Hey all! Angry here. Sorry this was late. It took a lot of editing. A lot. And I don’t let Hasse edit these because I want them to stay as blog-like and true to my thoughts as possible. So I have to do it myself. And I didn’t have any time over the weekend. That’s because the thing about trying figure out how the hell to map a Megadungeon at midnight on a Saturday night with the help of a White Russian? That wasn’t me being funny. That’s how I did it. And holy f$&% did it need a cleanup. So… Happy Megadungeon Monday on a Tuesday!

Happy Megadungeon Monday.

I guess.

I have to be honest; I’m not sure about this one and what’s going to come out of it. But given my new approach allows me to have a nice, honest, introduction before I start working, at least you’re forewarned. So, this is the bloggy, pre-work portion of the article.

It’s Saturday night. The Tiny One has gone to sleep, and I am sitting here with a White Russian and a pile of stuff trying to figure out how exactly to do this. And it has been a long week. Apparently, writing a book, planning a Kickstarter, and starting and running a company really take a lot. At least, initially. What should have taken me a few days ballooned into almost two weeks. Which is how I find myself in my current state.

But you didn’t come here to listen to me whine. It’s a shame because I could keep going. I could talk about my Physical Therapy and my…

Nope. No whining. Let’s get down to it.

Here’s where we’re at. I have my exit map. I understand how the entire dungeon interconnects. I have my plot. I understand what happens when in each part of the dungeon. I have my regional map. I understand the geography of my entire dungeon. And I’ve picked a section, and I roughly placed the large physical features of the section. And so, it should be easy just to start drawing a map. Shouldn’t it.

And yet, it’s not.

The problem isn’t that I don’t know how to draw a dungeon. I sure as hell do. And, frankly, I’m better at designing dungeons than most of the folks crapping out adventures for D&D these days. Though I do admit, I’m very rusty. That’s only because, the past three years, I haven’t been running as many games as I used to. Almost all of the gaming work I do is for this website. And, a few weeks ago, I wouldn’t have included the “almost.”

The problem is the tools themselves. I’m an old-fashioned guy. I draw my maps on graph paper. Actually, I don’t even usually bother with the graph paper. I draw my maps on any blank sheet of paper I find lying around. I don’t sweat the scale, and I use a lot of arcane symbols and notes only I understand, and I leave a lot blank to fill in. Like my notes for the games I run, my maps are just vague ideas scribbled down, and I fill in the details at the game table. Details like terrain and furniture and obstacles and hazards and things.

I moved on from graph paper for THIS project because, frankly, the project got too damned big for graph paper. I did briefly consider getting a bunch of poster board and tacking it to the wall and drawing the whole thing like that. It would be cool to have a wall covered with a dungeon map. But that’s not conducive to sharing. Or publishing. Or even running at the game table.

That’s why I switched to using Profantasy’s Campaign Cartographer 3 Plus. It’s a very powerful software tool based on an engineering computer-aided design tool called FastCAD. It has a hell of a learning curve, but I’d already gone through most of that learning curve as a result of some architectural design and CAD courses I took a long, LONG time ago.

See…

All right, I’m going to have to admit the booze is making me thoughtful. So, we may up talking more theory than practice this week, but it’s important theory. And, honestly, a big part of the design process is getting the thing you want out of the tools you have. Or coming up with new ways to use old tools. And that’s what I’ve been doing. The spreadsheets, critical path maps, exit maps, overlays for regions, and so on? That’s all me inventing tools that will allow me to design the thing I want to design. And the thing I want to design is a lot more ambitious than it needed to be.

But, if we’re going to pontificate for a bit before I get started, let’s pontificate specifically about mapping. Ultimately, this entire project is about producing a map. Because the map – the site – is the adventure. And for this project to live up to my dreams for it, it has to be a damned good map. The best map. The map has to tell the story and be the plot and guide the adventure and provide the motivation. It has to do everything. It has to be an artful map.

Now, I love the art of maps. I really do. And I have gotten rusty over the years. I used to spend hours drawing maps just to draw them. And I know a lot of GMs and a lot of gaming cartographers feel the same way. When you think about it, all those fancy maps in books like Curse of Stradh and Rise of the Runelords don’t really serve any game purpose. The players will never see them. If the players do see a map, they are going to see a quick line drawing on a battle map. I guess, these days, with online VTTs, there’s a chance the players WILL see the map. But I don’t want to get off-topic analyzing the online gaming phenomenon.

Yes, the map does provide some visual representation of the space. The GM needs that. And it does provide some sense of the mood and tone. At least, it can. Maps can have a mood. But these days, most RPGs seem to focus on uniform art direction even in their maps. So, everything in D&D these days looks like the same Mike Schley map. Not that I mind. I love Schley’s work. Beyond that, though, the map is just more art in the book. It’s just another thing there to get the GM to buy the product. It’s polish. It’s flash in the pan. It’s the sizzle, not the steak.

Well, this map has to be steak, but I also want it to ultimately sizzle. I want it to be a work of functional art. It IS the adventure design, right?

So, now we get down to how most people map. Most people – when they are drawing a map for their adventure – they start drawing boxes and joining them up. They don’t really care where stuff goes. I mean, they do try to plan their spaces with some kind of logic. A castle has to look like a castle. But it also doesn’t have to be a masterwork of scenario design in the same way that, say, the universe of Dark Souls has to be. And that’s why most computer tools these days are tile mapping utilities. Just assemble your map from a bunch of assets. Drag and drop floors and furnishings and walls and doors and all that stuff. Which is fine. I’m not begrudging that at all. It’s accessible. And for almost all dungeon adventures, it’s all you need.

But when I draw a map – and this is the reason why I’ve tended to use paper and a pencil for so long – when I draw a map, I tend to do a lot of playing and sketching and erasing and redrawing. I tend to crumple up the paper a few times and start again.

For example, when I’m drawing a room where I know a combat is going to happen, I start by deciding how big the room is. I draw a faint square. Then I try to figure out the overall shape of the room. Then I draw some blobs for the terrain features that will make that combat actually interesting: difficult terrain, high points, low points, and so on. Then I add the furniture that has to be there, trying to follow the terrain blobs where I can. For example, if I decide there’s a low obstruction and the room is a courtyard, I add hedges or underbrush or whatever. Or a bench for a high point. After that, I go over all of that in ink. Then I erase the pencil lines. And I have a map.

Sometimes, that process is time-consuming. Sometimes it goes fast. Sometimes I bang out five rooms in a few minutes. Sometimes, I spend thirty minutes getting an arena for a boss fight just right. That’s okay because I feel comfortable doing it. It feels natural. I LIKE doing it that way.

But, as much as I know how to use Campaign Cartographer to draw a map, I’m still learning how to use it. My maps on CC3+ are pretty crappy compared to my hand-drawn maps. In terms of design. They look really nice. CC3+ allows you to make beautiful-looking maps. But I’m still learning how to lay everything out. How to plan entirely in the program.

The nice thing about it – as I mentioned before – is that you can organize all of the map elements onto separate sheets. You can hide or show whatever elements of the map you like. As long as you organize them properly in the first place. That’s how I’ve been switching on and off things like the exits, the color-coding for the days, the critical path, and so on. Which means all those faint little pencil lines that I use to plan the sizes and shapes of rooms and then the terrain elements and everything is still totally doable. In fact, they are more easily doable. No inking and erasing for me. Just get rid of them when I’m done.

But that crap is central to the design process. I’m going to have to talk about my thinking at every step of the process. Which means I’m going to have screencap a lot while I’m working so I can explain what I’m doing. At least, at first.

Obviously, as time goes on, I can skip explaining every little step. I can start by showing you how I build one room. And then show you several rooms together. And then just build a whole area and just describe the highlights. So, the next couple of weeks are probably going to involve some excruciating levels of detail. Which I don’t mind so much. And I’ll be able to work pretty far ahead of what we’re talking about if that’s the case. In fact, I’m going to have to.

But the trouble is, that brings me back to where I am right now. I confess I haven’t spent much time at all on the Megadungeon in the last two weeks. It’s been a crazy whirlwind of activity here, even in my ostensibly free week. And between physical therapy and some personal emergencies, I’ve had time stolen away by the chaos of the universe that I wanted to use for this sort of work.

This isn’t me saying that I’m not about to do some actual work. But I think the work I’m about to do isn’t particularly exciting. And I can’t really skip ahead to the exciting bits without breaking my promise and not putting up the Megadungeon article on time. Hell, at this point, it’ll be a goddamned miracle if this does actually show up on Monday morning. I have a feeling I’m going to be doing a lot of just uncluttering and reorganizing things and figuring out how best to start sketching. Basically, laying the groundwork so that I can start designing rooms.

It sort of fits the theme of this week. I’m just shuffling stuff around, cleaning my desk, and organizing my files so the real work can begin. It’s going to be a rough three months leading to the end of the Kickstarter, the publication of the book, and the move. I have to be on point.

So, I’m saving and closing this document, and I’m going to pop into CC3+ and see what I can accomplish. And then I’ll grab some screenshots and tell you what I did.

Shuffling Maps Around

Okay. I actually ended up playing around a little bit more than I expected and I actually have SOMETHING to show for it. Now, for the hard part: explaining what I did. Because I sort of lost myself in playing with the space a little bit. And I really want to avoid those “and then I just, sort of, finished the map” moments. I have to warn you, though, this is going to be a little underwhelming. Try to focus on the end-point here.

First, I popped into my map of Level 2 and turned on absolutely everything. I let the thing show me all the data. And that was so that I could take absolutely everything that already existed and group it together. For those who know CC3, I kept all of the different elements on different LAYERS, but I stuck them all on one SHEET. For those who don’t know CC3, don’t worry about it.

In case you’re curious, by the way, here’s what the entire map looks like with all the information turned on:

Then, I added a black background under the whole thing.

Wow! That is such an important step, isn’t it? Thank goodness I decided to put the thing on a black background. Well, actually it is. There’s two reasons why I did that. The first is because dungeon maps really POP on black backgrounds in CC3. Especially when you use the optional features to add some shadow effects and stuff. Here, I threw a couple of quick rooms on there just to show you what I mean. Just open spaces, really. But you can see what I mean:

But the real reason was so that I could apply some transparency to all of the stuff already on the map and have everything become dark and shadowy. Why did I do that? So I could put white rectangles and boxes on top of it. Those would be my sketches. Something like this:

That’s just hypothetical. We’re going to be doing something better than that. But you see how I can lay down actually bits of the floorplan and see the design layers hovering over it like a translucent ghost?

Now, I could have just as easily kept the white background and done the rectangles in a dark color, but I don’t think it would have worked as well. For several reasons. First, the lines between encounter spaces and adventure days were already black. So they might get lost if I tried to use dark rectangles on a light background.

But I can’t imagine this crap is interesting to anyone. So, moving on. Let’s talk quickly about room size.

The Size of the Space

D&D is focused on tactical combat. And this is a dungeon adventure. And that amps that focus up to 11. Unashamedly. On top of that, because we’ll be making extensive use of random encounters and repopulating empty areas, every room is potentially a battlefield. And that’s stranger than you might think.

First, most dungeons are designed with empty space. Lots of empty space. And because nothing has to happen in the empty space, those empty space rooms don’t have to be particularly interesting. They don’t have to be designed to provide a compelling battlefield.

Second, most game designers don’t really seem to care too much about how the terrain affects the battlefield. They just tend to build rooms and stick monsters in them. And that’s a shame. Because the monsters of D&D 5E generally have one attack and one interesting trait and that’s the beginning and the end of the excitement. Combine that with the fact that encounter design is based primarily on putting one monster against the party, and you have a recipe for a bunch of slugfests.

Now, we don’t have the luxury of assuming any space is empty space. Because any room might be a battlefield. And we don’t have the luxury of designing crappy battlefields for slugfests. Because I actually take some goddamned pride in my work. So, we have to design every room like a battlefield. And we don’t even know what battle might be inside. Except in a few places. We will be designing some rooms for specific monsters. But that will come much later.

When it comes to designing battlefields, one of the most common mistakes is making the battlefields too small. And another, slightly less common mistake is making the battlefields too big. We want rooms that run the size gamut between the perfect size and larger, but still perfectly sized.

Now, two issues feed into the size of a combat space. First, there’s the actual dimensions. How many squares across is the space in any given direction. If the room’s largest dimension is too small, movement is just meaningless. You can’t move away from anything because it can get right back to you. There’s never a reason to dash and rarely even a reason to withdraw because you can’t put any distance between you and the baddies. Moreover, effects that speed up or slow down combatants like expeditious retreat and ray of frost become far less useful in small spaces. And PCs with short, stubby legs or who are slowed down by their armor don’t even feel the effects.

Now, if the room’s largest dimension is too big, you have a different problem. You don’t want rounds and rounds to pass before the combatants meet in the middle. And we’re not even going to discuss the issue of lighting and visibility in too-large spaces. Because that’s just a huge pain in the a$&.

Generally speaking, you want a room whose longest dimension can be crossed in one to two rounds. And in D&D, that’s pretty easy to figure. The average movement speed is 30 feet or six squares. Which means you want the longest dimension of your room to run between 30 feet and 60 feet.

Second, there’s the issue of actual floor space. Each combatant needs some space to move around, and there needs to be enough empty space between the combatants that they can maneuver. And that means that the PCs and baddies should not take up more than half the available floor space.

