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A collection of 15 posts

Map Mine: Shadowdark Random Dungeon Generation

Map Mine: Shadowdark Random Dungeon Generation

Welcome to part 2 of this mini-series where I'm walking through some random dungeon generation methods found in various tabletop game systems! In the previous post, I examined D&D 5th edition's random generation rules. This time we'll be walking through creating a Shadowdark dungeon using the methods found in

Random Dungeon Generators Part 1

Random Dungeon Generators Part 1

Hello, and welcome again to another edition of the Map Mine. After a brief hiatus (due to Extra Life 2023, replays of which will be up soon) we're back to bring you some random map generation techniques from various games. In this two (or three?) parter, I'm going to use

Cavern Maps Take Two

Cavern Maps Take Two

Well, we're back at it again. Making Caves. Being really bad at making caves. Slowly getting better at making caves. In the last post in the series, I took a crack at making a cavern map in Dungeon Scrawl. Let's take a look at version 3 and where we landed

Cavern Maps (and how I'm bad at them)

Cavern Maps (and how I'm bad at them)

If you've been following along with this blog series for a while now, you'll probably have picked on that I really like the super clean style of map that Dungeon Scrawl produces, and even made an icon pack that also has clean lines to accommodate that style. A lot of

Cursed Library of Gro'thell

Cursed Library of Gro'thell

Well, I've turned another map into an adventure for reasons I can't really fathom other than it's fun to do so. I also had a blast working on the layout, I'm pretty happy with how it turned out and am semi-excited to actually do more things in that style. It's

Large Library: Adventure in Progress

Large Library: Adventure in Progress

Well friends, no new map this week as I'm taking the Large Library maps and combining them together into another Shadowdark RPG compatible adventure. I'm about 75% of the way through the first draft, and everything will go up as it's completed - so I hope you'll keep an eye

Large Library Lower Floor

Large Library Lower Floor

Welcome again to the next iteration of the map series, wherein I work on a map out in the open and talk about design decisions. This time we're going to add a lower floor to the Large Library from a few posts ago. This is going to continue from the

The Map Mine: Keyed Dungeon Part 3

The Map Mine: Keyed Dungeon Part 3

Welcome to another edition of the Map Mine. So! I didn't expect to be revisiting this, but I did a playtest of the Keyed Dungeon from my previous post - and it turns out it runs pretty well, but needs a couple of tweaks to make it a bit more

The Map Mine: Large Library

The Map Mine: Large Library

Welcome once again to another edition of the Map Mine, wherein I discuss a map that I've put together to illustrate one or more map concept designs. In previous posts I've talked about things like subverting expectations, adding branching paths, and other design techniques (both those I fully agree with

The Map Mine: Keyed Dungeon Pt. 2

The Map Mine: Keyed Dungeon Pt. 2

Friends! Welcome to Part 2 of the Keyed Dungeon. Last week we put together a map, and this week I'm here to give you a short adventure module in the style of Shadowdark RPG. ℹ️A bunch of disclaimers here: I've never run a Shadowdark game. I've watched some actual

The Map Mine: Keyed Dungeon pt. 1

The Map Mine: Keyed Dungeon pt. 1

Turns out the cadence for these posts was a bit too close for me to effectively manage with quality posts, so after this two-parter we'll be moving to an every other week schedule. Every other Wednesday Alex will walk through a map he's created and discuss some of the design

The Map Mine: Cultist Lair

The Map Mine: Cultist Lair

Every Wednesday Alex will walk through a map he's created and discuss some of the design choices behind it. Welcome to another edition of The Map Mine! This week we're going to be talking about cults. Well, at least the kind of cult you'd find in a medieval fantasy setting.

The Map Mine: Alchemist's Laboratory

The Map Mine: Alchemist's Laboratory

Every Wednesday Alex will walk through a map he's created and discuss some of the design choices behind it. Welcome to the 3rd episode (edition? post?) of the Map Mine. Today we'll be having a look at an example Alchemist/Necromancer's laboratory. It occurred to me as I was setting

The Map Mine: Chaos House

The Map Mine: Chaos House

Every Wednesday Alex will walk through a map he's created and discuss some of the design choices behind it. Alright, so this map... is an extremely obvious attempt to show the collection of icons from the OSRaon icon set. The rooms themselves make very little sense as a collection in

The Map Mine: The Small Library

The Map Mine: The Small Library

Every Wednesday Alex will walk through a map he's created and discuss some of the design choices behind it. For the first post in the series, we'll start with a super simple map: "The Small Library". This is an example room of a functional-library where some sort of fight took