As those who follow our social media, its that time of the year again. What time? #ampvember time. Lauri tried to jumpstart the whole thing a month early, but here we are.
So, what is #mapvember. I guess I would relate it closely to NaNoWriMo or National Novel Writing Month, in which you try to write a whole novel in one month. Here we try to make a map every day of the month. Lauri has been doing his on the social media side, I’ll be doing mine a bit differently.
Once again it’s time for the annual #mapvember! In essence #mapvember was started by Miska Fredman. It is challenge to create one map per day for the whole November. I clearly forgot this but will still try to spend this month with maps in mind.
I actually was almost on time since I found the Dungeon Builder Kickstarter last week. I posted in on our forum and downloaded the demo. But since it was weekend I kind of forgot all about it. Until yesterday evening when I spotted a new map at Miska’s Instagram. With that in mind I woke up and tried to Dungeon Builder demo and this is what I was able to produce in five minutes:
Last November I stumbled on Miska Fredman‘s Instagram account and noticed he was drawing maps with #Mapvember. I got hooked. I even draw some maps myself too and Aki wrote about automated map generation.
Since then Miska has gone on Patreon and is drawing maps in addition to his job as the founder of Ironspine (Finnish rpg publisher). It seems like his map drawing has really paid off. At the end of August he published a neat booklet called A Dozen Dungeons (link to DriveThruRPG).
I enjoy coding, but doing it for a living can be very taxing. Therefore, I decided to start a project of my own, to keep coding, but do something that’s more stimulating to me. Also, there’s Miska Fredman’s #mapvember to which this can be my own special contribution.
Note that this is more about brainstorming and writing about the problems and possibilities this approach presents. I’ll try to return with something that works before the end of the month.
With all the OCR-stuff going on dungeons are getting better rep than in ages. Dungeon World is a certain classic and a game I would be willing to play at any time. Almost a year ago I talked about making dungeons on the fly and this subject raised its ugly head last Tuesday when the party descended into an ancient underground city in Egypt. Granted I was pretty tired then but I still think I had something good going on.
We are going to continue our descend into this forgotten tomb tomorrow and while I was searching the web for ideas and made notes about how to get it right I came into a conclusion that what I am actually doing is building a dungeon while I thought I was making a scenario for Call of Cthulhuish game.
We had a Chrismas party a week ago. Instead of board games, I said I could run World of Dungeons. It’s an ultralight hack of Dungeon World which I hadn’t run it before, so we took it on a spin. Because nobody believed that we could play entirely sober, I decided on a full improv session. It degenerated slowly, but inevitably—and undeniably gloriously—into player vs. player mayhem, which surprised me very little. Despite my mistakes as a drunken GM, we had a whole lot of fun, and I learned a few important lessons. These are my notes from the GM’s standpoint. Continue reading