The players map is a treasure map. It provides the navigational landmarks, identifies threats and hazards, details known obstacles and tricks, but most importantly the life changing score that waits in the darkness to be brought back into the light. If your clubhouse is big enough, it is also for sale from higher level PCs to lower level PCs.
This is a good point, and it shines a light on a weakness in my approach. My 'maps' aren't in-game objects with explicit value of their own. I think there are ways around this. I'll spend some time noodling on it.
Worst case, it's a weakness I'm willing to live with. "No model is perfect, but some are useful."
Map-as-artifact is great framing for this. Player-drawn maps are survival records, not just navigation tools.
It connects to something I've been wrestling with in Beneath Ahknoor, my current megadungeon. At a certain scale the 10-foot grid starts to fail. I've been borrowing from LS Whelan's Flux Space (Papers & Pencils) to think about this: levels tracked by familiarity and accumulated clues rather than geometry. The tension shifts from "did I draw this corridor correctly?" to "do we burn supplies or spend a piece of a character's Self to find our way back?"
Your point about the referee's map as a control panel rather than a game board maps cleanly onto this. The artifact at the end isn't graph paper. It's a ledger of what the party spent to get through. That's my approach to what you're describing with "flawed discovery."
This is great, and captures a lot of moments I've had trying to map things out.
We had the best of both worlds with Shadowdark. The map is present in a VTT with a light source, but fog of war is never cleared. Go so far away and there's no track of where you've been. So a paper map still ended up being needed, and we had those same moments of wait, that door should've lead elsewhere, how is the map wrong? It's not as wrong as it could've been, for sure, but those moments of panic with dwindling resources and random encounters stretches the nerves.
Have you had the chance to look at His Majesty the Worm? It is considered NSR rather than OSR. A megadungeon centered in a city, an overview map is provided and keyed. But it's contents constantly change, risks are still unknown or stale, and while a gap in the space might already be present to indicate something is missing, there's no guarantee how to get in there or whether it's a red herring. It's design principles are intriguing and it might get those gears turning for ways to tweak the OSR dials in unexpected ways.
Kate, your prose makes me hungry for more games.
The players map is a treasure map. It provides the navigational landmarks, identifies threats and hazards, details known obstacles and tricks, but most importantly the life changing score that waits in the darkness to be brought back into the light. If your clubhouse is big enough, it is also for sale from higher level PCs to lower level PCs.
Watch out for fakes.
Spot on! Maybe, low level character are just daring mappers trying to extort good money for information!
This is a good point, and it shines a light on a weakness in my approach. My 'maps' aren't in-game objects with explicit value of their own. I think there are ways around this. I'll spend some time noodling on it.
Worst case, it's a weakness I'm willing to live with. "No model is perfect, but some are useful."
Map-as-artifact is great framing for this. Player-drawn maps are survival records, not just navigation tools.
It connects to something I've been wrestling with in Beneath Ahknoor, my current megadungeon. At a certain scale the 10-foot grid starts to fail. I've been borrowing from LS Whelan's Flux Space (Papers & Pencils) to think about this: levels tracked by familiarity and accumulated clues rather than geometry. The tension shifts from "did I draw this corridor correctly?" to "do we burn supplies or spend a piece of a character's Self to find our way back?"
Your point about the referee's map as a control panel rather than a game board maps cleanly onto this. The artifact at the end isn't graph paper. It's a ledger of what the party spent to get through. That's my approach to what you're describing with "flawed discovery."
Exactly!
This is great, and captures a lot of moments I've had trying to map things out.
We had the best of both worlds with Shadowdark. The map is present in a VTT with a light source, but fog of war is never cleared. Go so far away and there's no track of where you've been. So a paper map still ended up being needed, and we had those same moments of wait, that door should've lead elsewhere, how is the map wrong? It's not as wrong as it could've been, for sure, but those moments of panic with dwindling resources and random encounters stretches the nerves.
Have you had the chance to look at His Majesty the Worm? It is considered NSR rather than OSR. A megadungeon centered in a city, an overview map is provided and keyed. But it's contents constantly change, risks are still unknown or stale, and while a gap in the space might already be present to indicate something is missing, there's no guarantee how to get in there or whether it's a red herring. It's design principles are intriguing and it might get those gears turning for ways to tweak the OSR dials in unexpected ways.