Pointcrawling Undercities

Today we resume where I left off with Tuesday's “Designing Undercities” post. (Those late night Google Plus marathon sessions of the Hill Cantons invariably kick the tar out of my aging butt--but then again you get what you paid for on this blog.)

Remember the project here is to create a mapping system that helps wrap your brain around the vast and complicated spatial dimensions of a full-fledged undercity. I turn to my old standby in visual organization, the pointcrawl, for some help here. (Longtime readers may remember that I tried to do this once before in thinking about the Realms Below of Sigil.) 

Let's recap the difficulties I was facing and how a pointcrawl system may help:

Historical layers. Tuesday I worked through a vertical cross-section method (reposted above). That process helped immensely in giving me an overall sense of the relationships and history of the differing phases of the undercity, but to effectively run it my badly-wired brain is also going to need some 2D top-down organization. I can capture that kind of mapping fairly easily using only 1-3 letter-sized pieces of graph paper with the pointcrawl method. 

Vast areas of empty space. Remember unlike a megadungeon which typically has a lot of contiguous space relatively tightly-packed the undercity sprawls both horizontally and vertically over much larger areas. Outside of a touch-every-doorknob OCD obsession there really is no need to waste much time and effort representing them—except for the all important dimension of where they lead, how much time traversing it takes, and potential obstacles in that path. In the pointcrawl we solve this by using a combination of lines and symbols that can tell us at a glance all the relevant information we need to know.

Losing the best bits. Related to the above point is the danger of having your most interesting points from a gaming perspective get swamped by the scale. Instead let's take each of those sites and mark them on the map with nice big distinct squares of their own.

Though only represented by a single abstract square each site will get the full detailed, standard graph paper mapping. The squares are abstracted units but my usual rule of thumb is to have a single piece of letter-sized graph paper correspond to each square. A duller area such as a small, residential housing may get collapsed into a single sheet with a larger ground scale and a really interesting or complicated site, especially one that has distinct sub-levels, may need a second or third sheet to back it up.

Entry points and vertical connections get hella confusing. Because they are big spaces that have seen years and years of habitation (of varying degrees) the chance of connections from the surface and between layers is likely to be exponentially higher than a standard dungeon. While it would likely drive you into a rubber room trying to capture each and every one, it helps create an interesting array of explorations options for the players if you have as many as you can captured. The pointcrawl simplifies the complicated dance of lining up horizontal with vertical space by treating vertical connections as simply as the empty spaces: a single line with some simple notation suffices.

Putting it all together here's yesterday's sample undercity as represented by a pointcrawl map. Click to enlarge.

Pointcrawl Map Key

The Lines

Unbroken lines = normal walkable passages (tunnel, corridor, etc)

Squiggly lines = unusual connector (teleportation, magic gate, etc.)

Arrow on line = vertical drop in the direction indicated (stairs, chutes, pits, wells, abysses, etc)

Two bars on line = barrier in passage (cave in, mudslide, locked gate, turnstile, giant critter, etc.)

Number in circle on line = confusing passage (twisty catacombs, maze, cavern system, etc) with number indicating roll for getting lost on a roll or below on a d6. Modify if party employs precautions such as chalking passages, using appropriate spells, hiring guide, and the like.

Dot on line = 3 hours of walking at normal, unencumbered pace along passage.

The Squares

Uncolored square = Recent human civilization mostly on the surface and drawn here to indicate entry points.

Maroon square = Serpent Woman layer, the uppermost layer of the undercity.

Yellow square = Space Elf layer, the second closest historical layer.

Orange square = Latter State layer, second from bottom.

Blue square = Hyperborean layer, bottom most.

I have marched through organizing the physical and conceptual map of my undercity, now we need to get into dealing with the further complication of this beast being a living, breathing social animal: the city part of the “undercity”. Look forward to at least one or more posts picking apart those angle.

Any questions about today's method? Is it clear what I am trying to do with this and how it fits together? Suggestions or opinions on how you think this could be done in different ways?

