The DM's Guide to DMing

lucci.tonight wrote:

Thanks folks for the response. That's something for me to think about when preparing.

Side note; I just scrolled up a bit and

Eleima wrote:

Thank you MilkmanDanimal and kenada for the feedback! I'm in no particular rush, but I'm shopping around for some adventures to take my players on further down the road.
...
My inexperience as a DM is almost painful sometimes, but I feel I make up for that in improv sometimes.

Hello friend, nice to see a familiar face (name?) diving into the world of DM around the same time. My inexperience is painful too, but thankfully my players couldn't recognize them Too many times I needed to tell them after a session "so uh I screwed up [that situation] and it probably should've been done like this..."

Honestly, even if my experienced players recognize it, they’re grateful enough not to be DM’ing that they just gloss over it. I typically just roll with it.
Last night in particular, there were a few question about poison persisting or not if a character’s been knocked out. I guess I use the rules as guidelines and I don’t want to be searching through the rule book for ten minutes as it breaks the flow and our sessions are short enough as is (~2 hours’ish, there’s only so many hours in the day and three of us are parents).

Thanks everyone for the feedback. I decided ultimately to go with the Waterdeep adventures, since I’m gonna need the Zhentarim content. I’ve got a lot of reading to do! ^^

I've been DMing for quite a while (since the early aughts) and I still make mistakes like that. I've definitely found that if you've got good players the best way to handle it is to glide past it during the session and talk about it after with an honest "ok i f**ed this up" or "ok i misunderstood this rule, we won't rewind anything that happened but here is how this will work in the future" and if someone built a character around a rule they misunderstood to be kind about letting them change it if the real interpretation breaks their character.

oh hey, so i got my first adventure writing slot for a DMs Guild anthology project! No pressure!

(And that's literally all i am allowed to say right now..... shhhh....) but will update you when i'm allowed

pyxistyx wrote:

oh hey, so i got my first adventure writing slot for a DMs Guild anthology project! No pressure!

(And that's literally all i am allowed to say right now..... shhhh....) but will update you when i'm allowed

So, naughty tiefling focused, or just naughty tiefling adjacent?

I *wish* it was a naughty tiefling anthology!

(scribbles note for future reference)

lucci.tonight wrote:

My inexperience is painful too, but thankfully my players couldn't recognize them Too many times I needed to tell them after a session "so uh I screwed up [that situation] and it probably should've been done like this..."

Allow me to add another voice to the chorus: You don't need to be an infallible rules expert.

If you make a mistake, just say so and work out how to fix it (change from now on, retcon the result, whatever).

"You have this whole world planned, don't you, Pyxi?"

Pyxi looks behind screen, single note is scribbled: "Naughty tiefling?"

"Yes."

Has anyone here designed a megadungeon? I’m working on one for my campaign, and it seems I’ve hit a bit of writer’s block. The first floor is okay, and I have some good ideas for later ones, but I just blank when it comes time to key the map I drew for the first part of the second floor. I think the issue is I drew the map assuming I could BS and rationalize my way through keying it, but that’s obviously not working out for me.

I’m thinking my next steps are to flesh out my areas’ themes and factions. I’ve read various things on megadungeons, but there doesn’t seem to be a lot written on actually designing one. While I’m not a fan of his style, Angry GM’s Megadungeon Mondays seems to suggest a similar tack (what he calls the dungeon’s story). Hopefully that means I’m on the right track now.

I haven't actually run a megadungeon (it's on the Big List of Campaign Ideas That I Will Someday Find Time For) so I'm interested to hear other people's ideas on megadungeon design. I could talk about my general dungeon design approach, though it's mostly a grab-bag of ideas cribbed from all over the place.

Have you played How to Host a Dungeon? It’s a solitaire game in itself, but also an inspiration generator for megadungeons.

kenada wrote:

Has anyone here designed a megadungeon? I’m working on one for my campaign, and it seems I’ve hit a bit of writer’s block. The first floor is okay, and I have some good ideas for later ones, but I just blank when it comes time to key the map I drew for the first part of the second floor. I think the issue is I drew the map assuming I could BS and rationalize my way through keying it, but that’s obviously not working out for me.

I’m thinking my next steps are to flesh out my areas’ themes and factions. I’ve read various things on megadungeons, but there doesn’t seem to be a lot written on actually designing one. While I’m not a fan of his style, Angry GM’s Megadungeon Mondays seems to suggest a similar tack (what he calls the dungeon’s story). Hopefully that means I’m on the right track now.

