Player-Created Ocean Map

A little while ago, I talked here about one of my successful Dungeons & Dragons campaigns. In it, the players sailed from island to island in a vast ocean, encountering a menagerie of isolated cultures and fighting against the oppressive clutches of an Arkhosian Empire (not too dissimilar to Chris Perkins' Iomandra Campaign). Exploration was at the heart of the campaign, and the table centered around charting out new islands on a giant 30" map we drew up. While cleaning out some stuff, I found the map among my various folders and scraps of paper and decided to share with you the interesting sketches and doodles that a 9-month nautical campaign produces.

(Be sure to click on the images for a larger view.)

More Doors

Having finished running through my 4E conversion of Chris Perkins' adventure Lich-Queen's Beloved, I've learned a few lessons about dungeons and adventure design. One of these is the importance of the architectural environment and the very elements of the dungeon itself. In Lich Queen's Beloved, the environment of the dungeon takes on an interesting role and challenge in and of itself in the adventure, namely in the types of doors that are encountered. Doors, I feel, are an oft overlooked source of hazards, terrain effects, challenges, and provocative dungeon dressing. At the end of this post, I also briefly touch upon a way in which we can all design dungeons with better (ie. more fun) secret doors.

What I'm trying to say is that we simply need more doors.

Charting the Unknown

At the end of the ancient year two-thousand aught nine, I divined a Dungeons & Dragons campaign entitled "Dragonslayers". Readers here have seen bits and pieces of some of the best parts to come out of that game, such as this and that, but have never seen that of which I was most proud and was most successful in terms of bringing both fun and immersion of exploration into the game world: charting the open seas.

The premise of the campaign was in some ways similar to Chris Perkins' Iomandra Campaign, although I assure you we came up with similar ideas independently. In it, scattered disparate islands on a watery world were kept under the oppressive regime of the Arkhosian Empire. The dungeoneers were the chosen few who could rise up and defeat the Empire. To do so, however, they needed to (among other things) unite the far-flung island communities and become masters of the open seas. The focus of this post is how our group collectively created the mechanics to go about exploring a vast oceanic world.