I’m not just going to do classic modules on this occasional feature, I’m also looking at popular/famous other works…and so why not Indie Darling/award-winning Deep Carbon Observatory, a fundamental LotFP module so coated by reviewer slobber that it is barely discernable as an original shape anymore. I’m not going to weary anyone with the thousandth review of the adventure itself, suffice it to say it’s a good idea that labors to make something playable. This is about the maps, dear boy, the maps. I’ll cover the overland map a little at the end, but if you’re new to DCO, it’s basically a situation-as-adventure, this dam just broke and flooded a valley, so adventurers get to revel in suffering and misery of the victims in the lower valley, then hit a mini-dungeon at the dam itself, then get to explore the now-uncovered lake bed above. The titular observatory is a complex built by Your Own Favorite Ancient Evil Precursor Race to examine the Legally Distinct Dark Under. The dangly final observatory is built to be the reward for the suffering party’s long and soggy trek, so it’s a map well worth study. Gross. Alright, first off, it’s correctly in isometric, which is something you need for such a vertical environment, albeit with a slightly wonky perspective that means I wouldn’t want to transmit this to a mapper, or even uncover bits on a VTT with dynamic lighting. Carefully working through the illustration does allow for parsing all the connections, but a flowing order of battle would be difficult to describe, and random encounters aren’t exactly easy to conjure out of the geography. No scale is provided, nor is there much of a key, so squint carefully at the pictures, dear suffering DM, and hope that the vivid and well-written content sticks with the incidental details well enough. It’s an effective piece of art unlike a lot of the other module illustrations, conveying the mood brilliantly…that’s certainly worth something. C+ for presentation. Lest I get accused of being overly dour, this is a great concept. Speaking as a physicist it of course has nothing to do with any real-world scientific observing, but the idea of a deep underground observatory for magical “under darkness” is great. Ancient, decaying structures are D&D’s bread and butter, but there’s a brilliant reason for this place to be exotic and for this spot to have never before been uncovered. Every part of the setup primes us for a weird, alien, and maddening underworld location that any sensible player group worth their salt would be thrilled to explore. And having the dungeon shaped as a pair of hollowed-out stalactites? A for concept. Sadly, the very first thing we hit when it comes to execution is “site is very small”. Fifteen keys does not a triumphal Final Dungeon make, even allowing for another dozen “spurs” that lack for any unique keying there’s not a lot to explore. A squishy mutated giant should have vast cavernous halls, a veritable maze to chase hapless adventurers down, not this tight little one-access loop. The concept calls, nay begs, for a huge complex filled with laboratories and barracks. Instead, a PC at one end of the place can quite reasonably expect to shout and be heard all the way over at the other end. Unfortunately this also means everything is pretty overstuffed too. Isometrics always make maps look more geometrically complex than they are, and this one is no exception. Single entry, only one main loop, barely even any branching…the exploration isn’t, most of the time. The only thing really saving the map is how vertical the whole thing is; long and dangly shafts to climb up and down make a lot of potential difference, once the third dimension opens up, players will start seeing the world as more real. That bridge between the two stalactites in particular is nice and terrifying, non-OSHA-compliant pass ways over an effectively infinite blackness are thrilling. Pity that and the long dangle-chain are the only bits of environment that really take full advantage of that. Powerful isometric art-piece maps are wonderful at conveying mood when the reader is sitting there and imagining dungeon-like gaming…but it’s what I’m going to call the Trilemma Problem, after the genuinely beautiful Trilemma Adventures (http://blog.trilemma.com/), a huge set of pretty one-shot maps that completely fall apart (or need a ton of work) whenever someone attempts to actually play them. Your players aren’t going to be able to see that isometric map, so who is it really for? It’s not made for a dungeon master; it’s made for a consumer. A passive reader, a reviewer with a Youtube channel, a Kickstarter backer. The comrades trying to play a game? That’s a much smaller audience, so wise call not optimizing for them. D+ for execution. Having said all that, I do need to highlight an isometric map that works a good deal better as a play aid, the valley map. Please note that it’s not strictly necessary to present the flooded valley/emptied lakebed as an isometric map, but it’s a charming touch for the regional map, and in no way detracts from the linear slog up-river. Coupled with the dry boxes-and-arrows event sequencer, a DM is absolutely equipped to run the most miserable Tragedy Crawl he could ever dream up. The key difference? Nobody needs to break out graph paper (or Christmas wrapping paper) to actually figure out what a 30’ move speed gets you. Don’t let this convince you one way or another on actually getting Deep Carbon Observatory. It’s putting the product to its secondary use, but a good adventure can definitely be had using it. You’re just going to be struggling against the map a bit, which is the real tragedy.
