UPDATE (4/19/2009) - Sharpen your pencils, get out the graph paper and enter the One Page Dungeon Contest! A "metric ton" of awesome prizes awaits those who dare! Contest ends May 14th, 2009!
Yesterday, Sham/Dave posted about his attempts to create a template for a "one page" dungeon level key. That was all prompted by a discussion on the Original D&D Forum about creating megadungeons.
As I said, one of my "McFly" weaknesses is someone saying "Gee, I wish a geek would do this...". It's how I created the microlite20 character generator and microlite20 NPC generator (which actually got me back into PHP and helped me to find a job in July, but that's a strange story for another day...) and it's how I was tempted (obsessed) to solve Sham's problem.
The hardest part actually was getting the 6 line/in, 30x30 grid from the Incompetech PDF (I used the Cornell template, based on Norman Harman's suggestion) into the OpenOffice document - I learned how to upgrade Ubuntu 8.10 to OpenOffice 3.0 in a roundabout way and got the PDF import extension. After that, it was pretty easy to use frames (text boxes) and line everything up.
The One Page Dungeon Level Templates can be downloaded here. This zip includes both Word and OpenOffice documents/templates.
(http://sites.google.com/site/chgowizsite/Home/OnePageDungeonLevelTemplates.zip?attredirects=0)
In honor of Sham's ideas, I'm releasing my own One Page Dungeon Level - The Wizard's Ruined Tower Level 1 - it's based loosely on an old 2E Fast Play module and one of the (I think) 3E Quick Start adventures. I can't remember quite where it came from. The map is hand-drawn in pencil. It's stat'ed for an OD&Dish type of game, so microlite74, OD&D, Holmes and Swords/Wizardry should work just fine with this. I used this to tweak the one page template.
Please, please... feel free to use this and give me feedback. One Page Dungeon Level Templates is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 United States License. If you publish, just please throw a link in to my blog, please.
14 comments:
Kudos to Chgowiz for all of his help with this. I've got the first one-pager done for my new megadungeon.
Most awesome! I just know I'm going to be using these in the New Year.
Ahh...this could be just the thing for a series of five room mini-dungeons I'm planning. Kinda like The Book of Treasure Maps
Thanks, chgowiz!
If I might make a suggestion, you should tag all documents you produce like this with your blog information as a footer.
@Propagandroid - thanks! I'll definitely keep that in mind and do that.
Next week I am going to give this a shot for my pet project!
@all - thank you and please share your results (if you can) - I'd love to see how this goes.
If there's an interest, I can post some of my steps for using GIMP to create the dungeon map, although Cartographer's Guild is probably a much better resource.
A belated "thank you" for making this template available. It was a heck of a lot of fun to play with. I couldn't stop until I had a finished dungeon level to play with.
Hey Chgowiz, this template is awesome! Absolutely brilliant and perfect for my upcoming OD&D campaign. You'll be getting an Exalt on the OD&D forums from me. Thanks!
I used the basic format for my Ancient Academy map! :)
@Stuart - that's great! I read your writeup and I'm glad it worked out well for you. I hope you continue to share your experiences and (eventually) your maps/dungeons with us.
I have a follow-on idea for this. Reminds me of the old geomorphs.
I've seen model railroad clubs and Lego clubs do this thing where members build sections of layout but there's a defined common interface at the edges.
You could set a suggested standard of corridors that lead in and out of the map sheet. Then the one page maps would link together more easily. (Of course, we can link them vertically as well.)
@Jon - That's an interesting idea! Maybe for a follow-on contest? We've had enough entries and starts that I think changing the rules now would mess people up - but I remember those geomorphs very well. I had much solo fun with them.
I think this sounds great. I'm trying to play with my children (ages 8 & 11). Having one page dungeons means I could take several with me and just pull them out on trips, vacations, waiting for doctor's appointments, etc.
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