Scribbles and Horrors

In this post I share my notes for Redux level Alpha. It’s in response to what are reasonable questions about how my large and oddly shaped dungeon maps work in actual play. It’s also a record of my personal prep and playstyle. I don’t pretend to be presenting anything terribly novel here–there’s no shiny method or clever innovation in how I run things. This is just what the most well travelled corner of my underworld looks like after 30-odd sessions of 3LBB campaign play.

It is a companion piece to Redux Setup, which covers some physical aspects of how I run my game.

The Notes

Here is a pdf which contains my complete notes for Redux Alpha, redacted to exclude what hasn’t seen play action, or what might be spoilers. Only about 3 pages of notes are witheld:

Redux-Alpha_REDACTED.pdf

In addition to these notes, here are documents authored by Alfonso Ultima, Phd. These were kept in the folder until discovered, then handed to the players:

Ultima_Has-God-Spoken-to-You.pdf
Ultima_How-to-Make-Decisions.pdf
Ultima_Guilt-and-Forgiveness.pdf

For comparison with actual logs of sessions played, here is a pdf of all 9 Redux sessions up through March 1026 where action took place at least partially in Alpha:

Alpha-Logs_1023-Mar1026.pdf

The Map

Construction and Development

Alpha began life as a fairly straightforward map drawn on graph paper. It looked like this:

This map never saw play. By the time I got a group together, I had replaced with this, the current Alpha:

I drew the new map on an index card, then printed out a full-page version to key. The highlighting indicates results from the U&WA tables: pink for Monster, orange for Monster and Treasure, yellow for Treasure only.

When I drew Alpha I was very cognizant about playability. I wanted the level to be accessible and exciting. It’s not too big, and each of the paths one can take leads somewhere slightly different. The large triangular room makes a pretty good landmark for deciding to explore other areas.

The multiple loops mean that Alpha is pretty good for telegraphing unexplored space. It’s been useful for players to work their way completely around an area. This has also meant that chases are pretty fun–there are several ways to get back to safety, and players have been able to make intelligent decisions in order to avoid danger.

Alpha is connected to lots of other levels. There are two downwards stairways and an elevator (though nobody’s ventured down them), to the north and to the east are other levels. To the south, well, less said about the south the better.

The Alpha Mapping Game

I gave players this initial map of the area. You can see plainly that it is wrong in several places, but it gives hints about the general layout.

This map proved to be quite frustrating to players when they discovered it was incorrect. To my surprise, instead of realizing the map was wrong, they decided they were in the wrong place! Eventually they figured it out, though. The point was to aid players in drawing their own maps, not to have them use the given one.

Here is the most up-to-date player map, drawn by Idraluna and posted with his permission:

You can compare this with the referee map and see that it is incredibly accurate. I have had zero trouble with players mapping Alpha.

My referee map doesn’t have any markings, but it is draw to scale, so I eyeball the distances and relay them. When a room is difficult to describe, I will draw it out on a piece of scratch paper and show it to the players for them to copy down. I keep an eye on their maps, and if they draw something which doesn’t fit what the characters are seeing, I correct it.

I don’t correct errors on the player map if the characters aren’t there to see it, and if a player makes assumptions (say, connecting a hallway on the map without having actually gone down it) they are on their own.

Keying

This meme demonstrates the duality within my soul

Initial keying was done mainly with the U&WA tables, with a few areas grandfathered in from the earlier keyed version of the map. I really like the random distribution, because frequently the dice will place content in places I never expected. For treasure especially, the U&WA tables are great for insisting that something is there, definitely in that place. Once I have a baseline distribution, I can go in and add more detail/embellishments.

In general I take fairly sparse notes, but add concrete detail in specific areas. Redux Alpha has a lot of writing associated with it, but most of this writing is Dr. Ultima’s essays and pamphlets.

Select Wandering Monsters

My wandering monster table has undergone several modifications. When a monster type has been cleared from the level I cross it off the list. Alpha uses a simple two-tiered table with monsters inhabiting Alpha and those from elsewhere.

Ruff-fish

The Ruff-fish are a plain rip-off of a vignette in Yevgenia Belorusets’ Modern Animal, where a priest has been preaching to a group of fish, and they respond with the curious inverted collective-individual dialogue.

