area for a fantasy campaign. Once high levels hit with flying mounts and teleportation, that’s not really going to have maps an order of magnitude larger, that becomes more like planes-hopping, a modern airport existence where the highlights get hit. There’s no place like home, and home base for your campaign is something scaled for human (or hobbit) feet.

  In the lead-up to the second annual Adventure Site Contest, I’ll make a few posts working though the creation of my own adventure site entry, currently titled Fog Valley Retreat. My players are going to be needing an adventure site next month and I have the idea, so why not go ahead and write it up all nice? I am in fact making two adventure sites for where they’re currently exploring, but the bigger one isn’t going to ever be written up for publication (because it’s using some non-commercial Dyson maps), so I knocked that out for 2-3 sessions’ worth of exploration in half an hour of prep. If it’s going to look nicer like this example site, though, I’m going to be spending a little more time.
  As an aside, drilling down a little bit on my process might make these things seem like a little more work than they actually are; I’m being careful and so I expect for this 3-pages-plus-map submission I’m going to spend about four hours of work. Some perfectionists will lavish dozens of hours on their lovingly crafted submissions but there are going to be great sites also slapped together in a couple hours. Please don’t hesitate to create and submit, a contest like this is a fantastic opportunity to get a project done, and also receive multiple sets of feedback. If you have extra time, the very best use of it is in playtesting your site, I cannot undersell how much better that makes an RPG product.
  So as a prelude, let me tell you (a bit) about my campaign; as my players have pushed deeper into the stormy central isles of my ongoing West Marches campaign (Into the Skyshadow Isles), they’ve been stumbling upon adventure sites from Adventure Sites I, notably the spider-themed linked sites of the Barrow Shrine of Corruption, Legacy of the Black Mark, and Etta Capp’s Cottage, which I’ve seeded as all being linked to an ancient elven spider-demon’s cult, the later two giving two halves of a map leading to an ancient elven hideaway in the hills….the genius module Webs of Past and Present. My elves, as all elves should be, are a decadent fallen people prone to depraved cults, and while they’re not heavily present in most of the Skyshadow Isles, a few of their moldering ruins remain on these particular isles. Looking around I spot an area where I think another site would go, if I have something nice and elven-ruiny. I could make a map at this point, but Dyson Logos has a perfect commercial map just right for something of this scale:
 
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  There’s nothing wrong with grabbing a free map for something like this, and that’s a real beauty right there. Two levels with a little bit of up/down on the ground floor, multiple means of ingress/egress, good meaningful loops, and clear clean rooms with a ton of visual interest. At twenty-one “rooms” it’s right at the max for a one-and-done adventure site, but with the more relaxed three-page limit that’s no issue. I also think it’s pretty…but it’s also something that is pretty easy to convey to a mapper at the table. I’ll probably draw the entry and the octagonal first balcony room for them first, because that’s complex, but after that they can do their mapping easily.
  Once I either pick out or draw out my map, I begin to think about the context for the site and what challenges will be presented...for an adventure site in this contest, I also want to see how it can be made more generic and thus usable for anyone’s game. So, while in my campaign this is on a constantly stormy island’s hills, I’m noting this takes place in any viny fog-shrouded valley. Should be a ubiquitous environment. I’m also preparing this to be where the elf general flees to if he does run from Webs’ site, but for the purposes of the site as a one-shot I have a generic “flight-risk bad guy”. I’m also going to note this site works as a generally-known sanctuary for moral reprobates in whatever campaign world, giving users a lot of flexibility for how to use the adventure site in any number of campaigns.
  I’m going to write up a story for the site here, but I think it’s going to be something that adapts easily to whatever generic Greyhawklike is being used. The upper left zone suggests a shrine and a private priestly complex, I’m going to tag that as devoted to a deceptive elven deity known as Saint Lilit, while the lower main complex is devoted to a god of travelers and refugees. Ostensibly neutral, this god can trend evil by being a protector of deposed tyrants and dictators. Who couldn’t use something like that? This religious hermitage thus gets known as the Fog Valley Retreat, descriptive and evocative both.
  The details of the map suggest some cool individual challenges. The hex this goes in has foggy valleys full of assassin vines, the front of the site being ivy-covered with some of that ivy as assassin vines is a classic and grants a little protection to the secret entrances. Fog is a theme that works for the elevation, I’m going to have waist-deep persistent fog present on the ground floor when doors or curtains are open, up to head-height in those lower-down rooms to the bottom right. That’s going to be an environmental effect to play with in terms of traps and hazards. Absent a map flow that encourages a “boss fight” or two, I think in fact I like the biggest combat danger to be present in the very first main room there, that big mark representing a huge statue. When someone under the protection of this religious retreat is killed, that center statue is going to wake up as an extremely dangerous threat, to be battled or avoided with difficulty. Add a clerical caretaker, random encounters, and a ghost or two, we have a nice challenging site aimed at levels 5-8.
  Which of course means I’m free to be very mean and have one of these running around in the fog:

