Dungeon Scrawl: Old school maps in minutes | Hacker News Reader

Dungeon Scrawl: Old school maps in minutes

dungeonscrawl.com

366 pointsCaseee68 comments

Open articleView on HN

I love the style of this and tried something similar before changing direction with Table of Sending.

After lots of testing, I settled on 2.5D tiles for the DMs who wanted to sketch their maps 15 minutes before playtime:

- https://tableofsending.com/

The shadowcasting fog-of-war has also been awesome since the map is semantically understandable:

- https://twitter.com/HunterLoftis/status/1269396682233581568

Looks great. Making maps is the worst part of being DM for me and playing on computer sets high standards for map quality so I end up spending 90% of prep time drawing maps :/

I've made a quick and dirty generator of outdoors maps for my hex crawler campaign, maybe someone will find it useful: https://ajuc.github.io/outdoorsBattlemapGenerator/

It has export to FoundryVTT (.dd2vtt format), I find it so much better than roll20.

Is the Escher-esque image under "Isometric Edit Mode" (https://dungeonscrawl.com/images/pic10.png) a joke, or does the tool allow for physically impossible layouts? Or am I reading the image wrong and it's a physical layout?

> does the tool allow for physically impossible layouts?

I hope so! I've definitely run some dungeons that had Escher-esque layouts. It's for D&D dungeons, not real life architecture :)

AFACT it's just a line drawing tool that supports isometric drawing.

One of the defining features of isometric is that such layouts are possible because the X/Y axes are identically sized (iso = same; metric= measurement) regardless of the position on the Z axis.

The tool allows for that, but it takes some effort and familiarity to actually do - the isometric mode just does a rotate and squeeze scale

This reminds me of the Dr Who episode "Castrovalva"; the Doctor and his companions do spend some time running around trying to figure out the layout until they realize what's going on.

I've entertained the idea of DMing that type of thing for a while now.

Q1, Queen of the Demonweb Pits, had something similar if I recall.

There was an article in Dragon magazine back on the 80s about hypercube dungeon layouts.

Even further back, there's Hunt the Wumpus, which I think was originally laid out on a Platonic solid. Messing with adventurers is a time-honored tradition!

The original Wumpus map I've always seen referred to as a “squashed dodecahedron”, though since it only uses numbered vertices without spatial coordinates there is no particular way to distinguish it from an actual dodecahedron,

I started using inkarnate [0] a few weeks ago. You can use the parchment style to have maps with old looking style.

People use it both for world/regional maps and for town but also scene maps [1]

[0] https://inkarnate.com/

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/inkarnate/

My dad has always talked about how much he loved having to draw his own maps for games like Labyrinth [0] and Asylum [1]. He just recently played Breath of the Wild and while he loved it, he mentioned how cool it would be to have to draw the map there.

I love the spirit in this, great job!

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Labyrinth_(1980_video_game) [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asylum_(1981_video_game)

Your dad may enjoy the Etrian Odyssey series (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Etrian_Odyssey) for the DS and 3DS where a big part of the game is you drawing the map on the bottom screen as you explore the dungeon.

Review of the latest game for 3DS: https://www.polygon.com/2017/10/17/16492092/etrian-odyssey-5...

If your dad hasn't played them yet, check out these games; aside from the lack of feelies, it's as close as you'll get to old-school games:

http://excelsior-rpg.com/default.htm

I always liked Richard Bartle's take on this from a game design perspective, in his:

"HEARTS, CLUBS, DIAMONDS, SPADES: PLAYERS WHO SUIT Muds" http://mud.co.uk/richard/hcds.htm

Essentially: exploring is one dimension of fun, and some people enjoy it even more when it's hard (ie:no automap).

I remember playing Eye of the Beholder with a friend, one of us on map duty, the other controlling the game...

Hopefully this catches the eye of someone in the thread who'd know: I have a 5yo and 7yo who have loved playing some version of ad-hoc D&D I invent on the fly but it inevitably breaks down at some point because I haven't accounted for something along the way.

What's the most basic setup I could use in terms of character attributes, dice, calculations, etc. They love even the most basic imaginative adventure so I'd rather something be easier to play quickly than take a lot of time learning. 20+ years ago I played some basic D&D and then some other rip-off (Rolemaster?! Swear it started with J though.)

I have an old Heroquest set somewhere but haven't been able to find it in my parents' attic.

Not sure if it fits your requirements but there are games like No Thank You, Evil from Monte Cook Games. It is geared specifically toward kids.

That looks vaguely like it could work, if there was a system to borrow from it. My kids responded really well to a very literal "exploring a cave" scenario so don't necessarily need the less-D&D style of those stories.

We also have a house full of toys so I'm trying to avoid buying more gear. We already have paper, pencils and dice.

I haven't played it yet, but Quest is designed to be simple for all ages https://www.adventure.game/

but it inevitably breaks down at some point because I haven't accounted for something along the way

Could you give more details? That might be helpful in providing some ideas.

For example, I might have instructed them to roll for three character attributes. And then they encounter an enemy which has hit points of some sort and maybe attack and defend numbers. And then I realise that something about their character attributes doesn't really gel with how I'm trying to get them to roll dice against that enemy. Or, wait, they need to jump across a pit but did one of their attributes apply (strength, dexterity) and how would it modify their rolling target.

My memory of childhood D&D stuff is very foggy which probably hinders more than it helps.

I think I need to know what the simplest set of character attributes and enemy values might be that can withstand some basic sketch-map-as-you-go exploration and fighting. Is it strength, dexterity and wisdom, out of 20? Or two or five attributes?

There are so many ways you could handle this. But I think the most important thing to remember is that not the system should be the focus of the game but fun. Don't just improvise the plot (according to your player's actions), but improvise "the system" as well -- after all, it's yours, and your only duty is to make it fun for your kids.

Forgot a certain ability on your streamlined ability sheet? Well, who says they all have to be determined beforehand like in DND? Just make them roll new ability specs just when you need them.

Or simply make due with what you've got, e.g. by adjusting what you originally had in mind for the enemy attack with what is possible within your simplified system. And for the next game, slightly update the system whenever you've identified an oversight.

Don't sweat it, the exact rules are not so important, as long as your players can rely on consistency (as a proxy for fairness). For kids, I think, in the end they're gonna love it when they can just roll some dice every now and then and observe how what their characters do results in success when they roll well and (non-catastrophic) failure when they don't. Other than that, I would imagine the theater-of-mind aspect, i.e., the plot and the general world setting will probably be much more important.

Modern (5e) D&D even explicitly encourages this with it's skill system. DMs are encouraged to just pick a stat (or even let their players pick a stat) that feels like it's applicable to the situation, then then add that to their roll.

You could try Amazing Tales by Martin Lloyd: super-simple RPG for kids: https://amazing-tales.net/

From what I've gleaned of the rules online, this sounds like a potential winner. Thanks!

As someone who has been moved his DnD sessions to Discord with COVID going on, and has made a "shareable map" out of Google Sheets, this looks fantastic!

My table has made great use of https://shmeppy.com for remote-play maps. The maps it makes are much less sophisticated (just painting color on the squares and lines of a grid). What it gives you instead are player/monster tokens that everyone can see, measuring tools, and "laser pointers" to allow participants to draw attention to a region of the map while speaking.

EDIT: also an awesome fog of war feature; how could I forget?

Actually having used these kinds of 2D maps, I find they're not fun enough for me. If you're really into old-school original D&D dungeoneering-with-a-ten-foot-pole stuff, it's nice.

But I want more for my players. The best maps have very nice multi-level dungeons, with strange stuff like underground rivers or a dangerous precipice connecting parts of the dungeon.

