Public Domain Wilderness Map Symbols

If nothing else, these might serve as models for your hand-drawn maps:

Here is a page from the book I got some of these from:

It seems you have to go back to the 1600s to get this kind of representational topography we like in our fantasy maps.

As you can see, I'm going for the old, hand-drawn look but you might find these two books interesting for more modern campaigns:
German Military Symbols (1943)
Soviet Topographic Map Symbols (1958)

Public Domain Hex Paper

I couldn't resist.  Meant to look gritty and uneven.  Hope you find it fun:

I was going to use an old font and number each hex but I don't have the patience right now.  Have an old compass rose and title banner instead:

Public Domain Dungeon Map Icons

I've been a bit distracted lately with non-blog stuff, but have some public domain icons for your dungeon map.  These are intentionally rough and gritty:

A door

A trap

A secret door

Stairs

And maybe less generally useful but something I've been looking for for a while, animal tracks:

Bear tracks

Wolf tracks

Mountain Lion, puma, or cougar tracks

And, not an icon, but a canvas to place them all on, public domain graph paper:

Haha, yes I'm laughing at myself, but, again it is more about the gritty, uneven feel I was going for, than just reinventing the wheel.  I've been working on a revision of my Dwarven Outpost Kit dungeon with this as the background and I like it.  I lower the levels on it, first, so it's more grey and unobtrusive, but it gives a more hand-drawn feel to the affair.

That's all for now.  I'll share more as I find them and eventually add all these to the borders and Misc zip file that I have on my public domain art page.

Collaborative World Building

I've had my players in this little sandbox for a while and needed a larger world outside of it.  I am not good at this because of indecisiveness and wanting to keep the infinite possibilities of an unwritten world as long as possible.  So finally I just asked my players to help.  I took a big piece of paper, cut it in four and asked them to draw some land.

They asked me about scale.  I told them ,"yeah, I don't know, don't worry about it."

After each of them had drawn some territory I had them pass their maps to another person and draw places people might want to live.  They were adding more features than I had intended.  I just needed help with some geography and where cities would be located but they were putting strange portals, ghosts, cave entrances, etc.

So I took there maps home and treated them as if they were folk maps, I mean that I made the scale much larger than their images seemed to show, because I wanted more than just four little sandboxes. 

I traced the major features and tried to interpret some of them.  Nicely enough, they had included some swamp, coastal marshes, mountains, forests and deserts, so there was geographic variety.  There was also ocean on a few of the maps that I interpreted as a central sea.  Here is what is what my interpretation looks like:

 

The scale is about 30 miles to the inch.  Don't know how realistic or game efficient that is but it seems good enough.

Putting it into Play
That took me about 2 weeks to get around to doing.  Then this Friday was one of my players birthday.  He asked if we could play using the map they had drawn parts of.  So I wracked my brain for a way to try and have a session that might tie into this newly made landscape.  I finally decided it might be fun to just give the some free mobility like I talked about in this post.  So I basically gave them a hot air balloon.  It is called the Wicker Tower, has an encumbrance limit and a magical stove that uses meat as fuel (so they have to land every now and then to hunt).

I used the elephant encumbrance sheet I had lying around.  It is 20' tall and 15' in diameter.  The boxes along the edge are hit points.  The six boxes in the middle represent the weight of one person and all their gear or the equivalent.  My players thought I did this explicitly to strip them of their hirelings (no, just trying to make them have to make choices, I'd actually forgotten how many total hirelings this party had).

Geographic Wonders in the World
On the wicker tower they found a corpse with some pages from a book and the map above.  I've been wanting to try Beedo's awesome idea of the Library of de la Torre for a long time.  Unfortunately I don't have all the cool rumors, dungeon locations, etc. that it requires, but I did have a bunch of wonders written up that hopefully might seem interesting enough to visit.  So that's what was on the pages, a selection of my wonders that worked well with some of the features my players had included.

I always have fun making physical game props.  For this I used the cool font mentioned in this post.  I printed them on heavy paper, folded them, soaked them in coffee and then dried them in the oven.  Each entry has a symbol next to it that corresponds to a place on the map.  Though some share the same symbol, so it can be unclear which wonder is at one of a few locations.  Some also have question marks because the location may be uncertain.

Cities and their Rulers
Okay, so I brought those things but I also asked them to do a bit more collaborative work on game night.  I had picked 6 locations from their maps to represent big cities and had them roll up stats for the cities as in this post of Zak's.  I still have to interpret all the results, there was actually an 18 for trade for the city nearest the party, so they were excited about that and are heading there next.  Then I had them all roll up characteristics of the leaders of each of these cities using my hireling trait chart.  Again, I need to digest that a bit but there were some promising results.

Balloon Flying Mini-game
One other thing I did, was try to see if it were fun or interesting to try a mini-game that you don't know the rules to.  I was trying to mimic the process of learning a skill in real life.  The balloon the players wanted to fly had four sets of pullies.  I gave four players a d4, d6, and d8.  They had to secretly roll the three and choose one as their result.  Then I would look at all those and tell them which direction the balloon was going.  Then they would roll again and try to direct it where they wanted, but they could only say "higher" or "lower" to each other.  The idea was that they had to figure out which pattern made the balloon go in a particular direction, then manage that pattern without communicating to much.  It was okay, nothing spectacular.  I intend to forget about it once they get a hang of flying in a wind, then we'll all assume they've learned to work it reliably.

In the end, it was a pretty fun way to make a fantasy landscape and then put it into play.  Now I need to go look at Vornheim again and come up with a map for this city they are going to.