​  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.

A dungeon by Scott Malthouse (but really, Arnold Böcklin), level 1.
Written for Heartseeker.
  You know the theme of Heartseeker joints by now. Take gorgeous old painting, slap a nonsensical node diagram over it, key the diagram, ship. The victim in this case is Arnold Böcklin, specifically his astounding Isle of the Dead, a beautiful work to be sure, one that suggests a dungeon to any D&D GM worth his salt upon first viewing. The seven keys all occupy a single page, as sadly we don’t get the implied crypts in that little cliff area. The painting is powerful, though, anything that has Sigmund Freud, Vladimir Lenin, and Adolf Hitler as its most famous owners has to be impressive.
 
 
 
  The sketchy story, such as it is, is that a cursed prince is dying and needs three colored chalices from an elf-island (titular isle of said damned), with an uncertain set of rumors painting no comprehensive picture of the place. There’s a very hackneyed set of…puzzles? Set of things that all boil down to “take chalice, deal with consequences. There’s a simple color puzzle, there’s an easy riddle, it’s all very rote. The strangest choice is node 6, which is keyed as “Moaning Forest” and described as “a deep forest”, in the painting is clearly just like fourteen trees. This place has a fetch quest for a map to it, a six-entry random-encounter table, and multiple rumors…just no.
  Obviously what I liked about this thing is the Böcklin painting, I’ve considered writing a one-shot set in the area myself. Simple as they were, I found the puzzle and the riddle cute…I run for kids often enough that both are perfectly calibrated to be brief head-scratchers for the 9-to-11-year-olds at the Saturday afternoon table. One of the random encounters, and pig-handled sword that curses the toucher to turn into a pig for a while, is fun.
  It’s getting trite at this point, but what can be improved is get us solid geography to explore. Having more coherence in encounters would also help a lot too…there’s a squid that attacks your boat, then a locust swarm, then ghoul-bats, then a possible witch, it’s all over the place, very isolated from any single mood or theme. The scope and scale of the site wouldn’t be terrible as a one-pager, but everything here being so abstracted was the wrong call, improve on the concept by allowing the players to walk 1” by 1” on a gridded square. Heck, if you’re feeling frisky even a little hex grid would be okay, but Dyson map this sucker.
  All this makes the best use case just “swipe the couple good ideas to use in a different context. With children players.” Running this as a one-shot seems like it’d be a weird and alienating experience, and not in a good way.
  Final Rating? */***** is all I can offer, which is very sad considering the painting.
 
  You know what? If anyone wants to Wavestone Keep this sucker, I’ll review your adventure. If it’s particularly great, I’ll even offer proofreading, editing, and/or map sketching services if you want to publish it. Call it a contest, but it’s ongoing for as long as it takes me to get bored. The two rules:

1. Adventure must be based on the physical geography of the classic painting Isle of the Dead.
2. Adventure must be written for a real, extant TTRPG system (any kind).

Pick up the gauntlet and write an adventure site base on any of the six Böcklin versions of the Isle of the Dead:

Introductory dungeon by Kelsey Dione(?), levels 1-3.
Written for the Shadowdark Quickstart Guide.
  Okay, I need to see what the deal is here. The glut of Shadowdark adventures from “game jams” are generally somewhat bland, generally decently built, and clearly being formatted following a very strict template: Meaningless factions outlined, tiny random encounter table, semi-helpful rumor table, well-illustrated single-level map following the Cult of Loops, and descriptions followed by bullets in a single-column that really encourages A6/’zine printout format. It’s not an awful template, but what’s remarkable is how slavish these writers are in following this mysterious template. It’s also notable how I’ve seen ZERO “out of the box” adventures…nobody’s looking outdoors, wilderness, city…all of it is down in the dungeon and you’re going to LIKE IT, scrub. So, let’s look at the Shadowdark Quickstart Guide’s sample adventure, I think the credit/blame is usually laid on the introduction for systems like these.
  In the Lost Citadel of the Scarlet Minotaur, I first took a look at the map…AND I’VE BEEN CHEATED:
 
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  This isn’t a nine-room hole in the ground, this is, barely, a proper dungeon, with twenty-seven keyed areas, enough for some real exploratory gameplay. It’s more linear than it looks at first glance, with most of the looping accomplished by those secret passages, but there’s still some reasonable interest with both the layouts of individual rooms and with how the branches work. The traditional “designed to take up a single sheet of graph paper” shape of the entire complex makes sense, most of us do that, but the lack of verticality is a bummer. Labyrinths of minotaurs are traditionally equipped with mazes, but the one in the lower left is rather perfunctory. I didn’t detect a mapper role in my skim of the rules, but mazes are mostly for groups that use player mappers. It’s a functional map for scale I think…BUT IT HAS NO SCALE GIVEN. I’m assuming 1 square=5ft, but that’s not sure. Not highly naturalistic.
  My annoyance with the formatting in Shadowdark is mostly for its lack of efficiency. There’s definitely something to be said about overly fetishizing terseness, but this is something that feels…off. Some tables (like the NPC names/appearances/behaviors tables) look clearly padded to fill out a whole page, while some other descriptions feel slightly truncated do to the 40-point font in a single column. It’s not terrible, but a flagship adventure written for a seven-figure RPG system is held to high standards.
   I suppose I should talk flavor. The titular citadel is a lonely sandstone edifice in the distant scrubland, open to the sky in the center, with three entrances besides the roof-to-courtyard middle climb. It was once used by a Mad Max cult that worshipped a bull god, until the last king turned himself into a minotaur and killed most of his followers, with the rest of his men turned into beastmen who now hide in increasingly paranoid isolation. Minimalistic descriptions try and keep this flavor, at times successfully, the Scarlet Minotaur himself is nice and terrifying. There is a completely out of left field “faction” of ettercaps also present trying to loot the place, with no connection to the rest of the flavor and no presence on the map outside of random encounter tables after the first four rooms. A lot of the “completely disconnected from the rest of the world” thing I’ve been seeing in third-party Shadowdark modules is seen here, as the thing is almost completely devoid of greater context. Gogogo, we’re here to dungeon crawl, set us at the site and let’s get into the content.
