Have Fun Mapping the Castle...!

Cartography.

I've always loved it.

Within the realm of RPGs — especially D&D — I've always thought it to be an essential part of the experience. Whether it's coming up with maps for a campaign (or adventure) you're creating as a DM, or mapping out the adventure as a player during a dungeon crawl ... or even just appreciating found maps that don't even pertain to your own games — maps are such an institution of the imagination.

I've been an illustrator all of my life. Not a professional one, but I do it for fun, for catharsis, for brainstorming purposes (which I guess in some way I could make a case for being a professional per se in that I "illustrate" concepts when I'm designing graphical interfaces for software?). I do it to crack myself up ... or my 8yo son with cartoons, doodles, and the like at times. But my love for drawing lends itself really well to cartography in relation to RPGs. I love coming up with dungeons in my mind, and then making them come to life on a sheet of graph paper for my eyes only — well, at least until my players decide to delve into my campaigns.

This year I've taken a break from DMing and switched roles to be a PC, which has been amazing. I completely forgot how much I enjoy creating a character and bringing them to life in a well-run campaign. And as a PC, I've always been the party member volunteering to record the party's journey via a solid map. What better way to record an awesome adventure (and to share with the rest of the party, as well as other gamers out there) then with a fun, detailed map. Communication through experience design is what I do for a living, so mapping is just another extension of my day-to-day.

Recently, my son started to express some interest in D&D — he's 8, which was how old I was when I fist discovered that awesomeness of the game (back in '79). He's a Minecraft junkie, so "adventuring" and building is in his blood, and has become something he's pretty passionate (obsessive?) about. Believe me, I was thrilled to discover his interest, so I spent a weekend coming up with a "simple" first-time adventure idea which I hope to share with him soon as his "entry" into the world of fantasy tabletop roleplaying. The map is a small section of an undercity sewer system — an exciting 1st-level jaunt involving magical mushroom men and a diabolical rat king.

Creating this was so much fun, and really inspired me to up my game with cartography — both as a DM and player — especially as I see how many awesome mappers there are out there, with styles running the gamut. I could get lost in RPG map Pinterest pages for days... it's almost too overwhelming!

One fun nugget I discovered in my map research (yes, research is such an important part of the game) was dungeons illustrated on isometric graph paper. Their perspective was incredible, yet can be very challenging as an illustrator due to it's angling. But once you start playing around with it, it starts to make total sense, and brings the mapping game into a whole new light. There are a ton of isometric graph paper resources on the web, so I found a simple free one that allows you to generate your own custom layout/grid as a PDF which you can print until your printer melts. There's only one "problem" in that once you get the hang of mapping isometrically, it's a definite mental challenge (at least for me) to switch gears and go back to the standard 2D "top-down" approach to adventure recording. I will always love that standard, but there's something about the level of satisfaction one gets from illustrating a dungeon crawl on isometric paper. It's almost liberating, honestly (it sounds somewhat bizarre to even type that, but I'm at a loss for a different word to properly articulate how it makes one feel...). So after this weekend's awesome session, I decided to re-illustrate the map I had created during the adventure, and give it an isometric treatment...

Not only is the literal mapping a very enjoyable part of the journey, adding detailing to the final product really helps to elevate the experience — especially since I never take gaming too seriously, I mean it's supposed to be fun... it's a game. So a lot of my details end up being certain things that we (as adventurers) encountered in the session, and often those events are best expressed through tongue-in-cheek ways.

So as 2018 has become a year of gaming, I hope to continue my mapping (and general illustrations) because it's become an extremely therapeutic experience and in the end is a whole lot of fun!

2018: The Year of Gaming!

So I've been gaming for a long time. I was first introduced to Dungeons & Dragons in 1979. I was 8 years old (same age as my son, Lars — whom I've been trying to get interested in RPGs, but no dice yet. He's more "Minecraftian" at this point.) and it blew my f'in mind. I remember going to some local stationary store with my grandmother (yes, things like that once existed) and for some reason they also had a bizarre hobby/gaming section. And there it stood in all of it's glory — the Monster Manual. I grabbed it immediately and fling it open ... the first thing I saw was the illustration of THE EYE OF THE DEEP staring right back at me ... and I was completely mesmerized. Up to that point I loved bizarre shit — myths + monsters, sci-fi, aliens, creatures from the black lagoons — and I had an overly active imagination, which just fueled this new "fire" known as roleplaying games.

Needless to say I my grandmother bought me that book that day (I guess she also saw the fire in my eyes), and I still have the damn thing. I don't think I put that manual down for a year. I was totally fascinated, and was dying to actually PLAY the game, but I didn't know anyone my age who had ever heard about it (and I really didn't know the rules, per se). Eventually that year one of my parent's friend's older kids saw me reading the MM and was like, "Right on, little dude!" He agreed to teach me how to play the game, and let me sit on a few impromptu sessions with his friends while listening to Rush and Sabbath. Needless to say, I never looked back...

Well, almost 40 years later, I still absolutely love the game — and gaming in general — but I found I'm still a total "purist" when it comes to most RPGs. With D&D, I never advanced past 2nd edition rules (even some of them are a bit questionable). When TSR was losing market share, they decided to change shit up with the entire concept of the game — I can only guess as a way to increase retention while building a newer audience — by making characters ridiculously powerful and basically lifted game restrictions around a lot of things that (in my mind) ruined the game and make it way too "Mall Metal/Hot Topic" for my liking. From a business perspective, in some ways I understood ... I just didn't like it. Over the years I stuck to the old rules — the only rules, in my opinion — and enough people did as well, so I've been able to continually play (mostly sporadically) and still keep that fire I had for the game ever since that Monster Manual moment.

One of the best things around gaming for this long is that I've made some amazing friends who share that passion — and that's pretty priceless — especially since I'm not the biggest fan of humans as time has gone by. We suck, but the games allow for a much-needed "level-setting" of humanity's imagination and creativity where we can pretend for a moment and transcend the insanity around us.

In 2016-17, I tried to run my most recent in-person campaign (which wasn't really a true "campaign" in that it was more a series of adventures using the same party, just without a single mission), but scheduling and bandwidth were a continual problem. Things dwindled and eventually fell apart. It wasn't for lack of trying — 2017 was a bitch of a year for everyone I know. It wasn't in the stars...

So I'm calling 2018 the "Year of Gaming" in order to make up for last year. For the first time I've gotten involved in a bunch of remote/online D&D sessions with (for the most part) complete strangers from around the globe. This time as a player — usually I'm the DM, but it was time to take a break from the "heavy lifting" for a bit. Initially, I was a little hesitant. What should I expect? But it's been great, and it's again "relit" that fire. I'm also considering attending some area gaming conferences, which was never on the bill. I always thought they were way too "nerdy" ... but screw it, I am total nerd — who am I kidding? I'm cool with that. It's all good... Even last week I posted a map (from a recent online session) I had illustrated one weekend morning just because I love illustrating, shared it in the Holmes Basic Google+ community on a suggestion, and now it's going to be part of an adventure being played at the NTRPGCon in Dallas this year. That is pretty awesome and completely unexpected.

Needless to say, I think we all need to have a bit more fun this year to make up for last year ... and gaming is an incredible vehicle for it!