Rescaling encounter maps for Tiny Epics (RPG Blog Carnival)

Errant Thinking proposes Tiny Epics: Small Souls in a Big World! for this months prompt for the RPG Blog Carnival. Thinking about the "Dungeons in miniscule" point, I was thinking about the fun to be had with messing with scale. Take a map and tweak the scale from 5' to 10', 15' or 20' as you like.

Castles and dungeons get a whole new lease of life - a window ledge is a great archery position, cavalry charges down corridors make sense, a doorway is not such an easy choke point, an open hall takes more than one turn to cross, all the calculus of moving and fighting within a space changes.

Fun with scale switching

To try and illustrate; I scanned and dropped a grid onto Castle Balronco from the fondly remembered Southern Reaches campaign - it actually looms over the Flytrap bar, haunt of the diminuitive flylings; so was already a place where scales were being fiddled with.
This place started as a repaint of a genuine castle on the Dordogne in France which provided ample detail for the outside - the skeleton of rooms drawn here are wrapped in walls at least as thick as the pointy arrow-slits along the top and bottom left and similarly some of the interior structural walls are very thick indeed. It provides a dungeon-appropriate level of connectivity and served well for the sessions I ran using approx 1 square = 5' scale.

If you bunch that up to 1 square is 15' then once you get into room 1, that big hall, it is a long dash to get across to any other exit leaving you exposed to ranged attacks or vulnerable to hit-and-run from mounted foes. Similiarly the doorways go from normal ~ 3' width to treble that, needing two adventurers shoulder to shoulder to hold it. Fireballs and other such area effects are not guaranteed room-clearers anymore. The list goes on.

None of this is too wild - there have been big maps in modules forever, but it is the ease of getting a second solid use out of a map by massively upscaling it, calling it a giants fortress, and setting your adventurer there. There are quite a few examples of this for existing giants fortress but I would also suggest calling it a giants ruin and having anything but giants there would also get you good mileage.

Continuing massively in this direction; bumping the scale up to 100' and making it a floating titans lair that must be traversed with a Spelljammer or some manner of underwater lair needing a submersible could also be fun.

The invert of all of this - down-scaling a map - can also be done but gets tricky because doors and passages rapidly become impassible to adventurers. This could be a neat puzzle, with an entire miniature dungeon that has to be navigated only through use of mage hand, familiars and hooks on lines, but unless size-changing magic is widely available to your party, it is not such a useful trick.

Castle Balronco in play

The Castle had three factions in it; fly-ling smugglers on the ground floor using the lower left rooms, beetlefolk wanderers where were flying in and out of the top of the castle and unbeknownst to the other two groups, a spider-vampire in some isolated rooms near the roof.

It meant that the ground floor was a combination of well trafficked but also partly-trapped - the unsound structure was not being disturbed by the small, light fly-lings marching about but the bigger player characters would set things off.

Beneath the castle was a dungeon - lifted from a photo of woodworm damage - which proved suitably labyrinthine.

If I were to run the place again, rescaled, suddenly all of those arrow slits become an entryway into some sort of grand temple and the now-huge central spiral staircase demands some sort of set-piece confrontation on it.

To close

Running on an up-scaled map changes the calculus of encounters - moves take you less far, ranges matter more, lines of sight, darkvision ranges, all the mechanics of encounters changes. At a minimum, it allows a straight-up recycle of a map, at best you could get some really memorable second uses by re-working who is present and making things different.

Note, there is nothing to stop you just rescaling the opposing forces; having small folk doing 'big' battlefield tactics in medium scaled places.
There is a map there, so I am counting my Joesky tax paid.

This was for the ever appreciated RPG Blog Carnival organised by Of Dice & Dragons.

And further; Dungeonize the Property Section

Rise Up Comus makes an excellent point in Unblocking Yourself: Dungeonize your Home look to draw inspiration for your hexes and dungeon rooms from what you see about you. They made the point in particular reference to dungeon rooms by looking at what is about your own house. I think that is an excellent idea; I have gotten good mileage out of a variation - finding inspiration for sites in newspaper property sections: "d30 dwellings and sites"

Normally these would be going straight into recycling but they are often great sources of quirky dwellings that you can get some nice ideas for odd features.

Property sections give inspiration for dungeon rooms or for me more often for hex locations or just general encounters.