They are a chorus, and so to produce the chorus I have the players all read aloud from the script together. I’ve had a lot of fun with these encounters. It’s pretty much strictly non-combat, but it forces players to be immersed in what’s happening before them.

The problem comes when players ask the Ruff-fish questions. I haven’t been able to come up with many satisfying ways for dialog with these creatures, so for the most part they say their piece and move on.

Dr. Alfonso Ultima, PhD

Dr. Ultima’s writings have been a really fun part of Redux. Started with a pamphlet, and he has also written numerous essays which get left around. The man himself has been fairly elusive; the players are still puzzling over what his deal is. He was the subject of a Records Request.

Select Keyed Areas

A - Lightbulb headed monstrosity (ON)

The LBHMs were inspired by the “protagonist” character from MAD GOD. They have lightbulbs for heads and lots of HD. When their pull-cord is pulled, the light is on, and the LBHM sits immobile.

This was a really great feature for the early sessions. It was something of a mystery, it lit up the central room for ease of description, and, it’s largely harmless unless disturbed in an obvious way. Eventually the PCs’ curiosity got the better of them, and they killed it, which is sort of sad.

?? - Goblins

My goblins have uniforms and equipment reminiscent of WWI Germans. The concept is something like outposts of units, so they have been building out various defenses. Including booby traps (usually poison gas behind doors or paintings), obstacles like barbed wire and land mines.

Goblin rifles are really dangerous at long range, but closing the distance seems to work well, as they aren’t wearing armor. So far bullets have been stopped by shields in NRACS, but I might want to change that soon.

AB - Treasure of the Snail Knight

Search for the actual treasure is still ongoing. In typical Referee fashion I assumed it would be much easier to find than it actually was. There is a looted treasure room, which contained a huge and heavy brass snail shell. Much interest was had during the session where the party slowly dragged it out and hoist it up the shaft into the air.

?? - Magic Booth

A simple teleported added well after the initial keying. Having a cool-shaped empty room was really handy for this purpose.

The Living Dungeon

Huge portions of what’s “true” about the dungeon have few or no written notes.

Perhaps the biggest one of these is that Alpha starts with stairways to a room, then a rough 40′ shaft downwards into the center of the level. There are no notes of this room or shaft because I know it’s there. This fact about the world shows up in player notes and expedition logs, but not my referee map or notes. The space in which play occurs–call it an imaginary world if you like–does not exist except in the actual interactions at the table. It’s not written down anywhere fully, it’s not in my head, not really. It emerges through social play.

The gift of creative energy has been bestowed upon me, and so here is a deeper part of my underworld: Redux Zeta III (0,0).

No, this is not a disentanglement from, but a progressive knotting into

- Gravity’s Rainbow, p. 1

Zeta III is three levels beneath Epsilon and two levels beneath Delta-Zeta I. Its main connections are with Zeta I and Zeta II. 5 of the arms of Zeta I’s large star descend via slopes two levels to Zeta III: these are those curvy 30’ passageways. You can also see the two gargantuan rectangular rooms–Zeta III is the floor of those rooms.

The scale is the same as my other maps, though it’s not on graph paper. For reference the three parallel passageways in the upper left are each 20’ wide. The smallest corridors tangled in the center are about 2’ wide.

Unlike Delta-Zeta I, I have many concrete ideas about Zeta III’s denizens. In the colossal rectangular open spaces are huge roly-poly’s. The large 100’ hallways are the domain of the Ormyul. The many densely packed chambers on the left hand side of the map contain an extensive library. The larger 15’ passages are home to Snail Men. The balance will be made up with creatures similar to those found in this painting–surreal sorts of colored blob creatures.

I suspect a workable method of mapping Zeta III will be a node map with lines representing corridors and nodes representing rooms or intersections. In part because in many ways the way it’s drawn is already a node map, just with added embellishments.

I’ve been making maze drawings with overlapping passages since middle school. I’d always wanted to find a way to make them D&D maps, but the logic never quite made sense to me. Still stuck in my foolish notions about dungeons having to make some kind of sense I wasn’t in a place where I could make something satisfying. For some reason I’m there now. It’s strange how as we get older, we come into age for certain things.

I’m definitely not the first person to draw maps like this. The ones here are beyond astonishing and beautiful. I tried to mimic some of the elements from those, with “windows” cut out of the bigger spaces and lots of parallel passages. I couldn’t hold a candle to their precision, though, and moved into my own chaotic knotwork.

