False Machine: Maps

Showing posts with label Maps. Show all posts

Tuesday, 9 February 2021

Dungeon Poem Challenge

Dungeon Poem Challenge

I had this idea of, not a Gygaxian Democracy dungeon, but a kind of blog-ring alter-dungeon challenge thing

Take one of the more interesting (and SMALL) Dyson Logos maps.

This one (I like it because it has a river on it).

Original here.

And anyone who wants to; make a dungeon of this map.

Thats; everyone use this specific map

I am going to try to do mine and will attempt to post it by Saturday or Sunday, and if anyone else wants to do one and tell me about it I will link it here. And we will see what everyone comes up with.

The general concept is; Artpunk plus functional. So original ideas preferred, as pretentious as you like, but minimal text, shaved right down, and functional as a dungeon for players without any extra context. But as much as possible, honed for beauty, interest and strangeness.

The link to 'poetry' being not the euphony structure or rhythm of the text, (though you can try that if you like), but the condensation of utility, beauty, meaning and originality into a functional and interesting micro-adventure.

All those things traditionally being opposed or at least difficult to have at the same time.

To do as much as possible with as little text and information as possible

Thursday, 20 February 2020

DCO Remastered - More Maps

I got sick as hell over the weekend, it was brutal.

Anyway, that did not prevent us from adopting at least some of your feedback, and we have applied it to the maps in the new Deep Carbon Observatory. So here you go.

You can click on the maps for high-res jpegs, probably most useful for the Dam map.

And apologies to Dirk again, we dulled his colours and Scrap made extensive alterations/additions.

The Drowned Lands

The Dam

And the Observatory

You can give feedback but we are getting close to the point where we are just going to go with what we have...

Friday, 14 February 2020

Deep Carbon Observatory Remastered - Labelling Maps

Alright, we are still hoping to run the Kickstarter for this in March, but working on edits, quotes from printers, labelling stuff like this etc etc as well as all the other projects both of us are doing soooo, there may be delays.

"FIX THE MAPS YOU FUCKING DING-DONGS" the Community have entreated us.

Well, no, we won't. But we WILL hire someone else to do that for us.

Specifically, underappreciated genius Dirk Leichty, of Silent Titans, Super Blood Harvest and a bunch of other stuff.

Here is a low-res version of Dirks Observatory Map

Which was way too pretty. So here is the map darkened (sorry Dirk!), and with scrap having made additions to it by drawing stuff.

Now comes our in-progress labelling issue. Neither Scrap nor I are good at dicking around with programmes, so we are feeling our way forwards on this one.

Originally I was just going to do it with room numbers and spread numbers. Here is an early, low-res attempt at a colour flip with just numbers showing where everything is;

But almost the ONLY thing every playtester agreed on was that they hated the numbers thing.

So here is a version with Numbers, room names and the word 'spread' inserted.

(You can click this for a high-res jpeg.)

That worked ok but also looked busy and awkward as fuck, so here is the dialled-back version with a red room number, the word 'spread' and then the spread number with a hashmark, and a handful of room and area names.

Again you can click for a higher res version;

Comments welcome but may be ignored as you all always disagree with each other anyway.

Monday, 2 June 2014

Veins Large Scale Mapping 2

Here are the Veins themselves in order of likelihood. For a crazy slightly gonzo formation you may simply roll a d8

1. River

2. Fault

3. Mine

4. War Works

5. Sulphuric blooms

6. Myco

7. Gigastructure

8. Burrow

For a more naturalistic generation you can try this table:

1-5. River

6-9. Fault

10-12. Mine

13-14. War Works

15-16. Sulphuric blooms

17-18. Myco

19. Gigastructure

20. Burrow

RIVER

The River is, in real life, the primary creator of caves. It shapes the classic 'wet look' limestone cave with the elaborate speleothems. In reality a river can leave a kind of halo of caves around it, mainly above it as it hollows them out and finds new routes through the stone, but also around, and underneath.

On The Map.

Remember a river will only go down in a vertical section.

In Description.

Rivers are unlikely to be navigable by boats in real life, in the Veins its your choice. Remember that if ships can navigate a river it makes it extremely valuable and strategically important.

An underground river will be cold, narrow and often fast. Its depth and power will vary tremendously. It will pile over falls and sweep through sumps.

FAULT

On the Map

The Fault is pretty simple, exactly how you imagine it to look, a jagged line. It doesn’t matter much if it changes its nature or direction when it reaches the vertical sections as it’s the nature of faults to break through vertical space.

In Description.

A fault could be described as a huge, dry, dark, irregular chasm in the mid-earth. A kind of natural void. Its walls will not be smooth or semi-organic like a limestone cave but rough and fragmentary, bearing the sings of torsion and stress. It may still be moving. It may have tectonic relics. It may still be active. There may be lava.

