My Top 10 Favorite Traveller Images (Part II)

Part I can be found here.

5. JTAS #13 Cover

The Journal of the Travellers' Aid Society was GDW's in-house periodical for supporting Traveller (until it was replaced by Challenge in 1986). With a few exceptions, the covers of JTAS weren't notable, but issue #13 is one that really captured my imagination. Drawn by William H. Keith, it depicts a member of the Hiver species, one of the most interesting – and weird – nonhuman aliens of the official Third Imperium setting. Few of the subsequent depictions of the Hivers ever looked as good as this one in my opinion, not even those in the Alien Module devoted to them. Consequently, this particular piece has stuck with me for years as a high point in Traveller art, particularly of alien species.

4. The Traveller Book Cover

William H. Keith returns (for the last time) with his cover art for The Traveller Book. Its placement so high on this list is at least partially due to nostalgia, because I've used it as my go-to Traveller rulebook for decades. I readily acknowledge that, from a technical perspective, the cover is slightly amateurish. However, I care more about its grounded vibe. It's just a merchant crew warily disembarking their 200-ton Far Trader, armed and ready for anything. It's a terrific encapsulation of Traveller as a game and I love it, for all its weaknesses as a work of art.

3. Alexander Lascelles Jamison

OD&D had Xylarthen the Magic-User and Traveller had Alexander Lascelles Jamison. This 38 year-old merchant captain has been the game's sample character since 1977, but his portrait got a significant upgrade in The Traveller Book over its original version. Drawn by David Dietrick, who provided a lot of great artwork for Traveller during the mid to late 1980s (and in Thousand Suns, too, come to think of it). Dietrick's reimagining of Jamison isn't just how I imagine this particular character; he's my mental image of the default Traveller character. You can't get much more iconic than that.

2. Charted Space Map

I've raved about my love of this map before, so I won't say much more here. I will add that this image is very near and dear to my heart, both because of what it depicts and how it depicts it. The map is peak classic Traveller – elegant and evocative with just enough information to inspire. I had this map pinned to my wall for years, so it will always be very special to me.

1. Regina Subsector Map

If D&D is defined in part by graph paper, Traveller is defined by hex paper, or rather by its 8×10 hex-based subsector maps, the foundations upon which the game's conception of the galaxy are built. Regina subsector is subsector C of the Spinward Marches and the example subector presented in in many GDW products. Regina is thus like the Grand Duchy of Karameikos, the Dalelands, or Lakefront City – an example that grows beyond its original purpose to have a life of its own. Every time I look at this map, I quickly find myself imagining situations and adventures on its worlds, especially those located outside the main travel routes. Looking at this map makes me want to play Traveller, which is exactly what a good RPG image should do.

My Top 10 Favorite Traveller Images (Part I)

Before I start, a couple of caveats and explanations. First, you'll note that I say "images," not "illustrations." That's because Traveller is rather (in)famous for its dearth of artwork, especially prior to the publication of The Traveller Book in 1982. However, the game never lacked for images, by which I mean maps, deck plans, and the like and many of these helped define the game and its approach to science fiction every bit as powerfully as did more "traditional" RPG illustrations. Second, I've purposefully limited my selection of images to Traveller products published by GDW between 1977 and 1986. There's a lot of third-party Traveller material published during that time, many with superb imagery, but, in the interests of focus, I've limited myself to only the main Traveller line. If there's sufficient interest, I might do a second series of posts that expands the scope a bit.

10. Diagram 1 from Shadows

Shadows is one of my favorite Traveller adventures, one I've refereed numerous times over the decades. One of my favorite things about the adventure are its maps and diagrams. All of them serve to describe the alien ruins found on the backwater planet of Yorbund that forms the location in which Shadows takes place. While several of them could easily have been chosen as an entry in this post, I think Diagram 1, pictured to the left, is by far the best and most interesting. As you can see, the diagram depicts the central shaft of the ruins, descending from a hidden entrance at the top of a surface pyramid tens of meters below the surface of Yorbund. It's a very practical image, enabling the referee to get a handle on how the various parts of the ruins relate to each other. It's also very atmospheric, establishing Shadows as a literal descent into the underworld. 

