Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Dungeon Scrawl: Old school maps in minutes

dungeonscrawl.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

41–50 of 69 posts

Re: Dungeon Scrawl: Old school maps in minutes

#41

Post by SweetLlamaMyth »

taormina wrote: post #35

As someone who has been moved his DnD sessions to Discord with COVID going on, and has made a "shareable map" out of Google Sheets, this looks fantastic!

My table has made great use of https://shmeppy.com for remote-play maps. The maps it makes are much less sophisticated (just painting color on the squares and lines of a grid). What it gives you instead are player/monster tokens that everyone can see, measuring tools, and "laser pointers" to allow participants to draw attention to a region of the map while speaking.

EDIT: also an awesome fog of war feature; how could I forget?

Re: Dungeon Scrawl: Old school maps in minutes

#44

Post by at_a_remove »

drdeadringer wrote: post #34
scott_s wrote: post #15

Is the Escher-esque image under "Isometric Edit Mode" ( https://dungeonscrawl.com/images/pic10.png ) a joke, or does the tool allow for physically impossible layouts? Or am I reading the image wrong and it's a physical layout?

This reminds me of the Dr Who episode "Castrovalva"; the Doctor and his companions do spend some time running around trying to figure out the layout until they realize what's going on. I've entertained the idea of DMing that type of thing for a while now.

Q1, Queen of the Demonweb Pits, had something similar if I recall.

Re: Dungeon Scrawl: Old school maps in minutes

#45

Post by pharke »

kemayo wrote: post #5
e12e wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is this somehow distinctive from Dragon Magazine / Dungeon Magazine from the late 80s in a way I'm not seeing? Or eg. the various TSR boxed settings with dungeons?

That cross-hatching-in-the-walls thing is fairly distinct, and I saw it immediately on Dyson's blog but not on a quick survey of old Dragon/Dungeon maps. That said, Dyson is clearly going for that aesthetic mostly, so it could be convergent evolution, and I'm hardly up to date on current styles for maps in other places.

Just taking a look at Dungeon Magazine on archive.org and it seems that crosshatching in walls is pretty common, at least in the early editions.

https://archive.org/details/Dungeon_Magazine_002/page/n25/mo...

https://archive.org/details/Dungeon_Magazine_002/page/n45/mo...

https://archive.org/details/Dungeon_Magazine_002/page/n51/mo...

https://archive.org/details/Dungeon_Magazine_003/page/n31/mo...

https://archive.org/details/Dungeon_Magazine_003/page/n41/mo...

Re: Dungeon Scrawl: Old school maps in minutes

#46

Post by simonh »

at_a_remove wrote: post #44
drdeadringer wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This reminds me of the Dr Who episode "Castrovalva"; the Doctor and his companions do spend some time running around trying to figure out the layout until they realize what's going on. I've entertained the idea of DMing that type of thing for a while now.

Q1, Queen of the Demonweb Pits, had something similar if I recall.

There was an article in Dragon magazine back on the 80s about hypercube dungeon layouts.

Re: Dungeon Scrawl: Old school maps in minutes

#47

Post by at_a_remove »

simonh wrote: post #46
at_a_remove wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Q1, Queen of the Demonweb Pits, had something similar if I recall.

There was an article in Dragon magazine back on the 80s about hypercube dungeon layouts.

Even further back, there's Hunt the Wumpus, which I think was originally laid out on a Platonic solid. Messing with adventurers is a time-honored tradition!

Re: Dungeon Scrawl: Old school maps in minutes

#49

Post by johnzim »

xwdv wrote: post #48

I would like to see a randomize button that creates something random and then lets me edit it to my tastes. It's just so exhausting to plan an entire dungeon from scratch.

One thing I found fun was to start by blocking out one room, then another and another and basically switching between tools - the geometric shape too for a tower or two, and then start linking them up.

After a little bit of noodling you start to feel the outline of a building and then you can be a little more deliberative.

In my experience, the hard part about planning out a dungeon is filling it with encounters.

There's another creator (Donjon) which doesn't make maps as prettily or easily as this one but it does allow you to basically do what you're looking for:

https://donjon.bin.sh/d20/dungeon/

Re: Dungeon Scrawl: Old school maps in minutes

#50

Post by hunterloftis »

I love the style of this and tried something similar before changing direction with Table of Sending.

After lots of testing, I settled on 2.5D tiles for the DMs who wanted to sketch their maps 15 minutes before playtime:

- https://tableofsending.com/

The shadowcasting fog-of-war has also been awesome since the map is semantically understandable:

- https://twitter.com/HunterLoftis/status/1269396682233581568

Post reply on HN