So, here I was, all set to do the next installment of my Let’s Build a F$&%ing Dungeon Adventure series when I realized there was a topic I’d never really addressed. Except in bits and pieces. And it’s a topic that I have been asked to address hundreds of f$&%ing times. Especially after I stupidly did a Livestream one night of me working on The Big City Map project.

The Big City Map project is a project that I started working on years ago. It started when I ran a campaign set in a giant city-state ruled by some powerful factions that included seven mage guilds and a host of other, less powerful guilds and organizations. The city had fallen into chaos when the founder of the city up and vanished one day. She had been keeping the factions and guilds in check for the century and half that she’d been ruling the city. She was an archmagus and had lived a long time and was pretty much the most powerful wizard in the world at the time. And her disappearance created a power vacuum and political chaos. It was a pretty cool campaign.

Since the campaign was an urban, political intrigue type campaign that took place entirely in one city and the extensive ruins underneath it, I drew a map of the city. It was a nice, simple, practical map of the city’s major districts and points of interest. Nothing fancy. I built it mostly around the rules for building cities outlined in an old D&D 3.5 supplement called Cityscape and its companion “digital enhancement.” Back when WotC put out supplements and free materials all the time. You know, when they supported their game with actual cool stuff instead of bland, samey hardback adventures every couple of months and a once-a-year book of random crap they collected from scraps around the office. “We’re doing another book, guys! What do you all have on your desks?” “I have a bunch of monster stats for planar monsters!” “I’ve got a write-up on elves!” “I did a thing about the Raven Queen.” “Cool, slap it together and let’s vote on which unrelated famous NPC name to throw on the cover.”

Sigh.

Anyway, one day I decided to take that simple, practical, boring city map and turn it into a beautiful, huge, building-by-building map. I decided on a size – four sheets of letter-sized paper for a total size of 22 inches by 17 inches – and started tracing the basic outline stuff from my practical map. And then I started just filling in buildings and streets and canals and things. Block by block and building by building I added a bit more to the map with each session. To call it a project would be lying. It was more of just an endless scarf. You know, a knitting project that you pick up for thirty minutes here and thirty minutes there, whenever you have some free time and nothing better to do? You never make much progress, but you’re not doing it to finish it. It’s just relaxing. Just fun.

And so, for years, I’ve had The Big City Map project sitting here. I haven’t actually worked on it for about a year, but I could start working on it again anytime. By my estimate, the city is half done. Here’s the two quadrants I’ve finished.

Well, one night I did a Livestream of me working on the map. I was bored and looking to kill time and to show off a little bit. You know how it be. And that was a mistake. Because, after that, everyone decided I was an expert on all things mapping. Just because I can draw lots of tiny little boxes over and over. And because I can plan.

Of course, even people who don’t remember The Big City Map project Livestream ask me about mapping. I’ve posted maps I’ve drawn before. And, obviously, the Megadungeon series is basically just about the biggest, most complex map that has ever had every element of it carefully and meticulously over planned. So, I’m always being asked to write an article about mapping. Specifically, I’m constantly being asked to teach people how to map.

Well, prepare to crest the hill of excitement and then go flying down the slope and crash headlong into the wall of bitter disappointment. Because I can’t teach you how to map. But I can teach you how to teach yourself how to map. But I’m probably not going to end up doing that either. Instead, I’m going to teach you why you really don’t need to bother with all of this mapping bulls$&%.

Don’t all thank me at once. Let’s talk about mapping.

Mapping: A Big, Stupid, Impractical Obsession

Gamers – myself included – are obsessed with maps. At least, the gamers who play real games. You know, Dungeons & Dragons, Pathfinder, Star Wars, Starfinder, that kind of s$&%. Not storygamey bulls$&% things that actually BRAG about how you can do an entire map by flinging some hastily labeled index cards onto the table. F$&% those games.

In fact, GMs generally obsess about maps the same way players obsess over dice. When you buy a module, for instance, and you flip through it when you get it home, you’re looking at the maps. Maps sell modules. It’s true. Don’t deny it.

So, what if I told you that most maps in most RPG products are completely unnecessary? Seriously. Yes, even the ones in the cool games that I mentioned above. Does that mean we should all be playing abstract index-card-map games? No. F$&% no. Nor does it mean we should get rid of the maps. Maps are awesome. I love maps. But they are mostly worthless. Empty calories. Like gamer candy.

Take my city map above. It’s awesome, and I love working on it. But it was just a f$&%ing Snickers bar. Delicious and a complete waste of calories. I didn’t need it for the game. I used a much simpler, blander map. One I don’t even have anymore. It was basically just a bunch of geometric shapes showing the outline of different districts of the city. But even that map was totally unnecessary. It was one of those crappy candy bars that’s just basically a solid plank of chocolate. No nuts, no caramel, the barest definition of a candy bar. And not even a good brand like Hershey’s or Nestle. It was dollar store chocolate.