The photography of these places give a great sense of how to treat the whole site - things like this persons sculpture garden attached to their house. Is it the lair of a Medusa? Is it living statues? Is it some kind of stone giant sacred space?

Elaborate gardens would be really difficult terrain to have to advance stealthily over or could be stuffed full of killer plants or traps. Interiors that serve exactly as in Dungeonize your Home but with the clutter of hundreds of strangers.

Often the interiors of our dungeons or structures end up quite sparse so it can be good to look at some of these places and consider "what would it be like if you had to get across this room?" Maybe there is only a narrow path between the piles of books between the chair and the door. Maybe it would be quicker to just trot across all the shin-high coffee tables and take the risk of them breaking. There can be some good ideas for shaking things up a bit.

The inspiration can be whatever you like and it also serves to use these property sections somehow instead of sending them straight into recycling.

=== Joesky Tax ===

d12 more dwellings and sites
1. Crooked paths tree - giant old moss covered tree of sprawling branches, home to a group of local woodlands folk who cheerfully abide it being the local easy access to the canopy above and a range of other fey destinations
2. Hags slab - somewhat unkindly named mid-lake foundation of an ancient structure. When not being used by local coven, often used for fisherfolk and a good source of local news
3. Ogres sauna - once a dwarven forge, now sealed over with crude daub-and-straw where an ogre is often found sweating or traipsing between it and a local pool
4. House of Mirrors - a cottage amid a garden festooned with broken mirror shards, home to an enchantress and their faithful minions, and filled within with mirrors from all corners of the world. Every magic mirror type is in here somewhere.
5. The strange interior shutters of this battered little cottage is the shell of the colossal centipede currently asleep within.
6. This clearing is festooned with battered but impressive furniture around a firepit. A trail through the forest leads up a hill to a smashed open wizards tower, still smouldering.
7. A line of collapsed trees bridge a ravine and provide a lively highway for local critters. A significant shortcut but very noisy to take.
8. The perfectly sheared away tower of a flying castle is slowly sinking into this wetland.
9. A ruin sits within perfectly tended gardens. Thirty feet from the walls the grass has been nibbled down by the sheep and geese that live here. Within skeletons continue to tidy and neaten what remains of the crumbling structure.
10. A fantastically arched structure, glassy domes of mystical construction, within a garden of plants from a much hotter clime and a small group of natives from a land far away.
11. Walls of ice make an otherwise normal local structure, inhabited by bundled-up halflings running a tavern in a tent in the garden.
12. A magnificent manor sits within a dell, its gardens a cornucopia of psychotropic plants. Grimly unsmiling, armed staff will sweep up any visitors/intruders to meet the master and be subjected to their interminable lectures about the liberating powers of vast quantities of their home-brewed psychadelics.

Shiny TTRPG links #268

Only the most interesting links from about the web. For more, see last weeks collection or the weekly r/OSR blogroll or check the RPG Blog Carnival. Bloggie-nominated. Originally inspired by weaver.skepti.ch, delinked by request.

Lonely Star posts The Poster's Code

Humberto Tramujas - Lupiron Press shares Rules are not neutral!

rose quarter-drifting / w.s. healed posts THE COIN DON’T HAVE NO SAY

The Foot of Blue Mountain gives us How to Chew Your Food

Crypt Of The Rambling Dead shares Less planning, more playing

Lonely Star posts How the OSR corroded my brain

Sam Sorensen writes Apologia for Plain Paragraphs

Table 46 asks Why don't the monsters simply eat the people?

Daniel Sell posts Bullet POINT

The DDS Board shares There is no BBEG

Iconography of a history yet to happen

I have long been a big fan of the Semiotic Standard developed for Alien (1979) by Ronn Cobb for "all commercial trans-stellar & heavy element transport craft" - in particular Artificial Gravity Absent is just so cheery. There should be lots of icons like that littering future settings, addressing problems we are not even considering yet.

Snip of Semiotic Standard by Ronn Cobb, recreated by Scotch and Soda

I have two particular cases in mind where there should be something like this about.
- Iconography developed by alien multi-species civilizations (Star Trek, Star Wars, Babylon 5)
- Iconography still lying around from the distant past (Warhammer 40k's dark age of technology, Foundation)

Alien gestures

While noting that iconography assumes that one is communicating with other critters that also 'read' or similar, one would assume that if you are sharing environments closely enough that some hazards or information needs to be communicated passively, this would get worked out.

