The DM's Guide to DMing

Also, pyxistyx, what is it about evil zombie fungus that's so incredibly compelling? The last dungeon crawl my PCs went through was also full of evil fungus monsters. I wish I'd had this latest prepackaged encounter from you at the time, I could have easily folded it into the larger structure.

Well, for me, i'm a big fan of body horror in general so i'm generally a big fan of the molds, slimes and jellies

I think I like the idea that something as seemingly simple as a fungus can take over "higher" more complex life. I don't have a playstation, but the general themes of the clicker fungus from The Last of Us and some research into cordyceps definitely influenced me there.

Speaking of oozes, someone shared a cauchemar cube on r/monsteraday recently.

Heh...gross. I love it!

For those of you using roll20 (or some other VTT) and draw your own maps, how much effort do you put into them? I’m working on my megadungeon, and I’m stuck wanting nice maps but not having the bandwidth/skill to make them. I feel like I have to use nice, color ones if I’m going to be using them in roll20 with dynamic lighting (but maybe not a good assumption). If I were just designing them for my notes, they’d be B&W with standard map symbols.

kenada wrote:

For those of you using roll20 (or some other VTT) and draw your own maps, how much effort do you put into them? I’m working on my megadungeon, and I’m stuck wanting nice maps but not having the bandwidth/skill to make them. I feel like I have to use nice, color ones if I’m going to be using them in roll20 with dynamic lighting (but maybe not a good assumption). If I were just designing them for my notes, they’d be B&W with standard map symbols.

I generally go trawl through /r/battlemaps for something interesting and base my encounters on that.

For all my mapping skillz (*cough*) ,

...I usually only have the time to draw crude shapes with the in system drawing tools or Google image search something that's close enough to work!

Really depends on how much you enjoy the mapping process; if you like building maps, pick up Dungeon Painter Studio or some other builder. If you really just want to flesh out a dungeon, just use Donjon to build a big map for you, and then fill it out with the stuff you want. I've grabbed loads of maps from r/battlemaps and I've randomly thrown black and white Donjon maps together, and the players never cared. The adventure is the point, the map's just a background for all the fun stuff anyways.

I’ve got Campaign Cartographer 3+. Given enough time, I can make something that looks okay, but I usually only have a week or two to get something ready, and that typically includes more than just making the map.

If I were running in-person, I’d be sketching out the map on a mat as we went. The players would move their minis around as they explore, and I’d describe what they see. On roll20, we use dynamic lighting, but otherwise the process is the same. So just grabbing a battlemat doesn’t feel like enough.

I tried doing ToTM, but the way I run is too dynamic. I use wandering monsters and adversary rosters, which means encounters can potentially happen anywhere. I ended up having to scramble to sketch something out in roll20, which results in a lot of dead time.

I suppose this is what I get for going too ambitious with the megadungeon. The scope is pretty sprawling. I have considered scaling it back a few times, but I really want to see it to completion.

I’ll see if I can find a balance between having something nice and having something functional. Also, I should probably look more for other maps I can repurpose, and maybe feel less self-conscious about what I’m broadcasting on roll20.

pyxistyx wrote:

For all my mapping skillz (*cough*) ,

...I usually only have the time to draw crude shapes with the in system drawing tools or Google image search something that's close enough to work!

I considered including a qualifier about mere mortals, so it’s heartening to hear this.

I've been running the Ghosts of Saltmarsh 5e campaign in Roll20 since April, and that campaign is perhaps notable as being the only released D&D campaign book (I think) that doesn't have colour maps—tapping I think into the old school aesthetic of the original adventures that make up much of the campaign. So basically black and white ink drawings with basic sketches of major room features (e.g. beds, chests, etc) and little else. Now I was a little disheartened that my players wouldn't be running around on full-colour maps, but in practice they seemed to have much more fun with the dynamic lighting (which was new to them then) and appreciated the maps for their clarity. Players vary of course, but that suggests to me that simple clear maps and good use of Roll20's dynamic lighting is enough if you don't have the time/inclination to create gorgeous artworks (as fun as they can be to draw).

