attacks of opportunity

I just published a book of dungeon maps, For the Love of Dungeons. Go ahead and check it out!

Labels: dungeon crawl, hand drawn maps, maps

Posted by Unknown at 9:05 AM | Permalink | Comments

I've been playing a lot of old-school D&D this year and enjoying it tremendously. This has given rise to a little "secret" project that's slowly coming to fruition. Here's a little preview:



Update: to my surprise, this map has turned up on Hand Drawn Maps and been referenced on Metafilter. Go map!

Update: For the Love of Dungeons is published!

Labels: dungeon crawl, hand drawn maps, maps

Posted by Unknown at 12:10 PM | Permalink | Comments

Today I worked out a little solo play dungeon creation game using tracing paper, tape, different colored pens, and Go stones.



The game uses a mix of random tables, mechanic interactions, and player choices to drive the evolution of the dungeon environment. Dungeon history is divided into epochs. In the Dwarven epoch, for example, a large Dwarven city dominates the dungeon. in the Age of Monsters, the city is abandoned and small monster bands vie for supremacy and resrouces. The game produces two artifacts, a dungeon map, and a history log.

The dungeon map is created on successive sheets of tracing paper. Each layer corresponds to a historical epoch. During each epoch, monsters and civilizations move in and repurpose the artifacts of previous eras for their use. In a paritcular era the dungeon map will typically show groups of creatures, relations between them, regions under their control, major treasrues, tunnels, and landmarks.



The chronology is a record of all the events occuring during the game, like so:

139: New Grandash attempts to raid Red Iron Colony, but are driven off. 
     New Grandash is abandoned, with Red Iron Dwarves looting its treasures 
     (such as they are).

140: Stendec the Minotaur attempts to set up a lair in Red Iron territory, 
     but is driven off with some loss of life.

141: Tupelo’s Goblins found a camp in the old Dwarven workshops. They 
     quickly expand their territory, discovered a cache of Dwarven gold. 
     Stendec raids the goblins for food in the winter. Red Iron Dwarves 
     send a raiding party after the Minotaur, but only succeed in driving 
     him out of his lair to another location.

142: Drawn by rumors of monsters and gold, a party of five brave 
     adventurers enters the underground.

You can review the whole log from playtest 1 here.

* I'm not sure who coined the phrase "lonely fun". It's a mostly perjorative term for solo-gaming in the absence of a gaming group, but it's one I like to appropriate to cover all kinds of solo-gaming.

Update: This game is now called How to Host a Dungeon, and it has it's own Web page: http://planet-thirteen.com/Dungeon.aspx.

Labels: design, dungeon crawl, lonely fun

Posted by Unknown at 12:00 PM | Permalink | Comments