3 Comments
Whew boy. Out of the simple little B2 complex, into the Great Grandaddy of Dungeons, a husky four-level complex (with generous sublevels) sprawling over complex pages and pages of eye-hurting Judges’ Guild cheap ink. The community term “Jacquaying” comes out of a cargo cult built around these wonderfully interlinked and looping maps, often perhaps not understanding what really makes them good. The original maps are a bit rough to even parse, but even redrawn they’re very complex: Daggum. There’s a lot of ambiguity in the image here. The first thing that screams for attention are those huge tears; structural damage makes everything about the map going forward look weathered, ancient, falling (literally) into ruin. It’s a welcome naturalistic touch for an environment that actually does struggle with appearing somewhat artificial…something about the room layout does give a vague impression of “this is a game first” rather than the flow I would first expect to see in a living architectural space. Lower down, the palace and crypt complex for levels 3-4 are more naturalistic, with the resultant drop in exploration complexity. Most of the difficulty groking the maps comes less from their artistry and more from their design, however…so A- for presentation. Conceptually, what we have here is the ur-dungeon. A winding, echoing environment with most straight stone halls broken up by occasional natural rock features, cleanly separated into “zones” with plenty of cross-connection. There are really two dungeons here, the first that upper pair of fallen halls with all the crevasses, the second the weirdo minotaur palace/trees/undercrypts…both concepts are solid, of course. The incorporation of each section together feels a little artificial (and actually makes me wonder if the author had two different dungeons being combined). B+ for concept, only because of the disjoint really. All of these quibbles rapidly fade away, however, when we get down to the actual pen and paper. Look at the design shown even in the very first room…there are two options presented immediately, but there’s also a blocked third that indicates the complex is big, and yet also fallen. Then you have the obvious draw of #2 as the next spot, but the way that it interacts with the hallway in #6 also tips off the players that they need to be looking for secret doors, setting up for a jaunt to #9 after an otherwise simple little side-loop. It’s actually doing a good job of making a very limited first section that teaches the explorers the methods to Thracia’s madness. And then, we go all over the place. A sloping hallway going down a level…secret passages leading to hidden rooms…more secret passages giving shortcuts…chasms allowing rope-using PCs up and down access…subsections that going up and down and all around…it’s a crazy exercise in exploration and discovering, rewarding careful mappers with geometry juuust symmetrical enough to hint at the unnumerable secret passages. As a pure exercise of just mapping, the upper half of Caverns of Thracia is a delight. Then we go down the elevator to Level 3 and we’re in a whole different module. Bereft of all the interesting atmospheric descriptions, the “outdoor” area is dismayingly simplistic. Wander around a bunch of flora, then assault a pretty “flat” palace that’s rather symmetrical and linear (judging by the standards of what came before), and if you are even so-so at looking at geometry then you’re not having any issue at all in making your way down to the final level. The fourth level is fine as a module adventure section but it’s a lot simpler as a map. One branchy loop, then two more big branches with their own little sub-branches…I’m not mad about it, but there are far fewer choices in exploratory gameplay. After all the early training to look for hidden passages and secret loops, the players are going to find them only rarely, a notable shift for a bunch of explorers hardened in the fires of the first few maps. After the front-loaded brilliance, the later maps are merely…okay. Still, A for execution overall. I wonder if there’s some hidden wisdom here, in the end. As the PCs level up, the initial cautious exploratory gameplay can be dispensed with more often for frontal assaults of plate-wearing supersoldiers backed by high-level magic. As nice as brilliant maps with chasms and crevasses are, those gaping maws are a lot less scary when someone in the party can fall light feathers, or tame flying monsters, or teleport…just as new gameplay opens up with leveling, I think Caverns of Thracia also shows that there are old aspects of gameplay that start to take a back seat as high level demigods stride the lands. Cartographic design principles do in fact need to change as high-level powers come online, shown starkly in this adventure as the “decent into the underworld” leads to maps that are simpler, not more complex. That’s not really a critique, but it is definitely something to keep in mind lest we descend into cargo-cult worship of “The Loops” without seeing that even one of the most influential cartographers in the hobby dispenses with them as the adventurers grow in power and options. Okay, you knew this one had to be first. Possibly the most-played, and probably the least-completed, dungeon complex in the entire history of the hobby…monster zoo, multi-level, famous and controversial, we have the Caves of Chaos: First of all, let’s talk about the presentation…it’s not great. The original TSR blue photocopy-resistant color can be a little uncomfortable even in a fairly traditional dungeon, but with an environment this complicated and layered, the