9. Snapshot Deck Plans

Another entry in this list and still no illustrations! Instead, gaze upon these deck plans from Snapshot. They depict two iconic starships from Traveller – the 100-ton Type S Scout/Courier and the 200-ton Beowulf-class Free Trader. These are probably the two most common "adventuring" starships in the game, in large part due to the fact that Scout and Merchant characters stand the chance of mustering out with one of them. They're also the perfect size for a band of characters. Though there are many other versions of these deck plans, it's these from Snapshot that are seared into my brain, thanks to having used them repeatedly in my youth.

8. Entering Jumpspace

Our first "proper" illustration and by William H. Keith, no less (a name that will appear several more times in this post and the next). In case the flash of red isn't enough to give it away, this piece appeared in The Traveller Book. That's the aforementioned Type S Scout/Courier as it prepares to enter jumpspace. Though very simple, it's a favorite of mine and has colored (no pun intended) my conception of what it Traveller interstellar travel looks like. Though I can't prove it, I suspect it was inspired, at least in part, by how the Millennium Falcon entered hyperspace in Star Wars.

7. Zhodani Battle Dress

The psionic Zhodani are the main rivals of the Third Imperium and were described in detail in the fourth Alien Module produced for Traveller. One of many great things about that supplement is the way it firmly established the esthetics of the Zhodani Consulate and their citizens and military forces. I particularly like this illustration (by Bryan Gibson) of Zhodani battle dress, complete with notations pointing out its various features, such as its distinctive clamshell helmet. This piece occupies a halfway point between being a traditional illustration and being a diagram, I think, but it's all the more effective for it.

6. The Patron

Another William H. Keith piece from The Traveller Book (note the red highlights), it depicts a distinctive element of Traveller – and one about which I'll be posting soon – the patron encounter. Many a Traveller adventure begins with meeting Space Sydney Greenstreet over drinks in the darkened corner of a startown bar, his bodyguard looming over the proceedings. Ironically, it's not a scene about which I can recall many illustrations in GDW products, which is probably why this one has stuck with me over the years. In many ways, this is the defining image of Traveller, or at least the way it was played back in my youth. If I didn't have other even more representative images, I'd probably rate this one even higher.

The Perils of Verisimilitude

Twilight: 2000, especially in its current Free League version, is very much a game of hexcrawling. The characters spend a great deal of time traveling across the war-torn Poland of an alternate year 2000, trying to survive, avoid Warsaw Pact forces, and, with luck, find their way back to friendly territory. The map above – apologies for its small size – is from the Foundry virtual tabletop we use to play the game. Its hexes are all 10 kilometers across for ease of calculating overland movement. Even at this size, you can see that the map is very stylized, focusing only on very large terrain features, like cities, forests, rivers, roads, etc.

For the most part, this isn't a problem. Despite its subject matter, Free League's Twilight: 2000 doesn't get bogged down in minutiae, preferring instead to keep things relatively streamlined. Thus, the degree of resolution in its travel maps is low. High-level features are visible, while more localized ones don't make an appearance at all. For example, the roads on the map are all (mostly) major highways. They're obviously not the only roads in Poland, but the maps don't bother with showing backroads. Putting details like that on the map would only make them harder to read, so they're left to the referee to include as he sees fit.

The situation is made a little more complicated by several other factors, though. Remember that the original Twilight: 2000 was published in 1984 by an American game company. Its knowledge of the geography of Communist Poland was probably not wholly accurate, not due to a lack of industry on the part of the game's designers but because it wasn't easy to get up-to-date information of that sort from behind the Iron Curtain. This was before the commercial Internet, too, so you'd have to consult physical map books if you wanted to know anything about, say, the roads of Poland at the time. But of course Twilight: 2000 wasn't even set at the time. It was set sixteen years in the future, so whatever information GDW had access to in '84 would probably have been out of date by the time in which the game was set anyway.