Let's Make a Dungeon - Map

Want to make a dungeon with me?  I'll show you a method that is quick and easy and yet still a good stand in for natural caverns.  If you get tripped up on your own perfectionism or are just too tired from work to make a dungeon come game night, this is dedicated to you.  I'll break this up into several posts because blogging about the process actually takes longer than using it.  So, today we'll just do the map.

Get 12 dice of various shapes.  Make about half of them visually distinguishable from the rest.  I chose dark and light:

Whoops, my d10 with the dark 7 should be on the other side

Toss the dice on the paper.  If  some roll off the paper just move them back to the closest edge:

I use blank paper but if you feel more comfortable using graph paper go right ahead.

Now trace the dice in pencil as you remove them and write down the number they rolled.  Light, sloppy, and fast is good.  If several dice clump together, trace around all of them like its one lumpy room.  Also put a little dot for the dark dice:

Now, draw connections from odd numbers to odd and from even numbers to even.  Not all of them have to connect but try to avoid a a simple circle. or completely linear arrangement:

If there is no connection between the even and odd caverns you'll need to arbitrarily make one. (luckily, our clumpy room connects the 3 even elevation rooms here.)

Now, clean up the connecting passages and draw little curved lines to indicate differences in elevation.  I draw them like little steps leading from the lower areas to the higher, each indicating a rise of 10'.  If a difference is too much, make it a sharp cliff:

Now, those dotted areas where the dark dice fell are "Fat Man's Misery" type passages, they're passable, but just barely.  Characters will either have to crawl on their bellies, or sidle along sideways. The chambers can be very low-ceilinged or choked with stalagmites. (I decided to make the passage from the elevation 3 room to elevation 13 very narrow, and make the 1, 3, 10 elevation rooms with dots have low ceilings)

One last thing.  If we roll a 12 sider and just count clockwise (roughly) to pick a room, we can place a water source and see what it does.  If there are lower elevations nearby, let it flow along.  If not, it can be a pool, or you can disregard- not every cave has to have water.

The largest numbers are the exits to the surface. So, here the 15 and 13 have entrances from surface caves or sinkholes.

Now we have some treacherous terrain to explore: narrow passages, long drops (one 60', one 100'), and even a dry cave hidden by a nearly impassable underwater one.  Next we'll place some monsters.

Silhouettes - LXII - Badass Women

If you've been following this series for a while, you know I make silhouettes from public domain images I find, and that some things are quite hard to find good examples of.  I've been searching for images of warrior women for a long time.  Today I am happy to present you with what I think are some decent example of just that.  For your maps, handouts, and rulebooks, badass women adventurers:

First, a fighter or rogue, or maybe even a kensai or ronin, :

Next an archer.  I personally wouldn't go into a dungeon topless, but she looks pretty confident so I'll let her decide:

A big woman with a club.  Maybe she's a bouncer:

I think this could be a martial artist.  She looks ready to bust out some savate:

Finally, a mage invoking some devastation:

Okay, the last one doesn't look too threatening, just imagine her spell stripping your skin off or something.  I'll keep looking for images of women in traditional medieval armor or from warrior societies, but these are the best I have so far.  I hope you find them useful.

You can use these images in any way you wish and they have all been added as vector graphics to the zip file linked in my sidebar to the right.

p.s. I gathered all the npc portraits together with every intention of making them all available, when I realized the zip was over 40 megs which is too much.  I'll have to go through and resize them all I'm afraid.

Silhouettes - LXI

More silhouettes for your maps, handouts and rulebooks.

Fighter with two-handed sword:

 

Another warrior with sword and shield:

A staff slinger:

A crossbowman:

an adventurer with torch and knife:

A hanged man:

Several stages of tadpole:

Another church:

More ruins:

Some manacles, handcuffs, or leg irons I plan to use to indicate slavers:

And a tuft of grass I used to indicate lushness:

These have all been added as vector graphics to the zip file linked in my sidebar to the right.

Visual Dungeon Challenge

Okay, friends, for my 999th post I'm throwing down my glove and offering a challenge to each and every one of you:

Make a one page dungeon that uses only images and visual devices.  No words.  No abbreviations.

This is intended to be given to another DM, not a personal bookkeeping system.  Because of that it can allow for some customization by the other DM.  You can use numbers, roman numerals, or your own invented symbols if you can convey what they mean to someone.

Post your attempt to your blog, link in the comments below, or email me, just share your map with us somehow.

This is not a contest.  You win if you make a damn attempt.  There is no time limit.  You can keep making these.  I think this should be an interesting exercise for any DM, because it will force you to look very closely at what exactly you require to run a dungeon, and how that may or not be different from what other DMs require.

Here is my first attempt:

I tried to indicate elevation with shades of gray and curved steps.  Each step is 10' and the darker it gets the deeper you are.  So, for example, the central area has a 90' drop to the right.  I think numbers might work better but didn't want them confused with room numbers.

I used a number to distinguish similar icons, so you can distinguish the potions, for example.  This will only work for very small dungeons or bare ones.  So I might need to come up with symbols for spells to put beside a scroll or for potion affects beside each potion, etc.  Though, that sounds very challenging.  Rather than use the same technique for the coins symbol, I could just put a number for the amount of coins in the hoard right next to it on the map.  Of course that would assume it was a hoard of one coin type or get very cluttered quickly.  A lot of problems.  But this is all okay, it's why I'm doing this: seeing what the limits are, seeing what is possible.

Now, I'm kind of cheating by telling you all that.  But maybe a sentence or two of explanation is okay-- something you might put in an image caption or email to a fellow DM.  Like "Roman numerals are NPC level" or "Greek letters are for traps."  And certainly we want to hear your thoughts behind your design decisions.  You just can't make something that requires a long explanation to be functional.

Good luck.