isometric point crawl dungeons are just so stylish and sleek, plus they tend to leave room for your own notes instead of covering the page with cross hatching
Quite interesting post, as a longtime map maker, I never was a fan of isometric maps, they just felt bland and….too clean to me. They failed to spur my own creativity as a GM. However, after reading this I am very interested in giving this a go and trying my hand at it. Thanks!
Idolizing Gearings work is just par for the course. Lovely article, I will following along and making sure to read some of your back work. As long as you don't mind I will also be adding a link to your blog on mine!
This is interesting because it revealed to me something I didn't know about myself - my residual affection for graphically representational, rather than abstract, maps as GM tools (as opposed to aesthetic 'content'). But then, I'm old enough to remember how thrilled we all were with the novelty of the isometric map in 'Ravenloft', so this might just be nostalgia - which is always to be distrusted. As I, too, tend towards the improvisational as a GM it was also odd for to me to learn, in considering this idea, that I struggle slightly with the notion of having a 'sort of' map. I can - if necessary - make places up out of whole cloth, scribbling something like those plans as I go along to establish consistency, and I can make use of standard maps (of course). But something about the 'half and half' nature of this level of abstraction gives me pause, not because it's objectively inadequate (it's actually very clever) but because I seem to lean towards wanting either a blank canvas or a very detailed one. I absolutely concede that this is a 'me' problem and I'm sure I'll experiment with this technique to see if I can't train this weird hesitancy out of myself. Thanks for the shout-out.
I think that shows is that preparation is a spectrum! And in particular that the preparation is sitting in different areas. Really, my liking this pointcrawl approach to a dungeon is indicating that I don’t always like to improvise the layout/connectivity of a location. But I also understand how for some it’s either or, they want the full details or none at all. I enjoy working from no map as well as it turns out, but if I do have a map, these kind of layouts are typically what I would like, all personal preference at the end of the day!
I’m old and slow… 6 decades of hex and counter war gaming. Just got into ttrpg to tell stories better. I had been finding campaign maps on line and overlay grids in photoshop. Old habits… then I saw the Cairn map with the point crawl!🤦♂️ a little slow… your dungeon isometric was another moment. A major paradigm shift in how I think about managing my game play.
have been super excited for these articles to drop since seeing the map you posted on the OSR reddit. Can't wait to see the next two articles! This is basically how i run everything from dungeons to cities to regions to, little pointcrawls that allow a lot of room for notes. I really love Gradient descents map, The Electrum Archive also has a great region pointcrawl, that and the region generation for Vaults of Vaarn got me into making pointcrawls. Hype for the next articles!
oh nice, I saw this article had come out through my email, so I'm getting to all of this a bit late. I'll get to reading them. Thanks for putting in all this work!
Thanks for putting this together. As someone who HATES drawing trad dungeons and does every dungeon as an area/pointcrawl with connections (that’s even how I’ve developed my solo dice drop style dungeons in my own games I’ve put out) this is great.
this is also how every ttrpg for solo playing should be designed, so you dont know shit about the room until your inside of it
That’s a very neat idea!
isometric point crawl dungeons are just so stylish and sleek, plus they tend to leave room for your own notes instead of covering the page with cross hatching
Exactly that!
Quite interesting post, as a longtime map maker, I never was a fan of isometric maps, they just felt bland and….too clean to me. They failed to spur my own creativity as a GM. However, after reading this I am very interested in giving this a go and trying my hand at it. Thanks!
Amazing to hear! If you try it yourself, please do share the results!
Idolizing Gearings work is just par for the course. Lovely article, I will following along and making sure to read some of your back work. As long as you don't mind I will also be adding a link to your blog on mine!
Not at all! Thank you so much!
This is interesting because it revealed to me something I didn't know about myself - my residual affection for graphically representational, rather than abstract, maps as GM tools (as opposed to aesthetic 'content'). But then, I'm old enough to remember how thrilled we all were with the novelty of the isometric map in 'Ravenloft', so this might just be nostalgia - which is always to be distrusted. As I, too, tend towards the improvisational as a GM it was also odd for to me to learn, in considering this idea, that I struggle slightly with the notion of having a 'sort of' map. I can - if necessary - make places up out of whole cloth, scribbling something like those plans as I go along to establish consistency, and I can make use of standard maps (of course). But something about the 'half and half' nature of this level of abstraction gives me pause, not because it's objectively inadequate (it's actually very clever) but because I seem to lean towards wanting either a blank canvas or a very detailed one. I absolutely concede that this is a 'me' problem and I'm sure I'll experiment with this technique to see if I can't train this weird hesitancy out of myself. Thanks for the shout-out.
I think that shows is that preparation is a spectrum! And in particular that the preparation is sitting in different areas. Really, my liking this pointcrawl approach to a dungeon is indicating that I don’t always like to improvise the layout/connectivity of a location. But I also understand how for some it’s either or, they want the full details or none at all. I enjoy working from no map as well as it turns out, but if I do have a map, these kind of layouts are typically what I would like, all personal preference at the end of the day!
Absolutely. Lord save us from the narcissism of small differences that is endemic in the hobby.
What software do you use to produce the point crawl graphics?
Hey! So I did this in Affinity Designer, but any program with some basic vector graphics capability and an isometric grid would work I think!
I’m old and slow… 6 decades of hex and counter war gaming. Just got into ttrpg to tell stories better. I had been finding campaign maps on line and overlay grids in photoshop. Old habits… then I saw the Cairn map with the point crawl!🤦♂️ a little slow… your dungeon isometric was another moment. A major paradigm shift in how I think about managing my game play.
Cairn is such a good game! Going through those kind of shifts in gaming can be fun I think, it’s nice when you experience an evolution.
have been super excited for these articles to drop since seeing the map you posted on the OSR reddit. Can't wait to see the next two articles! This is basically how i run everything from dungeons to cities to regions to, little pointcrawls that allow a lot of room for notes. I really love Gradient descents map, The Electrum Archive also has a great region pointcrawl, that and the region generation for Vaults of Vaarn got me into making pointcrawls. Hype for the next articles!
Thank you so much! You can check those out other parts right now! They should be released and up on the feed!
oh nice, I saw this article had come out through my email, so I'm getting to all of this a bit late. I'll get to reading them. Thanks for putting in all this work!
Thanks for putting this together. As someone who HATES drawing trad dungeons and does every dungeon as an area/pointcrawl with connections (that’s even how I’ve developed my solo dice drop style dungeons in my own games I’ve put out) this is great.
Glad I could help! It’s always great to have presentation/format options so we can pick stuff that suits us right?
For sure. I think a lot people get stuck in what they think they *have* to do for some reason. THIS IS A GAME DAMMIT