  All that said, let’s look at the content itself. It’s fine. Not a ton of static monsters, which is a good thing with the monster-heavy random encounter table and the decently frequent rate. There aren’t a lot of traditional traps but there are fun and flavorful dynamic things like pillars that inflict nasty status effects and scattered magical motion-detecting bull statues that just charge in a straight line down a hallway, smashing luckless explorers. There’s decent telegraphing of the worst things, like the aforementioned pillars having a dead ettercap in the middle with wounds caused by their effects and one room with a smashed bull statue with its emerald-power-gem shattered, indicating how to deactivate them while also showing the danger. There’s a hidden checklist being ticked with “interactive room, monster room, portent room, treasure” repeated almost by rote nine times. The secret door areas being detectable by good mapping is nice, that’s the real exploration/discovery content available. Looks good on stream, I’m sure.
  Treasure feels weird, like anything with the semi-arbitrary “XP for finding significant treasure” handwave system. There are enough magic items to make for spice, while the cash bits lack the wow factor of a true gold=XP system. Most of the treasure is lackadaisically semi-hidden, although the “main hoard” is in a fantastically nasty rotting blood-choked pool of water hidden amidst countless bones, which is good placement, very tricky to extract…this also includes the only really flavorful bit of acquired loot, a bottle that holds a sorcerer’s soul. There’s potential in THAT, at least.
  As any decent system contains a reaction table, there is lip service given to talking/negotiation with the sentient monsters encountered within the dungeon, although both ettercaps and beastmen are also written to be slimy complete scumbags, craven and fairly useless/unreliable. There’s the faintest nod to ecology given in the beastmen eating rats and centipedes but we’re in the Common Dungeon Problem zone with a couple dozen human-sized beings living out eons within a few hundred square feet of territory, that’s certainly not a unique conceit but it starts breaking believability a bit if you examine their slightly thin motivations. The Scarlet Minotaur’s original identity being discoverable but not usable is a little bit of a missed opportunity.
  I’m not reviewing the whole Shadowdark system here, but I think I can generalize some lessons from the Citadel of the Scarlet Minotaur. There is some solid workmanship here in the room-by-room construction of the dungeon, a pleasing blend of combats, traps, and “stuff to mess with”, all in a space that rewards exploration somewhat. It’s only when I look at the (regularly spaced, good) treasure that I start to have pause…there’s an almost rote placement here, and there’s no “wow” factor to anything…which, coupled with the lack of explicit 1gp=1XP (or 1sp, or 5, or whatever) rules, means the entire exercise lacks goals. A 5th Edition adventure here would make it explicit, “kill the Scarlet Minotaur”, maybe with side-quests. A B/X adventure here would have it implicit, “this dangerous place has wealth to plunder, let’s sneak around to steal it”, maybe with side-quests (bounties). This middle-ground Shadowdark doesn’t have either, handing over a very intrinsically enjoyable little dungeon crawl utterly bereft of larger context, meaning, or long-form campaign hooks. There’s nothing mechanically wrong with this example adventure, but there’s also nothing here that makes me want to play a continuing campaign.
  All that said, is there value here? Sure. Playing it directly you’ll probably have a fun time. There all lots of little bits and pieces that I’m happy swiping too, from the slightly videogamey bull statues, to the magic curse/blessing sacrificing locations, to a few of the set-piece trap rooms. It is well made, and the mechanical solidity of this template dungeon is reflected in the imitators’ slightly above-par cobbling. I suspect a genuinely good campaign could be played using this, you’ll just have to add a lot of context and meaning.
  *** on this one, what should be average quality for a dungeon adventure. I just wish its imitators took away twenty-seven rooms as a minimum, not the high bar.  This might be literally the best it can be for the target market, though.
  The adventure, as part of the free quick start ruleset, can be found here.

​  I’m not just going to do classic modules on this occasional feature, I’m also looking at popular/famous other works…and so why not Indie Darling/award-winning Deep Carbon Observatory, a fundamental LotFP module so coated by reviewer slobber that it is barely discernable as an original shape anymore. I’m not going to weary anyone with the thousandth review of the adventure itself, suffice it to say it’s a good idea that labors to make something playable. This is about the maps, dear boy, the maps.
  I’ll cover the overland map a little at the end, but if you’re new to DCO, it’s basically a situation-as-adventure, this dam just broke and flooded a valley, so adventurers get to revel in suffering and misery of the victims in the lower valley, then hit a mini-dungeon at the dam itself, then get to explore the now-uncovered lake bed above. The titular observatory is a complex built by Your Own Favorite Ancient Evil Precursor Race to examine the Legally Distinct Dark Under. The dangly final observatory is built to be the reward for the suffering party’s long and soggy trek, so it’s a map well worth study.
 
 
  Gross. Alright, first off, it’s correctly in isometric, which is something you need for such a vertical environment, albeit with a slightly wonky perspective that means I wouldn’t want to transmit this to a mapper, or even uncover bits on a VTT with dynamic lighting. Carefully working through the illustration does allow for parsing all the connections, but a flowing order of battle would be difficult to describe, and random encounters aren’t exactly easy to conjure out of the geography. No scale is provided, nor is there much of a key, so squint carefully at the pictures, dear suffering DM, and hope that the vivid and well-written content sticks with the incidental details well enough. It’s an effective piece of art unlike a lot of the other module illustrations, conveying the mood brilliantly…that’s certainly worth something. C+ for presentation.
  Lest I get accused of being overly dour, this is a great concept. Speaking as a physicist it of course has nothing to do with any real-world scientific observing, but the idea of a deep underground observatory for magical “under darkness” is great. Ancient, decaying structures are D&D’s bread and butter, but there’s a brilliant reason for this place to be exotic and for this spot to have never before been uncovered. Every part of the setup primes us for a weird, alien, and maddening underworld location that any sensible player group worth their salt would be thrilled to explore. And having the dungeon shaped as a pair of hollowed-out stalactites? A for concept.
  Sadly, the very first thing we hit when it comes to execution is “site is very small”. Fifteen keys does not a triumphal Final Dungeon make, even allowing for another dozen “spurs” that lack for any unique keying there’s not a lot to explore. A squishy mutated giant should have vast cavernous halls, a veritable maze to chase hapless adventurers down, not this tight little one-access loop. The concept calls, nay begs, for a huge complex filled with laboratories and barracks. Instead, a PC at one end of the place can quite reasonably expect to shout and be heard all the way over at the other end. Unfortunately this also means everything is pretty overstuffed too.
  Isometrics always make maps look more geometrically complex than they are, and this one is no exception. Single entry, only one main loop, barely even any branching…the exploration isn’t, most of the time. The only thing really saving the map is how vertical the whole thing is; long and dangly shafts to climb up and down make a lot of potential difference, once the third dimension opens up, players will start seeing the world as more real. That bridge between the two stalactites in particular is nice and terrifying, non-OSHA-compliant pass ways over an effectively infinite blackness are thrilling. Pity that and the long dangle-chain are the only bits of environment that really take full advantage of that.
   Powerful isometric art-piece maps are wonderful at conveying mood when the reader is sitting there and imagining dungeon-like gaming…but it’s what I’m going to call the Trilemma Problem, after the genuinely beautiful Trilemma Adventures (http://blog.trilemma.com/), a huge set of pretty one-shot maps that completely fall apart (or need a ton of work) whenever someone attempts to actually play them. Your players aren’t going to be able to see that isometric map, so who is it really for? It’s not made for a dungeon master; it’s made for a consumer. A passive reader, a reviewer with a Youtube channel, a Kickstarter backer. The comrades trying to play a game? That’s a much smaller audience, so wise call not optimizing for them. D+ for execution.
  Having said all that, I do need to highlight an isometric map that works a good deal better as a play aid, the valley map. Please note that it’s not strictly necessary to present the flooded valley/emptied lakebed as an isometric map, but it’s a charming touch for the regional map, and in no way detracts from the linear slog up-river.  Coupled with the dry boxes-and-arrows event sequencer, a DM is absolutely equipped to run the most miserable Tragedy Crawl he could ever dream up. The key difference? Nobody needs to break out graph paper (or Christmas wrapping paper) to actually figure out what a 30’ move speed gets you.
  Don’t let this convince you one way or another on actually getting Deep Carbon Observatory. It’s putting the product to its secondary use, but a good adventure can definitely be had using it. You’re just going to be struggling against the map a bit, which is the real tragedy. 

