Thursday, March 29, 2012

A 3x5 Map Experiment

Those who have read my blog know that I am a big fan of geomorphs. They are a fantastic tool for coming up with dungeons on the fly — especially those with a distinctly old-school flair. There are those, however, that balk at the seeming "uniformity" of maps generated by such a method. Since essentially all of the geomorphs over at Dave's Mapper are 100' x 100' all of the maps tend to be the same overall shape, even though the interiors might be radically different.

Enter the map I stitched together of maps drawn by Dyson. There have been a lot of positive comments about it. One that jumped out at me was that it seems more organic than other types of maps (the blocky nature of geomorphs, for example). This got me thinking of another way to implement the geomorph concept while getting a more organic outcome.

Most of the maps I used to generate this map were originally on 3x5 index cards. What if mappers out there produced a slew of 3x5 map areas with one or more ways to connect their map to other 3x5 maps. Here's the kicker: don't use a graph grid and don't worry how or where the connection happens. The result will be that the 3x5 card can connect, but not necessarily in a block — it creates a greater possibility to produce organic looking maps.

So, I quickly drew some up myself:




I then placed them together in order to create this:
Though not as organic as my inspiration, I don't think anyone could accuse it of being blocky. This being my first attempt, one thing I would do in the future is avoid getting too close to the edge of the card save for one or two rooms.

Anybody out there willing to take up the challenge?

11 comments:

Unknown said...

Awesome idea and execution.

Roger G-S said...

That looks great. Inspires me to make some more tetramorphs. ... although these would be easier to handle as physical objects. You could probably go even more outside the grid with angled and irregular passages and rooms.

Also, that wide passage in the top one has no mate.

Black Vulmea said...

That's slick.

matt said...

Very nice, I have to agree with you. One reason I stopped making geomorphs was they eventually got to be boring. They are inherently limiting in their structure. These certainly are interesting, may have to do some just to experiment with.

FrDave said...

It was your tetramorphs that, in part, inspired me to do this...BTW when I saved the top map as a .png, the railroad disappeared and I didn't notice. Thanks for pointing it out...it's fixed now.

FrDave said...

@Daniel, @Roger, @BV, @Matt
Thanks for the kind words...

Anthony said...

I like this a lot. The created map, while not as "natural" as the one that I drooled over in the previous entry, is a great improvement over the typical squared-off dungeon.

Passing thought: would it make a difference to use something other than rectangular cards? Perhaps polygons of different shapes, such as a one finds in a "tangram" puzzle? But perhaps these would be too hard to make the entrances/exits line up.

Gordon Cooper said...

Excellent idea, FrDave. I have lots of blank index cards waiting to be used for something. Now they have a purpose in life.

FrDave said...

The only difference I see is availability. 3x5 cards are ubiquitous, though I suppose you could cut a few up into whatever shape you want...

Andrew said...

I didn't use cards, as I use Photoshop, but here's a 3x5 geomorph. With landmarks.

http://fictivefantasies.wordpress.com/2013/02/13/prokopian-3x5-geomorph-drowning-shrine/

Andrew said...

I think these geomorphs are cool (obviously, as I'm making some.) I want to note, however, I don't have a problem with the regular geomorphs. I look at this map I did with the Dungeonmorph Dice fonts, for example. I did some in Word and Photoshop to touch it up, but the end result was evocative and cool. My players enjoyed it.

http://fictivefantasies.files.wordpress.com/2013/01/plusevian-plaza-map.jpg?w=436&h=500