/ Cory Doctorow / 12:43 am Thu Feb 17, 2011

Hand-drawn D&D maps of yesteryear


The Plagmada gallery features David McClouth's "Dungeon folder" -- "This is the contents of a manila envelope full of adventures and maps made by David McLouth in the early 80s." It's pitched as "outsider art," but I appreciate it as pure nostalgia, a tribute to all those hours spent filling in crabbed maps and monster-counts, treasure and epic items.

David McLouth, "Dungeon" folder

 

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  4. A quick glance suggests a series of dungeons with ‘zero-thickness walls’; as the gamer matures and tries to add believability for himself, his walls tend to get thicker…

  5. Not only thicker walls, but also starts thinking about resources and services and starts addindg kitchens, living rooms, shitholes and closets to store skeletons (or lichs)…

  7. Considering the size of the squares is 5ft x 5ft, “zero” thickness walls make sense when the alternative is walls that deserve to be on the outside of the fortress.

    Also, BB, when you require scripts to submit comments, might wanna say so rather than just dumping the comment into the abyss.

  8. Okay, now I feel really old.

    I don’t know which is worse — seeing D&D notes just like my old ones displayed on the internet as art, or as a nostalgia piece!

  9. Buying dungeon modules was all fine and dandy, but no self-respecting Dungeon Master can resist writing his own adventures. The first efforts almost universally consisted of a dungeon in the middle of nowhere with no reason for existence being inexplicably populated by outlandish creatures for no reason. Their sole reason for existence was to aimlessly wander those halls or just stay in one spot forever, waiting for an adventurer in search of GP and EXP points. Most of the adventurers carried around a ton of equipment, no matter their strength rating. By the time these problems were ironed out, interest waned and puberty was past. Usually. A guy I used to play with back then now has a PhD in nuclear particle physics and he still plays. The monsters are now unpaired bosons, however.

    1. That is a great one.

      I have to say, I never did understand the pure dungeon campaign. They always just seemed so hack and slash when I played them.

      And if you want to see art, wilderness campaign maps are where it’s at. I always wished the players got to see what they were trekking through. Good times with colored pencil…

  13. This looks more-or-less like the maps one of my flatmate’s leaves lying around after his D&D sessions. Sometimes his group plays at our house; one of the guys is 50-something, although the rest are in their 20s.

    Personally, I think it’s incredibly tedious, and I’m amazed how much they all care about it. Wander-Encounter-Dice-NearlyDead-Repeat.

  14. “Art”! In a gallery! This is almost as disheartening as William Carlos Williams’ note to his wife he left on the fridge about eating all the blueberries, published as a “poem” in every %*$# intro to poetry or intro to literature anthology. I don’t want to say “My three year old could do that,” but if these count as art or poetry, then everything does.

    Maybe if it makes us nostalgic then it should count. YMMV.

    2. I have slain
      the ogres
      that were on
      level five
      and which
      you were probably
      saving
      to level up
      Forgive me
      they were viscious
      their suite
      had gold

  15. I got to give him credit – at least his is finished. I can’t tell you how many maps sat half-drawn in my old D & D box. Mmm… Graph paper, Staedtler mechanical pencils and erasers. Memories!

  16. Heh, I bet the DM wanted to confuse the player with some hard to map floor plan – probably had it in for whoever was doing the mapping, and wanted to make their life miserable…

    For those unfamiliar, the gamers don’t know the layout but have to map it themselves from descriptions of what they “observe” as provided by the dungeon master”

    “The west wall runs actually north-west to south-east 30 feet, and and in the south-east with a north-south wall extending…”

  17. Did anyone notice the Orgy Room described on the third page for the first map (DM084DungeonKeyD1L1_C), note 5? It reads “Orgy Room. Party changed into equal members of each sex and a 10 turn orgy ensues.”

    2. That page is my favorite thing in the whole archive, I’m astonished that someone picked it out so fast.

      It’s the image I often point to when I’m talking about how odd some of the stuff in the archive can be.