Designing Undercities

Giant subterranean cities piled out far under the sun-baked city streets. Byzantine, twisty layers of rubble-choked tunnels (nee roads), cavernous temple fanes, forgotten palaces piling on top of each other aeon upon aeon.

One of the elements I deeply love about Tekumel is that hot and forgotten world's vast undercities. In the core play area empire of Tsolyanu, a long-standing tradition called ditlana in which cities—at least in theory—are razed every 500 years and built over. Part sprawling megadungeon, part still-active underbelly of city life, they have had a fascinating pull on my imagination. Not surprsingly they have been long something I wanted to incorporate into my classic D&D campaign, yet I have never been quite able to pull it over the conceptual hump.

Why? Undercities on a Tekumelyani scales are seriously spatially-challenging beasts. I've had small-sized versions for many years, neighborhoods of cities conveniently bracketed off with cave-in's or very compact and sealed off little settlements (let me count the number of domed cities sitting in lakes I stole from the Holmes side-view example). But the truly sprawling undercity that matches and supersedes the larger environs of the city it sleeps under? Intimidating.

Just to give you an exact sense let's take a passage that Victor Raymond wrote in his ever-useful introduction thread to playing EPT “out of the box” about Barker's underworld under the port metropolis Jakalla:

“...The first level of the Jakállan Underworld is drawn on a 17” x 22” sheet of graph paper, 10 squares to the inch–and each square is ten feet in measure(!). Thus it is assumed to cover an area roughly 1700 feet by 2200 feet – almost 1/3rd by 1/2 a mile in size, centered largely under the ruined Temple of Hyáshra in the City of the Dead. If you consider the map of Jakálla, each hex has been said by Prof. Barker to be 50-100 yards across. To be fair, Prof. Barker has also said that the map is “semi-representational,” i.e. more important buildings appear larger on the map than they really are. Even so, the top layer of the Jakállan Underworld would require several 17x22 sheets to cover the entire city. This suggests that it would be difficult to actually map the entire Underworld...”

It's just not the horizontal hugeness of such a beast, you also have any number of other complications to conventional mapping to deal with: miles and miles of “empty space” (old roads, side-tunnels, etc.); the vertical dimension of historical layers that increase the total size many times; large numbers of entry points from the surface; and of course the potential active use of the upper levels by humans and other surface dwellers (thus also giving it the more complicated social dance of urban adventuring).

One could find a massive piece of architect's graph paper and laboriously fill each exacting section of your undercity in piece by piece, all the while trying to allow for the mental trick of knowing that your map still doesn't reach. I'm not going to do that.

What follows is less tutorial—as you can tell I am no expert—and more of me grasping for a method in designing undercities on a grander, more thoroughly thought-out scale.

Part I: Mapping the Layers

As much as I hate timelines and all the attendant setting-bloat whoha when tackling a undercity it undeniably makes for a practical starting point. I work better answering a series of leading questions while futzing with some kind of schematic.

How old is the city?

How many civilizations flourished here and for how long?

I am going to start with a young city by Tekumel standards, 5000 years, as my world is not quite as ancient. I am going to say perhaps five different civilizations each spanning a convenient millennium.

Who first founded it?

How did they order their city? What did they think was important?

Were they displaced or did they just evolve historically?

What lead to the city being buried? Was it a fiery cataclysm, a more gentle abandonment, or intentional process? Did anything survive on the surface?

How large of a surface area was it when it was abandoned? What structures survived being buried?

Who replaced these city-dwellers?

[Repeat question set above again and again until you have finished with each succeeding phase of the city.]

I take a standard piece of graph paper and start to draw out length wise the layers as I answer them. My squares I am going to say are roughly 250 feet a pop to give me room to work with. I would ratchet these upwards and downwards in scale depending how vast of a city I want, but the exact ground scale is really not so important to me as I am mostly just trying to grasp the overall vertical, horizontal, and historical relationships with this process.