I've also used Roll20's vector drawing tools to create random encounter maps (specifically outdoor maps). These usually amount to simple polygons with consistent outline/internal coloration to represent e.g. patches of thick grass (difficult terrain and hiding spots), tree trunks (with implied canopy overhead), big rocks (to block sight in dynamic lighting) and water. I find that preferable to just dropping in mismatched tile graphics from the free art assets tab. These I create in advance for a few 'types' of location, and re-use unapologetically when needed, just mixing up what end of the map the characters start on. I think it boils down to having something that is easy for the players to interpret and interact with over extraneous and occasionally distracting details.

(As a counterexample, I'm also playing in a Curse of Strahd Roll20 game, which does use the colour maps from the campaign book, and as players we will latch on to incidental background art regardless of the DM's descriptions, especially if it looks incongruous. At least twice we've interpreted something as a giant toilet, and loudly demanded an explanation from our long-suffering DM.)

kenada wrote:

For those of you using roll20 (or some other VTT) and draw your own maps, how much effort do you put into them?

LT;DR: Dungeondraft doesn't take a lot of effort, especially if you know what it is you want to draw.

I haven't had to draw any for my game(s), yet, but I do own Dungeondraft. Check out the video below about it. The video is 8 months old so there may be updates/bug fixes since it was put out. I added another one that shows some more. The second video shows some frustrating things about doors that I also ran into.

What this software won't solve is a lack of imagination, unfortunately for me. If you have imagination and know what you want the map to look like, but don't have the tool to do it, Dungeondraft is a good tool for whipping up your maps. One downside, for me, is the style of the objects. They're kind of cartoony. This could be an upside for someone else, though.

Dungeondraft has some good lighting options in it, but you may not want to use them if you are using the Dynamic Lighting feature of Roll20.

-BEP

Dungeondraft Basics Video:

Another one:

A time-lapse of a bigger, more detailed outdoor-ish map:

I went searching for Dungeondraft reviews and came across most of those videos. It looks pretty slick, the price is right, and it actually supports macOS. A lot of these nifty tools don’t have Mac support, so that’s greatly appreciated. I picked it up and will play around with it a bit. Thanks!

Glad to hear. The interface could be better but the price is real good for what it does with ease.

Post some of your maps when you get them finished.

-BEP

bepnewt wrote:

Glad to hear. The interface could be better but the price is real good for what it does with ease.

There doesn’t seem to be any documentation, but it seems to be fairly intuitive. I like how I can just grab and pull things. One of the things I loathed doing in CC3+ was mapping twisting, branching dungeons because it’s such a hassle to deal with multipolys (which you need to use once your dungeon forms a complete circuit).

Post some of your maps when you get them finished.

Will do! Once I get the map I need done, I’ll share it. I also want to convert my existing maps (because I think they’ll look a lot nicer). I’ll share those too. I think it’d be a good way to show off what I was able to do in Dungeondraft versus Campaign Cartographer 3+.

I took a stab at redoing one of my existing maps in Dungeondraft. It’s a fairly big one that I never bothered to fill in with doodads and stuff.

Dungeondraft crashed a bunch while I worked on the map. The cave tool also got pretty slow towards the end. I was able to use the scatter tool once. After that, it always crashed whenever I’d select the tool.

I feel uncertain about whether to continue using Dungeondraft. I’m going to need to sleep on it. When it worked well, it really worked well. When it got in the way, it really got in the way.

The crashing is definitely disconcerting. I haven't used the program too awfully much, but never had a crash.

The scatter tool crash issue is a known issue. A temporary fix on a pinned note in the Discord server support channel, is:

0. Back up your map.
1. Open your map file in any text editor
2. Navigate to the "object_library_memory" or "scatter_library_memory" section, depending on which one is crashing
3. There, if "mode" is set to "tags" or "used" change it to "all"
4. Set "scroll" to 0
5. Save and it should be fixed

The software is in that nebulous place of being pre-release but being a paid product.

