Family Break

Hey all,

So I'm swamped with work this week, except for a short break I'm taking while my family visit, so no posts for a couple of days.

In other news, I'm going to open up my Microdungeon store next Tuesday. It'll just be a small selection of original dungeons to start,with some more neat stuff to follow bit by bit.

Cheers,
TonyD

Evil Plans

Some back-and-forth on Twitter this morning reminded me of something that's not directly related to D&D or dungeon maps, but still very important. Hugh Macleod (@gapingvoid) has some great valentines day prints for sale right now.

Gamers and game designers love to talk about ways to improve their game and share ideas about how to be more creative. I think it's just as important to have this conversation outside of gaming as inside it. I want to toss Hugh the biggest shout-out I can muster, because his work has directly inspired me in designing games and launching this blog.

Read Hugh's PDF How to be Creative. It's a much-needed kick in the ass to anyone who wants to... well, kick ass! It doesn't have anything overtly to do with gaming. Yet it's a great manifesto, whether you want to be a great game master, publish your own games, or make awesome art.

10 Ways that Dungeon Maps can be Art

1. Taking you to another reality
2. Showing your own reality in another way
3. Resonating in tune with cultural traditions
4. Throwing cultural traditions into sharp contrast
5. A craft that requires a certain effort and technique to master
6. An opportunity for the artist to show off a technique that's theirs and theirs alone
7. A symbolic language for allegory or metaphor
8. A vehicle for expressing ideas
9. An living, evolving tradition that changes, advances, and grows over time
10. A very special kind of art: art you can play

It's Mad Wizard Week

Why is this crazy dungeon full of deathtraps and ridiculous puzzles here anyway? Because a Mad Wizard put it there of course? I love "mad wizard" dungeons. They provide a rationale for dungeon elements that might seem incongruent in a regular dungeon. White Plume Mountain is one of my favorite examples of this. In high school a buddy of mine also ran a game where the dungeon was a cryp that an arch mage built because he knew he was turning into a Liche and he wanted to keep himself in for the good of the world.

This week I'm posting three variations on the "mad wizard" dungeon theme. Enjoy!

What's This About

A few months ago I was at my printer's when I spied a box of 4" x 3" cardstock note pads.

"What are those?"

"Oh just some leftovers from a print job. Want some?"

I took 10 of them, 200 pages in all. Within a few days I picked on up and started sketching a dungeon map on it. Pretty soon I'd done a half dozen. I started drawing more maps and handing them out as presents or business cards. I was having a blast.

Fast forward to December. I'd drawn about 60 maps and given away more than half of them. I'd been toying with the idea of starting some kind of blog again, which is when it hit me: a microdungeon blog.

This is a blog of maps for dungeon-exploration games in the style of Dungeons & Dragons. I love dungeon maps. I think they're art. But mostly I think they're fun. I've got enough maps to last the next five months, and I'm not even half-way through my paper yet.

Getting Ready

Welcome to Microdungeons.com. I'm still getting this thing ready, but here's the plan: starting in the first week of January, I'm going to post 3 new microdungeons a week. If you want a preview, you can see some of them on my Flickr page.