The founding layer is naturally the bottom and I place it there. I color code it for use later (blue in this instance) to help distinguish it from the top layers. I am going to go with my perennial “lost civilization” favorites from the Hill Cantons, the Hyperboreans. They constructed a fairly compact city with cycolpean walls. The city was submerged by a vicious sorcerous deluge a 1,000 years into its life leaving the large stone structures encased in a preserving 30-foot thick layer of mud.

The original citadel, high on a bluff, survives and was incorporated into the next phase of the city (I mark it on the right and make sure it is visible in my next layer) by the Latter States who built a broader, yet less grand city on the site. I draw that layer on my side-view with an orange color and no space between the layers due to the relative shallowness of the layer.

Exactly 1000 years later, a Space Elf host burns and ravages the city near completely with only some of the larger, more durable. This city is larger and far grander than the other layers with giant plazas, massive pyramids, aqueducts, etc. Foul serpent women (from the future) encase this city again a 1,000 years into its life in a giant bubble of amber and collapse a mountain over it for good measure. I draw in a thick layer to represent the deep burying.

For mysterious reasons known only to their serpentine minds, the serpent women hollow out a space in the mountain rubble and construct a massive underground ceremonial space (colored in maroon) only to abandon it nearly intact after a millennium. The current human city of Dobre Rajetz rises on this spot.

And this is what I am left with (click to enlarge) a simple but functional cross section--and more importantly a conceptual idea of what structures, flavor, and size each layer of the undercity has (and roughly where they fit in relationship to each other). 

In Part II, I take up exploring how to use my pointcrawl ideas to capture both the sweeping horizontal and vertical dimensions of the space.  

Crawling Without Hexes: the Pointcrawl

Despite spending 1-2 hours a day sinking psychic energy into this here rpg blog, I am still as much or more of a wargamer as I am a roleplayer. There have been too many years of pushing little lead men and cardboard counters to deny it.

Hexes literally come with the terrain in both worlds. Yet as much as I love that old six-directional organization in my wargaming--where relative position is a top priority--I have to admit that I find them not terribly useful in running day-to-day wilderness exploration in my games.

Don't get me wrong, I still use hex maps, but they have been relegated to only one of several layers of maps I use in campaigns. Right below a top level “symbolic” map (a map, often shared with players, filled with out-of-scale markings and illustrations distorting things by their relative importance) is often a large-scale map of six-mile hexes.

Neither layer of map is what I actually use at the table.

What I actually use at the table are two kinds of hexless map systems: the first being a point-to-point system (the second a “vector” map akin to the West Marches that I may discuss tomorrow).

What's point-to-point? Simple, it's a map that replaces hexes with locations and connectors only. Fortunately I didn't have to invent another wheel, but looked to some old favorite wargames. Take the map from the Civil War classic A House Divided pictured below.

Why bother switching? Because a hex map places “empty space” areas, the countless hexes that may contain nothing much of interest, on the same semiotic level as interesting locales (and by interesting I mean a wide latitude of things from minor curiosities/landmarks to settlements or adventure sites, any point that is worth more than a cursory description). It reduces the amount of information I can see at a glance and the paper shuffling between hex map and gazetteer becomes a stage management nightmare for me when I run a game.

Secondly, hex maps tend to play down the fact that most overland travel is rightly conducted along some kind of track or road. Pathless travel is exhausting, massively disorienting, and dangerous to the point that even something as rough as a mule track or a game path is usually preferable.

Hex maps also tend to not be able to show impassable terrain on a granular level, cliffs or peaks that prevent a line of travel or wetlands areas where the water gets too deep. Note how paths bottleneck in mountain and coastal wetlands areas in the House Divided map. I want to be able to portray the situation where an area maybe be close by how the crow flies but involves a circuitous route by foot. I also want those bottlenecks—places of “strategic” importance to find or hold.

This is what my typical PbP map looks like (click to enlarge).

The squares represent the sites of interest and are color coded with map pencils for ease of reference. In this case, dark blue equals a settlement a town or larger (sky blue is for smaller ones), green is a landmark, and brown is a potential adventure site with its own sub-map.