The key here is 'form' - but actually there is quite a bit of leeway - looking across our iconography, a sufficiently abstracted 'Predator' would look the same; even a very strange alien form would be renderable in most of these signs with minor modifications - it would still have 'standing' 'lying' 'floating upside-down' and 'suited-up' forms - albeit with a tail or six limbs or an octopoid form or what have you. Swap those out and all the rest of those icons remain comprehensible.

One would assume that a whole block of hazards that are not dangerous to humans would appear on such a set - perhaps warnings of 'large beings walking' for smaller creatures or a variety of dangerous atmosphere tags for things with less tolerance of pollutants or even certain atmospheric components than humans.

From the history of a far future

For 40k, there ought to be some iconography that roots in the dark age of technology that ought to be plastered all over everything - even recognising that the Imperium has its skulls-and-wings staples, there ought to be other symbols in there that have persisted alongside the quasi-magical technologies they have. Red and yellow hazard striping has been part of armour designs for as long as folk have been painting but it would be neat to have some other iconography too.

For all that the Imperium has lost lots of know-how and technology, simple icons ought to have persisted - things like 'psi hazard', various warnings for plasma, melta, las and other hazardous technologies and all the semiotic standard above for voidships. Maybe some kind of 'beware the Men of Iron' or the like.

I would think that Necromunda terrain and Genestealer Cult gear would have lots of these plastered all over the day-to-day objects they use and fight through.

A counter argument could be heiroglyphics - where the meaning of symbols became lost for a chunk of time until dedicated study restored it to understanding. This could well be a valid argument, but I posit a setting where enough time-lost spaceships, isolated colonies and long-lived organisations stuck around that such symbols have survived, even if only a fraction of them.

What use to you, a DM?

Maybe not a lot, maybe what I am probing at here is that in your far future setting there could be icons and indicators that have become common across species or persist through time such that the ancient site you break into is comprehensible.

I feel there is an exercise here of going, much like Ronn Cobb did, "what hazards do folk face in this environment, what needs to be warned against" and coming up with symbols for those. If you could create such a set, imagine sharing a map with your players where all the hazards and traps are fully explained in the iconography, the challenge is for them to figure out the translation and then map their path based on that.

= = = Joesky tax = = =

d6 Icons of a Future Yet To Pass
1. Arm intersected and shifted by an arc - "Danger, Reactive Energy Shields"
2. Triangular 'face' with spiral eyes - "Caution, free-will subverting entities"
3. Black human figure with light blue line around head in front of red/white spiral - "Wear psy-barrier equipment"
4. Human figure with right side dissolving into pixels - "No shielding beyond this point"
5. Human figure with head split diagonally, across split is squared skull - "Beware humaniform mechanoids"
6. Diagonal split vertical lines and dots (1/0 cascade) with triangles/circles/squares - "Data corruption / memetic contamination"

Ducal House - Year Seven Begins

This is being written as we cruise up on the second child-related campaign hiatus - it is a good sign that the campaign has survived one so far and that interest exists to continue with it post-hiatus.

The stats are becoming quite impressive
Running March-2020 to present
149 sessions held (150 including session zero)
663 hours played
Averaging two sessions a month tempo.
Levelled up 10 times

Big things done this year was the closing down of one major threat to the world - the reemergence of the dead god of the undead - by tracking down a last extant artefact, slaying his last true believer with it and flinging the parts into the vauls of a mountain fortress. This puts paid to a plot running since session two, and the blow fell in session 138 so a mere 136 sessions to resolve it, with some detours along the way.

The big shift this past year was accelerating the in-world clock; getting more relaxed about time passing. This paid off in us getting nearly a whole month done in ~ 30 sessions roughly a session a day, twice as fast as in previous years. We all agreed to try this and it seems to be paying off.

The Sorcerer, as drawn by the Bard

As ever, XP is a flat 200 per session and then whatever comes from combat and risk-taking. There were a few big fights while questing around trying to find the artefact which pushed the total nicely but since then, apart from one ambush by rivals, there has been a lot of inteligence gathering and set up for a run on the next known hazard-to-all-life so a slower tick up of XP.

Statistics

Sessions per month varied over the year - quite a lot early in the year while bearing down on the artefact and then slower in the back half of the year - averaging the twice monthly tempo that was the initial target. I must once again recommend this sanity preserving technique for DMs - commit to a tempo that is slower than you would love, and then see if you can get a bonus session here or there. Those sessions will feel like treats as opposed to trying to keep a high tempo, having life-driven cancellations, and have the same number of sessions feel like thin gruel.

