Be a map vulture

Using real world maps

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There’s no shortage of battle maps or traditional dungeon maps for rpgs. There are great creators putting out material (often for free) that you can use at your table.

But what if you want something different? I tend not to use traditional dungeon maps and I don’t use battlemaps. I like maps that are a departure from the RPG traditional.

I’m a fan of function-based cartography, where maps are easy to use and contain only critical information. I’ve done this for isometric pointcrawl dungeons, for caves, and topographic hexmaps.

Sometimes though, I need a map but I’m either a) short on time or b) lazy. Here’s a few types of real world maps which you can repurpose for games.

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Cave maps

I like my cave mapping system, but sometimes I like real world cave maps. Let’s look at a mammoth of a cave, the 2km deep Krubera cave. We have a side profile:

Image Credit: nalga.wordpress.com

And also a top-down profile:

Image Credit: nalga.wordpress.com

This easily converts into a horrible megadungeon pointcrawl. Take these two maps and mark location keys at various points on them. You’d need to make judgements about climbing and squeezing, but with a bit of thinking that would be easy enough.

This is way more inspiring to me than a traditional dungeon cave map. If I don’t want to make one of my cave maps, I’ll grab one of these and key it!

You could use this for a cave crawl in Mork Borg, Cairn, or Into the Odd.

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Metro maps

Metro maps can function as pointcrawls. You could also use them as a transport network for an urban location. Like this one:

Image Credit: https://trylonmontreal.com/montreal-metro-map/

Take this into an image editor, replace the location names and you’ve got a pointcrawl (or just copy it to paper). This could work well for a mega-structure crawl as well.

A metro map style is a solid way to run pointcrawls. This metro map designer enables the easy creation of one, without any need for graphic design software.

This would work great for Cy_Borg.

Urban Maps

Having street level maps can be good for managing travel and chases. It can also give you a load of locations. Check out this one from 1950s London:

Image Credit: Wikimedia Commons

It’s easy to scale up too, grab some city maps. This map of Cincinnati also lacks many labels so you can easily put your own annotations in:

Image Credit: University of Texas Library

Modern city maps are often too busy to be of use for me at least. I think metro maps are pretty perfect for a modern city, coupled with neighbourhood pointcrawl maps if you want to get granular.

You could use these for a game like Liminal Horror or Electric Bastionland.

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Topographical Maps

Large scale overland maps are plentiful in the community. But it you want more detail about elevation, pick up a topographical map:

Image Credit: Map France

These can also guide the formation of one of my topographic hexmaps. The one above is centred on France, where green is low altitude and deep red is highest altitude. You can also get ones that use isolines rather than colour:

Image Credit: The Dyrt

If you want to use scale based travel, that works great with these maps, though they also works well for hexmaps too (just overlay a hexgrid).

These work for classic overland travel, for games focused on exploration like Cairn.

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Be a vulture

Use maps from the real world. They are designed with function in mind, and just because it’s real world, doesn’t mean you can’t use it in your own fantastical creations.

To draw my own maps irl, I use Faber-Castell Pitt Pens. Yhey use India ink so you can spill beverages on them at the gaming table and it won’t even run.

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Recommendations

I’ve written a fair amount about maps for MurkMail. So I’m going to shamelessly recommend my own work this week.

I’ve used mapping as a basis for hacking rules. Using a network like this:

I’ve looked at an approach to mapping caves and how to run a flooding scenario.

You liked that map huh?, Ready to Pointcrawl?, and Time to Crawl are a 3-part series that discuss building and running an isometric pointcrawl like this:

And I’ve put elevation on hexmaps and talked rules for climbing open terrain.

Go have a read of them!