I always draw in terrain as background under the grid (note the bands of hills and mountains) roughly to scale from the higher-layer hex map. This reminds me exactly where topography begins and ends if I need to use it in-game—and what type of encounter or weather chart to use. I use a wide range of terrain and vegetation type, so this is especially important for me.

Now let's look at the all-important connectors. Solid lines represent roads, double solid lines Roman-like roads with sturdy road beds. Broken lines represent tracks. I will add letters if I need to code the path further, “S” represents a secret or hidden path, for instance, “G” stands for a game path that the party will need an outdoorsman-type to find and use. Rivers and creeks can also be used as connectors.

The dots on connectors play a big role in simplifying things, they are the units of measurement between squares. They typically represent about six hours of unencumbered walking and three hours of normal riding time. If a connecting path is shorter or longer or more difficult I note it directly on the map. The typical foot time just happens to correspond to my encounter checks. The system lends itself to wanting to minimize too many dots, so I tend to brainstorm lots of green-coded minor landmark boxes to both give players more choice in direction and make travel seem more colorful.

The last thing you will note are random notes to myself (the chance for finding on a d6 the stairs to a cave system under the Old Tower square, for instance.) This on-map notation plays a big part in helping me run the game at the table and my actual maps will get very busy with them. Again I can't emphasize enough how helpful this is ease to play flow.

That's one of my systems. I know you devious people have your own. What's up your wilderness-running sleeve?

How to “Awesome Up” Fantasy Maps

Roger hit on an important distinction in the discussion yesterday about what makes a great map great:

“ The difference for me can be summed up by how much the map uses iconic versus symbolic representation. (Crash course in semiotics: iconic = using a picture of the object represented; symbolic = using a stand-in that doesn't look like the object)
I think you'll find the best maps use iconic elements a lot--the hand-drawn mountains and trees in the Greyhawk and Glorantha maps, for example. Put another way, the Greyhawk map would have come out even cooler if the cities were hex-filling skyline icons a la Divine Right, don't you think?”

Yes, actually I do. There is something much more compelling about the use of iconic imagery that is readily obvious when you train your eye on visual examples.

First, let's take a gander at another contrast handily provided by the terrain symbols chart in the back of the Expert booklet of the B/X flavor of Basic D&D (it will help to click on many of these pictures to get the full effect):

Note how much more evocative the suggestion for smaller-scale maps is than the symbolic, pragmatic ones for the larger-scale hexes (a distinction that apparently the BECMI versions of the Known World/Mystara picked up on for the larger-scale maps.)

Now, let's go back to Roger's example, to see if he is on target.

Greyhawk:

Minaria (Divine Right's continent):

My own gut calls it a slam-dunk and I would hazard a guess that many of you do too. So why isn't this technique used more in rpg maps?

I mean seriously, take even my five top-picked maps. I won't budge from calling them great maps, but they do pass up some opportunities from real-life map-making to make them even greater.

Historical maps, for instance, made heavy use of iconic whimsy. They often didn't merely depict terrain but added little drawings of ships, critters, people, coats of arms, icebergs, etc. Here's an example from a 16th-century Scandinavian map:

Beyond those touches of whimsy why not introduce even more robust and diverse examples of terrain iconography. Here are two examples taken from the beautiful work of the Hungarian-American cartographer Erwin Raisz:

Note how much mileage he gets out of granular distinctions. Now imagine that on a map near you. 

Awesome, no?

What Makes a Great Fantasy RPG Map Great?

I spent a good portion of my weekend (when I wasn't marching up and down the square) thinking about maps. Cartographic love runs deep in many old-time rpgers and I am certainly no exception. In fact the powerful draw of maps preceded my entry into the hobby and maintained itself even for the two decades I was out.

Where does that power come from? What features of a great map make it great?

Let's take it apart.

A great map provides both a cerebral and visceral experience. A great map doesn't just tell your brain the necessary practical facts to help run a game—like how many hexes it is from Nyrond to Rauxes—it hits you in the gut too. It evokes a feeling or mood, the fleeting sensation of a world that might have existed.