Free League is in a slightly better position. Since this version of the game was published in 2021, it has the benefit of hindsight. Its designers could look back at maps of Poland from the 1990s and use those to produce a more "accurate" version of the terrain, right? Not necessarily. Even in their version of Twilight: 2000, which uses a slightly different history than did GDW's version – I'm using my own history, which is closer but not identical to GDW's – the USSR continued to exist into the year 2000. That means looking at maps of the real world from the '90s might not reflect what happened in this alternate reality – or they might; it's hard to say.

I mention this, because, during the course of the Barrett's Raiders campaign, the characters would often find themselves in some hex or other. The players would inevitably have questions about the specific terrain in what looked, on the map, to be a largely empty hex. What was the elevation like? Where there any farmhouses or buildings? What about dirt roads? Etc., etc. Usually, I'd make something up on the spot and that would be that. However, players would sometimes think they could be helpful to me by making use of Google Earth to show us an image of what an area "really" looks like. For example, here's an image of the area above from Google Earth:

There are innumerable differences, big and small, between this image and the travel map from the Foundry. If you look carefully, you can see that not only does the Google Earth image include features that aren't visible on the travel map, but that the travel map is, in fact, wrong in a lot of places. That is, the Foundry travel map suggests that many areas are, for example, forested when, in reality, they're farmland. That's not a big deal, I suppose, but it demonstrates a way in which modern tools, like Google Earth, can make the referee's job harder rather than easier.

Harder? Yes. When a player finds information like this and offers it up, thinking he's being helpful, the referee now has to decide, "Which do I use: the game map or the real world map?" The real world map offers many advantages, often including extra detail that can be timesaving. No longer would the referee need to make up details on the fly. Instead, he just needs to zoom in on Google Earth and look (assuming that area has that level of detail – not all places do). Furthermore, such online tools are readily accessible nowadays; there's no need to go fumbling through a book or books. It's all right there.

Acknowledging all that to be true, I ultimately decided against using Google Earth or similar things, opting instead to use the often-inaccurate travel maps. They were, to my mind, both simpler and less likely to lead us down an endless path of checking ever more specific sources of detailed information. Every time the characters crossed a river, how wide is it? What's its depth? What kind of fish can be found in it? Etc., etc. I don't deny that such stuff can be useful and, for many people, perhaps that's exactly what they're looking for. More power to them! For me, I'd prefer to keep the details entirely within my own control. Will I get many wrong? Absolutely – but that's OK, because, in the grand scheme of things, it probably won't matter.

Obviously, everyone will draw their lines in different places. There may be some details they absolutely want to get right, while there are others that won't matter. As everyone reading this knows, I care a lot about, say, language and so, for instance, I care about the various dialects of Polish but not so much about where bridges across the Vistula River are actually located. Another referee may reverse these concerns or care about both or neither. At the end of the day, it's your game; do what you want with it. For me, I decided against relying on real world maps for my alternate universe version of Poland at the dawn of the 21st century. You may feel differently.

Starship Geomorphs

It's yet 2025 yet and I've already started to make good on two resolutions for the new year: to post more (though not exclusively) about Traveller and to draw attention to other RPG blogs whose content I like. Today, I've decided to combine them by highlighting Robert Pearce's superb Yet Another Traveller Blog. Though it's not updated regularly, what sets YATB apart from other blogs devoted to Traveller is its focus on providing lots of incredibly useful resources for play, particularly deckplans. I made regular use of these maps when I was refereeing my Riphaeus Sector campaign years ago.

Among the most useful resources on the blog are its two collections of starship geomorphs. The first of these was released more than four years ago and is available as a free PDF and as a hardcover print-on-demand book through DriveThruRPG. The second was only just recently released and is currently only available as a free PDF. This second set of geomorphs was "specifically designed to recreate the feel of the smaller, classic Traveller starship designs," whereas those in the original collection are more eclectic and include plenty of geomorphs for larger vessels. 

Both collections of geomorphs are excellent. I urge anyone with an interest in Traveller, particularly referees of Traveller, to take a look at them.