overall effect is very overwhelming, busy and layered and all over the place. The cave entryways’ interaction with “trees” is less than clear, as are the slope setups. All this is given thought in the module itself, but it is a whiff on the information presentation side. The complex er…complex is perfectly runnable, but it’s a hard to parse from the direct view. “Stairs up” vs. “Stairs down” particularly wins an award for least helpful legend ever. C- for presentation. The design concept, though, is great. A narrow slot valley with multiple openings makes everything seem incredibly open to the approaching party, while also giving the subconscious message that “higher levels = higher level” in a wonderfully literal sense. People who unironically use the word “verisimilitude” will object to the monster zoo aspect of each species being a hundred feet away from the others but looking at the conceptual design of the space itself…great idea. Verticality is important in general, but there’s something particularly nice about being able to hit various bits of the map just by scrambling up the slopes. Really the biggest objection is that they don’t all have back-line interconnection, but that’s not the point of the adventure. A+ for concept. All that being said, in the actual execution…eh. The reason for this adventure’s classic status is more the setup and the room details, rather than the map’s direct flow. Branching little complexes like A or G have very fun encounter potential based on the writing, but in terms of exploration there’s just not a lot to them. The better early complex is south with the goblins managing to link D-E-F, there’s a lot of flow those secret doors allow, with extra props to the whole secret wing of rooms 28-31. B-C is okay. Complex H is particularly annoying in how it staunchly refuses to link to C or G. As a finale goes, the J-K complex doesn’t bug me, I like how J’s link to K is in the most counterintuitive direction, while the final rubble-strewn passage out in the southwest is something that more module designers of today should consider. There overall use of secret doors is interesting to me with the Caves of Chaos. You like loops? Well they’re your reward for bringing along the elf. After you find the first one (probably between E-D), you’re keyed up to look carefully for hidden links between caves, with canny parties probably monitoring what height they’ve ascended or descended to so they can be on the lookout for a secret door leading to another evident cave mouth. I’m mixed in the intermittent reward aspect of the secret doors being only in some locations…I can imagine a clever mapper bashing his head into the wall for multiple torches in room 33 seeking passage to 40, for example. In room 45 that intuition might be rewarded in a surprising way. It’s easy to fetishize looping dungeon designs at the expense of actual play. Just because it’s all on the same page, every single point doesn’t have to link to every other in multiple ways…it’s okay that the caves are actually six dungeons, not a single one. In a very dense, slightly silly way, the module is teaching about how to implement multiple dungeons on a single map, with just enough travel between them to provoke a random encounter check. It’s a miniaturized campaign, which is very cool and why the module’s had so much staying power. Now within those aforementioned six dungeons I am more distressed at the level of linearity. Something with only six keyed rooms like A or G make sense to be branches-not-circles, but there are a lot of branches that suffer in the larger complexes too. I could also do with the verticality mattering more, very often its just a slope or a stair for tactical, not geographic, purposes. While trying not to be overly fastidious, there is more that could have been done with the map(s) to encourage exploratory play. I’d say it was avoided out of a sense of compassion to the player mapping, but complex I exists, so that’s out the window. B- for overall map execution. None of this is me saying that Keep on the Borderland isn’t an awesome module. The Caves of Chaos are well made for the module’s purposes…mostly. Unfortunately, B2 is “often begun, rarely finished” in part because of the disconnected nature of the various cave complexes. Couple that with a restock suggestion that can be a little demoralizing (you cleared the kobolds, yay, now enjoy the same complex but with goblins), and I think it’s evident why the upper caves don’t get explored that often despite the massive number of people starting with those dang kobolds. Some of that is the nature of the game, some of that is because of the module’s massive popularity leading to uncommitted groups, but a little of that does come from the lack of interconnection between upper and lower cave complexes. I’m not going to argue that B2 is anything other than completely successful, but I do wonder if with a little more map interconnection it could have been even better… I’ll be doing a new series here covering maps; I’m going to start reviewing adventure maps, starting with classics like Keep on the Borderlands and Caves of Thracia, but moving on to newer adventures as well. As a bridge, I think I’m going to talk a little about the Adventure Site Contest maps. Cartography is something I really love about this hobby, and a quality map is what I focus on first in almost any product…but it’s easy to over-focus on it, just like it’s possible to focus on things like art, formatting, or even prose quality over the value of the adventure content itself. The Adventure Site Contest results are a prime example of this.