December last year was also the point where the actual hours and the theoretical plan finally crossed over. That plan - a pair of five hours sessions, ten hours of gaming, per month - was wildly ambitious for a sustained campaign but lo, we got six years in before we've fallen under that target. Admittedly, we have been burning down a massive pandemic-lock-in bank of hours played but still, we are only now falling behind where I might have hoped to be.

There was no level up this year - it was spent at 11th level throughout. They are creeping up on 12th level, one more good fight and they will probably get there. Average session length has ticked down this past year; 3.3 hrs versus 4.1 hrs the year before and 4.6 hrs for the campaign to date. We put in a fair few more evening sessions in person this last year which were good for keeping tempo up but those slots are just shorter by their nature.

As mentioned above after a wedge of combat XP while closing in on the artefact, things have been a lot lower risk of late. It needs one more significant fight - though one thing that is slowing things down a chunk is the inclusion of a fairly heavyweight high-CR follower in the party of late which has been diluting everyones combat XP gains.

As mentioned above, very happy to see the steepening of the time passing in-world; hopefully we can keep up this in-world tempo as it makes it more plausible for in-world consequences to propagate, both good and bad.

Plot progression

To recap the party's actual doings in world - things opened with a raid on an infernal ceremony, a desperate noble seeking to restore his families fortune, then progressed through repatriation of rescuees from a githyanki raid on the astral, and some setting the realm in order before they departed for a raid over the mountains into the chaotic warzone of their western neighbour, under invasion by their northern neighbout. Awakened ancient monsters, undead legions, wolf-riding hordes and local militias all clashed in the lands where a god had once died. After a side-trek to sneak into the lair of the stone giants lich-king for reconnaisance, the party scoured these war torn lands until they found the ruins of the ancient capital, snuck in, fought their way out past a swarm of demons and undead and fled with the blade of that long-dead god.

After a brief respite at the beach, the blade was used to slay that gods last true believer, then flung in the deepest, darkest vault in the family holdings. A diversion to the moon was followed by some house duties to supervise the removal of a deadly legacy from a buried temple of Bain beneath the capital, followed by an ambush by a third party in those same undercity catacombs. Finally, after tense discussions with their lieges court mage and realising they hunted the same foes, the year closed with a tour of the trouble spots, gathering the freshest of news by flexing the sorcerers teleportation capabilities.

The background goal to all this has been gearing up to put a stop to the second threat-to-all-life they are aware of, the stone-giants lich-king and whatever dread works he is up to.

Look ahead

We were to have a session tonight, before the campaign went on hiatus once more but now smallest householders enthusiasm for fresh air put paid to those plans. Last time it took us six months to get back to playing; we shall hope for similar this time around, so maybe some more sessions in August? We shall see.

Resolving the threat this lich-king poses is the main goal the players are aiming for at the moment, most likely that will carry us through to the end of the calendar year and after that there are a million loose threads lying around, up to them what they chose to prioritise but I think there is still enough meat on the bone for us to continue at least another year. For now, that is good enough, the year after I will deal with as we get to it!

Shiny TTRPG links #267

Only the most interesting links from about the web. For more, see last weeks collection or the weekly r/OSR blogroll or check the RPG Blog Carnival. Bloggie-nominated. Originally inspired by weaver.skepti.ch, delinked by request.

This weeks r/OSR blogroll also marks my hand-off to Vance of Leicesters Ramble, their carrying forward the torch is greatly appreciated.

Daniel Sell gives us How To Stop Jumping Ship

Goblin Punch posts Divine Patronage: A Separate System for Party Advancement

Build Worlds writes World Orogen

Jared Sinclair Dot Bear Blog Dot Dev shares How To Make A Dungeon

I Cast Light! writes PONDER THY BLOG(GIES): Thoughts On The 2026 BLOGGIES

MurkMail shares Encounter sequence generation

Table 46 writes What Should Have Won the Bloggies

Golden Achiever posts CAVE JAM!

Luke Gearing shares Boasts

Prismatic Wasteland writes Rating Every Room in White Plume Mountain

Four encounters for a caravan mini-campaign

One of my original 90s gaming group graciously hosted a get together for that old table over a weekend and one of the things we did was a round-robin D&D mini-campaign.