Have you checked out Donjon? It's a random dungeon generator and it's a phenomenally useful tool; you can build loads of different dungeons of various themes and sizes. I just did a Colossal one for the heck of it, and about 15-20 seconds later it had built me a 291 room dungeon. You can choose Undead or Arcane or some other group to populate it, and it'll do it all. It's silly how useful it is. I'd say if you need some ideas, randomly create a few dungeons with different ideas, and start pulling stuff out you like.

never run one (yet!) but i can churn out a megadungeon map or two no bother...

here's one i made for my patreon page a while back (basically just a doodle that got out of control, but the idea in the back of my head was of an ancient city built around an underground lake that the adventurers would explore as part of an archaeological expedition.

IMAGE(https://smackfolio.files.wordpress.com/2020/05/random-megadungeon-1.jpg)

And one of my (MANY) unfinished projects is fleshing out the dungeons i drew for inktober last year into a proper extended megadungeon.

IMAGE(https://smackfolio.files.wordpress.com/2019/10/part-one-example.jpg)

beeporama wrote:

"You have this whole world planned, don't you, Pyxi?"

Pyxi looks behind screen, single note is scribbled: "Naughty tiefling?"

"Yes."

Have you been reading my tuesday campaign notes!

I actually had a red herring set up today for my group earlier - they are looking for a saboteur aboard an airship and they noticed that one of the crew was looking a bit shifty and was a little sweaty and slippery and was radiating magic.

...Turned out that she'd just spent the evening with the resident Tiefling bard and a bottle of Oil of Slipperiness and therefore had a pretty solid alibi.

Thanks for the suggestions. That How to Host a Dungeon game looks neat, though I think I’m going to start with a stream of consciousness dump regarding the dungeon and see where things go from there.

Gremlin wrote:

I haven't actually run a megadungeon (it's on the Big List of Campaign Ideas That I Will Someday Find Time For) so I'm interested to hear other people's ideas on megadungeon design. I could talk about my general dungeon design approach, though it's mostly a grab-bag of ideas cribbed from all over the place.

Sure, I wouldn’t mind hearing that.

This is less about drawing the map and more about either why you put things in the map or what you do with a megadungeon map once you've drawn it.

Note that I haven't done a megadungeon specifically--I've designed dungeons for my players, I've done West Marches games and sandbox stuff with big maps but I haven't specifically done a megadungeon. But I think a lot of this design knowledge can transfer over.

Landmarks

So, I'm a much more sandbox, narrative-simulation GM. So the Angry GMs approach of using XP gains to plan out the anticipated adventure is very clever from a game perspective but antithetical to my personal preferences. Which is fine, because there are different flavors of roleplaying, and some people prefer the way that lets the GM plan out climaxes and so on. I'm frequently way over on a Gygaxian sandbox side of things of "here's some stuff, go explore and figure out how it all fits together"...though I've also designed sessions for Mouse Guard that had pretty exact flowcharts.

First off, I tend to think in terms of multiple layers of structure: we've got the physical layout of the dungeon, but also other ways to look at it. I like to take the map and make an abstracted graph of the rooms and their relationships, so I can think of both the physical layout of the rooms and the way they connect together. But we can overlay this with other structures: this region is where the goblins patrol, here's how the factions divide up the space, this part of the dungeon is a natural cave while this other part is built up, this monster has it's den here but you can see signs of it elsewhere in the dungeon.

The reason why thinking of it in terms of multiple structures is because when we're designing a big, open-ended space, a way to get a manageable handle on it is to take an ordinary quest and scatter the parts around the dungeon. Even a super-linear railroaded quest design of flipping three levers in order becomes more open-ended and interesting when you have to find the levers and deal with the other stuff going on around them.

So a useful way to populate your megadungeon is to think up a bunch of smaller quests or puzzles and deliberately scatter the piece far from each other.

The point is to motivate the design--to give the different elements you put in the dungeon a reason for being there. You can get away with really gonzo elements as long as they relate to something else--the cause-and-effect from being related to other elements helps ground them.

There is a bunch of useful terminology from other disciplines that applies no matter what kind of dungeon you're making though. The Angry GM mentions the critical path, for example. But this stuff goes way deeper--for example, Disney has been studying theme park design for over half a century--and there's a lot of useful design information out there to draw on.