Three Dimensions

I mentioned in yesterday's post about my favorite science fiction roleplaying game map that Traveller's star maps are two-dimensional and that that's long been an issue for some fans of the game (though it mostly doesn't bother me). In the comments to that post, several readers mentioned the three-dimensional star maps included in GDW's 2300AD (né Traveller: 2300) and SPI's Universe. Here's the Near Star Map from the former, which covers a volume of space within 50 light years of our solar system:

Even at this small size, you can see there are a lot of stars included on this map. As it turns out, there are, in reality, even more stars within 50 light years of Sol, but GDW didn't have the benefit of our current astronomical knowledge. They worked from the then-quite good Gliese Catalogue of Nearby Stars from the '70s, which has since been updated many times (and perhaps even superseded). Still, I loved this map, which included XYZ coordinates for hundreds of stars, which provided lots of scope for exploration and adventure in the 24th century.

Much as I loved that map, though, my absolute favorite 3D star map came from SPI's Universe:

This map included far fewer star systems and covered only a volume of about 30 light years from Earth. However, I probably spent far more time poring over this map than 2300AD's. The reason for this is quite simple: I encountered the Universe map first, making it perhaps the first three-dimensional star map I'd ever seen. Unlike 2300AD, I never actually played Universe, but I read the one-volume, softcover edition of the game released by Bantam Books cover to cover multiple times. The pull-out star map left a lasting impression on my thirteen-year-old self.

I love the idea of using a properly three-dimensional star map in a science fiction roleplaying game. Nowadays, the availability of much better astronomical data and personal computers with useful software, employing 3D maps is probably easier than it's ever been. Despite that, I've never refereed or played in a long-running SF RPG campaign that made use of them. I don't know why that is or if it's likely to change anytime soon. I have very vague ideas of following up my ongoing Twilight: 2000 campaign with a 2300AD one, but that's still some years in the future, if ever.

Has anyone reading this made a good use of three-dimensional star maps in their roleplaying games?

The Best Map Ever (Take 2)

Long ago, at the dawn of this blog, I declared Darlene's exquisite map of The World of Greyhawk to be "the best map ever." To be fair, in the linked post, I qualified my hyperbole somewhat, saying that no "map for a fantasy RPG setting has ever captivated me the way" this one had – and I stand by that. Darlene's map of the Flanaess is one of the greatest maps ever made for use with a fantasy roleplaying game. It's beautiful simply as a work of art, eminently usable, and, for me at least, almost as iconic as Dave Trampier's AD&D Players Handbook cover.

However, there is another map of which I am equally fond. Perhaps unsurprisingly, it's this one:

I apologize for its small size. The original is quite large and the width of a blog post is inadequate to show its true glory. The map depicts the portion of Charted Space in which the Third Imperium and its interstellar neighbors exist, along with a couple of important astrographic features, like the Great and Lesser Rifts. Each of the rectangles represents a single sector, an area of space equal to 32 × 40 parsecs. Some of the sectors are named, like the Solomani Rim, the Beyond, and the Spinward Marches, but many of them are not. 

The map was, I believe, originally produced by GDW as a freebie to give away at conventions and to mail order recipients. I received mine in a large envelope after I'd written to the company to request their latest catalog. I was ecstatic to get it, because I'd previously seen a black and white reproduction of the map in a British book about RPGs whose title escapes me now (a No Prize to anyone who can tell me which one it was in the comments). I liked the map so much that I hung it on my bedroom wall, belong the Darlene Greyhawk map and there it stayed for years, even after I'd gone away to college. Unfortunately, the map was lost when I removed it from the wall some years later. 

Unlike the Greyhawk map, this one is simple in its presentation and lacking in detail. Nevertheless, I'd still say it's quite beautiful. There's an elegance to it that I have always found incredibly appealing, an elegance that's very much of a piece with the elegance of Traveller itself. It uses only three colors – black, white, and red – just like the original Traveller boxed set, which I think contributes to rather than detracts from its attractiveness. In science fiction, minimalism is often a very solid esthetic choice and it's one that classic Traveller embraced from the very beginning (more on that particular topic in a future post).

