Best of the Web - MSJX Maps

This week's Best of the Web is dedicated to maps by m.s.jackson at msjx. Specifically dungeon maps. I've never really been happy with my own dungeon maps which tend to look like the sample in the back of the original DMG. I've always kept my eye out for better style (isometric, top-down 3-d, or standard) but I get attracted to overly complicated looking maps which take too long. As I look around I keep coming back to msjx's maps. The older ones are a bit different style but the newer ones are beautiful. They are simple, clean and clear (especially the 'infamous Fuck Your Printer versions'. 

Here is a selection of the top-down dungeon maps I like:

The Eternal Grave of the Elaborist Saqqara

The Great Hall redux

Vinjeøran Burial Tomb

The Temple of Sorrowed Ladies

No man is an island, a dungeon tomb

The Mines at Torgath

Sigyn's Kurgan

A dungeon

There is also an isometric map that I really like. Bath House of Blonin Breasthaven is for Far Away Lands and it perfectly matches the aesthetic feel of that game and is the prettiest isometric map I've seen. Simple, clean, and clear.

6-Mile Hexes

There has been discussion back and forth over map scale with many deciding that 6-mile hexes were superior. I happen to agree. A 6-mile hex has a ton of room for adventure can be seen by the 6-mile hex of New York City (that's a hex that is 6-miles from flat-side to flat-side (or 7-miles from point-to-point).

Live from New York

I'm not from NY and I've only been a few times but I think Manhattan being a popular tourist destination and because of the unique geography with the rivers outlining the island it makes an ideal example. Half of Manhattan fits comfortably with chunks of New Jersey and Queens. That's a lot of space.

Here's a second example a bit closer to home, San Francisco which also happens to have a nice geography for showing this scale. The whole thing doesn't fit into the 6-mile hex so I've included the overflow to help show things. Ever walked from one end of San Francisco to another, it's doable in a day, but it's a bit of a haul even cutting off some bits. Pro-tip, the cable car engineers often let younger folks jump on for free as long as you don't get on the first stop, there is a hitch however in that you may have to get off and help the engineer push when the car runs into one of the few spots between cables (at least they did in the 80s).

So all things considered I think 6-miles has enough space. So much so that a hex crawl that just gives one item seems a bit under-developed. I'd go with a hex should have minimum one item. The 1d8 chart below can help determine where the item is at any given time, if you roll an 8 toss a 1d6 to determine the which partial hex. Those subdivisions are 2-miles each (from flat to flat but it doesn't matter because where just trying to find the basic location of the cave where the Cthulu cultists are having their ceremony, we need to know if they are in Battery Park or Jersey (or a Pac Bell stadium or at For Point for that matter).

Roll 1d8 and maybe ean additional 1d6 to find out where things are

For the Love of Maps

I need a break from cleaning up village maps and thought I'd do something slightly different.

I've always loved maps. When I went hiking as a kid I'd stare at the topomaps, when I went to Disneyland or another theme park I'd obsess over the map. I saw beauty in dungeon maps when I started playing Holmes back in the day and one of my first 'real' jobs was at a mapping company and I actually brought up D&D and the various maps during the interview.

When I was young I could draw pretty well, as the decades rolled on drawing morphed into photoshop and my hand-eye skills changed (I'm hoping to rebuild that skill with practice). So for most of the stuff on this site it's recycled Public Domain stuff from long, long, long ago.

Exterior maps are where I'm going with this, more specifically regional maps. I loved Darlenes map of Greyhawk so much I framed it and put it on my wall. It was a great large scale map with a sense of balance and beauty. I didn't like the slavish devotion to the hex standard though and it covered way to much area in insufficient detail but that was the DIY attitude of early TSR. Then I ran into Harn by Columbia games and their maps were amazing. Realistic but without going into the topo-lines that give me too much of a modern/sci-fi vibe. I framed Harn and put it up as well (and Ivania and others). But the kind of maps I found years later searching about on the internet were Hachure maps and Poetic Maps.

Hachure map

Hachure maps, are one of the earliest styles of topographical maps, before they settled on lines to show the vertical topography every x feet, instead they used lines that somewhat mimicked the verticals in a less accurate more stylized way. Although from post-renaissance in nature these maps feel they could have been drawn during the medieval period. They show most things without having to resort to symbols.

Poetic Maps (the term used by Columbia Games, I don't know the accurate name) date back even further. These are maps that draw out what you would see. They don't really need a legend as a hill looks like a hill, and a river like a river. The best known example would be the Middle Earth map. These can be hideous but I find most to be somewhat beautiful. Most maps created in the medieval period and the renaissance are Poetic maps. Most were done using metal etchings that could then be used to print books and occasionally they'd be colorized afterwards. The internet is full of badly colorized versions but the underlying maps are beautiful.

So doing my own maps I've been trying to settle on a style Ptolemy. Topographic maps were out as they were too modern. Harn style were difficult to get right, I'm too sloppy for that. I found a ton of Hachure maps and Poetic Maps and vacillate back and forth over which I prefer. It's likely I'll go with one style for one campaign world and the other for another, giving a very different feel to each. But which to spend time on now?