A: Kobold Lair

I've been silent on the blog for a long while - still playing and still tweaking rules - but no blogging. A week or so ago my eldest said she was thinking of running D&D at college and wanted to run the first adventure she'd ever played through, she thought it wouldn't be too hard for a first time DM to run.

There are a few issues with the presentation of the module, so I decided to revise it slightly to make it easier to run. Initially I was just going to add some names, then I thought I'd revise how the room information was presented to make it clearer, then I thought I'd redraw the maps.

I'm going to post one map a day for this project, starting with the map for A: Kobold Lair. I'm sure you'll all have spotted which adventure it's from:


The shading is familiar - it's an old style I've always liked as I noted in a previous post, but one made popular in the last 10 years by Dyson Logos. You need some form of shading for maps where the corridors are the same width as the spaces between them. Previously for my maps I'd shaded the whole background in grey, but it makes it a bit oppressive. Shading just near the walls is better, as it just makes the walls stand out, but if you do that in a block colour it looks odd. The cross-hatch shading works as the irregular nature of the shading works well with an irregular border.

I could have used the version Dyson himself drew of the map, but it has grid squares drawn over it which makes it cluttered, and it gives me no room for the extra info I want on the map. It's fun to draw maps, and I thought it would be interesting to compare afterwards to see where I could improve.

I did the lairs one at a time, then combined them all into one single map which I've printed out on A3 card. This lair was the first, as is clear from the fact that the density of my shading has changed slightly as I drew it.

I put the name of the rooms - enough to remind you on the fly what it is - but often not the whole name (as it gets too cluttered). I used to mark on all creatures, but now I just make room descriptions clearer so it's not necessary. I do sometimes mark the creatures directly on the map when I'm doing one-page dungeon style - but in that case I have more space as there's no room number.

I have shaded in the locked door to the store as that's a detail I used to got wrong when I started out DMing, and it's very easy to mark.

I may add back in a light grid at some point, but it's not that necessary as I draw the players' map on thin see-through paper as I talked about before.