Gave it a spin. UI is pretty clean, good landing page and neat that it can do isometric as well. Love the path tool. Wish there were dedicated Undo/Redo buttons in the top bar. Only bug I found was that if you use the menu item to 'rough it up', ctrl+z undoes the rough up and the last item you created.

I would like to see a randomize button that creates something random and then lets me edit it to my tastes. It's just so exhausting to plan an entire dungeon from scratch.

One thing I found fun was to start by blocking out one room, then another and another and basically switching between tools - the geometric shape too for a tower or two, and then start linking them up.

After a little bit of noodling you start to feel the outline of a building and then you can be a little more deliberative.

In my experience, the hard part about planning out a dungeon is filling it with encounters.

There's another creator (Donjon) which doesn't make maps as prettily or easily as this one but it does allow you to basically do what you're looking for:

https://donjon.bin.sh/d20/dungeon/

You can actually import generated Donjon dungeons into Dungeon Scrawl using the TSV file

I've played around it a bit since someone recommended it a few days ago. Great for coarse dungeon layouts, but would probably need some more detail-oriented "finishing" if I'd want to use it for VTT play. Once we're going back to real dice, this might come in handy, if I'm ever doing a dungeon-heavy campaign.

Until then, I have to cope with the oddities of running DungeonDraft with Wine.

Yeah once we go back to an actual table (2021?) this will be amazing. I can see using this to sketch out a dungeon before breaking down into smaller maps in DungeonDraft for VTT.

I'm currently playing through the old Zelda games that don't provide an in-game map. This looks like it could be useful.

This tool is awesome and perfect timing because I am writing an adventure for my daughter and her friend to play :)

It looks pretty awesome from the bit I could play with it. It would be nice if it worked properly on mobile also. Just being able to hide the tool bars and pan without the keyboard would help a lot.

I've been kicking around an idea that would also require a similar sort of browser-based drawing tool. Is there a good library for building these, or do I start with a blank <canvas>?

There are a lot of graphics libraries out there, but I’ve been using PixiJS.

https://www.pixijs.com/

Threesj with socket.io for collaboration

I haven't really done role-playing about 20-years but aren't dungeon crawls a bit simplistic compared to freeform adventure story telling?

The "old school" style they're advertising is mostly based off of Dyson Logo's maps. I think it's interesting that this seem to come out after Dyson started teasing a similar program for his Patreon subscribers. On one hand, it's a great looking piece of software, but it feels a little scummy to write software that heavily leans on Dyson's style and then directly compete with him.

Is this somehow distinctive from Dragon Magazine / Dungeon Magazine from the late 80s in a way I'm not seeing? Or eg. the various TSR boxed settings with dungeons?

That cross-hatching-in-the-walls thing is fairly distinct, and I saw it immediately on Dyson's blog but not on a quick survey of old Dragon/Dungeon maps. That said, Dyson is clearly going for that aesthetic mostly, so it could be convergent evolution, and I'm hardly up to date on current styles for maps in other places.

The style really reminds me of old Chaosium maps, from the 1980s.

Just taking a look at Dungeon Magazine on archive.org and it seems that crosshatching in walls is pretty common, at least in the early editions.

https://archive.org/details/Dungeon_Magazine_002/page/n25/mo...

https://archive.org/details/Dungeon_Magazine_002/page/n45/mo...

https://archive.org/details/Dungeon_Magazine_002/page/n51/mo...

https://archive.org/details/Dungeon_Magazine_003/page/n31/mo...

https://archive.org/details/Dungeon_Magazine_003/page/n41/mo...

I never read those magazines and I can't say I'm an expert on dungeon map styles, but it's the hatching done in the dungeon walls that Dyson is known for (e.g., https://dysonlogos.blog/2011/09/03/dungeon-doodles-a-crossha...).

It looks like the person that made this program started playing around with the idea May 9 (https://twitter.com/probabletrain/status/1259172635776294912) a day after Dyson started tweeting about his program (https://twitter.com/DysonLogos/status/1258797586464542723).

