Slow going on the blog front mostly because I have been prepping to run an online, open-table Barrowmaze game using Old School Essentials + Advanced Genre Rules. This is a roll-over another game I was running, also using OSE. This was initially set up to be an in-person open table game, but account of the whole Pandemic was shifted online right as we were getting ready to get together. Life stuff made it difficult to get the required number of players, so we chatted and decided to shift the game to the OSR Pickup Game Discord server, in the hopes of getting new players. We also decided to pitch a new game, as it seemed people were a tad shy joining an existing game that had been running for months now.
Most of my time has been spent mapping Barrowmaze. I have a few issues with mapping over voice, I find I spend a large portion of the time either mapping myself using Roll20’s terrible tools, or I force that on my players and then spend a significant amount of time checking and correcting maps. So I decided I would just map out Barrowmaze, which is no light endeavour.
I’ve tried three different tools to come up with the maps, all of which have their ups and downs.
- Dungeondraft: This is by the developer of Wonderdraft, a highly regarded mapping software, except the focus on Dungeondraft is on the dungeons, obviously. It’s the most featureful of the tools I used, but its still in Alpha, meaning that its a pain to use. Frequently the application just hard quits, entire segments of walls disappear, random cave explosions appear on your map – its really, really frustrating. It also deleted one of my major map files, which would have lost hours of work had I not used version control.
- Dungeon Scrawl: Probably the most aesthetically pleasing mapping software to me, this looks like it will be a great tool once its developed. But as of right now there’s no easy way to delete walls within a room, and to place in-room walls or stairs you have to unintuitively place them in “erase” mode. I also find that the “join rooms” option doesn’t operate on the principle of least surprise. It joins rooms only if you intrude upon one room. If you just place rooms adjacent to each other, it doesn’t actually join them. I’m waiting until this develops more before I look into it again.
- Dnd Map Sketcher: Gorgeous isometric mapper written in Unity that also seems to want to be a VTT. Its fairly barebones at the moment, but looks great. Unfortunately for me while isometric maps look great for dungeons designed for them (check out all the Trilemma Adventures stuff, for example), they became extremely difficult to read for compact dungeons. Also since this does not have have a cave tool its doesn’t fit my use case.
I didn’t try any of the other standards, I ended up sinking too much time into Dungeondraft to justify it. Overall I can’t say I’m that happy with it, looking at the subreddit for the tool it seems the user base is more the kind of player who is looking for typical 5e set-piece encounters, instead of mapping out actual dungeons, but I do have my fingers crossed.
I am hoping to get back to the Failed Careers and my Gygax 75 setting once I have a session of this open table game under my belt, and I have been working on a few system hacks I want to playtest and put out there.