Here’s the thing: a map is a diagram. What you kids call an “infographic.” It exists to convey useful information that is most easily conveyed visually. So, what did my big city map show?

It showed the shape of my city. And it showed a bunch of specific locations and where they were in relation to each other. Locations that were keyed to notes in a big binder that told me what was actually at that location and which NPCs could be found there and s$&% like that.

But who cares where the locations are in relation to each other? Is that information useful? Seriously, in ninety-f$&%ing-nine percent of campaigns with city maps, does it ever matter even one tiny little bit that The Lame Dragon Inn & Tavern is six blocks away from The Happy Halfling’s Used Bardic Instrument Emporium? No. It does not. Because that information has zero impact on the game. It’s not like GMs ever keep track of the exact time it takes to get from the Lame Dragon the Happy Halfling. In a city, you can generally get from any location to any other location, and you get there at the speed of plot. And, unlike a dungeon, players don’t generally explore a city and look for interesting places to go. They don’t travel intersection by intersection the way they would travel room by room in a dungeon. They go from specific places to specific places. And they find out about locations by asking about them or learning about them. The closest the PCs get to exploring is “we look around for an inn.” And then they can just find any old inn.

Now, I am sure there’s a bunch of mouth breathers already scrolling down to the comment section to tell me that, if a fire spread through the city, for example, or if a chase scene happened, that information would suddenly be important. Yes, I can imagine completely hypothetical situations that never actually come up too. Because that s$&% just doesn’t come up. And if it ever DID come up, well, that’s when you draw a f$&%ing map and figure out what’s near what.

Most maps of settlements in most RPG products are just glorified lists of locations. And if that’s all they are, just a list of locations, then that’s a very inefficient way to present the information. Because you need a separate list to reference to find out what’s actually on the map anyway. The map is utterly superfluous.

Now, note that I said, “most.” If your campaign is actually about political intrigue and different factions are in control of different neighborhoods and that control shifts and you have to keep track of it and keep track of which locations are under which faction’s control because the PCs have reputations with different factions and because faction control determines the sort of random encounters the players might have there and what sort of trouble they will get in if they start s$&%, then, yeah, a map is actually useful. Likewise, if you have a mechanical system that effects all the die rolls and random encounters in specific neighborhoods based on the conditions of that neighborhood? Again, yeah, a map is useful for showing which locations are where and for keeping track of where the party is. I mean, imagine if a neighborhood has a very strong guard presence and all the people know there is always a city guard nearby to call in case of trouble and, consequently, they are resistant to intimidation. Or if a neighborhood is controlled by criminals and no one wants to be seen talking to heroes or outsides, so all checks to gather information are penalized. Then, you need a map. And the map needs to show those neighborhoods.

See? I told you I could imagine hypothetical bulls$&% reasons why maps MIGHT be useful. But that’s not most games. Most games don’t need most of the maps they include. That’s my point. And I’m not making it to s$&% all over maps and the drawing of maps. I’m making that point because it’s something you have to understand if you want to draw good, useful maps.

The problem is, not everyone wants to draw good, useful maps. They want to draw pretty maps. Because they love maps. And some people genuinely want me to teach them how to draw pretty maps. Well, here’s how to learn how to draw pretty maps: draw whatever the f$&% you want. There. Done.

I mean, that’s what I’m doing with my giant-a$& city. I just draw whatever the f$&% I want. Because that map is useless garbage.

If you want to learn how to use maps to actually prep and run your games, though, that I can help with. In fact, I am. Because, my first lesson – the most important lesson – is draw the maps you need, not the ones you want.

More to the point, understand the difference between Practical Maps, Tactical Maps, and Artistic Maps.

Mapping Practically

Let’s start with the most basic, straightforward style of maps there are. Let’s start with Practical Maps. Most of your maps will end up being practical maps. And they are called that because they are actually f$&%ing useful.

Practical maps display the minimum amount of information needed to run the game. And they display only information that is most efficiently shown on a map. And what information is that? Well, a Practical Map shows the relationship between different locations. And it shows only as much of that information as is actually necessary.

Think about a dungeon. A dungeon is basically a series of interconnected rooms. Each room has a description, just like a location in town. That’s because rooms have contents. And those contents might have statistics. Monsters have stats. Treasures have stats, even if it’s just a number of gold pieces. Traps have stats. NPCs have stats. And every room is going to be described verbally. Because that’s how role-playing games work. All of that crap is presented as text because that’s the best way to present that information.

