RPG & Dungeons and Dragons

Since it’s Black History Month, I’m making sure you folks know about Mike Pondsmith.

Mike designed, amongst other things, Cyberpunk 2020 and its wonderful spin-off Cybergeneration. He designed the critically-acclaimed Castle Falkenstein. A black man kicked off interest in two incredibly white-dominated genres in a white-dominated hobby is a remarkable achievement.

Fact 2: In most versions of Dungeons & Dragons, the default alignment of werebears is Lawful Good.

I re-designed the map order worksheets during my time at WOTC as manager of cartography. Mainly it was just to make the worksheets completely digital and accessible for anyone who was to design maps for our game worlds. These are the final versions which were being used up till 2003 at WOTC.  The list of map symbols goes back to the dawn of role playing game maps and TSR.  Dave Sutherland and Dennis Kauth were the two people who really started all of the organized nature of making map orders easier to produce for the TSR RPG R&D design department.  

Dennis Kauth was originally from an engineering background, so he even made sure that all of the symbols had a corresponding number in case of the situation where someone was not able to draw things out in a competent manner, they could just simply write a number on the map reference and circle it, thus making “it” the object or feature from the master key.  The mapping standards is one of the first things Dave & Dennis showed me when I started work in the mapping department at TSR in the early 90s.  

“Drungor, a dwarven fighter, has just discovered a ring of invisibility.  He puts it on and wills himself to be invisible.  Oops!  Only his legs disappear.  Why did this happen?”  (Advanced Dungeons & Dragons Trivia Game by Richard Borg, cover by Glen Orbik, TSR, 1991)

I just thought of an EVIL dungeon.

Backstory: i work for a company that does vacation packages (I’m not a travel agent because im hourly with incentive not purely commission). One of the partner hotels gave THIS as a way to encourage us to book through them. It’s basically a six sided maze with pits where the ball gets stuck but the more i stared at the it the more i wanted to make it in a game.

So you’ll need one of these, that way you know your map is properly aligned. Photocopy it and trace it (to scale) onto grid paper. Let your adventurers go around on it.

The goal is to clear all the sides and get to be center. The pits i mentioned earlier are designed to get the ball stuck but i say make those lead to other sides like short cuts, and in doing so your players will see there is a portal to go through in the center they must find the right one. (They can’t go into the wrong hole see the portal and travel to it like by flying).

When they first begin they think it’s just a maze but when they get to the edge it looks like a cliff with canals cut into them vertically. As they attempt to scale down it it, the gravity shifts and they’re walking right side up. If they get to the hole and attempt to scale down it, same thing. If they throw something down the side it will land on the floor and reveal the gravity shift and the 3 dimensional nature of the maze.

Each side has some small villains, a mini boss (your discretion) and there’s a major boss blocking the portal in the center. “Find the path” and “guidance” doesn’t work, and you cant raise above the wall. Once they defeat a mini boss give them a hint which way to go so they can clear all six sides. Obviously give them some dead ends where they can rest and recover. This will REALLY aggravate your players but give them decent rewards along the way to keep them motivated, don’t skimp out on the magic items (if you don’t want to get too many magic items make them consumable magic items like spell scrolls and potions).

The maze is on a demiplane. Once they clear it and get to the center, perhaps they can use it as their own prison for future encounters.

Tea Party

Reading The Classics!

Advanced D&D Players Handbook

Advanced D&D Dungeonmasters Guide

Advanced D&D Monster Manual

Advanced D&D Monster Manual II: Electric Boogaloo!

Alec Surana.