The concept for all of this was caravan guards taking a wagon from one point to another. It proved pretty robust as a vehicle for random encounters - we had something we were supposed to be looking after. There were NPCs when we needed them for rescues. They did not interfere when we did not need them because they were just wagon drivers. It gave a rationale for why the scenery was changing and how come we were dealing with completely different things from one encounter to the next. It was a nice model for getting straight to the gaming with minimum preamble.

On Fast Party Coherency

The characters we cooked up in a hurry ended up gelling really, really well conceptually. There was an orc monk who was basically a WWE wrestler. I was an orc fighter, dump stat intelligence, just like hit things with my sword. We had a Goliath archer who was effectively the brains of the outfit, to his chagrin and horror, and a halfling sorcerer who was a very kinetic, act-on-sight fellow. For him the plan is do the next step and then see where we are and then do the next thing after that and see where we are, repeat until problem solved or enemy defeated. As a group, they meshed together ridiculously well. Group cohesion was almost instant because everyone was team "scream and charge" - even the halfling (especially the halfling). It worked unexpectedly well.

For short haul campaigns or con games, I think the phrase that sometimes kicked around is "drive it like you stole it" and this was a good example of that. For short haul stuff just stick in someone who is going to burn the candle at both ends and the middle for the duration of this game and then if they survive, bonus, if they do not they have entirely served their purpose.

The Encounters

The set of four encounters started with the first 5e that one of my pals had ever run (typically a WHFRP GM of late). He blended Tuckers Kobolds with a splash from MCDM's Flee Mortals. Very amusingly there was a setup bit where the kobolds were supposed to threaten us as we entered their territory which was supposed to be five minutes of dialogue that turned into a two-hour tower raid because we guessed they had some kind of signal flags on the roof. We attempted to get the drop on them and there was a whole bunch of gaming completely unanticipated and ahead of the actual planned encounter.

The intended encounter was a pop-in pop-out ambush in eight foot Pampas grass where velociraptor riding kobold lancers came at us out of the grass and then we lost sight of them again. There was also Kobold Trapsman from Flee Mortals - together they gave us a fairly serious run for our money. Very good value concept and time-wise - we got something like six hours gaming out of what was supposed to be a one or two hour thing.

The second encounter was a mystery where we found someone beat up on the road, then came to a cottage where it looked like grandma had been attacked by someone - allegedly a hunter. We found a bunch of grisly remains, the worlds most confusing murder scene. We followed tracks into the forest and came upon grandma, in very bad shape - when then turned into a werebear and pummelled us. Turned out that all the confusing remnants were reverted dead lycanthrope bits and the werebear had been assaulted in their home by werewolves. We did not figure this out until the werebear had roundly kicked our butts for a bit before we finally KO them and were able to get the story from them afterwards. Collectively, our PCs were thick as mince, the wrong team for any kind of investigations but that did not stop it being fun.

The next encounter was an ambush in a trapped canyon with an ogre mage and harpies. Our wagons were levitated, everything was topsy turvy and the harpies were literally in their airy element. We had a lot of trouble trying to get footing to fight properly and intercept harpies as they snatched away wagoneers and generally fend off the tootling ogre mage who was causing all this chaos. We lost two wagons, three wagoneers and most of our cargo in that first ambush so we resolved to track them down to their lair. There we had part two, a raid on the camp of the harpies and rescue of our fellows. This time we had tactical initiative and could make use of terrain and surprise on our side - things like cutting tent ropes, setting things on fire and generally steamrolling the foe in a satisfyingly vengeful way.

I ran the closeout which was recycled from a hex from Hexcrawl25 which was bog mummies and crawling claws where the bog mummy flings his hands at you and then closes. I used a peat mummy which just had a slightly different variation of Mummy Rot and difficult terrain (the bog) around the wagons. The minor threat of the crawling claws were great because they distracted and also served to put flanking on PCs for the Bog Mummies to then hit like trucks.

The caravan set up worked really well for just a knock-about game which was just a string of unconnected encounters. It was a good little lesson for why caravan guarding campaigns are great because you can just nail in absolutely anything and there you go, a campaign. It also worked pretty well for the roster switching as we rotated GMs because we can say whoever was not there at the moment was scouting, foraging, down with food poisoning or whatever and it is still perfectly reasonable they turn back up for the next encounter.