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.

Finish this Chart

I found the One-Page Disease chart I'd been working on months ago.  I don't have the mental juice to finish it now.  I will later, but in the mean time thought I'd just give you what I have.  Here is a Word doc.

The idea was to try and capture the biggest archetypal diseases like leprosy and the plague without getting too scientific.  So, what having a disease entails is pretty straightforward for both players and DM, but the catching of them is still kind of spooky-- just being on a ship for a session means you have a chance of catching Ship Fever.

I also divided the diseases into categories because a) it seems like we tend to do that ourselves, treating some diseases as familiar threats to deal with around home and some as fearful exotic things, and b) felt it would help players better know when they might be at risk.

The symptoms are all picked from the standardized list here and try to all have some specific in-game mechanical effect.

What is lacking is symptoms for the diseases of the Wilderness and Underworld and the virulence and lethality numbers (which is really the hardest and most important part- and thus undone).

The disease section of Small But Vicious Dog by Chris Hogan was the starting point for this, so if handling disease interests you you might want to go take a look at his take.

One-Pagers for Phone

I've come to realize my phone is quite handy on game nights.  If I forget something I have pretty much everything I've made on my blog somewhere.  I've also put some pdfs directly on myphone for expediency's sake-- no need to search the blog.

The new pdfs upper left, then a draft.  Hard-to-read chart example lower left.

But the problem with those pdfs is that, at that tiny size, my charts tend to all look alike.  So I used my silhouettes and blew them up so you can easily see what each chart is about.  I also added in the "The Potion/Ring is Actually . . ." as a third page.  That way my base and possible weird variants is right where I need them.

The only hiccup I had was learning how to create my own page style to switch from portrait to landscape to portrait again.  Otherwise, you should be able to customize the one pagers to your heart's content and do this for yourself.

Here is my phone pdf for Potions and for Rings.  This makes me think, what would a chart of "The Drug is Actually . . ." look like?  Better get on that.