OSR Modules with the best layout & presentation

[BruceWright]

The castle is a 3D maze, and the map deals with that complexity extremely well. If the map is hard to understand it's because the castle is hard to understand.

…

I'm sorry. This is the best dungeon geography ever made, and the map documents it like the masterpiece that it is.

Nostalgia glasses off, I disagree.

I printed it with flat maps when I ran it recently, and the layout turns out to be much simpler to run. It’s not quite the maze it presents itself as.

I’m happy that the map disorients players. I don’t want to be disorientated as the DM.

But yes, the isometric map is a classic piece of D&D art. I am extremely nostalgic for it, having run it “back in the day”. I would love it on a t-shirt, and I recognize that I’m saying that the Sistine Chapel of D&D is mid.

But still, i do not think it is the model that new adventures should mimic for clarity.

 

[Whizbang Dustyboots]

I3 Pharaoh is fantastic. The layout is entirely designed for being run at a table and not an adventure that's organized to be an entertaining read like it's some kind of vacation guide.

Here's random page (page 14) and you can see how each area is very easily keyed for DM use.

That's pretty good, but I'd argue that 50% of that text can still get chopped, which will make it even easier to use.

 

[Whizbang Dustyboots]

I'm also going to bring up Necrotic Gnome which many have mentioned.

Many Mothership pamphlet adventures are also great for this, squeezing a ton of adventure into a tiny amount of space. (On the other hand, when it goes wrong, some of the pamphlet adventures are a mess of teeny tiny text.)

 

[Sacrosanct]

Nostalgia glasses off, I disagree.

I printed it with flat maps when I ran it recently, and the layout turns out to be much simpler to run. It’s not quite the maze it presents itself as.

I’m happy that the map disorients players. I don’t want to be disorientated as the DM.

But yes, the isometric map is a classic piece of D&D art. I am extremely nostalgic for it, having run it “back in the day”. I would love it on a t-shirt, and I recognize that I’m saying that the Sistine Chapel of D&D is mid.

But still, i do not think it is the model that new adventures should mimic for clarity.

I don't know. This is a dungeon I had made for Revenge of the Rat King last year, and I'm not seeing how it would be confusing.

 

[Whizbang Dustyboots]

I don't know. This is a dungeon I had made for Revenge of the Rat King last year, and I'm not seeing how it would be confusing.

View attachment 422196

That map is a lot less tangled up than Castle Ravenloft is, though. You did a great job making it clear and usable.

 

[Sacrosanct]

That map is a lot less tangled up than Castle Ravenloft is, though. You did a great job making it clear and usable.

Credit goes to Michael Sean Piper, who did it. He does a lot of maps like this.

 

[BruceWright]

Agreed. That map is super clear.

 

[BruceWright]

There is a map. A really good one, actually. And I would say the only confusing thing here at all is K61 isn't actually marked on the map, possibly by mistake or possibly just because the 30x10 corridor is small or both.
…

Oh, yep, I did miss that, from the explanation being tucked in the unkeyed entry that I would need to cross-reference from its reference in the information about the shaft.

That’s what I mean about needing to prep in advance. Definitely not something easy to understand on first glance.

K61 is the location of the trap. The trap is activated by pressure plates in K61 as is described in detail by that entry.

Yep and now upon re-reading that entry, I do recall it. It has been a year since I ran it, and I think I did take note of it during my prep.

This is the destination of the trap in K61. A sentence in that keyed location says that there is a trap door in this location that leads to K31a. But note, this door is not a trap. It's just an access panel.


But there is "A trap door in the floor leads to K31a."

Right. I missed it on a quick glance of K61, as it is imbedded in the middle of a seven sentence paragraph about how the monster in the room attacks intruders. Not kidding.

Needlessly obscure. Should be its own paragraph and have more clarity. “Trap door in floor leads to k31, this is the destination of the elevator trap in K61”. Something like that.

Nothing in K31 springs the trap. The trap is in K61 and described in detail there.

What I get from this though is that modern maps aren't complicated enough and have so much linearity and are generally so two-dimensional that this sort of confusion isn't even possible.

Eh, that’s a stretch.

I am “old school” and ran i6 Ravenloft as a new release in 1983. I’m not some young whippersnapper.

My time is valuable, and so I desire clarity and ease of use.

 

[Celebrim]

It’s not quite the maze it presents itself as.

Starting from the main floor, you have 5 stairs down and 7 stairs up.

Although the PC's don't know it, they probably want to find Strahd's main crypt on Map 12, which means they need to go down.

How to accomplish that is far from obvious. Getting up is easy. But the paths down are constructed so as to get the player's lost. Of the five stairs down, K20 and K23 aren't readily accessible from the main floor. PC's theoretically could, but it involves deliberately looking for side entrances or using magic, and even if they do that only gets you as far as the Larder's of Ill Omen. K18's passage down is blocked by a wall of rubble. K64 is behind a secret door and again only gets you as far as the Larder. That leaves just K31, which has a first landing with a trapped corridor and an elevator trap but does get you to the crypt but only in the flooded sub level. It's still by far the best route other than removing the wall in K18 but it's not obvious.

From the Larder, you have only two ways down, K23 but again trapped by the elevator trap and the secret door hiding K79.

K70 is a choke point for any entrance except K18, and it's trapped and if you arrive here planning to go down, all the stairs go up. The right path is trapped at K80-K82, which takes you (or more likely part of the party!) back to the flooded sublevel.

The only other good way down is from K83 on map 4.

I don't see how a flat map simplifies this.

 

[BruceWright]

For the players, it doesn’t need to simplify it. As a DM, I’m glad that a flat map simplifies it.

I’m just saying, as a person who has run i6 from the orthographic map in the 1980s, and with a flat map recently, the flat map was much easier. I dunno. Maybe my brain works different from yours. shrug