    3. I don’t know about 1st edition, but in 2nd edition 1 “turn” meant 10 minutes of in-game time. That’s a lot of orgy.

      I always used a graph paper notebook for my maps- made it easier to coordinate them with notes on story, npcs, and so on. I used to just recycle them after a campaign ended, though…

  18. Heavily influenced by Ed Emberly’s Drawing Book: Make A World and others as a small child, I used to like to secret various stylized images into D&D maps. So as players worked out the map as they played, they would reveal a tableaux of fanciful figures, creatures, faces, symbols, and sometimes lettering which would provide clues to various elements of a quest or to the parts of the dungeon or other structure still unexplored.

  19. I still expect all hallways to be exactly ten feet wide in the real world. And, as others have pointed out, walls have zero thickness. D&D physics ftw!

  20. http://aetherco.tripod.com/chameleon/chammap2.gif

    A savvy rules lawyer could argue that all the walls on the map are really paper-thin, and can just be busted through. “It seems the DM designed the dungeon with the architectural sensibility of Japan in mind.”

    Also, if it’s in a museum, it means we can go in and loot it. Very popular pastime lately. We just have to get there before the Capital One guys.

  21. This Is Just To Say

    I have deleted
    the SPAM
    that was in
    the inbox

    and which
    you were probably
    hoping
    I would click

    Forgive me
    they were outrageous
    so fleet
    and so bold

  22. “Art”? Hot diggety dog! Does this mean that old folder full of maps and notes at the back of the closer shelf is now worth big bucks? I can see it now, hanging on the walls of the ICA with a huge price tag next to each scrap. After all, its 1st Edition AD&D! Talk about a Monty Haul!

  23. Hey Boing Boing,

    I’m Tim Hutchings, the guy who organizes the PlaGMaDA archive. If any of you have questions about the archive, what’s in the archive, or why the archive might be important, please ask away.

    If you have materials you think you’d like to donate, email collections@plagmada.org.

    1. Hey Tim H!
      I’d love to know the purpose behind the archive! Are you just trying to create a depository of old, handmade D&D modules, or is there more to it than that?

      1. The official mission statement reads:

        “PlaGMaDA’s mission is to preserve, present, and interpret play generated cultural artifacts, namely manuscripts and drawings created to communicate a shared imaginative space. The Archive will solicit, collect, describe, and publicly display these documents so as to demonstrate their relevance, presenting them as both a historical record of a revolutionary period of experimental play and as aesthetic objects in their own right. By fostering discussion and educating the public, it is hoped that the folkways which generate these documents can be encouraged and preserved for future generations.”

        I’ll translate this as: Game maps and documents like these are interesting, and fulfill a lot of the criteria of a folk art. Like many expressions of folk art, they are considered very disposable and I think that sucks.

        The archive physically collects these maps and preserves them. Gamers consider their game paperwork the most precious thing in the world until they stop playing games and then most of them don’t give a damn. I have about a ten second window in which I try to collect these things from gamers, ten seconds between the time they love the papers and the moment that the closet space is needed for baby clothes or whatever.

        I believe that these maps are important, and the sorts of gaming that produce them are slipping away or being played differently with new generations. It’s important to understand that maps like these are going to be important to people in the future, think about how much contemporary computer gaming aspects are directly descended from table top RPGs.

        I’ve curated shows out of the archive at a couple of university art galleries, and for sections of an exhibition about computer gaming called “Space Invaders” which was shown at two museums in Europe.

        Maps like these fire my imagination, they inspire nostalgia, they imply really great stories that people a lot like me experienced in another place and time.

        And, dude, they’re maps – maps are great. You can’t go wrong with a map, especially a well-used, beaten up old map. Even a NYC subway map becomes special after it’s been thumbed through.

        Pardon the roughness of this post, it was crafted in several unconnected free minutes at my day job.

  24. Maybe it’s just the Nethack talking but that dungeon is just begging for someone with a pickax to make some “creative entryways”.

    And yes, the kobolds can be very, very scary. They may only have 1 HP, but given some time they can hang a LOT of rocks from the ceiling to make a pretty ugly trap. That and a nearby underground stream can cause lots of trouble for anyone.