The map's not without a couple of problems, the first of which being that it's a flat, two-dimensional depiction of three-dimensional space. That's an issue Traveller has always had and there's no easy way around it, though some fans have tried over the years. I've never been much bothered by it myself, since properly 3D star maps tend to be very complex and difficult to use in play. The bigger problem, in my opinion, is that most sectors of Charted Space are claimed by one or more large interstellar empires, which makes it feel fairly cramped rather than wide open. For many types of sci-fi campaigns, this is fine. If you're looking for one in which exploration is a central activity, it's less ideal, though there are some ways to fix this.

Even so, this remains one of my favorite RPG maps and one to which I regularly return for inspiration.

A Tale of Two(?) Dungeons

In the comments to last week's post about The Official Advanced Dungeons & Dragons Coloring Album, an anonymous poster theorizes that "the map used here is identical to the one in the Holmes basic set intro adventure" to which commenter Frank replies that it's "not identical, but very close." In the interest of discussion, here's what the Holmes Basic Set map looks like:

Meanwhile, the map from the Coloring Album looks like this:

If you look carefully at the two images, you'll see that Frank is indeed correct: the dungeons are very similar to one another but not quite identical. Even so, many of the most iconic features of the Holmes dungeon are still present in the Coloring Album version, like the sea caves at the bottom left and the rat warrens at the middle top. Zach Howard, over the excellent blog Zenopus Archives, has a useful post in which he looks at some of the similarities and differences between the two versions.

I'm fairly confident that the map appearing in the 1977 D&D Basic Set was created by Holmes himself, though I'm 100% certain of this fact. If so, that makes its reappearance in the Coloring Album, albeit in modified form, all the more fascinating to me. Why was it chosen? Was it because its compactness made it especially suitable for the pared down "D&D Lite" of the Coloring Album? Why not make an entirely new dungeon map? I suspect the answer is probably fairly mundane, but I can't help but wonder.

Arduin Map Collection

Dave Hargrave's The Arduin Grimoire (1977) and its two immediate sequels, Welcome to Skull Tower and The Runes of Doom (1978), are important artifacts from the first few years of the hobby of roleplaying and thus of great interest to all fans of old school gaming. These three books, often known collectively as The Arduin Trilogy, were not just mere flights of fancy by their creator, but outgrowths of Hargrave's home-brewed fantasy roleplaying game campaign, among whose hundreds of players was none other than Greg Stafford of RuneQuest fame. The Trilogy not only delighted many roleplayers during the '70s, but also included some of the earliest published artwork of Erol Otus.

Emperor's Choice Games, the current publisher and rights holder of Arduin, has big plans for Dave Hargrave's legacy, starting with the release of a large collection of maps based on those he made for his RPG campaign almost a half-century ago. These maps include not only the titular County of Arduin (an earlier version of which I positively reviewed fifteen years ago), but also maps of the continent of Khaora in which it is situated and the country of Chorynth as well. The new County of Arduin map is gorgeous and filled with lots of interesting and useful details.

If you're a fan of Arduin or just a lover of fantasy maps, please take a look.

Small is Beautiful

Like a lot of gamers, I've long had a bad case of cartophilia. Truth be told, my love of maps predates my involvement in the hobby of roleplaying. From a very young age, I would pluck atlases off the shelves and then spend hours staring at the maps within. I was especially fond of historical atlases, since I enjoyed seeing the way borders changed and countries grew and shrank according to the fortunes of war and other events. 

Once I became a player of Dungeons & Dragons, I naturally gravitated toward paying even closer attention to maps of the Middle Ages. What I noticed is that, during many periods of medieval history, many parts of Europe were divided into a crazy quilt of petty kingdoms and principalities. This isn't news to anyone with even a little knowledge of history, but it was positively revelatory to me at the age of ten. Growing up in a world of superpowers and large nation-states, this was contrary to my own sense of what the world was like or indeed could be.

