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?