Weenie: a "visual magnet" that draws guests to an area--Cinderella's Castle at Walt Disney World being a famous example. Valve are masters of using similar concepts to guide players; in Half-Life they had an explicit design goal of letting the player see the level exit before being able to get to it, going through the Portal 2 commentaries are fascinating. For dungeon design, we can apply the basic principle of giving the players glimpses of dungeon features from a distance. This can be through a simple vista or overlook, but since we've got the full GMing tools we can also think of it in other terms: a fresco that depicts the layout of the dungeon, the distant sound of an underground river, the villagers in the tavern with stories about the underground mushroom forest, the room with the unmistakable scratches on the floor that show that a dragon was here.

Kevin Lynch’s book The Image of the City has been cited at me a lot lately, so I should probably actually get around to reading it instead of just summaries of it, but one concept discussed in it is legibility in urban design, dividing the space up into paths, edges, districts, nodes, and landmarks. A good landmark characterizes the space it's in but also contrasts with it. For example, the vampire bat cavern is a maze of large bat-filled chambers, and at the center is Vald's tower. The gothic tower acts as an icon for the space but is different from it.

What we want to avoid is the thing that's plagued quest designers since the very first Choose Your Own Adventure game: blind left-or-right choices aren't interesting. Landmarks are one way to do that. There's other tools: paths that have a consistent theme (the Roman-army-carved road into the mountain); edges that act as boundaries and divide one theme from another (the river between the goblin territory and the rust monster warren); districts with a distinct theme (here's the mushroom forest caverns); etc.

Structure

Landmarks tell us where we are in the dungeon, but how do you lay out the structure of the dungeon elements? It can be an intimidating challenge because arbitrary geometry can quickly get out of hand...and we want to think about the invisible structures as well--e.g. these three rooms are important for this particular quest.

So I tend toward more sandboxy design, being influenced by things like West Marches campaigns and the open-ended megadungeon design from the Alexandrian, including a a dungeon layout technique inspired by Jennell Jaquays which fits into my larger design sensibilities that I learned from cyclic dungeon design.

You want the landmarks and structure to help give the players goals. Sometimes the system you're using can help: Torchbearer does this through the characters having explicit, written beliefs to define what they want. But with any system you can have hooks--those bits of foreshadowing that give the players something to work towards.

Importantly, you don't want the map to just be a maze of rooms. Just like there are landmarks that center the players' attention in districts, there are connections between districts. I find it useful to think of the region map as a room map where each room is it's own sub-dungeon map--i.e. a graph where the nodes are themselves graphs. There can (and probably should) be multiple paths between districts, so they're a bit more complicated than just rooms.

The idea here is that you want the dungeon to have texture. A spider-web of rooms starts to feel like an infinite featureless plane after a while, but choke points, sub-dungeons, and paths that are interestingly different (do we take the smooth road past the guardposts or do we try to raft down the underground river?) make the dungeon feel much more interesting.

Think of the way Super Metroid or Dark Souls approach level design: they use acquiring specific abilities or defeating particular enemies as gates for controlling access to areas of the map. The maps are densely interconnected, but there's a logic of those connections that the players can puzzle out.

With a megadungeon you don't need quite as many hard gates--just traversing the dungeon takes more effort than in a videogame, due to using players' social time--but the idea of spaces linked with chokepoints still applies.

And all of this applies to more than just the literal dungeon rooms--I've frequently used mission flowcharts to plan Mouse Guard missions and played in Unknown Armies campaigns where relationship graphs were an important part of the planning.

You can take these invisible structure things a step further and draw literal graph-maps for them, like the crew territory claim maps in Blades in the Dark or the social-combat maps in Diaspora.

The purpose here is to help the players anticipate things. They make better decisions and have more fun when the have some context. It also helps the story make sense in hindsight, which helps it feel more fair. I tend to err on the side of giving too much information. This isn't Gary Gygax running a tournament one-shot, and I don't enjoy arbitrary character death. (PCs very rarely die in my games.) Telegraph the danger before the players need to commit to it, give them explicit stats for the things they are considering fighting, etc.

It's much more interesting to me when the players have all the pieces to the problem and have to decide what to do about it. Besides which, in a megadungeon there will probably be enough different things going on that the players will be sorting through all of that information and putting things together in ways you didn't anticipate--which is awesome!

Themes and Content

Something I always have trouble with is coming up with the initial ideas for content. Once I've got a spark I can take off running, but operating in a vacuum is paralyzing.

I tend to lean on procedural generation and random tables, either actively as part of play or just to help spark ideas as I'm mapping things out. So things like Aaron Reed's Downcrawl come in handy. Planarch Codex: Dark Heart of the Dreamer has a one-page thing on "Dungeons as Monsters" that I like.