I found myself experimenting with a bunch of different styles here. The 100’ passages sort of break the map up into sections, and in each one it appears I’ve tried something a little different. I won’t say this was intentional–it just sort of happened. Some of the styles I like more than others. I’m especially intrigued to explore more flora-like structures, with leaves, vines, and flowers.

The blue shading adds a lot. I didn’t intentionally choose TSR module blue, I was just looking for a somewhat neutral color which would provide good contrast, which I suppose is why they chose it.

There’s lots I’m happy with in this map, though I sort of hate how the big 100’ passageways look. They don’t fit in with the rest, and I feel like they are awkwardly in the way. This was sort of intentional–I wanted them to be separate from the main tangle, blocky and sharp obstacles–but I feel like they just sort of look bad. I drew too early in the process, and too hastily I think.

It is possible that they will look less bad once I give them somewhere to go–you can see how the map extends off three edges; more maps of this type will need to be drawn up. Perhaps its just that they’re such a huge structure you need to zoom out farther for them to make sense.

I have plenty more paper.

—

I ran a session of The Realm of Yolmi using this map, detailed here: Escape From Special Operations Complex #903 Session Report

Nearly 5 years ago I kicked off this blog with a post about Level EPSILON in Redux. Well, I am happy to announce that I have finally completed drawing level Delta-Zeta I, which sits directly beneath Epsilon:

(in this map, as with Epsilon, North is to the left.)

The left third of this image is Level DELTA, right two-thirds are ZETA I. Underneath this map is ZETA II and ZETA III.

The Process

Level ZETA has been a long time coming. (It usually doesn’t take 5 years to finish level 2!) After drawing Epsilon in 2021, I immediately wrote up a schematic for Zeta, and got to work:

Quickly I lost steam–it just took too many sheets of 4-squares-per-inch inch graph paper to realistically have 50′ hallways. Over the years I kept returning, would get a little ways into it and then become overwhelmed.

I moved on to other maps at smaller scale–drawn on blank paper or index cards–which have become the main area of exploration for Redux. (One of these I slotted into the space beneath Epsilon and wrote about here: Defunct Dungeon Map.)

When the Redux campaign finally began in 2023 (with actual players!), I started them in my newer levels. Zeta has remained dormant as a Good Concept until now. Now it’s about ⅓ done.

Level Delta (the left side) I completed separately, but recently had the energy to expand connect a new Zeta portion to it. I did a very quick sketch in my notebook with the main features, and got to work.

I carefully sketched out the star first, trying several permutations, before copying it at scale on graph paper. This was entirely nerve-wracking. After this I filled in the space. I used a very fine ballpoint gel pen and a pencil on three 11” x 17” sheets of 10-squares-per-inch graph paper. I didn’t use a straightedge or a compass, everything is freehand with the graph paper as a guide.

I did not count how many hours this took me to draw, and it’s complicated because I was simultaneously drawing portions of Zeta II and Zeta III, but quite a few. It’s been a fairly manic couple weeks. I find once I start working in earnest on levels like these it begins to dominate my thoughts. I see tangled passages when I close my eyes–glimpses of the fantastic. When I get home from work I immediately start drawing and wont stop for hours, don’t even notice when people ask me things.

Notes about the Layout

Many of the passages are knotted together–these are not upward- or downward-sloping passages, but are all level ground. Call it non-euclidean if you’d like. I imagine these sections will be hideous to map out, but that’s my players’ problem, not mine. I like how a topology can be so clearly readable when looking at it flat on the page, but be so bewildering once you try to make sense of it as a 3 dimensional space.

I do my best to make my dungeons fairly easy to navigate once you know where you’re going. Those big 30′ passages can take a party to any section of the map it wants to go if they’re willing to take the long way around, and then if they choose get into the weeds of things they can.

For this project I intentionally included a ton of stairs, elevators, and slopes. Likewise, I paid special attention to the stairways coming down from Epsilon, giving those locations plenty of navigation options. It’s fairly trivial to go from the up-stairs down a level or two.

The 10-pointed star turned out fairly well; half of its slopes go down 1 level to Zeta II, and the other half go down to Zeta III. The octagonal interior reminds me of Dark Souls, for some reason. Stars are neat features because they force a kind of outpouring and an inward tendency–I feel like the big one is sufficiently grand and overwhelming.