I have no idea how often they fix issues and release updates. Maybe there is info on that on their Discord. If they are taking bug reports or the like on their Discord server, you should let them know about the large map situation.

If you'd like to send me your map so I can open it in my DD to see if I get the same issue with slowness, go for it. Send it to [myGWJLogin]@gmail.com.

I'm running the version that was current the day you said you bought the software.

-BEP

ps. Their Discord server: https://discord.gg/J9Czgpu

There's a subreddit where the creator posts patch notes: https://www.reddit.com/r/dungeondraf...

I think the Mac version was released only recently, so it might just be the newness of the port. I uploaded a copy of the map here. If you’d rather I email it, I can also do that. It takes several seconds to render the cave walls once you load the map, then it takes several (to many) to rerender them after making changes with the cave brush.

I don’t know if it was because it was a conversion rather than a new map, but it took me about four or five hours to get to what you see. I spent less time on the CC3+ map just because I never bothered to add stuff, so I can’t compare productivity directly between the two.

I really liked the painterly tools. Being able to get things down quickly was nice, though filling in all those little rooms eventually got tedious. The path tool was also pretty good. I struggled once I started trying to do things it didn’t seem designed to do. I managed to get it to fake the edges where the cave opened over the chasm, but I couldn’t find a convincing way to do a proper chasm (short of just making my own assets).

Since it’s still pre-release, I’m not going to dwell on the UX issues or some of the other problems I hit. I don’t know if they intend to give you more control over layers or not. It’d certainly be nice if they did. Still, even though I’m not sure whether I’ll stop trying to use CC3+, it’s another tool in my toolbox. Thanks again for the suggestion!

Earlier, I downloaded your map and experienced the slowness you talked about. Then, I created a new map, I think it was 100x100, and it was also slow.

Then, I created a 30x30 map and had no slowness whatsoever.

Every time you click with a tool like the cave tool, it appears to reprocess the whole map. That makes sense based on how the tools like that work. Unfortunately, it's going to get worse as the map gets larger. They really need to work on this.

-BEP

This DungeonDraft map below was posted on Reddit. Neat map and bigger than the test one I did that was slow to work with so I wonder how he did it w/o dealing with the slowness jank.

I'd like to know how he did the sides of the cliffs.

I guess it's time to learn to use reddit and ask the guy the questions!

-BEP

The map is 6080 x 4000 - open the image in a new tab to see the whole thing or just click this link.

IMAGE(https://i.redd.it/t6g29i0tlts51.jpg)

Looks like a Dwarf Fortress map.

bepnewt wrote:

This DungeonDraft map below was posted on Reddit. Neat map and bigger than the test one I did that was slow to work with so I wonder how he did it w/o dealing with the slowness jank.

It seems like only cave brushes are extremely slow. If you use a material brush, performance is not as bad.

I'd like to know how he did the sides of the cliffs.

(Edit: this is how I think the author did it.) The cliffs are a bunch of paths the author layered to create the effect of cliffs. The interior is a material brush layered on top of the cliffs. Because you can’t change the layer of floors, the floors were probably relayed manually using the pattern shape tool. Of course, there’s also ton of custom assets.

This is what I was able to do just with the built-in ones on a small map.

IMAGE(https://i.imgur.com/NAo6EWV.png)

I then took a shot at doing the same map in CC3+. It was easier in some ways and harder in others.

IMAGE(https://i.imgur.com/PUUz4tO.jpg)

Most of the challenging parts involved actually getting the dungeon tools to work right in Dungeon Designer. I like to use the Schley style, but its room and corridor tools don’t actually use the Dungeon Designer room and corridor tools. Its tools just let you draw arbitrary shapes. The nice thing about the tools in Dungeon Designer is that they can automatically break walls when connecting corridors with rooms. Fortunately, once I realized that, I just switched presets and used the standard tools with the Schley assets.