First of all, look at the maps of first and second place…there’s a mostly linear tomb, or a r-r-r-random procedurally generated “branch-style” map with only one loop. That’s completely fine for an adventure site. A map isn’t the be-all, end-all, but rather exists to serve the adventure being played, and in the top two adventure sites the maps were properly scaled and designed for the adventures written. In Lost Vault of Kadish it would have been strange and nonsensical to have looping corridors for a lost king’s vault. In Fountain of Bec, the main treasure room should be off on its own little branch, otherwise the trolls who’ve taken over the dungeon would have smashed and looted it. The top two adventures weren’t really helped by their maps, but neither were they hindered. Other finalist adventures like Glen of Shrikes and Etta Capp’s Cottage were similar, with relatively simple maps that didn’t provide much of an exploratory gameplay experience. That’s fine, they were good adventures. Now I don’t want to minimize the importance of maps either. An adventure like Legacy of the Black Mark didn’t live and die on its very solid map but having multiple directions to explore undeniably helped the adventure it was trying to foster, an exploratory delve. Likewise, Barrow Shrine of Corruption was a very simple and direct site much like Lost Vault or Fountain, but unlike those two its entire flow depended on the main loop, which incorporated a lot of verticality in a vital way. There’s some great atmosphere in both of those entries, but I really think their more complex geography was essential. Probably the two very best maps in the contest did make themselves seen in the other two finalists, of course. The large orphanage/reformatory of St. Durham’s Home for Wayward Youth elevated it masterfully, giving an extremely detailed location with lots of exploration for heist adventures, lots of defensive features for a siege scenario, as well as logical and functional day-to-day flow which is needed for verisimilitude in a site just visited to investigate to negotiate in. Similarly, Lipply’s Tavern as a complex mutli-faction dungeon delve had to have a good map, with verticality, multiple routes of ingress/egress, and secret passages detectable with good mapping. A bad map would have made the site completely fail, while it managed to get up to finalist despite one judge being unable to score it largely because of the quality of the dungeon. So, good map is good. It’s increasingly clear as I go through this exercise that maps are something that must fit the adventure, both in scope and in theme. Starting with a map can be fine, but the map must then be centrally integrated into the themes and scale of the adventure (see half a dozen of my saddest Crapshoot Monday reviews). Starting instead with the concept, plot, or theme and then making a map custom fit to the adventure is probably the best bet…although I recognize that’s a lot more effort to many. Again, the second place adventure site used a random dungeon generator. As an aside, an example of the mismatch situation is Frostfire’s Durance Vile, which had a fantastic set of maps for a module 300% longer. If Stripe does release it as a full module of 8 pages, I’ll snap it up in a heartbeat and the maps are a big reason for that…but maps have to fit. So going forward in this new series, I’m going to be looking at maps, not just as they are by themselves, but also in how they support the module, adventure, Dungeon issue, etc as well. I’m not going to ignore the presentation, because that is an important part of what is first and foremost a method to convey information to the struggling DM…nor will I ignore artistry, because that’s an important part of getting the DM excited about actually running the game. But more than anything else, I want Maps That Work. How do 3-8 buzzed and/or caffeinated players negotiate these things? Because that’s how we put the Dungeons in Dungeons & Dragons. |
AuthorWeblog of Ben Gibson, the main writer and publisher of Coldlight Press. Archives
April 2024
Categories
All
|