I mean, I'm fond of random generators in general, and some are specifically useful when planning out parts of a megadungeon.

The other way to design a thematically-consistent dungeon is to secretly print out a map of your ruined Dwarf Fortress fort and have your players explore it. That's because it comes with a history and context, so the rooms and contents make sense, or at least are internally-consistent. You can do similar things if you think about how different parts of your megadungeon fit in with its history.

I don't think you have to have the entire megadungeon planned out in obsessive detail, either. One advantage of a megadungeon is that there's lots of stuff in it, so lightly sketching out some of the content is sufficient if you are confident in your improv-content-on-the-spot techniques. (Which is another reason I keep random tables handy: a spark of an idea is enough if I can improv how it is anchored to the rest of the world.) Things build on each other and grow if you let them. Plus, having those structures I talked about is a great safety net from improv-ing: if I know the dragon lair is nearby, and I randomly roll an encounter with...goblins...who are...afraid...then clearly they're afraid because they're fleeing the dragon and I should describe their scorched armor and frightened cries to the players.

Conclusion
There you have it: my approach to dungeon design, as I think it applies to megadungeons. This is all my opinion, of course, and I'd be interested in hearing how different ideas work out in practice for an actual megadungeon.

That’s some really great stuff. I generally lean the same way you do as far as simulation and approach to GMing goes. I’ve read the megadungeon stuff at the Alexandrian several times, though I often feel like I’m missing something because I lack the context of having played those older games. Even as I’ve muddled through it with smaller dungeons, I still think it’s been a useful approach.

What you mention about texture and layers and landmarks, that’s what I think I’ve neglected. I drew a bunch of rooms and thought I could rationalize them into something, but that stopped working once I got past the first floor. I think stepping back and thinking through those things will set me up for filling out the rest of the dungeon.

As an aside, one of the reasons why I don’t want to cut the dungeon short is there is a landmark reveal towards the halfway point that I don’t want to lose. At some point, the interior of the dungeon will give way to the outside. There are several places where it can happen, but eventually they’ll see that the dungeon continues to another mote way high in the sky, and atop that mote is a castle.

They followed a fey trail to find this dungeon, and detect magic has revealed hints of magic permeating this place. I’ve dropped hints elsewhere that time and space are a bit weird in this region, and I really want drive that home by having the cave they thought they entered lead them up miles into the sky. Now I just need to make it an interesting place to continue to explore.

I hadn't seen this before today, but these articles seem interesting. Particularly the discussion of factions, fronts, clocks, and other tools to make the thing more manageable.
Let’s Build a Low-Prep Mega Dungeon, Kevin Whitaker
Part 1 Part 2 Part 3 Part 4 Part 5

That was a good read. Routines reminded me of adversary rosters, which are awesome. I’m convinced there’s no reason they shouldn’t be used all the time regardless of the scope of the dungeon (because they it so much easier to have experiences emerge organically when the dungeon reacts to the PCs). I’m not sold on fronts, however.

I’m not going to rehash why in too much detail, since I’ve discussed them here before, but I don’t think they’re a good fit for the kind of game I run. I like threat maps more, but I haven’t been using them in my current campaign because I’ve been operating from the status quo (per the Alexandrian’s suggestion), and the PCs haven’t really disrupted it yet — at 11 sessions into the campaign (and with multiple exploration groups).

However, I think the idea to create threats and clocks for the factions is a good one. At first I read that as clocks rather than clocks in the AW-sense, but I think there’s merit to using both. I had already planned to reputation into other parts of my game (PF2’s VP subsystem is kind of clock-like), so maybe I should also consider that for my factions.

Anyway, lots of good stuff here. I’m really excited about getting to work on this dungeon now. I just need to block out some time to start ideating.

Yeah---I think with a megadungeon especially it makes more sense that the dungeon is equilibrium until the players disturb it. There's already enough stuff for the GM and the players to keep track of, after all. Clocks are enough of a tool to get on with it.

The one feature of fronts that I do like is that it makes it easier (for me) to work out what will happen if the players manage to thwart them, but that's not really an exclusive or intrinsic property of fronts.

I can use some pointers on how to run a combat scenario that'll come up in my campaign very soon...
Setting: Lost Mines of Phandelver; Thundertree ruins.
Lots of small enemies scatter around the map, so the PC will be going in and out of combat fairly frequently.