After I used those tools, I had to do some cleanup. For whatever reason, the floor fills weren’t lined up, and there was an extra node on one of the corridors. I turned the floors into a multipoly (instead of trying to figure out how to manually align the fills). For the walls, I just deleted the extra node manually. One big difference here between CC3+ and Dungeondraft is that the edits are permanent. If you want to change things around, you’ll have to deal fix up the geometry and edit it manually.

After that, it was pretty easy to lay things down. I had to manually place symbols to make the cliffs. There is a “Symbols Along” command, but I wasn’t aware of it until after I made the map. That would let me drop a couple of paths that I could use to place symbols. It’s also not quite as nice as Dungeondraft, which is again because the edits are baked into the map as soon as you make them. The path disappears, and you’re left with a bunch of symbols. Want to change things? Delete the symbols and make a new path.

I then did some additional cleanup to make the CC3+ map look less terrible. This is where CC3+ was much nicer than Dungeondraft. CC3+ has fairly robust support for sheets and layers, so I put the cliff and its topper on their own sheets. I used a color key with a poly in the shape of my dungeon, so the walls inside the dungeon would look like they were set into the dungeon instead of sitting on top.

I also adjusted the filters. By default, CC3+ applies a ridiculous bezel filter to walls. I toned that back. I also changed the filter on the walls, so the ‘ambient shadows’ didn’t look quite so harsh. Finally (but actually earlier in the process), I set an edge fade on the cliff topper, so it blended into the cliffs like the original map in your post did. Oh, and I also applied a filter to darken the topper’s fill so it was not quite as bright.

If Dungeondraft had better support for layers and editing the properties of things, it’d be killer. Right now, that is the single biggest thing I miss. I want to be able to lay things down and create effects by blending them. I shouldn’t have to create an asset that does the edge fade or dirt effect. I also wish there were better default options for material fills. I could go looking for assets, but I’d probably waste inordinate amounts of time looking for things that match the default style. :O

Yeah, you can do a lot with the path tool and material brush over multiple layers to create cliffs. Another tip I saw recently is to use lighting to make the lower levels appear darker. Here's something I threw together quickly to try it out:
IMAGE(https://i.imgur.com/9MsTDDT.png)
That's just the cliff path tool on two layers, plus the gravel material brush at the bottom. Then I lowered the overall light level and added some low-intensity lights to illuminate most of the map and create the illusion of a shadow at the bottom of the cliff.
The lighting's still a bit uneven, I could probably move my light sources around a bit to smooth out the bright spots.

I like that effect. Looks good.

For all the flexibility that CC3+ gives me, I was about a magnitude more productive putting together my sample map. I’ve got a ghast lair I need to do, so I’m going to try to do that in Dungeondraft completely (instead of trying to convert something).

We just need a few more sales before the "Heart of the House", a Haunted House ones-hot adventure I collaborated on, hits Copper Bestseller status on Dms Guild.

If you're interested in a cool higher level haunted house adventure with a lot of randomisation and replayability (plus a lot of room maps by me) , why not grab a copy while it's still discounted for October!

So my players have made the brilliant decision to trap not one, but TWO hostile Flameskulls in an empty bag of holding. I could just have the skulls burn their way out, or launch a couple fireballs at the next person who opens the bag, but that seems a bit predictable and I want to reward this poorly-thought-out bit of player creativity.

I thought I might give them a chance to negotiate with their new captives, but I'm having a heck of a time coming up with things they might have to offer. What would a nigh-immortal flaming magic skull actually want?

Why not have them be combined with some other weird thing that came across the pocket dimension (because reasons) to form some unfortunate really bad thing that escapes and causes serious badness?? New big bad thing!!

So, a flameskull might not have the canonical juice to do this, but how about if they transformed the 'inside' of the bag of holding into some sort of haunted house type thing that features many of the items that were previously stored. Your party doesn't necessarily have to go in and root out the flameskulls and whatever else they've conjured up inside, but they've probably got an awful lot of stuff stored in there... Say, Player1, where have you been keeping all of your money, anyways?

That's a fun idea but it was a completely empty bag of holding, they only found it recently so they haven't yet filled it up with miscellaneous junk.