I think Dyson's program is just a Photoshop extension and Dungeon Scrawl looks way more powerful, but it's worth pointing out the very similar timelines and styles.

Here's someone playing with the concept even earlier though. It did the rounds on reddit at the time, so I'd assumed it was the inspiration.

https://twitter.com/watawatabou/status/1197194111171940352

(in aother tweet, @watawatabou attributes the style to Dyson, though the idea of doing it programatically).

Dungeonscrawl is definitely inspired by Dyson.

Here are some tweets by the maker:

https://twitter.com/probabletrain/status/1259172635776294912... https://twitter.com/probabletrain/status/1258821040937013248...

Actually, development started before Dyson's Photoshop product, and sure it leans on his style, but the hatching existed before and was popularised by him. It's a common style across many existing dungeon mapping tools, and just one of the styles offered by the tool.

I'm glad to hear that! The style is very popular in the drawn maps I've seen. I haven't been interested in maps for long and don't pay too much attention to digital map programs. I associate the style with Dyson, as that what I've heard other people do. I first saw you tweeting about the program after I saw Dyson's tweet and the Dungeon Scrawl site says the development began on May 8th, which is why I thought the timeline looked a little suspect. I'm happy to hear that's not the case.

I was hand-drawing cross-hatched style maps on graph paper in the early 90s when I was a teenager running my own campaigns, and I certainly don't claim to have invented it either..

Mine didn't look quite so good though. ;-)

Yeah, this was kind of my mindset, too. Hatching is certainly an old trick, and I see the "Dyson hatch" is somewhat distinctive - but for me, knowing "old school" maps, it didn't stand out from the other offered styles - and certainly lived up to the promise of "old school" look and feel :)

FWIW, I just pulled open my red-box era OD&D books and the maps are all hatched in various styles when underground, but stippled (kind of a grassy texture) to indicate exterior; so e.g. a for a keep in the side of a mountain it would be clear which walls abut solid matter and which are stone.

The maps in the basic set use circles rather than lines for the hatching though.

Dyson's tool (which is more like an art asset) is pretty much Photoshop only, which is prohibitive to some. I signed up for their Patreon when they first previewed it, thinking I could use it with Affinity Photo. There's some layer combination features missing that means it's PS only.

This is a very common hatching style that I have seen countless times.

This is really great, I love the clean UI and ease of use. This must have been a huge amount of work!

Panning does not work in safari

Could use a link to jump into an existing example map.

https://dungeondraft.net/

Wow this is very impressive. I wasn't expecting the lighting stuff and was amazed.

Amazing! Windows only, though :(

Their big feature for the next major release is a Mac version, and until then it works quite okay in wine. Probably better in Linux/Wine, as that tends to have fewer graphics bugs.

My enjoyment factor of both DungeonScrawl and DungeonDraft is a bit different, as with 'Scrawl it's awesome sketching a big event location, whereas with 'Draft I get a Bob-Ross-ian spark when adding minor details. A candle here, a floating corpse there, some cobwebs and fungi…

I can pair DungeonDraft with FoundryVTT, where you can get virtual lighting support imported from the maps. So you don't have to "paint" your walls twice, once for the pure visuals and once to see where vision and movement is blocked.

Any chance of splicing each grid as a unique PNG and building it up in JSON like Tiled when exporting?

I can’t really tell what this is. Is it just a drawing tool that applies styles, or does it procedurally generate dungeons for you? If it doesn’t procedurally generate, it would probably still be more fun to just use graph paper and some coloured pens

Fun? Maybe. But this is so much faster. And as a GM, sometimes I'm just coming up with maps fifteen minutes before I sit down to play. This is a really solid tool for when I don't have time for Dungeondraft, and I find Dungeondraft to be even more fun than graph paper.

It just draws things.

This one generates dungeons:

https://watabou.itch.io/one-page-dungeon

Reply on news.ycombinator.com