Scribbles and Horrors

Here is a map of what was an underworld level in my OD&D campaign Redux. It was my second attempt at filling an empty space below the 1st level. As I am currently working on a third attempt, I have decided to retire this map. I’ve never really been satisfied with it, honestly.

My main problem with this map is that it doesn’t have any striking or defining features. It’s just a bunch of rooms and hallways strung together. While some of these have interesting shapes, and work together on a locally, nothing in this map leaps out as central, evocative or adventure-worthy. It is a stringy, linear, mess. What is there to do in this map? Go from room to room, pretty much. It feels monotonous to me, lacks a certain spark. Despite having many areas, there aren’t many places to go. I had tried to fix this problem by incorporating several little lairs. Each lair is accessed by a single choke point, however, so the adventure stops there.

Linearity and dead-ends aren’t universally bad dungeon design or anything, though, so why do I have such a problem with it here? I think in part it’s because movement through this map never feels intentional. In a more open layout, movement is intentional because the party has to choose to go in one direction or another. In a well-structured linear map, movement is intentional like a funnel: the structure is driving the party forward, and they can either choose to acquiesce to its meanderings or turn back. Here, the level is neither open enough to allow for strong choices nor intentional enough to draw players forward. Pursuing linearity here does not bring the characters deeper and deeper, into the dread and gloom, it simply takes them vaguely around.

This level has depth in that many of its rooms are stuck behind other rooms, but there is no consistency and little drama. Consider room R or room G–what is there to do but keep going forwards until you inevitably run into them? Perhaps what this map actually needs is more dead-ends–red herrings to force a choice one way or another. Perhaps the balance could be made up for in particularly nasty traps or the like. On the other hand, connecting some of the areas to make satisfying loops would open things up a bit. Perhaps adding some big, domineering rooms as hubs.

Drawing wise, the map is uninspiring. The scale is off in many places. Some of my best maps have been drawn on blank paper; this isn’t one of them. Most of the hallways are supposed to be ~10′ (with a few 20′and 30′ thrown in.) In practice, the map is out of joint with itself. An underdiscussed part of mapmaking is what kind of gestalt experience is evoked in the map reader. This experience can make or break high-stakes creative decisionmaking, which is quite important for D&D. For this map, I find it very flat and blah.

This map never saw much action, thankfully. Once a group dipped a toe in but were quickly chased out by a some Heroes. Perhaps more exploration would have made me more fond of it, but honestly I’m glad none of my players had to slog through it.

Still, this is a completed map–there are lots of little rooms to find. At any rate there’s a lot of space here. I had hoped to stock the place full of exciting contents and call it good–the words “extravagant” and “elegant” are scrawled at the top of the key–I wanted to pick lurid, stifling, incense-and-tapestry vibes. I wanted ancient, shimmering blobs of disused goblets. I wanted the smell of old pillows, faded velvet, fuzz, tarnished silver and brass. What I got instead was writers block. It just doesn’t fit into my dungeon in the way I hoped.

For now, I will place this map into my “old” folder and replace it with something new and bigger. Maybe one day I’ll return and find a use for it. If you are reading this and would like to try your hand at keying or adapting it, please do so and send me what you come up with! (As with everything I post on my blog, you are welcome to use it in your own game, but please do not publish it as your own or feed it to an AI. You are not my friend if you do either of these.)