Once I became a player of Dungeons & Dragons, I naturally gravitated toward paying even closer attention to maps of the Middle Ages. What I noticed is that, during many periods of medieval history, many parts of Europe were divided into a crazy quilt of petty kingdoms and principalities. This isn't news to anyone with even a little knowledge of history, but it was positively revelatory to me at the age of ten. Growing up in a world of superpowers and large nation-states, this was contrary to my own sense of what the world was like or indeed could be.
In recent years, I've found myself thinking more about those maps of the Middle Ages, especially as I further develop the setting of Secrets of sha-Arthan. For example, the Empire of Inba Iro is actually made up of twenty districts, each of which is ruled by its own king, who, in turns, swears fealty to the King-Emperor of da-Imer. I've taken one of these districts, the Eshkom District, and fleshed it out for use as the starting area for new campaigns. The district is actually quite small – about 60 miles east to west and 45 miles north to south – because I think that's more than large enough to contain more than enough opportunities for adventure without overwhelming a referee new to the setting.
Over the years, I've drawn a lot of setting maps and I've fallen prey to the urge to "go big." I suppose that comes from having looked with awe at the maps of Middle-earth one too many times as a kid. There's something undeniably appealing about a huge map covered in evocative and mysterious names. Such maps seem ripe with possibilities. However, as I've gotten older, I've come to feel that, lovely though they are to look at, big maps rarely get used to their full potential. More often than not, they wind up being akin to those world maps in the Indiana Jones movies, marking only a handful of places the characters pass through on their way to the site of their next adventure.
Nowadays, I'd much rather the characters spend more time in a smaller area, getting to know it better than they ever could if they were constantly flitting about from one end of a big map to the other. My Twilight: 2000 campaign, for example, has spent the last two and a half years of play within a fairly small part of Poland. Likewise, the Traveller campaign in which I'm playing has taken place entirely within a couple of subsectors in the Crucis Margin sector. This has helped to give it a "cozy" feel that I've come to enjoy. Rather than simply being a huge swath of Charted Space comprised of hundreds of planets, each one indistinguishable from the last, Crucis Margin feels like a distinct place, with its own unique feel. I think that can be important to the success of a campaign.
What's your experience with smaller campaign areas? Do you like them? How do they compare to larger areas in terms of contributing to player attachment to a setting? I'm quite curious about this, because, looking at the RPG settings that have been sold over the years, most of them seem to lean more toward the large and I wonder whether this has influenced the preferences of gamers. Let me know what you think.
My favorite game is one I've played more then a hundred sessions of, an adaptation of the Hells Rebels pathfinder campaign. The entire game revolves around one city. We visited another city once for an assassination of someone who was causing trouble in our city, and we once ventured to a nearby mountain fortress to close the only route to our city. Aside from that, the entire game has taken place inside this one city, rarely even leaving it's walls to visit the sprawl of towns and hideouts near it. You can walk from one side of the city to another in like four hours. It's been amazing. I have a personal connection to specific neighborhoods, and a strong sense of the NPCs, because we keep going to the same places and meeting the same people. It's also been great as the game as pushed to a climax and we battle for control over the city. We had the option to set fire to neighborhoods to aid our troops, but we decided against it- that's Redroof! Can't burn down Redroof, half our rebellion grew up there! Can't burn down Temple Hill, the orphanage and the Church is there! Okay maybe we can burn down the Walled Gardens, it's all rich snobs there, but what if the fire spreads to the dockside? Those sailors helped us when we were dodging bridge tolls, and that whole area is almost entirely wood...
ReplyDeleteI have always liked maps and also had a urge to "go big" in the past too. Now I prefer smaller settings with rumors of bigger territories and biger events in the background, that may be developed in the future.
ReplyDeleteDCC also emphasizes small maps and a localized world.
ReplyDeleteBest RPG maps ever? Pete Fenlon's maps for MERP, by a country mile.
Another thoughtful post. Having a comfortable, knowable home base makes the journey into the unknown more meaningful I think.
ReplyDeleteIn our comicbook superhero games, we'd focus on one city and knew every inch of it, with some globetrotting adventurers sprinkled in for variety.
Same with CoC and New England.
Tom Baker's early years on Doctor Who handled well that juxtaposition of the small, homey comfort of England with the alien, unknowable vastness of the universe.
Similarly, The Lord of the Rings fully fleshes out the Shire. The provincial hobbit characters are the ones we follow through the sweeping epic. And the books start and (most importantly) end in the Shire.
As a fellow cartophiliac, I was always a sucker for big maps — not just for the artistry but the *promise* they held for stories and adventure. As a DM, I frequently adapted existing maps (the board from Outdoor Survival, a detailed topographic map from Philmont Scout Ranch, the tile system from Mighty Empires) and overlaid them with kingdoms and castles... most of which were never visited by players.
ReplyDeleteStill, even if they are never reached, I know gamers appreciated a larger world existed, that there was the *potential* there would always be more to explore. As one friend said to me after a short Star Frontiers campaign, "At least you got us off that damn city map and took us somewhere interesting."
IIRC, the very first Dungeon Master, Dave Arneson, conducted the entirety of his 39-year D&D campaign on his map of the lands surrounding Blackmoor. As published by Judges Guild in 1977, the map covers about 340 by 520 miles, which is about the same size as each of the following:
ReplyDeletefour Judges Guild Wilderlands maps
Tolkien's map of Wilderland in The Hobbit
California
Sweden
Yukon
If that's big enough for Arneson...
That's a relatable feeling. Looking at the map of Middle-earth, most can't help but feel tempted to do something as wondrous, but I ended up realizing it won't be easy to put such a map to good use.
ReplyDeleteI keep notes describing the setting, kingdoms, people and other setpieces, but when actually drawing a map I always go for smaller ones. In my experience, a lord's fortified city, a few surrounding settlements and then its surrounding lands were always enough to get a sandbox campaign going. Since travel isn't an easy task when anything beyond a settlement's walls is often dangerous, untamed wilderness, a lot can still happen in these relatively small territories.
If the players decide to travel beyond the map, I can always draw another small map based on the setting's notes and attach it to the previous one. If I keep following this, the map will get big on its own organic way, but I never push it towards that, I just let it happen if it does.
This is the way to do it. Once I was running a campaign based out of Restenford in Secret of Bone Hill and at some point somebody asked about the nearest big city so I had to make something up on the spot. Between sessions I went and printed out the City-State of the Invincible Overlord of course and later on they had many fine adventures in there...
DeleteI'm reminded of this passage from one of my favorites of all the Appendix N books, Bellairs's The Face in the Frost:
ReplyDelete"If you looked at a map of the South made in Prospero’s time, you would think it was a badly done and rather fussy abstract painting, or the palette of a demented artist. You would see blotches within splotches within wavy circles; you would see shapes like ladyfingers, like stars, like dumbbells, and like creeping dry rot. All this was the fault of Godwin I (Longbeard), the first King of All the South, and the last to hold any real power. He divided up the kingdom among his sons, and they did likewise, and so on. Primogeniture was never established, so eventually the South became an indescribable conglomeration of duchies, earldoms, free cities, minor kingdoms, independent bishoprics, and counties. These little worlds were often the size of small farms, though they might be named the Grand Union of the Five Counties, or the Duchy of Irontree-Dragonrock."
What a great quote.
DeleteI thought of “The Face in the Frost” too when I read this blog entry. I could easily see a whole campaign set therein.
Deleteremember when video games would include a decent sized cloth map, that generally had little to do with the game?
ReplyDeleteI do! Those were the days ...
DeleteHi James I always lived the dark sun 1st edition map and still think about it thirty years later. It was just the right size between too big and too small. Seven cities- great! I can explore that without becoming overwhelmed. The edges of the map with the undefined sea of silt were super interesting to me. In contrast darks sun 2es map overexplained things and somehow made the area less interesting imo.
ReplyDeleteI kind of like the map for exalted but I've come to the conclusion that I'm not that interested in maps that have no boundaries, ie where the edge of the land blurs into the realms of chaos and so on. It makes the world feel smaller to me.
My previous campaign with the regular gang was a Classic Traveller campaign that took place over almost four years of play and occupied two star systems at both ends of a Jump 1 corridor.
ReplyDeleteThe one before that last a bit over two years and took place almost entirely within two counties in Massachusetts. Some day I aim for a campaign that will take place entirely on an aircraft carrier sized ship. 8)
"Big Ship" campaigns can work well in scifi games even if the crew and passengers never disembark. Had a good time with LBB Traveller where the eight-month campaign started as we were all boarding a fair-sized "cruise ship" on an express run and ended when we disembarked at the far end of the route. We did some cosmic sightseeing in a few systems and had some interactions with local "shuttle merchants" peddling their wares and services during refueling at a couple of points but basically never left the ship itself.
DeleteMy standard campaign map is one page, 18x20 hexes at 10km each. Occasionally I have to make 1-4 bordering maps or some overseas area (Isle of Dread style), never needed more. If most hexes have something of interest, and places to go back to, it'll keep players busy for a long, long time.
ReplyDeleteThe second RPG I played was Gangbusters. We spent years with just that map of Lakefront City. Jake
ReplyDelete