Where The Territory Is The Map
You Need To Be Map-Maxing
Campaigns need maps. A Clubhouse campaign needs a lot of maps, and a place to store them, because—while there will be only a few early on—map quantity will only grow over time.
For Advanced Dungeons & Dragons 1st Edition (as with any D&D edition, or knockoff thereof, worth playing), that’s going to be a mixture of overland and site (i.e. dungeon) maps.
You don’t need to start with much. A blank hex map, with one hex rolled up and the rest left blank, is all that anyone needs. A town and a dungeon, the latter being just three levels at most (but open to going deeper), is sufficient to get started. I showed all of this with the initial series of Tower Campaign articles last year.
As Jon Mollison’s Solo Play video series shows, you will end up nesting maps into each other over time; big overland maps (the sort you use for overall campaign action tracking), smaller overland maps (the sort that you generate for more local operations), and location maps at the bottom end of that scale.
Whether you generate your maps physically or digitally, and update them accordingly, you should strive for the following:1
Clarity: You’re not the only one that will use this. Others need to be able to read what you wrote, drew, and annotated. Draw clear and clean. Key the same way.
Consistency: Maintain your schema across maps, and across updates to maps; this means that when you do update a map, you put the old versions into an archive so you (and others) can maintain consistency across time as well as space.
Conciseness: Your maps will be used, and referenced, by others in the campaign sooner or later. Include only what the end-user requires; omit everything else. For online maps, you can just link to another document or page that has whatever you omitted from the map.
Dunder Moose did a stream over a year ago about using Hexfriend to get started on the overland map.
For the indoor map, using Appendix A, there’s this blog article series from 2022:
There’s ten parts in total, and the writer did not link them together. Despite this inconvenience, I urge those of you unfamiliar with how to use this procedure to do a careful read-through and to follow along on each step by doing your own generated dungeon.
Yes, you can do this live at the table and generate the dungeon on the spot; I have done this several times, and the experience of absolutely no one knowing what’s next enhanced the experience for all of us. I am getting faster at doing it too.
“But only the Referee deals with maps.”
Until your man has turf. Until your man as allies. Until your man has assets he can’t just toss on his back, on a horse, or (at most) on a cart or wagon. Then you, players, are not only within your rights to make your own maps you should be prepared to do so.
Those maps also need to be clear, consistent, and concise; other players will use them, for one reason (and purpose) or another, and those players will do things with their mans that make changes to those maps. They will raid your man’s turf. They will assault your man’s allies. They will attack your man’s assets. They will get into your base, killing your mans, and taunt you while they do it. They will even come at your mans so hard that you will need to play your Paladin to do something about it.
Be it something so big as a cosmic power struggle, or something so small as two street gangs fighting over territory in a single neighborhood, you need maps because this will always come down to territory and in a hobby all about Fantastic Adventure Wargaming, the maps are the territory- and the territory are the maps.
I will take the time to clean up my own maps, redraw them (as per above), and photograph them to upload for review in the Tower Campaign’s Discord server.