There was some back and forth in the comments on Saturday's post about how hand drawn (and hand inked as Scott Pasha added) tend to be more powerful than even beautifully done computer-generated ones. My guess at the why is that a hand-drawn map creates more of an illusion that a map is a product of the world it represents.

A computer-drawn map talks to your head. It's precise, a useful tool to help you effectively run a junket through the wilderness—but it misses that gut pull completely.

Feel the difference in the two following maps of Harn.

Great map:

Good map (but missing something right?):

A great map tells a story about it's setting. It visually pulls out elements that are critical to that setting and influences what is important to a reader.

Each of those five maps I listed on Saturday immediately told me something about the setting before I even cracked open a related gazetteer.

Church's maps graphically highlight features that seem imbued with myth and mystery—hallmarks of Glorantha. What is that gigantic monolithic block rising three-dimensionally from the page? Why is there a swamp pooled at it's base?

The flowing alien-seeming Tsolyani script and symbolic on-map caricatures of deities instantly transport a viewer to the exotic environs of Tekumel. Skeletal Sarku leers from the City of the Dead. (Sadly this is only of these maps that uses the kinds of depictions of people, monsters, ships, etc. common on medieval and ancient maps to build mood.)

The eye-catching prominence of tracts of wilderness in Darlene's Greyhawk maps jump off the page. Long stretches of dark-green heavy boreal forest and heavy black ice made me instantly want to know what this Blackmoor was. How wouldn't see the jagged bands of thick chocolate-brown mountain peaks surrounding the Valley of the Mage and want to immediately pack up some mules to investigate?

A great map uses color and negative space to contrast elements. Notice in Darlene's map how the wide, green spaces that make up each nation make for a subtle contrast with those wilderness areas I mention above. There are no heavy border lines just beautiful terrain brackets.

Though Church's Prax map is black and white, it's lack of color is almost a virtue because of it's effective use of white space and his shading detail for terrain features.

A great map uses fonts that are appropriately sized and chosen for feel. Map text doesn't dominate any of those five maps. We have all seen those maps where text virtually clutters the whole thing for a busy, busy mess that exhausts you just looking at it.

Contrast this recent Dragon Pass map with Church's to get a sense of the defining differences to both those features above.

Good map:

Great map:

Top Five Fantasy RPG Maps

Rob, the protagonist of High Fidelity, claims early in the novel that you can judge the character of person by their responses to Top Five lists. Such lists are part of the stock trade for lazy day blogging. Who am I to resist the call?

What are your Top Five? I promise not to judge. Much.

In reverse order:

5. Dying Earth RPG maps by Sarah Wroot. The color and skill of these maps thrill me. They are some great whimsical touches on the street level maps of Kaiin that at times sell me on the Vancian feel more than the RPG itself.

4. Bey Su city map from Empire of the Petal Throne by M.A.R. Barker. It wasn't until my second time around in Tekumel fandom that I realized that the cover of EPT was a map by the professor himself. Bonus immersion points for a map more symbolic than geographically accurate (if anything what most maps drawn in our dreamworlds would look like to the inhabitants themselves).

3. William Church's Prax map from Runequest II (the first one that is). No other map captivated me into wanting to know more about a setting than this one (remember that the details of Glorantha were pretty sketchy for those of us who had only that rulebook as an intro).

2. William Church again sweeping the list with the map from Dragon Pass. OK this is a bit of a cheat since it's technically from a boardgame of Glorantha, otherwise I'd be tempted to put it in #1. Click to enbiggen to get the full effect. 

1. Ah, the all-time classic and nostalgic favorite, Darlene's map of Greyhawk. Other kids had posters of Dallas Cowboy Cheerleaders and ferraris, I had this one up on my wall—where it reigned for four years until a Black Flag poster came along to kick it off.

Campaign Map

Map courtesy of AKS Mapper, a nifty (and free!) map-making software package.