I’ve been running most of my D&D set piece locations with flowchartish diagrams schematics (thanks Redditer Mr_Venom) for at least a decade. I even do this for published adventures, breaking their maps down into diagrams that I can riff off. I did this with all the dungeons in Slumbering Ursine Dunes and with the large dungeon of Death Frost Doom. I do it with cities (to an extent), with wildernesses, even with continents (the point-crawl of the Ultraviolet Grasslands is a diagram overlaid on a stylized maps). One new product that does this beautifully is Sean McCoy’s Mothership: Dead Planet, a horror sci fi rpg that captures the essence of what makes a space ship horror setting tick.

Now, I like a beautiful map. I’ve made a few that I quite like myself. Some of them, I even run semi-regularly. For example, I’ve run the Tower of Down as a dungeon four or five times:

But, mostly maps are a chore for me to run. I like to make notes on my maps, indicate monsters, switch connections, hidden keys, treasures, and so on. If distances are crucial at a certain point, I prefer to have a notation (50′ drop! very dangerous! animated venom0-spitting rats on spikes!). Counting squares to determine distance? Not something I enjoy. A black map background I can’t write on? Not useful. Pretty, but not useful (and yes, I did precisely that on the Tower of Down).

That’s why: schematic diagram.

Red Sky Dead City, Golem Graveyard, Delve 2-iii

This is a simple axle-hub-and-spoke dungeon from my current patreon book-in-progress. It has 11 rooms and is likely more than enough for a 2–3 hour dungeon-delving session. It also has enough space for added notes, placing the results of random encounter checks, and more.

These are the notes that describe the dungeon schematic:

Golem graveyard: An ancient, plain warehouse, half-sunk in sand is covered in small pocks and scratches. It houses the Golem graveyard, a memorial and mausoleum to the great archaics that the Izvoreni once maintained.

Inside the graveyard are large stone gates, covering deep shafts. Many are trapped with noxious gasses.

Some still have active auto-defence golem-traps (HD 5).

One still has a fully-sentient, sleeping archaic named Never-

Rests-Until-the-Deed-is-Sung (AC 15, HD 3, conservative).

And these are the encounters and treasures from the neighborhood: