The roleplaying game hobby can be visually stunning. As gamers we
find inspiration in amazing artwork – the cover of our favorite
version of
Dungeons & Dragons, line art that fits our
favorite character, iconic monster illustrations, the portrait of the
perfect villain for our campaign – and fantastic maps enabling us
to navigate wondrous fantasy worlds. This becomes even more
significant considering the action envisioned in roleplaying games
takes place in everyone’s imagination (albeit sometimes with the
assistance of miniatures, game mats, and terrain). The graphic
elements of a map – whether for a roleplaying game supplement or a
fantasy novel – invite the viewer to explore that place, providing
a visual medium for the quest and incentive to investigate its
mysteries.
Maps remain one of the core elements of the roleplaying game
hobby. They’re a visual medium that – unlike pages of adventure
or gazetteer text – can make an immediate impression on gamers and
quickly engage their imagination. Their prominence in roleplaying
games – especially the earliest efforts – evolved from maps in
the literature that helped stimulate the hobby. Maps of lands like
Tolkien’s Middle-earth and Howard’s Hyborian Age setting continue
inspiring gamers with their ties to rich literary resources. Dungeon
floor plans scrawled on graph paper served as visual guides to the
earliest
D&D adventures. Show some gamemasters a blank map
and they start scheming how to integrate it into their own game,
populating it with monsters, treasures, and traps and developing a
theme for an entertaining dungeon delve. Show players a wilderness
map and their curiosity comes into play: where does the party start,
what features should they explore, what’s in those ruins over
there?
My own journey of inspiration from maps began with
The Hobbit.
I loved the maps included in the novel: a treasure map in the dwarven
style and a regional map of “Wilderland” where the story took
place. The treasure map might serves as a good example of a possible
in-game prop, but the Wilderland map fired my imagination with its
various tags. Even after all these years – and having read it to
myself and aloud to my son innumerable times – that map still stirs
my creativity. What are those lands like after the events in
The
Hobbit? What lives in the Mountains of Mirkwood? What’s the
best route to take a mule-train of pipe weed from the Shire to
Erebor? How do the woodmen figure into the region with Beorn and the
goblins? What hazards lurk along the Old Forest Road? Getting
The
Atlas of Middle-earth as a kid helped fuel my enthusiasm for
Tolkien’s
Lord of the Rings and
Silmarillion as well
as my own gaming endeavors. Even today a map in a fantasy novel helps
me relate characters and cultures to places and visualize where
events occur. I’m reading Fletcher Pratt’s
The Well of the
Unicorn and constantly refer back to the small, single-page map
of the realm where the story takes place; it helps me immerse myself
in the fantasy world, much like roleplaying game maps.
Dungeons & Dragons certainly fostered a love for maps.
The
Basic D&D set I received that began my roleplaying
journey in 1982 provided maps in both the rulebook and enclosed
module,
B2 The Keep on the Borderlands. The adventure included
maps for the eponymous keep, the surrounding wilderness, and the
Caves of Chaos with its labyrinth of monster lairs. The wilderness
map in particular invited exploration as the Cave of the Unknown was
left to the gamemaster’s designs. I eventually fleshed out the
“Haunted Keep” offered as an example of dungeon design in the
basic rulebook, using the map as the basis for its own full-length
adventure. The
D&D Expert set continued this map-based
inspiration with its map of the Grand Duchy of Karameikos and the
two-page map of the known world and Sea of Dread in module
X1 The
Isle of Dread. Upon purchasing a new
D&D module
I’d tear off the shrink wrap and, after admiring the artwork on the
interior booklet cover, look over the map to see what it might tell
me about the adventure. Along the way, with plenty of time in my
high-school days for immersion in roleplaying games, I devised a slew
of maps, some developing into full adventures, others languishing as
only initial concepts for future scenarios. As I explored other games
and genres, I drafted maps for roleplaying in those settings, too.
even used maps of existing and self-created fantasy worlds in my own
miniatures games, where each figure represented a unit in some
faction’s army, marching across hexes, fording rivers, crossing
mountains, capturing cities, and forging their own military narrative
on my tabletop.
Maps continue inspiring us, inviting us to explore them.
Dyson Logos,
Matt Jackson, and other map creators lend gamers their visual creations to populate as they like for
their own adventures. Play some of the wonderfully succinct,
map-based mini-adventures from
Tim Shorts,
Simon Forster,
Michael Prescott, and others. A single location-based graphic can provide the
material for an entire night’s adventure; a regional or world map
can form the basis for an entire campaign. I love the map of the
Brecken Vale from
Justin Halliday’s Hero Kids;
it
visually describes an area rife with adventure possibility, both in
the printed scenarios he offers and in the inspiration little
graphics provide for this gamemaster dad pestered to run another game
session.
Maps serve as the departure point for exploration in roleplaying
games: the gamemaster devising adversaries, encounters, and adventure
hooks based on map locations; the players asking questions about what
characters might know about various features and then planning how
they might interact with what they find there. They help channel the
creative energies we pour into our gaming exploits, providing a
visual focal point and the foundation of our understanding of an
imaginary fantasy world.
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