In recent years, I've found myself thinking more about those maps of the Middle Ages, especially as I further develop the setting of Secrets of sha-Arthan. For example, the Empire of Inba Iro is actually made up of twenty districts, each of which is ruled by its own king, who, in turns, swears fealty to the King-Emperor of da-Imer. I've taken one of these districts, the Eshkom District, and fleshed it out for use as the starting area for new campaigns. The district is actually quite small – about 60 miles east to west and 45 miles north to south – because I think that's more than large enough to contain more than enough opportunities for adventure without overwhelming a referee new to the setting.

Over the years, I've drawn a lot of setting maps and I've fallen prey to the urge to "go big." I suppose that comes from having looked with awe at the maps of Middle-earth one too many times as a kid. There's something undeniably appealing about a huge map covered in evocative and mysterious names. Such maps seem ripe with possibilities. However, as I've gotten older, I've come to feel that, lovely though they are to look at, big maps rarely get used to their full potential. More often than not, they wind up being akin to those world maps in the Indiana Jones movies, marking only a handful of places the characters pass through on their way to the site of their next adventure. 

Nowadays, I'd much rather the characters spend more time in a smaller area, getting to know it better than they ever could if they were constantly flitting about from one end of a big map to the other. My Twilight: 2000 campaign, for example, has spent the last two and a half years of play within a fairly small part of Poland. Likewise, the Traveller campaign in which I'm playing has taken place entirely within a couple of subsectors in the Crucis Margin sector. This has helped to give it a "cozy" feel that I've come to enjoy. Rather than simply being a huge swath of Charted Space comprised of hundreds of planets, each one indistinguishable from the last, Crucis Margin feels like a distinct place, with its own unique feel. I think that can be important to the success of a campaign.

What's your experience with smaller campaign areas? Do you like them? How do they compare to larger areas in terms of contributing to player attachment to a setting? I'm quite curious about this, because, looking at the RPG settings that have been sold over the years, most of them seem to lean more toward the large and I wonder whether this has influenced the preferences of gamers. Let me know what you think.

Polyhedron: Issue #12

Issue #12 of Polyhedron (June 1983) features a very striking cover by Larry Elmore that depicts a pegasus-riding warrior about to engage a red dragon in aerial combat. Like all of the newszine's recent covers, this one draws inspiration from the issue's installment of "Encounters" about which I'll write shortly. 

The issue proper kicks off with an editorial by Kim Eastland – now the publisher of Polyhedron – in which he discusses several matters. The first of these is that Polyhedron has joined TSR's publishing division. I've often called the 'zine "Dragon's little brother" in jest, but, starting with this issue, it's actually somewhat true. Consequently, Mary Kirchoff, who serves as editor, will see her attention divided between Polyhedron and other TSR periodicals. On the other hand, the look and layout of Polyhedron clearly benefitted from this arrangement.

Eastland also discusses the many and various meanings of "official" with regards to TSR and the RPGA. That he has to do this at all is painful reading in retrospect, particularly when it comes to the contortions relating to Gary Gygax's columns in Polyhedron and elsewhere. I'm not sure that the fans of any RPG company has ever been as obsessed with "officialdom" as those of TSR, but they clearly were. Sad to say, I was one of them. It's all so silly now, yet, at the time, it seemed oddly important to me and so many others.

The letters page contains one interesting letter and reply, concerning the omission of the Cthulhu and Melnibonean chapters of Deities & Demigods:

As with all such replies by TSR spokesmen, I'm sure there are additional complexities to be considered. Nonetheless, it's a fairly straightforward and plausible answer to a longstanding and much debated "mystery" of D&D history.

This issue sees the appearance of "Two Cents," a new column devoted to RPGA member opinions and suggestions. It's a fine idea for a column, though, if the first installment is any indication, few of the ideas on offer are all that remarkable. Gali Sanchez, a name I most strongly associate with Pacesetter Games, is the author of this issue's "Encounters," featuring Grifton Dunsaway, a human fighter, riding Orrex, a pegasus, as they do battle with Forszahn, a red dragon. Though evocative in concept, there's not much more to the encounter, which is too bad. I very much love the idea of aerial combats in D&D; I've just never seen them handled very well under the rules of the game.