MINE

The Mine is a little like the Fault. The mine heads stop and then a new branch is begun from behind the mine head as the miners seek the vein they are after. Like many of these shapes the mine is an extremely abstracted form of how a mine map would look in real life.

On The Map.

Technically a mine should proceed up and down a little differently than it goes across. I have mainly ignored that though.

In Description.

The *major* difference between this Vein and any other is that a Mine is rational. It is built to be accessible, though often for races shorter than man. Columns will be left to support the roof. Searching shafts may run in every direction. Dwarves will be able to read the culture of the miners from the toolmarks left on the walls.

(Remember this isn’t an exact map of what the thing does, only where it is. Real rivers and mines can have small falls, steps, ladders, lifts, anything you like.)

WAR WORKS

War mines are unusual in that you use two colours and that they produce a large amount of lines. If you roll this result you may only need this and one other to make a map. The war works each start in an opposite side of the map and process towards each other.

On The Map.

They essentially look like brush heads. An extending line, then a lateral at its head, then more extenders and so on.

The war works are positioned to cut each other off and intercept each other.

In Description.

War mines will be smaller and less stable than normal mines. Towards the ‘attack heads’ they will be of a minimal size, about three feet wide and four or five high. They were built fast. There may be signs of conflict. The conflict may still be active. End points may be cut off by explosives or magic collapsing the heads.

SULPHURIC BLOOMS

The blooms are strands of corrosive gas seeping up from the deep earth, they chemically corrode stone and produce cave systems leading upwards.

On the Map.

On the map the blooms actually look like roses. On the vertical they curve up like stalks, on the top down they are roughly circular infiltrations of corroded stone, like cup stains on paper.

In Description.

These expulsions ruin the stone. The surfaces are rotted, torn and almost necrotic.

MYCO

Now we get onto the odd ones. Myco veins represent tendrils of fungus, slowly infiltrating through the stone, cracking it apart, widening it, searching, perhaps blindly, or for some unknown purpose. Then, over centuries, or days, dying back, leaving empty caverns with the rock bearing the strange fungal marks and the passages stretching in gorgonite waves.

On The Map

These are like a very simple tree.

In Description.

Myco passages will be stained, strange and winding. They may have numerous tiny branching inaccessible pathways. They will however, link up, all products of the same organism they will join like the branches of a strange tree. The cave surfaces may be crumbly like flagstones pushed apart by a mushroom growing from below, or smooth, abraded away by mild organic acids. The passages may still carry fungal smears.

GIGASTRUCTURE

The gigastructure is a built thing. Something huge, a city, ziggeraut or city-sized tomb. It probably wasn't built here, but sank slowly into the earth over millennia, being compressed by the shifting of plates and the slow unfolding of time. Whatever it was has long been forgotten now.

In this image you can see Rome on its way to becoming a gigastructure before it was dug free.

On The Map.

The gigastructure shows layers in the vertical sections and radial pattering in the top-down sections.

In Description

Moving through it could be like moving through a giant breakdown pile, except all the stone is worked, blocks, columns, collapsed or tipped over buildings, even sewers or city streets turned on their sides. The cultures will be effaced by time, truly ancient.

BURROW

A giant *thing* has found its way down from somewhere, an ancient dragon, purple worm, tarresque, mad god or something stranger.

On The Map

The burrow goes laterally across the top down sections and curls in loops down the verticals as the creature digs its way deeper.

Unlike every other Vein, this one has an end. Perhaps the beast still sleeps, or is dead, but maybe not.

In Description.

The passages have been ripped open by some natural force. The signs of claws or other marks may still be there. The width of the tunnel may give some indicate of the size of the creature.

Friday, 30 May 2014

Large Scale Mapping for Veins 1

Ok here is my idea for quickly generating large underground volumes extending through three dimensions.

Divide an a4 sheet into quadrants.

Quadrants are either top-down or vertical.

If vertical then top is always at the top. If horizontal then North is at the top, the other compass points arranged as usual.

If you want, one vertical compass can have Up, Dwn, North, South instead, but that is a bid to mind-bending and crazy for right now so we will leave it out.

You need about three passage-forming elements. We will start with the simplest, a river. In blue.

Remember in the vertical sections a river can only go down, never up. Now we will add a fault.

Now a mine in green.

There are four kinds of hex, depending on how many lines are in the hex.

No lines - the wilderness of stone. Hard travel, have to search, go cave-by-cave.
One - Transport possible along route. Semi-wilderness, encounters rare but nearly unavoidable when they do happen.
Two - More travelled. Tribes. Small outposts. More encounters, can be avoided.
Three - Likely encounters, organised polities, armies, population centres.