In the end, if you really break it down, the only information that would be clumsy to present in text format is the relationship between the rooms. That is, what rooms can you get to from what rooms. How are the rooms connected? Right? I mean, what other information isn’t already in the necessary block of text? And how horrible would it be to track the players’ movements through a dungeon if each room of the dungeon included lines like “if the players go to the east, they will end up in room 17; if they go to the west, they will end up in room 45″ and so on. Holy crap that would suck.

And, most GMs don’t track time that carefully either. You can just assume a certain fixed amount of time passes in the transition between rooms. That’s what I usually do. So, even the distances don’t really matter.

Long story short, a practical map for a site-based adventure – say, a small temple – would look like this.

That’s literally all that’s needed for most dungeons. Seriously. Again, mouth breathers, stay out of my comment section with the “hypotheticals.”

If you want to learn how to draw a good dungeon map, learn how to draw rectangles and lines. And I can’t think of a way to teach you how to draw rectangles and lines. I mean, they don’t even have to be straight. Mine aren’t that straight. Rectangles and lines. That’s all it takes to map most dungeons. And anything more is generally just mapsturbation. Unless…

Good Mapping Tactics

Admittedly, games like D&D and Pathfinder add a little more to the mapping mix because they do have some specific mechanics that are very dependent on precise positions and distances and things. That is to say, they include tactical combat systems. And that does change everything. A little.

If we start from the premise that a good map only presents information that is absolutely necessary and can’t be presented any other way, then we have to admit that the maps of locations in which fights are going to break out must show a little bit more information. Lines and rectangles won’t do. So, you have to up the level of mapping to the level of a Tactical Map.

And this is where people start to go crazy and lose control. Particularly when mapping dungeons.

A good Tactical Map follows the same criteria as a good Practical Map. It displays only what information is absolutely necessary and only what information can’t be presented more easily in some other format. That’s why Tactical Maps don’t include stat blocks for monsters.

What does that mean? Well, first of all, it means that Tactical Maps should only exist for places in which a fight is reasonably likely to take place. Wizards of the Coast and Paizo both LOVE to include to-scale, tactical maps of every f$&%ing location the players might find themselves in, regardless of what they will be doing there. They have a tendency to draw their entire dungeon map as a tactical map, even when there are no wandering monsters, and half the rooms are empty. Now, that CAN be practical. If you are only going to include ONE map of the site and part of the map is going to involve fighting, the whole map should be tactical. But the problem is, every f$&%ing GM falls into the trap of drawing out every site they create for their home games as a Tactical Map when it might be easier to draw a Practical Map of the adventure and then just create the three Tactical Maps for the three rooms that actually have fights in them. Yes, it’s creating four maps instead of one. But it’s about ten times easier to make a Practical Map than a Tactical Map. It takes like, five minutes. And then you only have to spend the extra time creating Tactical Maps for a part of the whole space.

Wizards and Paizo – among other things – are concerned about page count. You don’t have to be. You can spread your maps happily over six different sheets of paper.

Second of all, Angry’s Rules of Not Overmapping also mean that a Tactical Map doesn’t need to include absolutely every f$&%ing thing. It only needs to include things for which there are rules. And things for which the rules are likely to come up. What does that mean?

First, it means a Tactical Map has to allow you to quickly determine distances and ranges to the extent that the game requires them. And that “to the extent that the game requires them” is very important. 13th Age doesn’t have precise ranges or distances. It uses fuzzy, vague terms. Same with Star Wars and Genesys. Those are based on range bands. Maps for that game don’t have show any sort of exact scale. Just a vague sense of size to match the vague rules of the game. Meanwhile, everything in Pathfinder and D&D happens in five-foot increments. The games are stuck on a five-foot-square grid. Even if you think you’re playing gridless and using pretentious terms like “theater of the mind,” you’re still on a grid. As a result, a Tactical Map for those games needs to be measured out in five-foot squares. Using any other sort of scale – or no scale at all – is just obscuring the information you need. So break out the graph paper.

Beyond that, a Tactical Map needs to show only what things actually affect movement, line of sight, and line of effect. Grass and carpet and tiles and s$&%? Worthless. Clear ground is clear ground. Also, small bits of debris like dirt and rocks? Still worthless. Just clear ground. Underbrush thick enough to slow you down or allow you to conceal yourself? That’s useful. Furniture that impedes movement or blocks line of sight or line of effect? Useful. Objects that block movement? Useful. Columns and pillars and posts and tree trunks that are small enough that people can share a space with them but provide cover and concealment? Useful.

Here’s an example of the same temple above as a Tactical Map:

Using a collection of very simple symbols, a Tactical Map shows where all the walls are. And all the doors. You can see the trees in the courtyard, both their trunks and the spread of their canopies. The canopies can provide concealment and cover, after all. There’s some brush that is thick enough to impede movement and provide concealment if someone drops prone. Pillars at the corners of some squares can be used for defensive cover. And furnishings that effect movement are shown. There’s also a pool of water. That’s going to slow movement too.

Not shown? Well, the courtyard is a slightly sunken garden with a tiled cloister around it. The slight step down onto the grassy ground is omitted. As are some steps to a slightly elevated area in the shrine. There’s a rug on the floor of the priest’s bedroom. There’s some windows. While it is conceivable that some of those things COULD affect combat, the likelihood is small. And those elements are included in the room descriptions. The GM can adjudicate the effect.

Drawing a good tactical map – and here, I’m talking only about drawing the map, not designing the encounter, because I’ve done that many times before – drawing a good tactical map is a matter of being clear and being minimal. Decide what elements of the room are actually likely to affect the combat and draw those. And don’t draw any space you don’t have to as a tactical map.

To be quite honest, if I knew the only two fights in this temple took place in the Courtyard and the Shrine, I’d have only mapped those Tactically. For the rest, I’d have used the Practical Map above.

If my style has an old school look to it, well, that’s because it IS old school. That’s basically the mapping style that we used back in the day. Way back in the day. This is how Frank Mentzer taught me to map in his 1983 Dungeons & Dragons Basic Rules. Look. I’ve still got my books:

The thing is, you can use whatever symbols you want. Whatever makes sense to you. Of course, the map itself will be supported by the text of the adventure anyway. So, everything can be highly symbolic. The point isn’t to reproduce the space like a satellite image. It’s to represent the important bits of the space. To scale.

It does help to learn to draw straight lines though.

So, You Want to be a Map Artist

Now, let’s talk about the maps that you find in modules. They are numerous. They are highly detailed. They aren’t Practical. They aren’t Tactical. Most of them shouldn’t exist at all. But they are really pretty. And that’s precisely the point. I call them Artistic Maps because that’s what they are. They aren’t maps that were designed to be useful. They are maps that were designed to be pretty, whether they are useful or not. And where they are useful, the prettiness generally can’t get in the way of the usefulness. But some cartographers forget that and clutter the f$&% out of the maps with embellishments that make s$&% really unclear.

Back in the 4E D&D days, the designers at WotC – as part of their process of standardizing battlefield design in a pretty brilliant way – invented symbols that could mark squares on their artistic maps to identify areas of difficult or harmful terrain. That was very helpful because their artists loved scattered rocks and skulls and bones and other debris all over the floor. Instead of getting their artists under control, they invented a symbol to tell you which rocks and skulls and bones would impede movement and which ones were just visual representations of flavor text.

I have a mixed opinion on that whole thing. But that’s not important.

The point is that published module maps are really terrible examples of how to draw your own maps for role-playing games. Because the maps are impractical, over-embellished, and unnecessary. Why are they there, then? Well, because they are pretty. And GMs like maps. They like looking at maps. They serve the same purpose as the artwork. They are decorative. They make you feel better about how much you’re spending on these products – or they give you good value depending on your cynicism level – and they are engaging and evocative.

That said, they aren’t completely useless. Just as with the rest of the artwork in the module or other product, Artistic Maps do help establish the tone of the place. Here, look. I slapped together an Artistic Map of that same temple I used above. Check it out.

Yeah, I know the shadows and lighting are a little weird. Get off my f$&%ing back. I’m not a f$&%ing artist, and I’m still learning how to work with all of the special effects in Campaign Cartographer, okay? That’s why I’m not teaching you how to be an artist.

The point is, the Artistic Map actually conveys something about the space. Even this crappily slapped together map. I mean, if you had to guess, would you think the shrine was dedicated to a good deity or an evil one? And is this temple ruined or is it in good repair? It looks like it’s an active temple. If the heroes walked into the place, got attacked by monsters, and didn’t find a priest, they’d suspect something happened really recently.

Despite my rantiness earlier, Artistic Maps aren’t useless. But they aren’t maps. They present some of the same information as maps, but they also do completely different jobs from normal maps. Mostly, what they are is an embellishment for a commercial product.

But they are pretty.

The problem is, Artistic Maps present an unrealistic standard for most GMs. Because they take a lot of talent, practice, and hard work to produce. So, it’s a good thing they are actually unnecessary. Unfortunately, they are all most GMs have ever seen. That’s another advantage of my being so f$&%ing old. I remember what maps used to look like when our modules weren’t all expensive, two-hundred glossy page affairs. And that’s what you should strive for.

Honestly, mapping is just like narration. If you try to be all flowery and fancy, you’re going to f$&% it up. Because the point isn’t to show off, it’s to communicate clearly.

So, before you sit down and start mapping, figure out exactly what information each map needs and focus on presenting that clearly. Keep doing that, and you’ll eventually get better. Then, you can start to embellish.

Now, leave me alone. I’m going to finish another city block before dinner.

And then, next week, maybe we can map a dungeon.