Each PC takes up twenty-five square feet of combat space. One five-foot by five-foot square. So, the party occupies between four and six squares. Meanwhile, the enemies can vary a lot. A single foe might only take up one square if it’s man-sized or smaller. Larger foes can take up four squares or nine or sixteen. And there can be several foes. Encounter groups range in size from single monsters to pairs to groups approximately equal to the number of PCs to mobs. But the maximum practical encounter size in D&D seems to be about twenty foes. Fortunately, that’s pretty rare. And because only weaker monsters – relative to the party – congregate in such large groups, it’s rare to see big groups of big monsters. So, it’s a safe assumption that the monster party will generally need two or three times as many squares as the party at most.

So, you need up to six squares for the PCs and eighteen squares for the baddies at the very high end, though it’s usually closer to twelve. That means the smallest space you can get away with is 36 squares if you don’t know what the party is going to be fighting there and 48 squares are about average.

Now, you might notice that 36 squares comprise a space that’s six squares by six squares. Which, conveniently, is precisely the smallest dimension you want to use in terms of movement.

And all of that boils down to Angry’s Standard Battlefield Sizes. A standard battlefield is a square. That’s the most basic, boring shape for a fight. And the smallest square you can use is 6 squares by 6 squares or 30 feet by 30 feet. A more average size is 8 squares by 8 squares or 40 feet by 40 feet. A large size is 10 squares by 10 squares or 50 feet by 50 feet. And a huge battlefield is 12 squares by 12 squares, which contains 144 squares and measures 60 feet by 60 feet.

Now, conveniently enough, you might notice all of these sizes fit very nicely into the encounter spaces I marked my map out in. Each encounter space is exactly 15 squares by 15 squares or 75 feet square.

That wasn’t an accident.

Squares and Lines

Now, you might notice that the smallest of rooms leaves a lot of space between the edge of the encounter area and the walls of the room. Two small rooms placed roughly in the center of their respective encounter area would end up being 9 squares apart. That’s almost 50 feet of void between the smallest of rooms. And that means the hallways between the rooms are going to be pretty long.

That might be pretty surprising for particularly old-school gamers used to the old styles of dungeon maps that used little squares as the standard symbol for a door between two rooms. Yeah, I sure did give the impression of very close rooms connected by doors, didn’t I? But the map is going to look a lot more like a bunch of squares and rectangles and irregular cave shapes connected by long spokes.

And that wasn’t an accident either.

While that design does look a little unnatural and gamey because it makes such inefficient use of the space, it does serve several very important purposes. The most important purpose is that it very clearly and obviously turns the map into a collection of shapes connected by lines. Yes, the purpose of turning the map into squares connected by lines is to turn the map into squares connected by lines. Why? Because it’s easy to map.

The players can very easily, very clearly tell the difference between a room and the hallway between rooms. And once they start mapping, they will start to notice the boxy, grid-like map. Apart from a slight variation in the absolute length of the hallways, there are never any extremely long hallways that cross half the dungeon and pop out in weird places. Every hallways are a sort of standard length. Rooms are never more than one segment of hallway apart. Basically, as the players start to map the dungeon, they will never encounter a situation where the map is f$&%ing with them.

That’s also why the hallways don’t branch or come to complicated junctions. Hallways run between rooms, and they are always exactly one hallway long, and they always run in cardinal directions, and there is never more than one hallway coming out of a room in any given cardinal direction.

Remember, we’re going to ask the players to actually use the layout of the space to figure out where to go. And that means we need to gain their trust by following consistent, easy to see rules.

Consistent, Not Boring

Wow, I ended up explaining more than I thought. But those explanations do tie into what I started to do. And, look, I didn’t do much. It’s late, and I’m feeling the Kahlua and Vodka. Sorry. What I did start to do was exactly what I said I do when I’m mapping. I started figuring out the basic sizes of the rooms and then started to define the actual rooms themselves. In short, I started with this:

And expanded a bit:

And then added some detail:

And finally settled on this:

Sort of. I know the Gateway, Causeway, and Seal aren’t going to stay rectangles. They are carved out of natural caves after all. I was really just playing around to see how this all came together. Next time, I’ll explain the basic process, and we’ll probably lay out all of the rooms for the entire first day. Most likely, we’ll even be starting from scratch. I’m not entirely satisfied with what I’ve got here. But at least it gives a sense of the basic progression. A sort of preview of next Monday. Which will be a lot more focused on the practical and a lot less about shuffling maps around. And I’ll be sober. And it won’t be after midnight.

See you then.