The Unseen Servant forums

Players, Friends, if you post on these pages
Put your prejudice aside,
For, really, there’s nothing here that’s outrageous,
Nothing sick, or bad—or contagious.
Not that I sit here glowing with pride
For this adventure: all you’ll find is laughter:
That’s all the glory my heart is after,
Seeing how sorrow eats you, defeats you.
I’d rather play laughing than crying,
For laughter makes us human, and courageous.

— François Rabelais, Dungeon Master

Let's talk maps.

This is a procedurally-generated dungeon, which is to say the rooms are determined by the rolling of dice, and we are all united in our ignorance of what lies ahead. In other words, I don't have a map of the blasted thing.

However, as the quantum wavefront collapses, and the Castle becomes more concrete, you may find a map very useful.

I suggest one of you volunteer for the role of mapper. To sweeten the prospect, I offer the following arcanum:


The Crooked Theodolite is carried by the party’s map-keeper. This instrument allows for the precise measurement of any room or constructed environment viewed. It grants Armor 1 to its bearer, but only against damage that take place in rooms that have been recorded on the campaign map.

The mapper would be welcome to use whatever they found most convenient and easiest to share. Having poked around, I'd recommend Alex Schroeder's Gridmapper.

Gridmapper is simple, clean, extensible, and free. Anyone can edit it, so the whole party could pitch in, adding rooms or leaving notes on the map. Information on saving files is here (it looks to me that saving to the Wiki is the way to go, although Alex also suggests that it could be saved as a text file shared via dropbox).

I hate to be the tip of the squabble spear [it's not what I generally relish] but...

Saves.
1d20, roll under Ability Score.
1 always succeeds, 20 always fails.

I believe it's equal or under.

This single thing, equal or under a stat, it's my torch.
They'll put it on my stone, "He rolled and we're pretty sure it wasn't equal to his stat. He loved his B/X."

Good catch! I had The Black Hack in my head.

It is certainly much more satisfying to roll your exact score and have that be a good thing.

I was officially banned from doing the map in the few campaigns I played in, so I will have to pass

Wizard Lizard wrote:I was officially banned from doing the map in the few campaigns I played in, so I will have to pass

Sounds like there's a story there.

Fee Fi Fo Fum.
Ask not whence the thunder comes.
Ask not where the herds have gone.
Nor why the birds have ceased their song.
When coming home, don’t take too long.
For monsters roam in Albion.

For between heaven and earth is a perilous place.
Home to a fearsome giant race.
Who hunger to conquer the mortals below
Waiting for the seeds of revenge to grow.

btw I suck at mapping

I hope someone takes this up. I post too frequently from my phone to do it.

Hrm, Deet's not the sharpest tool in the shed, but, at the risk of biting off more than a mouthful, I'll be our cartographer.

That tool looks... interesting, but way too fiddly for my taste. Being a bit of a map nerd, and having built up mad Photoshop skillz since 1994, I'll do it that way if everyone's cool with that. Here's a little map I scribbled together for my FTF Dungeon World game, for example... Maybe the best way to share the map updates is if we make a post somewhere, and I'll just edit that post every time the map changes. Yeah?

So I'll add The Crooked Theodolite to my Deet Sheet, and we'll see how we go....

Thanks, mb. for agreeing to take on the role of map-maker! I have no doubt that you'll handle the role with grace and aplomb.

The singular stickiness of a wicket: I'm not seeing the images you're posting, either here, or in the character thread. I know the forum can be weirdly finicky about images, but I don't know what the nature of this finickiness might be.

for some reason the image doesn't display for me that MB posted

Pulpatoon wrote:

Wizard Lizard wrote:I was officially banned from doing the map in the few campaigns I played in, so I will have to pass

Sounds like there's a story there.

The DM was a math buff, and made an hyper-cube dungeon, with triangular angles everywhere at various degrees, and we got lost and started bickering and arguing with each others in-character...eventually, realizing we were lost and had been wandering aimlessly for a while, one of my fellow players took the map from me which I had kept with me in a corner of the table, behind chips packages. It looked like...spaghetti, I'd say. How in the world I had managed to get it this wrong is beyond me, but the end of the story is : we decided it was better to try and blow up the walls than follow the map.

Hmm, oddness. I uploaded the image here, then linked it in img tag, so as to not create a 10000 pixel high post. But, well...

Also updated the images on the character post, and to avoid any Kurt/Kordt Konfusion, I changed Deet's brother's name to Odric.

mb. That's a lovely map!

Wizard Lizard, mapping four-dimensional geometry on a two-dimensional sheet of paper has defeated greater intellects than ours.

I'm definitely no math nerd, so no 4D dungeons please Pulp.

Hey, I was wondering how much metagaming knowledge is ok? Like, Vanis doesn't have the book at hand, but I found a reason for him to remember convenient bits, which would be ok at my table since I do the player knowledge = character knowledge, but it's not my table, so, that's that. Should I bury my copy or is it ok to make an actual use out of it?

Wizard Lizard, I'd say you're walking the line perfectly. To be frank, I'm using Rabelais as flavor text. There's very little of him in the adventure itself.

Yes, thank you for offering to do the maps, mb. I love mapping but unfortunately anything involving a computer and me usually ends in failure and anger. If we were in person it would be a different situation. I was not able to see the first image posted but that map posted 11/20/16 @1309 is beautiful.

Will there be a separate thread for maps to be posted so as to be easier to reference as we go along? Or will a map just be reposted in the regular thread periodically?


P.S. Reading a Rabelais quote made me want to reread some of my Robertson Davies books.

P.P.S Oh, what I wouldn't give to have been there to witness that moment of silence and see the facial expressions of everyone at your table when the spaghetti map was finally revealed.

coil23 wrote:Will there be a separate thread for maps to be posted so as to be easier to reference as we go along? Or will a map just be reposted in the regular thread periodically?

I was thinking maybe once we've seen more than huge double doors I'll open a map thread, and we just leave it there with one post which I'll update whenever the map gets updated. Make sense? Unless we'd prefer to see the developing stages of the map, in which case I could just make a new post in the thread every time...