Maps and Legends

This month, A Character for Every Game is hosting the RPG Blog Carnival. The topic is cartography.

Maps are obviously pretty vital to most campaigns. You’ve got maps of fantasy worlds, of dungeons, of the city your superheroes are based in, of the star systems (or galaxies!) your space-opera heroes are flying between, of the haunted mansion your horror heroes are about to get killed in. And there are plenty of tools to help you generate these maps, including random map generators such as Gozzy’s and full-fledged map-creation utilities such as RP Tools’ MapTool or DungeonForge (both of which are free).

What I don’t see as much of these days is the map within the game. In older editions of D&D, it was fairly common for a treasure map to be included as part of a treasure horde. This fell by the wayside in third edition, and fourth didn’t bring it back. Maps could, of course, still be placed by hand, but without a presence on the random treasure tables, I find many gamemasters tend to overlook them. And that’s a shame.

A treasure map is a built-in story hook. It presents a goal for the characters, and it comes with several natural challenges. Namely:

Discovering the Location

Even if the map is complete, the PCs have to identify the location depicted on it.  This might not always be easy.  If the treasure map is older than a few years, there’s a decent chance some landmarks might have changed.  A flood, fire, or earthquake could wipe away natural landmarks, while the expansion of a village might turn a stand of forest into pasture or farmland.  If the map isn’t complete, the PCs might have to try to reconstruct fragments of it.  Or perhaps the map is complete, but it only leads to the entrance of a ruin or a dungeon…

Journeying to the Location

Once the PCs know where to go, they still need to get there.  At lower levels in particular, this can pose problems.  A journey through the wilderness is dangerous by itself.  If the location is within a hostile nation’s territory, things get even more complicated.  And if the PCs were careless while they were researching the location in the previous step, perhaps they’ll have to contend with a band of thieves, or race a rival treasure hunting party — or worse, a recurring enemy might get wind of their activities.

Exploring the Location

Having followed the map, the party still isn’t finished with their hunt.  They need to find the right door to open or the right place to dig.  They may need to explore that ruin, or contend with the traps the previous owner of the treasure set up to guard his wealth.  They may need to contend with other creatures who have moved in — the goblin tribe and their ogre overlord may not know about the treasure, but that cavern is nice and roomy, and they’re not going to let the PCs just walk right into their new home.  There may be something about the location itself that poses a problem:  the mysterious manor appears only on nights of a new moon, so the PCs will have to wait until the time is right — and then they have only a limited window to explore before the place disappears again!

A statue by a path near a stream. Generated by Gozzy's random wilderness map generator.

Of course, once the players have the treasure in hand, there’s the trip back to consider…

Maps, especially fragmentary ones, can also be of interest to players for other reasons.  To the left is a wilderness map I created with Gozzy’s generator.  While these are meant as encounter maps, consider some of the possibilities here.  There’s a clear path, perhaps an ancient road, stretching across the bottom, which probably runs more or less parallel to the stream to the east.  On the side of the path is a massive statue, now crumbling.

Who does this statue represent?  Was this a roadside shrine?  A battlefield?  Was there a village here, long ago razed, with only the stone statue remaining?

What if the PCs were to find this map fragment, along with some text allowing them to identify the general area?  The presence of a map will instantly cause them to infer the importance of the site.  After all, why else map it?  Curiosity alone may well lead them to seek it out.  But here’s the trick:  their discussion of the map will probably contain ideas you can appropriate.  They’ll speculate about what, exactly, that statue might be, and why it was built there.  They may even talk about what else might be in the area.  Listen to what they say.  Take a note or two.  With a little luck, and a twist or two of your own thrown in, you’ve got yourself an entire adventure plot out of that map fragment — and it’s a plot the PCs will already be invested in!  You can do this trick just as easily with a map of a building or a dungeon, or sometimes even an island or a valley; the players will look for meaning in it.

If you’re not playing fantasy, similar ideas apply to other genres.  Pulp or horror stories often feature the protagonists coming across a map to a lost temple or a distant valley.  In a sci-fi game, a star chart showing an old trading route, now out of use, or a mysterious mark on a distant and mostly-unexplored system can spark the same curiosity.  Even in a superhero game, there’s opportunity for a secret lair or a rare mineral — or maybe they arrive at the villain’s base to find it empty, but with a detailed map of Fort Knox spread across the table.

There’s always a place for a map in your game.  Give it a shot.

Related posts:

1. Spectacles for Your Maps
2. Brainstorming an Adventure
3. Stealing, By the Numbers