If you’ve picked up the 5th Edition Dungeons & Dragons Starter Box and not run it yet, I really recommend it. The adventure is actually a wonderful little point-crawl with a fairly well setup beginning and end, but with a lot of free choice as to what gets done in what order, what doesn’t get done at all, and so on. It’s actually a great example of how to put together a low-level mini-sandbox environment for a game.

Back in October I posted my remake of the Cragmaw Hideout from that adventure, and in our most recent fifth edition game the party finally made it to Cragmaw Castle, leaving only one major place to go (and a few minor ones that they’ve skipped or got sidetracked from along the way).

Because Cragmaw Castle is fairly easy to scout the general structure of before going in, I figured this would be the perfect time to make a player map that looked and felt a bit like the classic player map from Tegel Manor.

To really get the “Tegel Manor” feel across, I printed it on yellowish faux-parchment paper. I also had two versions ready – one I added extra rubble into the path through the collapsed wall on the bottom-right of this map with my pen so if they didn’t spot the side entrance it wouldn’t be as obvious. But they did.

And here’s a version sans grid for those who prefer a clean gridless map:

I have to stress that the cool design isn’t mine – the map that this is a redraw of was originally drawn by the incredibly talented Mike Schley for the Lost Mine of Phandelver adventure published by Wizards of the Coast. I’m just making it feel a little more… old-school.

And here’s a shot of the map in action, about 2/3 of the way through our game session on Wednesday: