Spectacles for Your Maps
In the spirit of this month’s blog carnival on maps, I thought I’d talk a little bit about map design. Not the act of creating the actual map, although there’s plenty to be said about that; rather, the art of populating it. Not with settlements, either. With spectacles.
Spectacles are an element overlooked by many gamemasters, even experienced ones. We’ll lay out mountain ranges and rivers, forests and plains, cities and villages, political boundaries and dungeon locations. But what we sometimes forget to include are those sites that take advantage of the fantasy nature of the setting. We might have something akin to Weathertop from The Lord of the Rings, but what about the fairy tales’ giant beanstalks rising to the clouds or mountains made of glass? The mysteries of the world that inspire local legends and bardic songs?
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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.
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Humor and Gaming Blog Carnival Roundup
The carnival has moved on to Roleplaying Pro, where this month’s topic is “The Future of Roleplaying.” April’s carnival on Humor and Gaming produced quite a few posts, though, so let’s get to them:
Here at A Butterfly Dreaming, I presented the pun-laden Grape Jelly monster, and also discussed how such humorous stuff might be used in an actual game.
An Undisciplined Oaf Quartet discusses useful shortcuts for comedic roleplaying: powered by tropes.
Viriatha of Bard of Valiant offers some easy notebook projects… with a bit of bite. Don’t ask to borrow a pen.
Having the right quip at the right time is pretty important for comedy, and Campaign Mastery talks about how different forms of comedy can be used in a game, and how to do so effectively.
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