Tuesday, May 1, 2012

Three Dimensional Dungeon Graph Paper


Tsojcanth of Lost Papers of Tsojcanth fame offers up this gem of a post in which he explains how to make awesome 3-D dungeons out of horizontal and vertical dungeon geomorphs. 
Here's a peak at it, but you have to hit up his blog for the full skinny.
This is a really slick way of designing dungeons, and he sells the idea good and hard.  Apparently, climbing up and down presents challenges for characters that players actually enjoy.  Who knew? 

The problem that I had with this process is that I don't like using geomorphs.  They're great for inspiration and I can see why so many DMs use them, but overly random nature leaves me cold.  I found myself wondering why some clever guy didn't just make some 3-D graph paper that I could use to draw up my own dungeon.  Then I remembered that I'm a clever guy and got busy:

Click on this for the bigger version. You can see the
seams in my hacked together blocks, but you should
be able to work around that.
This isn't perfect.  If you use this paper, (and I encourage you to do so and wouldn't mind seeing how you use it, wink nudge) you're stuck with my big blocky structures.  But it does free up your imagination and allow you to a lot more control over your dungeon architecture.  I highly recommend hitting up Dave's Mapper for more inspiration on the vertical tiles.
Keep an eye out, as inspiration strikes I hope to put together more block files to give you more options, too.

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