Monday, October 17, 2011

Discovered Dungeons: Undertemple #1


Download the map from MediaFire.

While digging through some old boxes of gaming materials, I came across a some of my early map designs from some of my initial forays into D&D back in 1981-2. I was in eighth grade at the time, and lucky enough to have a dad who had his own office... and copy machine... and VeloBind machine!!! It was actually how I put together the first version of The System toward 1984-85. (FYI, the poorly-written, daisy-wheel-printed original is something I've been considering sharing at some point. Stay tuned.)

So sometime in 1981-2, I collected the best of my maps, including several dungeons, a tower and a ship (inspired by U1: The Sinister Secret of Saltmarsh), copied the originals and bound those copies into a "volume" titled Maps I. I guess I was expecting to produce Maps II at some point and, if I remember correctly, it was going to feature outdoor/hex maps. I only ever put together that one copy of Maps I.

There are a few supporting illustrations in the "book," and they're about what you'd expect for an eighth-grader who drew moderately well, but had not really had any art lessons proper. The maps? Well, let's just say I'm pleasantly surprised at how well they seem to hold up. The layouts are generally well thought out for the minor dungeon crawls I intended them to be. In some of the rooms on a couple of the maps, I see the faint pencil lines that say things like "monster" and "treasure," but that's about it as far as any kind of notes.

The originals are in black and white, but I've always loved the low-tech look of the 100% cyan (i.e., "single color, but still color") printing on the inside of the early modules, so that's how I'll be sharing them here. The typographic elements are new additions, as is the full cyan bleed, but the map interior is unaltered from the original (outside of the color change.)

I apologize for not providing any sort of additional notes on any of the maps, but you don't need me for that.

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