Firstly - my new pens have arrived - 6 Pigma Micron Fineliners sizes 005 (0.2mm) to 08 (0.5mm) - yay - which reminds me that when drawing the Caves of Chaos I drew it with quite thick pens at double size (on 1 cm square paper) and then after scanning and adjusting printed it out at 5 mm = 10'. This meant that my lines all looked a lot neater, but some of the text has come out a little smaller than I would have liked. I think in future I'll work at true size.
A more serious problem was that some of the lairs - particularly F and K - were too large to fit on one sheet of A4. Joining them back together digitally in most cases was fine, but I ran into the same problem Pete Fenlon's MERP maps had. At one point I had three separate caves overlapping, but with one small 10' square section which I had accidentally omitted off all the maps!
MERP had this problem at Wold which was not on any of the maps, and Pete Fenlon did a small map section for "#4001 Northwest Middle Earth Map Set" which was supposed to overlay the other maps and allow you to join them together. Many, many people tried (I have two copies of the book - one chopped into pieces as per the promise that you could piece them together) but until about 5 years ago no-one had ever succeeded.
But I digress - back to the Caves of Chaos...
In contrast to the last lair (which was too big), this one is apparently too small - but I think this is an advantage of this "big map then split into lairs" approach. I've got lots of old modules whose maps slavishly adhere to the size and shape of the paper, and several OSR megadungeons which split their maps up into sections which all adhere to the same size and shape.
My next project for the blog is likely to be to redraw the levels for my own Castle Blood, which is highly complicated and has many intricate connections between levels. For example it has sections which are connected to levels above and below but not to the level around them. Sections pass over, round and through other sections. For anyone else other than me it could be confusing to see how it all fits together - but it all just evolves naturally for the players as they explore. It is quite a surprise to arrive somewhere you couldn't manage to access by a completely different method. (This is a trick I picked up when I developed the Mobile phone game Bounce for Nokia). The way of presenting it is clearly to give an overall map, but then also separate maps of each individual section, also with side-elevation maps. There is an alternative approach some use where they colour individual sections, but I prefer this chopping up method better.
Tomorrow we move on to the halfway point - the Hobgoblins...
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