To Map or Not To Map?

[ghoyle1]

The scenario I'm working on insists on having some prisoners trapped in
a sprawling warehouse complex filled with nice thugs and cozy little
deathtraps (not unlike Lo Pan's headquarters in "Big Trouble in Little
China"). As this scenario is intended for a local game day, it can't
take more than an afternoon. Therefore, I don't want to turn the
warehouse part into a huge dungeon crawl. Has anybody found a way to get
around having to map out lots and lots of rooms instead of just
concentrating on the bits you want the players to run into?

Guy

[Captain Obvious]

You could just list the types of encounters you want to run, devise some basic order to run them in, and wing the rest.

For example, your Big Trouble type thing would have the "Wheelchair David Lo Pan" encounter, the "Elevator Deathtrap" encounter, the "Escape the Lair" and "Return via Secret Tunnel" encounters, etc. leading up to the "Interrupted Ceremony/Vast Melee" encounter, several "Death of Lieutenant X" encounters, and finally the "Death of Lo Pan" encounter (well, technically, some of the lieutenants died after Lo Pan, but you get my point).

The new Warhammer Fantasy Roleplaying game has an adventure supplement called Plundered Vaults, which has an adventure along these same lines, taking place in a sprawling maze of a mansion.

In some ways, this is kind of a railroad, but if you develop a few encounters that can be circumvented in some way, it becomes much less of one.

[ghoyle1]

Thanks for the advice, Cap! I might try to come up with some kind of flow chart arrangement to avoid the railroading, I guess.

Guy

[Spence]

When I am running a really large place (or magical/wierd) and I don't want to map it all out I use a combination of room maps and a random corridor/chamber generator. The random generator has table with different die rolls meaning different things, corridor curves left, curves right, cooridor staright with down stairs at left side. I match the roll results with several repeating simple line sketches. Some of the results will be minor or major encounters. The major encounters are usually the important rooms/locations something like "door is west entrance of room b".

Since I roll dice as a nervous habit they really don't know if I am rolling for a reason or not. The randomness keeps the layout completely unexpected and if you have "mappers" in the group they really get confused when north and south seem to move around.

[Steve Long]

For a "game day" or "convention" type of game, where you have a strictly limited time in which to finish the game, I don't think there's anything wrong with telling the players, "In the interest of time, I've only mapped out certain parts; you can't actually explore the whole warehouse on the map." There's plenty of precedent for this. Look at any of the old TSR D&D modules that were adapted from tournament play. They usually have information indicating which parts were for the tournament (i.e., a limited set of encounters to keep things flowing along in a smooth and timely fashion), and which were added to the module to "round out" the adventure and make it suitable for publication.

[ghoyle1]

Oh, that's good to know. IIRC, they have PDFs of most of those old modules up at the TSR site; I might download 1 or 2 and see how they did it. Thanks for letting me know that, Steve.

Guy

[Steve Long]

In some cases, it's just indicated textually -- there'll be a section called something like "For Tournament Play" that tells you which rooms/encounters to ignore. In other cases (as with, IIRC, the A series, or at least some of its modules), the maps themselves have slightly different shading indicating tournament and non-tourney rooms.

[Hal Owen]

Oh, that's good to know. IIRC, they have PDFs of most of those old modules up at the TSR site; I might download 1 or 2 and see how they did it. Thanks for letting me know that, Steve.

Guy

Pardon my ignorance, but could you give a link to this?
I could probably find it myself, eventually, but I only want to find things that are offered freely, I don't want to end up with a bunch of pirated stuff.

[ghoyle1]

Pardon my ignorance, but could you give a link to this?
I could probably find it myself, eventually, but I only want to find things that are offered freely, I don't want to end up with a bunch of pirated stuff.

Heavens no! I was referring to http://www.wizards.com (not TSR, as I said; my brain is old). I should have said "sone", not "most of", those old modules; check at http://www.wizards.com/default.asp?x=dnd/dnd/downloads , which is the download site for some of their old 1st and 2nd edition AD&D stuff.

Guy

[Shadow Warrior]

If the Wizards site doesn't have what you're looking for, most of TSR's back catalogue is also available legitimately in pdf form at good old RPGNow.

1st Edition AD&D pdfs (http://www.rpgnow.com/default.php?cPath=1_297&)

2nd Edition AD&D pdfs (http://www.rpgnow.com/default.php?cPath=1_294&)

A module is normally just a few US dollars. For example, module A1 Slave Pits of the Undercity (http://www.rpgnow.com/product_info.php?products_id=1059&) (the tournament adventure for GenCon XIII) is available for USD 4.95.

[ghoyle1]

Thanks, Shadow! There are lots of OOP modules on those lists that are invaluable, even if you don't play those particular game systems. And I'd rather have a legit copy than a bootleg any day.

Guy

[Shadow Warrior]

Glad to be of service, Guy. You are right, I'd far rather pay the very few shekels necessary for a legit copy.

Another good place for legit pdf shopping is DriveThruRPG.Com (http://www.drivethrurpg.com/catalog/index.php), although not for TSR stuff.

[Hal Owen]

Heavens no! I was referring to http://www.wizards.com (not TSR, as I said; my brain is old). I should have said "sone", not "most of", those old modules; check at http://www.wizards.com/default.asp?x=dnd/dnd/downloads , which is the download site for some of their old 1st and 2nd edition AD&D stuff.

Guy

Thanks a lot, ghoyle1, and you too Shadow Warrior.

What I meant to say in my post was that if I did a search for:
"Download PDF TSR module"
or some such, I would end up with a bunch of hits for pirate download sites.

Now only do I never do that, I would also never be rude enough to mention doing it on a game publisher's board if I did.

Thanks again.