  27. I tossed about a half-file-box of dungeon maps, keys, and outdoor maps when I moved out of my parents’ basement.

    Toward the end of my scribbling I got pretty serious about making the levels make sense, architecturally and operationally.

    I earned some money in the cowboy days of the RPG publishing industry, churning out articles and adventures.

  28. The Orgy Room on that first map is the best part. That either led to weird blushes and homoerotic tension as various virgins had to either hear or role-play what their characters were doing to each other, or it ruined the adventure as the players refused to have their characters leave.

    “Guys, c’mon, I worked hard on this dungeon!”

    “And we’re enjoying it! What’s your problem?”

  29. Looks like the old ‘ruler-generated dungeon’ trick.

    1. Lay a ruler across graph paper – the angle isn’t important, but make sure the line will intersect points on the graph rather than meandering through squares, never hitting anything.

    2. Draw lines of random length, with random gaps between them, again making sure to go point to point.

    3. Flip the ruler to some other angle, repeat. Don’t cross the stre…erm, lines. Once the ruler comes round to roughly the same direction as existing lines, keep it parallel to those lines.

    4. Eventually, corridors and rooms reveal themselves – close the gaps. Mark ‘S’ on random walls to indicate secret doors. They needn’t lead anywhere important – they just need to be secret. Mark ‘T’ in other rooms for random traps. Again, there need be no rhyme or reason for their placement.

    5. Populate rooms with random creatures. Spend no time whatsoever considering why this appears to be some sort of monster hotel, with various beasts and undead sitting in their rooms, staring at the walls, never venturing out, never getting into trouble with the monster in the next room, never peeking into the corridor when they hear the adventurers wreaking bloody havoc a few doors down. The players will not ask, because they do not care. The dungeon’s residents will wait around, become suddenly angry when somebody opens the door, and have some kind of loot.

    6. Profit! (Don’t forget a compass rose.)

    I’m off to get a tattoo of a mind flayer lich on a beholder chariot.

  30. Zero-thickness walls, heck. That’s for pikers. :)

    I once designed a dungeon that was vaguely spiral and each floor was similar in layout but slightly different in size (think the Guggenheim Museum). The dwarf blew his “detect slope passages” roll, and the poor party was totally convinced that some of the walls were of negative thickness to make their map work. They completed about 4 circuits before they figured out they weren’t going in circles and hitting amazingly-fast respawning monsters. :)

    But the most evil thing I’ve personally seen done to a party…

    Party of teen-level characters head into a dungeon, and on the first level they hit swarms of gas spores. Dozens of them. Over and over. Finally, they have disposed of them all, and get down to business… down several levels, where it gets *really* hard. They finally vanquish everything, and they’re slogging out of the dungeon. No spells left, no potions left, no scrolls left, everybody is in single-digit hit points. On the good side, the party is moving at “encumbered” speed because the 4 strongest party members are carrying a huge chest full of all sorts of goodies. They round a corner, almost out of the dungeon.. and down at the far end of the corridor they see another gas spore, floating in the dim darkness. Somebody with a bow says “Hah. We missed one” and wings it with an arrow.

    The DM says “*thunk*”. “*thunk*? not *pop*?” “Yes, *thunk*, and it’s heading your way now”. The party realizes that they are in no shape to tackle a beholder, drop the chest, and run for their lives. Then they make their way back to town.

    The next day, they’re commiserating their loss in the tavern when they overhear a very low-level thief and an illusionist chatting up the barkeep, with far more money than their level would usually imply. “We knew these guys went down into the dungeon, and we was drunk as an alcoholic dwarf and up for a laugh. So Frankie makes up this ball from leather and junk and sticks looks like a gas spore, and I throws my one invisibility spell on Frankie. He picks it up over his head and walks down the hallway at them. The elf shoots the ball, then soils his pants, they drop this chest and run… next thing you know, we’re rich.”

  31. I often wonder how many miles of unexplored dungeons there are out there. DMs spend many nights drawing multi-level labyrinths and fretting over the right treasure/monster mix only never to play more than a couple of games with it, if at all.

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