Spoiler: Screenshot of how I set it up on roll20

IMAGE(https://i.ibb.co/MpKmrBf/Capture.png)

I have two specific questions.

Q1: For combat scenario where enemies join after a couple round, how does initiative works?

Suppose Tree A starts combat with PC on 1st round, and Tree B joins on the 2nd round.

  • Do I roll initiative for both Tree A and Tree B?
  • Do I wait until round 1 ends then roll initiative for Tree B? and if so, do my PC keep their initiative number?
Q2: Is there a better way to handle characters going in and out of combat too frequently?

The screenshot above only shows a part of the dungeon, but the rest is very similar. A lot of small cottages filled with many low hp monsters (Twig Blight mostly; 1d6+1hp each). I can foresee my PC rolling for combats, kill them in half a turn, venture into the next room, and rolling for combats again. I want to have a contingency plan for when my PC complains it's getting repetitive.

I have thought about exchanging some of the low hp monsters for one with a higher CR, but I'm not confident in my ability to make it balanced yet. My PC and me don't exactly mind fudging rolls though so that's what I might do if I can't get the balance correct.

Typically, roll initiative for a group; all the trees get the same initiative. If Tree 1 is there in turn one on initiative count 10, that's when Tree 2 shows up. It's just easier than rolling over and over for everybody, and I just give the same number to every enemy of the same type. Now, if there's a Bandit and a Bandit Leader, I'll do those separately, but you could do them together if you wanted. As a rule, I do all the initiative rolls at the start of the combat, and if people come in later, they just get assigned that number. FYI, if you're unsure on balance, that's a really good way to do it; if you're not sure your party can handle six Kobolds, have four be in the room and if things look too easy, the other two hear the noise and come running in. Stagger your enemies out a bit, which will give you a lot more flexibility in balancing encounters.

As for lots of little enemies, well, if it stops being fun, they aren't there. Handwave them away. They went for a walk, are hunting somewhere else, or never existed.

Yeah I roll initiative for keyword-groups (Goblin, Goblin Chief, Wolf) and i'll usually keep a handful of tokens invisible close by in case reinforcements are required, which will keep to the same initiative for speed when introduced. I've not found a good solution for bitty, stop-start-stop combat encounters (you'll hit that again in Wave Echo Cave) that i'm all that happy with, but i've taken to tweaking dungeons and encounter locations to avoid that as much as possible. (Usually throwing in an obstacle in between is usually enough i think to pace things out a bit, a trap, a barricade, some sort of puzzle, etc).

For thundertree specifically, I played it as-is first time through and I think I'd probably (and will probably, since i'm running it again) make some changes to avoid the whole stop-start combat thing.

So right now i'm thinking, straight up move all the blights to a single location around the druid's hut. It makes sense that he's potentially the one responsible for them being there. They're weak enough that by the time your players get to thundertree they should be able to handle a pretty big swarm of them.
There's a Lunchbreak Heroes youtube vid where he suggests that you could have Reidoth secretly attempting to cultivate a Gulthias tree in the area, which is an idea i'll probably steal myself next time through, using the blights as protection while he works on that.

For the now empty areas you could add something else, non-combat either a couple of traps (maybe set by the dragon cultists or Reidoth to warn of intruders/inquisitive dragons) or throw in some background info and story about the previous occupants to uncover.

Going from memory, that leaves the spiders, and a couple of locations with the ash zombies which i think would both work as-is, since you'd be taking out the "outdoor" battles on the right hand side of the map and that should pace the combat out a bit better. All of those encounters are in areas where you have to "trigger" the combat (opening the door to the ruined keep/inn, exploring the web covered building).

*You could (and i'm just thinking/typing out loud for my own game now, really) maybe change the ash-zombie encounters so that they are more along the lines of the clickers from Last of Us. make them a bit more deadly bit also completely blind and run them more like a puzzle encounter (either make the PCs really think about how they are going to take a group of these down, or how do they sneak past them to search the buildings for loot - although you'd have to ADD some loot in that case because as far as i remember there's pretty much nothing in them by default. ). Basically change it up so it's more of a skill challenge than just another turn by turn fight.

The cultists technically shouldn't really turn into a combat encounter until confronting Venomfang so that gives you a bit of a RP encounter to mix things up as well. (I had them actually be wannabe cultist - rich over-privileged noble kids from neverwinter thinking it would be cool and trendy to parley with a dragon and getting in WAY over their heads).

And the Dragon encounter is pretty solid as-is.