​  Whew boy. Out of the simple little B2 complex, into the Great Grandaddy of Dungeons, a husky four-level complex (with generous sublevels) sprawling over complex pages and pages of eye-hurting Judges’ Guild cheap ink. The community term “Jacquaying” comes out of a cargo cult built around these wonderfully interlinked and looping maps, often perhaps not understanding what really makes them good. The original maps are a bit rough to even parse, but even redrawn they’re very complex:
 
  Daggum. There’s a lot of ambiguity in the image here. The first thing that screams for attention are those huge tears; structural damage makes everything about the map going forward look weathered, ancient, falling (literally) into ruin. It’s a welcome naturalistic touch for an environment that actually does struggle with appearing somewhat artificial…something about the room layout does give a vague impression of “this is a game first” rather than the flow I would first expect to see in a living architectural space. Lower down, the palace and crypt complex for levels 3-4 are more naturalistic, with the resultant drop in exploration complexity. Most of the difficulty groking the maps comes less from their artistry and more from their design, however…so A- for presentation.
  Conceptually, what we have here is the ur-dungeon. A winding, echoing environment with most straight stone halls broken up by occasional natural rock features, cleanly separated into “zones” with plenty of cross-connection. There are really two dungeons here, the first that upper pair of fallen halls with all the crevasses, the second the weirdo minotaur palace/trees/undercrypts…both concepts are solid, of course. The incorporation of each section together feels a little artificial (and actually makes me wonder if the author had two different dungeons being combined). B+ for concept, only because of the disjoint really.
  All of these quibbles rapidly fade away, however, when we get down to the actual pen and paper. Look at the design shown even in the very first room…there are two options presented immediately, but there’s also a blocked third that indicates the complex is big, and yet also fallen. Then you have the obvious draw of #2 as the next spot, but the way that it interacts with the hallway in #6 also tips off the players that they need to be looking for secret doors, setting up for a jaunt to #9 after an otherwise simple little side-loop. It’s actually doing a good job of making a very limited first section that teaches the explorers the methods to Thracia’s madness.
  And then, we go all over the place. A sloping hallway going down a level…secret passages leading to hidden rooms…more secret passages giving shortcuts…chasms allowing rope-using PCs up and down access…subsections that going up and down and all around…it’s a crazy exercise in exploration and discovering, rewarding careful mappers with geometry juuust symmetrical enough to hint at the unnumerable secret passages. As a pure exercise of just mapping, the upper half of Caverns of Thracia is a delight.
  Then we go down the elevator to Level 3 and we’re in a whole different module. Bereft of all the interesting atmospheric descriptions, the “outdoor” area is dismayingly simplistic. Wander around a bunch of flora, then assault a pretty “flat” palace that’s rather symmetrical and linear (judging by the standards of what came before), and if you are even so-so at looking at geometry then you’re not having any issue at all in making your way down to the final level.
  The fourth level is fine as a module adventure section but it’s a lot simpler as a map. One branchy loop, then two more big branches with their own little sub-branches…I’m not mad about it, but there are far fewer choices in exploratory gameplay. After all the early training to look for hidden passages and secret loops, the players are going to find them only rarely, a notable shift for a bunch of explorers hardened in the fires of the first few maps. After the front-loaded brilliance, the later maps are merely…okay. Still, A for execution overall.
  I wonder if there’s some hidden wisdom here, in the end. As the PCs level up, the initial cautious exploratory gameplay can be dispensed with more often for frontal assaults of plate-wearing supersoldiers backed by high-level magic. As nice as brilliant maps with chasms and crevasses are, those gaping maws are a lot less scary when someone in the party can fall light feathers, or tame flying monsters, or teleport…just as new gameplay opens up with leveling, I think Caverns of Thracia also shows that there are old aspects of gameplay that start to take a back seat as high level demigods stride the lands. Cartographic design principles do in fact need to change as high-level powers come online, shown starkly in this adventure as the “decent into the underworld” leads to maps that are simpler, not more complex. That’s not really a critique, but it is definitely something to keep in mind lest we descend into cargo-cult worship of “The Loops” without seeing that even one of the most influential cartographers in the hobby dispenses with them as the adventurers grow in power and options.   

