Thursday, March 13, 2014

Vertical Pointcrawling

Longtime readers will note that I have spent a good deal of time working out how to organize horizontal space in the kind of pointcrawl format that works for the cracked hardwiring that is my brain. I've covered the wilderness, undercities, above-ground city ruins even the vast space underworld of Planescape's Sigil.

One thing that hasn't been touched on is some of the more complicated ways I have been using related schemes to add (literally at times) new dimensions to existing points: the vertical pointcrawl.

Let me back up and give you some background. A year or two back much of the eponymous campaign revolved around the exploration of the vast undercity Kezmarok. That space is on the whole organized with two horizontal pointcrawls: one above for a ruinscrawl of the sad old portions of the city and the more frequently-used undercity pointcrawl below.

It's mostly worked quite well on my end with the party in the main exploring and clearing various points each corresponding to a single sheet of graph paper. Recently in one of my favorite organic developments in a sandbox campaigns one of the PCs, Ba Chim the wereshark-landsknecht, has had to trade a favor, recover the artifact Spinning Wheel of Mokosh, to the archwizard Frantisek for a spell to regrow his burned off left leg.

This quest is taking them back to the undercity this time to a sub-level/structure called the Hypogeum of Vibaker in the Rubicand Caverns of Oldest Lhoma (there are at least three homage, in-jokes hidden in there).

Which roundabout gets me to the point(crawl), that system of caverns has taken up some undisclosed numbers of points on the horizontal pointcrawl. Here's my rub though, I had conceived them as a somewhat complicated series of vertically-layered caverns and though my horizontal scheme allows for some vertical organization by way of the various point connectors, it didn't really robustly support the kind of visual organization you would see for instance in the old cross-section maps stretching back to the famous ones in the LBBs of OD&D.

In other words, I wanted something that could break out a point (or related points) with a vertical organizer while maintaining the same spatial integration with a horizontal pointcrawl.

Thanks to medical necessities I had a lot of time on Tuesday to rework things. Here is a veiled and greatly simplified version of what I redid. There is nothing profoundly different here mind you, just a flipping of the axis with some different reworking of the connectors and color-coding to represent vertical differences.

Basically a few things are going on here.

One you will see a key at the bottom. Squiggly lines represent long staircases. Straight lines running vertically represent shafts (stupidly and confusingly I drew them horizontally here which should just represent normal horizontal connections) and dotted lines sloping tunnels or ramps. Normal connectors will run 10-30 minutes of travel, while a dot represents a long space or difficult to travel space with four hours of travel per dot.

Secondly, the colors map to this:
Light Green = Small, relatively low-ceilinged natural caves
Dark Green = Artificially-worked areas typically 10-15 feet high (dungeon)
Orange = Large caverns with soaring ceilings.


I still feel like this missing something and that naturally bothers me. Maybe something that jumps out to you the reader?

9 comments:

  1. Presumably any connective megastructures (subterranean grand-staircase or miles-long canyon) would either fit inside a single (possibly highly-connected) region, or you'd need to introduce a custom connector type?

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    1. Right now these are mostly relatively tight areas (one or two points on my horizontal pointcrawl), but it would be easy to accommodate larger megastructures like that (and thanks that gets my brain firing).

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  2. The horizontal lines are confusing. The flooded cavern is below the Piles of Manure? One assumes that points are in alignment; that is, points on a horizontal line are (roughly) on the same plane, while points on a vertical alignment are (roughly) vertical with respect to each other.

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    1. Yes mea culpa I rushed the key and was too lazy to fix it. Your assumptions are correct. Points on the same general plane should be roughly on the same elevation.

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  3. It might just be me, but the color code feels a bit unintuitive. On a green/light green/orange scale I'd expect the darker green to be easiest to navigate, or biggest, while moving towards the yellow/orange/red seems like it ought to get more difficult or dangerous, which makes me think of the tighter and more organic spaces. That's really just a nitpick though.

    Maybe what is feel off to you is that you only get one axis of horizontal offset between various points? Maybe it'd be interesting to think about a way to get 'depth' in the map? Hard to do without going isometric, but maybe you could curve passages around behind or in front of certain features? I'm not sure if that adds much or just unnecessarily complicates it.

    That all makes me think it would also be helpful to have some kind of North arrow though to indicate how things are related to the larger world? I don't know if you plan on being able to emerge again from anyplace besides the city above, but it would seem neat to wander through the caves for days and emerge someplace far from where you started.

    I like what you're doing here though, certainly gets my brain spinning on fun possibilities for my own game.

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    1. The colors were arbitrary truth be told. I like your suggestion of intensity by shade. Now that I think about it may redo to the actual map in more underworldy shades of blue and dark purple.

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  4. For things like the Rickety Bridge, I create a node just for that. But, I tend to use much smaller nodes than you do (3-6 rooms). Also, you need a bit more vertical variation. It makes little sense to build underground stuff on even, regular depths. I like the idea of using dots to represent longer passages. I'll have to start doing that.

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    1. Yeah my nodes (and I really should have been more explicit about this in the post) generally correspond to a single sheet of graph paper's worth of maps at 10 foot per square. "Empty" points though will have a sketch at best.

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  5. This reminds me of how to host a dungeon. Its a rather organic dungeon generator that does the side view 2D like this.

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