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The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Traditional Games > Here Be Monsters - Maps, tokens, handouts and other paraphernalia thread
 
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Ratpick
Oct 9, 2012

And no one ate dinner that night.
I personally lean towards form over function in maps: while a degree of realism is necessary for a map to be believable I'd personally rather have a pretty map over a detailed and realistic one. Having said that, I agree that the 7th Sea map is neither pretty nor realistic.

To provide an example, I really like the map of the world from the video game Bastion:


The reason I like this map is that it feels like a map someone could've made of the world in-setting. Medieval maps of Europe had limited use as actual navigation tools and were more like works of art showing with words and pictures where places were (more or less) in relation to each other. While the Bastion map isn't quite as cluttered as the maps of Olaus Magnus (my favorite medieval cartographer) it still has that feel of an actual map someone could've made in the world.

This is not to say that a detailed and realistic map is a bad thing: if you're running a game where exact distances and the lay of the land matter then maps like the ones of Middle Earth posted here are an amazing resource. I personally just tend to run things like travel and distance more in the abstract and I'd rather have a map be evocative than exact. (Obviously, if I can have both then that's great!)

* # ¿ Dec 15, 2014 10:48
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# ¿ May 17, 2024 16:01
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Ratpick
Oct 9, 2012

And no one ate dinner that night.

Len posted:

This seems like a good thread for it. I'm playing a Dungeon World game and I'm planning to split the party this weekend.

One group is going to be going with combat. So I don't need anything there.

But the other is going to be solving puzzles and riddles so I need some solid puzzles. Preferably with handouts. The people going into the puzzles are the bashy half of the team and they've been rping so this should be interesting.

There's a puzzle in one Dragon magazine from the 3e age I've wanted to use ever since:

Basically, it's a corridor, some 30' in width, divided into 5' square plates. Some of the squares are trapped so if you step on them there's a magical zap that deals a lot of damage to anyone stepping on it. The first and last rows of squares are untrapped. When a character steps on a square they hear a chime that lets them know how many adjacent squares are trapped.

So, yeah, it's minesweeper D&D style. If you want to add a bit of challenge to it, have a monster wander into the room just as the players are halfway through the room.

* # ¿ Jan 14, 2015 10:03
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The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Traditional Games > Here Be Monsters - Maps, tokens, handouts and other paraphernalia thread