Thanks Milkman for the advice and info on group initiative, and pyxistyx for the various ideas/ways to modify it. Luckily I still have around 2 weeks before my party arrives at Thundertree, so that gives me some time to experiment and lay out these ideas. I will probably do something with grouping the Blights because as I was laying down the monsters I already felt tired

...throw in some background info and story about the previous occupants to uncover...

I really like this idea since one of my PC's pre-set background is he used to live in Thundertree. I have planed out what each cottages/houses used to be when Thundertree was still occupied by people. One of the house is designed to be the PC's old house, and I planted some sentimental items there (deciding between a stuff animal or a wooden toy sword), hoping my players will appreciate the little easter egg there.

lucci.tonight wrote:

Q1: For combat scenario where enemies join after a couple round, how does initiative works?

It’s up to your general policy. If you roll group initiative, then add them to the current group’s initiative. If it makes sense that they’re distinct (but still grouped), then go ahead and roll them separately. Generally, the fewer enemies that can act together on the same initiative, the better it is for PCs. Otherwise, they can easily gang up on one and overwhelm them.

Suppose Tree A starts combat with PC on 1st round, and Tree B joins on the 2nd round.
  • Do I roll initiative for both Tree A and Tree B?
  • Do I wait until round 1 ends then roll initiative for Tree B? and if so, do my PC keep their initiative number?

If it makes sense as the same fight, I’d let the PCs keep their initiatives. Ultimately, the point of initiative is to decide in which order everyone acts. It’s not really an interesting mechanic in its own right.

Q2: Is there a better way to handle characters going in and out of combat too frequently?

Adversary Rosters. The gist of it is you separate your list of enemies from your key, so you can play their reactions organically based on what the PCs are doing. If the PCs are having a noisy fight, and it makes sense for the ash zombies in area 3 come out to play, then that’s what they do. There is a risk that things can snowball out of control if the PCs are too reckless (let them retreat), but there’s also a reward for approaching things smartly and cautiously (you get to control the pace of engagement).

The way I would handle Thundertree is to go through each encounter area and write down what’s there in a list. I’d then ask myself if it makes sense for those things to be in other areas. For example, the cultists in area 13 are hiding. They have people standing guard, but maybe they also send people out on patrols to scout for incoming danger. You could then include “cultists (patrol) areas 8, 9, 10, 11, 12” in your roster, and depending on the timing and their inclination, the patrol might join the fight or retreat back to their base to fortify it (or flee!).

Here’s an example from my game. In the megadungeon we were discussing before, the PCs had made their way down to a spider’s nest. It was a huge room covered with webs. While they were doing this, I had been tracking a creature that was patrolling the area. They knew it was there from its tracks, but they didn’t really watch their flank very carefully (otherwise they would have noticed its stalking them). After they killed the giant spider there, they decided to withdraw and heal, but then they ran smack right into the patrol that was coming up behind them. It added an element of dynamism to my dungeon that wouldn’t have been there otherwise if I’d just keyed that the spider is here and the grothlut is there.

FYI that Thundertree map has a 10 foot grid. it looks like you are running it as a 5ft grid. You may want to adjust that.

Oh yeah that 5/10 thing has tripped me up in a couple of maps.

EriktheRed wrote:

FYI that Thundertree map has a 10 foot grid. it looks like you are running it as a 5ft grid. You may want to adjust that.

Ya took me a bit fiddling around on roll20 to get the grid size correct. I still need to adjust the token size because now all my monsters effectively double in size :/

Thanks Kenada for the article. Thundertree sounds like a good map to practice this concept with the patrolling cultists. Thanks roll20 for the GM layer so I can actually visualize where my baddies are and not lose track of them

Humble Bundle is running an RPG Cartography bundle. I always appreciate using map packs for my games, though I wish I had the patience/talent to draw up my own as well as pyxistyx does.

I paid more than that for Campaign Cartographer via the Bundle of Holding two years ago... and still haven't put in the time to properly learn how to use it. :/

Note that the $25 tier of the bundle only gets you a one-year license, vs $30 for a lifetime license.

I had no idea Campaign Cartographer had time-limited licenses…. Also, for what it’s worth, if you’re on their mailing list, ProFantasy sent out links to a 50% discount on your next order through their site.

I make my maps in CC3+. It has a learning curve, and I always feel dumb while using it because there’s so much I don’t know, but it gets the job done, and I sometimes make a map that almost looks pretty nice. This is the hexmap I made in CC3+ (using the Mike Schley Hex style from the Cartographer’s Annual 2018).