So, depending on what hex you are in you just describe what you see on the map.

"A river leads straight down, a fault leads down to the west and up east, a minework leads up and west."

You can still search to go anywhere but those are the main routes and should (eventually) take you somewhere.

Encounter density probably equivalent to desert. Routes will compress travellers but population much lower overall so should even out.

Will do a table for the kinds of lines you can roll for tomorrow.

Saturday, 3 May 2014

Does this make sense?

Making a Cave.

This table is designed to help you generate a single cave in which to set an encounter.

Roll three dice, a d4, d6 and d8.

This cave has	This many exits	in	Which lead to a
	D4	D6	D8
1	None	Wall	Walk
2	One	High on wall	Walk
3	Two	Floor	Climb
4	Three	Roof	Chimney
5		Hidden	Traverse
6		Hidden	Crawl
7		Blocked	Squeeze
8		Blocked	Pitch

To begin with the only important thing is where you come in.

Which Die has the highest number.

d4 - you enter through the roof.

d6 - you enter through the floor.

d8 -you enter through the wall

If triples, this is one of the d100 caves.

Every cave has one way in, that’s how you get there. It may not have a way out.

The Total

4. Flooded. Over 6ft deep. One island.

5. Delicate Decorations.

6. Dry. Dead. Full of broken fragments.

7. Wet. Dripping. Thick mud.

8. A river runs through it.

9. Kinks on the middle, half out of sight

10. A river falls through it.

11. Speleothems form columns from roof to floor.

12. Flooded. Wade-able. Some islands.

13. Almost-vertical shard of space, everything is climbing.

14. Cave contains a vertical pitch inside it.

15. House-sized.

16. Church-sized.

17. Stadium-sized.

18. Gigantic. An environment in itself.

THE D4 tells you how many exits the cave has.

Never tell players how many exits there are. They have to go in and search. One might be hidden and none are necessarily obvious. There may be no way out.

THE D6 tells you where the exits are. If you need the location of two exits then bring in the number rolled on the d4, if you need three then bring in the number rolled on the d8.

Hidden exits cannot simply be found by wandering around, they must be searched for carefully and will not be obvious. Blocked exits can be unblocked with time and work.

THE D8 tells you the kind of exits they are. Again, if you need a second or third number, bring in the numbers rolled on the d4 and d6. In that order

Making a Map

Now draw a bunch of lines across the map at right angles. There should be at least three from two right-angled directions. If you want a small-scale map then use a small number of lines, for a large scale map use a large number of lines.

It should look something like the opposite page.

This should create a nest of irregular diamond patterns on your page. These will act in a similar way to hexes would in a normal wilderness map.

If you wish, you may add a compass. This will not always be useful or necessary underground. Veins dwellers generally do not use compass directions, instead they direct by linear description. But it may be so if you wish to link different area's.

If you want to you can roll up a complex from the experimental generator. Write the complex rules in the top.

“The Torrenting Torment of He Who Seeks,

always exposes the tracks of those who passed last

but never hides the innocent or lets the guilty flee.”

If there are special dungeons or areas you have prepared, you may wish to add them to the map at this point.

To start adventuring, choose an entry hex, you may select this yourself, or simply drop a d4 on the map.

Roll a cave for the entry hex and write the number in the empty space. The (e) indicates this is an entryway to the Torrenting Torments of He Who Seeks. Its ok to assume a roll of 4 on the d4 for the first cave.

453. The(e) is for entry.

You come up through the floor.

Flooded, wade-able, some islands.

(So, you mut come up through an island, possibly a short waterfall climb.)

One exit in the roof, one in the floor, one in the walls.

The roof exit leads to a climb, the floor exit to a chimney, the walls to a traverse

Going from area to area takes D6 Hours, that's the same number of Lumes.

Depending on which way they go, the map could end up looking like this;

Draw an arrow to show which way the PC's entered a cave. The highest number will show you where that entry is if you want to use it as an exit when coming back

Each black line can have only one red line crossing it.

You can cross corners.

Some sections may not be accessable.

Thinking maybe put little W, CL, CR, CH, TR, CR, S, and P signs on the red passage lines so you can remember what they are.

If Things Go Wrong With The Map

This method can lead to the players being partially or totally dead-ended. There are a few things you can do to resolve this if you want.

There should always be a way out. The way out should be terrible. A long squeeze that forces players to abandon equipment. A long sump without light, a leap into the dark.

Remember rivers. Water always finds its way. When you encounter one you may draw it on the map if you wish. If you are feeling soft you can even make it navigable.