There aren’t very many choke points in this map, but there are a lot of shortcuts and longcuts. It’s possible to travel through this map by sort of choosing a direction and going towards it, but there will be resistance in the form of monsters/traps and doors. Lots of doors.

The long staggered parallel passageways to the south were surprisingly easy to draw, and I find them different and visually appealing. They remind me a little of crystalline rock structures, growing. In my D&D campaign before Redux, all the maps of which were lost in the mail, I had some really beautiful organic maps. Recently my maps have been fairly blocky and chunky (mostly because I’m using graph paper.) This isn’t a bad thing at all, but it’s nice to have found a structure which is both blocky and gives the impression of growth.

The big rectangles at the top are immense open spaces–about 100′-200′ down. They make me very uneasy, but they are necessary I think. It might be possible to run BITS in them.

The lower left corner of the Delta map came to me in a dream. I saw it in a flash, and then worked to make it real. I’m glad I did, turned out great.

Not everything worked. My linework in some places is less clean than I’d like it to be. Also I drew to the very edges of the graph paper to get the connections precise. This worked, but was sort of a pain to deal with. Some areas feel better than others, and there are a couple of places at least which I feel downright awful about. I made a few mistakes with the pen, and when I went to correct these with whiteout I whited out the correction instead of the error. I was blessed to only have to do this 3 times, though.

For me, the concept of the underworld includes immensity and unknowability: complete indifference to visiting inhabitants. I want viewers of this map to have to sit with the notion of these vast empty subterranean spaces. I want it to be a kind of struggle. The underworld is awe-inspiring and bewildering and strange, not because it is large, but because it is unyielding to interpretation. I paid attention to navigability when drawing this map, but haven’t worried too much about mapability. In part this is because I’m blessed with players who enjoy mapping, but also I’m beginning to question whether it’s important for my dungeon maps to be game-friendly at all. I’ve decided to begin focusing on things which I find to be beautiful and meaningful, and trusting the people I play games with to find them beautiful as well. This has been freeing.

It’s possible the best game with which to explore this map won’t be OD&D, perhaps it will be something like Conventional Dungeon Paradigm, or something else entirely. Regardless, only a tiny percentage of the spaces depicted on this map will ever see the light of a PCs torch. The exciting part is that any one of them could, and many will.

Notes about Contents

It takes a very long time for me to develop dungeon contents which are satisfying. Check back in like, uh, 4 years.

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 Level EPSILON. 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 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.)

This is Level EPSILON. It is the first map in my underworld that is completely drawn. Level Epsilon is also a “first level” in the sense that it is one of the levels accessible from the surface, and is a likely place for first level adventurers to explore. There are plenty other entrances to the underworld which could serve this function as well, though.

Before sitting down and actually drawing the map I worked out a outline of the different areas, and choke points between them. I had some idea of what this level needed to do:

1. Connect to levels NU, PI, and ZETA below and to level ALPHA-EPSILON above
2. Serve as an introduction to OD&D and my campaign
3. Have plenty of space for getting lost in and exploring
4. Harbor a couple of big secrets for the party to accidentally uncover

I also had a couple of concepts I knew I wanted to include:

1. Stuff all around–rooms and hallways are crowded, full to the brim with junk
2. “The Players” a theatre-themed monster group
3. Skeletons, because I like skeletons
4. animal-men of some kind
5. “The Winding Way”, a distinct architectural feature that is mysterious, but also helpful for navigation

With these in mind, I divided the sections up more or less arbitrarily. I made sure that every section connected to “The Winding Way” at least once, and made other connections as seemed necessary.

I then went to work on the actual maps themselves. It took about 3 hours for each map, over the course of a couple weeks. I sketched in pencil the outlines of the sections as described in the outline, and more or less let myself go. The result was dungeon sections that were very separated from one another–almost like little islands. While choke points are good, I might experiment with smaller sections and more choke points closer together in the future.

The architectural styles of each of the sections turned out to be very distinct from one another. I didn’t exactly intend this at the beginning, but it’s nice. Each section has a different wandering monster table, so it makes sense that it has a different “feel” as well.

All in all, I’m pleased with the way this map turned out. I am excited to begin keying it, and to have people adventure within.