Building an 'old school' 3-ring binder. Input wanted!

[jdrakeh]

Lots of town and city stuff there - if you need encounters for them, email me at mythmere AT yahoo dot com and I'll send you the City Encounters pdf, if you don't already have it.

Thank you so much for the kind offer but I'm trying my best to be self-supporting. After I run some errands tomorrow, I'll be browsing by your Lulu storefront to pick up City Encounters, Eldritch Weirdness, and the Quick Primer for Old School Gaming. In fact, I already have them bookmarked!

Also, FWIW, Swords & Wizardry is so very much the game system that I've been waiting for since the late 1990s. Many others have come close but Swords & Wizardry really brings the fun back to fantasy! Thanks for getting me jazzed about role-playing again, man.

 

[jdrakeh]

I spent an hour or two fooling around with Hex Mapper and Photoshop last night to come up with the following overland map. I worked in various 0One map modules (and you may see some classic D&D/AD&D correspondence in there, as well).

Note that individual manors are not shown on the map, nor are hundreds (though there are three within the shire). The Sheriff, of course, resides in New Falcon, though the city itself is not under his domain. Or, at least, I think that's how I'm going to swing it. As I mention further up the thread, the world above ground is secondary to what lay beneath its surface.

 

[Mythmere1]

Thank you so much for the kind offer but I'm trying my best to be self-supporting. After I run some errands tomorrow, I'll be browsing by your Lulu storefront to pick up City Encounters, Eldritch Weirdness, and the Quick Primer for Old School Gaming. In fact, I already have them bookmarked!

Also, FWIW, Swords & Wizardry is so very much the game system that I've been waiting for since the late 1990s. Many others have come close but Swords & Wizardry really brings the fun back to fantasy! Thanks for getting me jazzed about role-playing again, man.

You're absolutely welcome!
Matt

 

[Orius]

I'll build up to that. . . it's not like I can throw together three binders full of notes over the weekend

Neither can I, I'm not that crazy, and I'd never be able to write that much that quickly. Some of the stuff in my binders is 15 years old.

This is pretty much what the Dungeon Under the Mountain maps from 0One Games are for. I know you said that you don't follow electronic products but, if you get a chance, these are highly recommended at less than $4.00 a pop. They're basically customizeable PDF maps of mega-dungeon levels. You can turn numerous features such as colors, furniture, and room numbers on or off to print GM maps and player maps all from the same file.

Sounds interesting, but I'm very old school with my maps. As in getting a tablet of graph paper and pencilling it in. Drawing maps was always one of the things about DMing I really enjoyed. One of these days, when I actually get arund to creating a significant mega-dungeon in the spirit of Castle Greyhawk or Undermountain, I want to get those double-sized 11x17' tablets of paper that Staples sells. I swear they were made for D&D players.

If it were up to me, there's four things I'd keep (which may or may not already be on your list; I don't recognize about 95% of it) no matter what:

1. Some sort of book/binder/whatever of spells and spell write-ups
2. One of the many different arms and equipment guides, for weapon and armour write-ups
3. A book/binder/list/whatever of magic items
4. A binder of any and all tables, charts, etc. that you have designed yourself in the past that suit the particular genre you are running - you can always find generic stuff in one book or another; but your homebrew bits need to be organized.

I have some of these. I have a custom arms and equipment guide I printed out about 9 years ago, from all the stuff I had in 2e splats, Dragon articles, and so on. Unfortunately it's mostly 2e-based. That's one of the things I need to update when I get the time, I want it to be based on 3e standards for consistancy, and remove some of the extra uneeded stuff. Particularly the weapon list, it's all alphabetical like 2e's list instead of organized like the 3e list, and has tons and tons of redundant weapons (like polearms and minor sword variations).

 

[jdrakeh]

Sounds interesting, but I'm very old school with my maps. As in getting a tablet of graph paper and pencilling it in.

Yeah, I miss the days when I had the free time to do that I was just lamenting the other day, when talking to an old friend on the phone, that I hadn't held on to my old boxes of handmade maps and such (well, actually, I did — but a flood ruined all of them while they were in storage). I just don't have the time to recreate all of that stuff as an adult.

 

[Orius]

Yeah, sometimes I do a map on the computer, a lot easier to edit it during the creation progress, and a good program can make very nice quality maps. Unfortunately, I've found few programs that handle city or overland maps well, many of the ones I've tried were disappointing in one way or other.

 

[jdrakeh]

Well, I had a little bit of free time, so I threw together the following overland map with travel guidelines (intended to be used as front and back inserts in a 3-ring binder). And, yes, "Airie" is a deliberate misspelling of Aerie.