  Okay, you knew this one had to be first. Possibly the most-played, and probably the least-completed, dungeon complex in the entire history of the hobby…monster zoo, multi-level, famous and controversial, we have the Caves of Chaos:

   
    
First of all, let’s talk about the presentation…it’s not great. The original TSR blue photocopy-resistant color can be a little uncomfortable even in a fairly traditional dungeon, but with an environment this complicated and layered, the overall effect is very overwhelming, busy and layered and all over the place. The cave entryways’ interaction with “trees” is less than clear, as are the slope setups. All this is given thought in the module itself, but it is a whiff on the information presentation side. The complex er…complex is perfectly runnable, but it’s a hard to parse from the direct view. “Stairs up” vs. “Stairs down” particularly wins an award for least helpful legend ever. C- for presentation.
  The design concept, though, is great. A narrow slot valley with multiple openings makes everything seem incredibly open to the approaching party, while also giving the subconscious message that “higher levels = higher level” in a wonderfully literal sense. People who unironically use the word “verisimilitude” will object to the monster zoo aspect of each species being a hundred feet away from the others but looking at the conceptual design of the space itself…great idea. Verticality is important in general, but there’s something particularly nice about being able to hit various bits of the map just by scrambling up the slopes. Really the biggest objection is that they don’t all have back-line interconnection, but that’s not the point of the adventure. A+ for concept.
  All that being said, in the actual execution…eh. The reason for this adventure’s classic status is more the setup and the room details, rather than the map’s direct flow. Branching little complexes like A or G have very fun encounter potential based on the writing, but in terms of exploration there’s just not a lot to them. The better early complex is south with the goblins managing to link D-E-F, there’s a lot of flow those secret doors allow, with extra props to the whole secret wing of rooms 28-31.  B-C is okay. Complex H is particularly annoying in how it staunchly refuses to link to C or G. As a finale goes, the J-K complex doesn’t bug me, I like how J’s link to K is in the most counterintuitive direction, while the final rubble-strewn passage out in the southwest is something that more module designers of today should consider.
  There overall use of secret doors is interesting to me with the Caves of Chaos. You like loops? Well they’re your reward for bringing along the elf. After you find the first one (probably between E-D), you’re keyed up to look carefully for hidden links between caves, with canny parties probably monitoring what height they’ve ascended or descended to so they can be on the lookout for a secret door leading to another evident cave mouth. I’m mixed in the intermittent reward aspect of the secret doors being only in some locations…I can imagine a clever mapper bashing his head into the wall for multiple torches in room 33 seeking passage to 40, for example. In room 45 that intuition might be rewarded in a surprising way.
  It’s easy to fetishize looping dungeon designs at the expense of actual play. Just because it’s all on the same page, every single point doesn’t have to link to every other in multiple ways…it’s okay that the caves are actually six dungeons, not a single one. In a very dense, slightly silly way, the module is teaching about how to implement multiple dungeons on a single map, with just enough travel between them to provoke a random encounter check. It’s a miniaturized campaign, which is very cool and why the module’s had so much staying power.
  Now within those aforementioned six dungeons I am more distressed at the level of linearity. Something with only six keyed rooms like A or G make sense to be branches-not-circles, but there are a lot of branches that suffer in the larger complexes too. I could also do with the verticality mattering more, very often its just a slope or a stair for tactical, not geographic, purposes. While trying not to be overly fastidious, there is more that could have been done with the map(s) to encourage exploratory play. I’d say it was avoided out of a sense of compassion to the player mapping, but complex I exists, so that’s out the window. B- for overall map execution.
  None of this is me saying that Keep on the Borderland isn’t an awesome module. The Caves of Chaos are well made for the module’s purposes…mostly. Unfortunately, B2 is “often begun, rarely finished” in part because of the disconnected nature of the various cave complexes. Couple that with a restock suggestion that can be a little demoralizing (you cleared the kobolds, yay, now enjoy the same complex but with goblins), and I think it’s evident why the upper caves don’t get explored that often despite the massive number of people starting with those dang kobolds. Some of that is the nature of the game, some of that is because of the module’s massive popularity leading to uncommitted groups, but a little of that does come from the lack of interconnection between upper and lower cave complexes. I’m not going to argue that B2 is anything other than completely successful, but I do wonder if with a little more map interconnection it could have been even better…

  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.