D&D General Experiences Re-Drawing Adventure Maps?

[Shiroiken]

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.

The placements are supposed to be strategic, but sometimes the designers went with random instead. The sudden jut out of a hallway was meant to allow defenders a place to break line of sight and provide cover against intruders. It's particularly important when dealing with spellcasters, since it reduces their range (and makes fireball much more dangerous).

I totally agree on the room size for leaders, feeling that even a 20x20 is plenty. I also think your use of 3D is really, really good, since it makes sense for lizardfolk/sahuagin and can throw off players who think only in 2D.

 

[David Howery]

I didn't generally redraw dungeon maps, but I redrew large scale maps a lot. When I combined B2 and B5 into one big gaming area with the Keep in the middle, I had to redraw the outdoor map for B5 a lot to fit it onto the B2 map. Luckily, the outdoor maps for both were grid squares and the same scale, so matching them up wasn't too hard...

 

[iserith]

Since I run on Roll20, I end up redoing all dungeon maps. Almost always I'm adjusting someone else's dungeon maps rather than do my own from scratch. There are just so many decent maps out there to use as a starting place. It's an exercise I really enjoy working on, easily my favorite part of the lonely fun of DMing. I often make changes so that the dungeons have more verticality and less linearity. Having a high amount of meaningful choices per unit of session time makes for a highly engaging game in my experience.

Thinking about and discussing adventure locations from a pure gameplay standpoint (less so about lore/history of the dungeon) is very interesting and useful to me, so more threads like this please!

 

[RobJN]

A classic, with some embellishments:

This was a working draft, where I was adding stairs up to the castle walls, a walled garden on the northewest, kitchen doorway access, and stables to the northeast

 

[Peter BOSCO'S]

The reason for larger rooms and corridors is so that the party does not have to spend all their early turns doing nothing but moving through the difficult terrain of the squares of party members who are in front of them, but who have lower initiatives. Smaller rooms make it easier for choke points to cut off melee focused characters while still giving ranged characters much more freedom to act. Don't make rooms smaller unless you are o.k. with this.

 

[el-remmen]

The reason for larger rooms and corridors is so that the party does not have to spend all their early turns doing nothing but moving through the difficult terrain of the squares of party members who are in front of them, but who have lower initiatives. Smaller rooms make it easier for choke points to cut off melee focused characters while still giving ranged characters much more freedom to act. Don't make rooms smaller unless you are o.k. with this.

I kept all the halls the same width and just changed their lengths.

I never knew passing through an allied box was difficult terrain, I always let people do it for free (3E holdover, I guess).

Ranged characters are worse off in close quarters, allies can grant cover to enemies unintentionally and in the way I run the game, they can hit a friend!

 

[el-remmen]

I took @cowpie's advice and put the bisecting hallway back in on the first level:

 

[el-remmen]

It took some work to cram level two into a two-page spread, in fact, I couldn't. I had to put the throne room and the baron's quarters on the next page, but the sections break off from each other nicely (I edited them together below). The biggest change are the vertical halls that flank the temple (37), which now have steps leading below areas 27 and 29 - creating a potential place to get trapped. I had to keep the dining room (41) large to fit all the sahuagin, but I am going to describe it as two stories tall with stone tables and benches hanging from the ceiling, allowing for multiple levels of dining in the submerged room. The sharks pens will be similarly described. Barracks (24) is also a pretty large room.

 

[Richards]

I redid the maps for the "Ex Libris" adventure from Dungeon #29 - the one with the shifting rooms in the lower level. As written, each of the fifteen rooms would require a separate 16" by 16" map, so the first thing I did was cut the dimensions in half, since an 8" by 8" geomorph fit much nicer into a 9" by 12" Manilla envelope for transport. (At this stage of our campaign, we were playing at the house of the other family who made up our player base.) As the adventure used the AD&D 1E rules and we were playing a 3.5 campaign, I also ended up swapping out some of the creatures that didn't yet have 3E counterparts, but other than the size I kept the designs of the fifteen shifting rooms pretty much the same.

Johnathan

 

[el-remmen]

I redid the maps for the "Ex Libris" adventure from Dungeon #29 - the one with the shifting rooms in the lower level. As written, each of the fifteen rooms would require a separate 16" by 16" map, so the first thing I did was cut the dimensions in half, since an 8" by 8" geomorph fit much nicer into a 9" by 12" Manilla envelope for transport. (At this stage of our campaign, we were playing at the house of the other family who made up our player base.) As the adventure used the AD&D 1E rules and we were playing a 3.5 campaign, I also ended up swapping out some of the creatures that didn't yet have 3E counterparts, but other than the size I kept the designs of the fifteen shifting rooms pretty much the same.

Johnathan

Wow! I stole the lay out of "Ex Libris" for the climactic final adventure for my "Out of the Frying Pan" campaign (3E) back in 2005-6 calling it "Hurgun's Maze" and I made 16 x 16 versions of each room I could lay out as they traveled through the shifting rooms. I love to homebrew and adapt creatures, so I did that - but since the place itself was different I wasn't copying the contents from the adventure, just the setting layout. One of the best adventures I ever ran.