el-remmen
Moderator Emeritus
Note: Possible spoilers for Ghosts of Saltmarsh and the classic U1-U3 series.
I don't know about you, but I often find myself redrawing maps for pre-published adventures. This may be because of my tendency to run 1E modules and 1e/2e adventures from Dungeon (for whatever the current edition I am running - currently 5th). I am currently prepping U3 - The Final Enemy out of Ghosts of Saltmarsh (I lost track of my copies of the original modules, unfortunately) and was really annoyed to find that the maps are still presented with one square equaling 10 feet rather than have them re-scaled to be 5 feet per box for easy representation on the grid. So that is the first thing I usually do ahead of time so that I don't mess up trying to do it on the fly on the battlemat during play and waste time (some areas I pre-draw entirely using 1 inch box graph paper).
The other thing I am doing is just making the levels (especially the top level) just smaller overall. These maps are just too big and logistically speaking would take too many sessions to get through (Heck, I made the maps of the swamp lair in N1 - Against the Cult of the Reptile God significantly smaller and it still took my group four sessions to get through - not including a session of travel to get there). Furthermore, as written, the PCs are expected to go here twice, stretching out the time even further.
Anyway, while some individual areas need to be as big as they are drawn because they are meant to hold 60 sahaugin at a time or whatever and it is meant to be a huge fortress, other areas are needlessly huge and spread out, so I try to redraw the whole thing to fit on a two page spread on my graph paper journal. This means removing some rooms entirely (since the fortress is still under construction, I just make some tunnels/rooms - like area #3 - end in rubble or incomplete walls) and making some rooms smaller. (For example, I see no reason why the Spartan-like sahuagin would need roomy quarters - even a champion does not need a 30' x 30' room, when a 15' x 15' cell is still bigger than the average American college dorm room). This also means moving some rooms (for example, I put area 13 - the slave pens - halfway between levels 1 and 2 by looping a hallway and adding a sloped passage). However, it also means carefully considering what that means for sound carrying and the opportunity and speed with which reinforcements can arrive if the PCs make too much noise.
I just cut the hall with the guest rooms (areas 14 and 15) on the top level because sahuagin don't seem like the type to have "guests."
Lastly, sometimes these modules have unusually shaped corridors and layouts for no good reason (in this case I think the reason is to keep sound from traveling too easy around the place, but that actually makes little sense given that it is a fortress mean to go on alert on a moment's notice). So, while I try to keep a little of the idiosyncratic shape, I also straighten a lot of it out. It is one thing if the map is of natural caverns being put to use as a lair, but a designed and engineered place presumably is designed towards its uses.
Levels two and three are even bigger and I am considering trying to combine them into one - but that may be too much work and undercut the sense that there are enough enemies in here to be considered an army that threatens multiple communities, so we'll see. . .
All this said, this is not a complaint (well, it is partially a complaint - the 10' squares thing is annoying), since I find drawing/re-drawing maps to be fun and sometimes a challenge (like I have said many time before drawing and crafting to me is as much a part of the hobby as encounter design or what have you). I was mostly wondering if other people run into this issue and how they handle it.
Anyway, below is the original map from Ghosts of Saltmarsh (1 square = 10') and my (still not inked) quick re-do of it (1 square = 5') .
I don't know about you, but I often find myself redrawing maps for pre-published adventures. This may be because of my tendency to run 1E modules and 1e/2e adventures from Dungeon (for whatever the current edition I am running - currently 5th). I am currently prepping U3 - The Final Enemy out of Ghosts of Saltmarsh (I lost track of my copies of the original modules, unfortunately) and was really annoyed to find that the maps are still presented with one square equaling 10 feet rather than have them re-scaled to be 5 feet per box for easy representation on the grid. So that is the first thing I usually do ahead of time so that I don't mess up trying to do it on the fly on the battlemat during play and waste time (some areas I pre-draw entirely using 1 inch box graph paper).
The other thing I am doing is just making the levels (especially the top level) just smaller overall. These maps are just too big and logistically speaking would take too many sessions to get through (Heck, I made the maps of the swamp lair in N1 - Against the Cult of the Reptile God significantly smaller and it still took my group four sessions to get through - not including a session of travel to get there). Furthermore, as written, the PCs are expected to go here twice, stretching out the time even further.
Anyway, while some individual areas need to be as big as they are drawn because they are meant to hold 60 sahaugin at a time or whatever and it is meant to be a huge fortress, other areas are needlessly huge and spread out, so I try to redraw the whole thing to fit on a two page spread on my graph paper journal. This means removing some rooms entirely (since the fortress is still under construction, I just make some tunnels/rooms - like area #3 - end in rubble or incomplete walls) and making some rooms smaller. (For example, I see no reason why the Spartan-like sahuagin would need roomy quarters - even a champion does not need a 30' x 30' room, when a 15' x 15' cell is still bigger than the average American college dorm room). This also means moving some rooms (for example, I put area 13 - the slave pens - halfway between levels 1 and 2 by looping a hallway and adding a sloped passage). However, it also means carefully considering what that means for sound carrying and the opportunity and speed with which reinforcements can arrive if the PCs make too much noise.
I just cut the hall with the guest rooms (areas 14 and 15) on the top level because sahuagin don't seem like the type to have "guests."
Lastly, sometimes these modules have unusually shaped corridors and layouts for no good reason (in this case I think the reason is to keep sound from traveling too easy around the place, but that actually makes little sense given that it is a fortress mean to go on alert on a moment's notice). So, while I try to keep a little of the idiosyncratic shape, I also straighten a lot of it out. It is one thing if the map is of natural caverns being put to use as a lair, but a designed and engineered place presumably is designed towards its uses.
Levels two and three are even bigger and I am considering trying to combine them into one - but that may be too much work and undercut the sense that there are enough enemies in here to be considered an army that threatens multiple communities, so we'll see. . .
All this said, this is not a complaint (well, it is partially a complaint - the 10' squares thing is annoying), since I find drawing/re-drawing maps to be fun and sometimes a challenge (like I have said many time before drawing and crafting to me is as much a part of the hobby as encounter design or what have you). I was mostly wondering if other people run into this issue and how they handle it.
Anyway, below is the original map from Ghosts of Saltmarsh (1 square = 10') and my (still not inked) quick re-do of it (1 square = 5') .