There is a "Convention Update" on RPGA events about which there's little to say. "Dispel Confusion" is three pages in length this time, covering all of TSR's RPGs. The questions cover a wide range of topics, from the ridiculous to the sublime. My favorite question – or, more accurately, response – concerns the lethality of Gamma World, as answered by designer James M. Ward. 

GWQ: The GAMMA WORLD game system is so deadly, my players complain that their characters get killed off almost before they have rolled them up! What can I do to help them last long?

GWA: If your characters are constantly dying, they're probably not being very careful. The game was designed to test the intelligence and role-playing skill of everyone who tries their hand.

Ward does go on to offer some genuinely useful advice about how to moderate the game's deadliness for beginners, but I can't help but chuckle at his initial response.

"Basically Speaking" by Jon Pickens takes a look at mass combat in Dungeons & Dragons. It's a topic of long-term interest to me, but, unfortunately Pickens doesn't provide much in the way of concrete guidance on how to integrate large battles into D&D beyond "read some Tony Bath." Good advice, certainly; I guess I'd hoped for more. "Knight Hawks: A New Dimension" by Doug Niles is an overview of the Knight Hawks boxed starship rules set for Star Frontiers. It's mostly a bit of advertising dressed up as an article, alas. 

Part III of Frank Mentzer's "Mapping From Square One" continues its focus on how to describe dungeon rooms to players engaged in mapping. It's good stuff and I appreciate the effort Mentzer put into this, even as I realize that, by comparison, my own maps have always been rather straightforward. Mentzer, meanwhile, favors rooms like this:

Yikes!

Gary Gygax takes over "Notes For the Dungeon Master" this issue, with a very nice two-page discussion of how to create a campaign setting of one's own. Gygax introduces the "bullseye method" of using concentric circles of detail – lots toward the center and less with each "ring" around it, at least to start. Merle Rasmussen's "Roles" looks at the various kinds of agents possible in a Top Secret campaign – double agent, triple agent, mole, blunt instrument, etc. It's too short in length but offers some food for thought nonetheless. The same can't be said about Kim Eastland's continuation of his series on the RPGA tournament scoring system. Perhaps I am unduly harsh and this would have been of interest to RPGA members at the time. Now, it's tedious ephemera of the worst kind.

Leaving aside the RPGA catalog that takes up the final eight pages of the issue, that's it for issue #12. 

The Eshkom District

Though progress continues to be quite a bit slower than I'd like – due, in large part, to my constant tinkering – Secrets of sha-Arthan continues to chug along. I've taken a break from working on its rules to working on its setting. In particular, I've been developing a border region of the Empire of Inba Iro that can serve as a starting area for a new campaign. The first step in doing so was producing a map. Here's a scan of a portion of my original, hand-drawn map.

The region is called the Eshkom District, after its largest settlement, the city-state of Eshkom, one of the so-called Twenty Cities of Inba Iro, whose kings swear fealty to the King-Emperor of da-Imer. Eshkom has a history of unrest and periodic rebellion against the Solar Throne, all the more so since Chomachto invaders from the north seized it and declared themselves the new ruling elite of the Empire. I think a troubled border region like the Eshkom District had a lot of potential for adventure.

Fond as I am of hand-drawn maps, I nevertheless wanted something a bit more polished for eventual inclusion in Secrets of sha-Arthan, whatever form it eventually takes (that's a topic for another day). To that end, I turned to the cartographic skills of Glynn Seal of Monkeyblood Design to create a more attractive map. Here's the same portion pictured above in more professional form:

I'm quite pleased with the results. Glynn did a superb job of translating my rough original into something that's both usable and appealing. What I particularly like about Glynn's map is the way that the various settlements and ruins stand out against the background. That's important to me, because I made an effort to include lots of places for the referee to develop into adventure locales and I want their locations to be visually apparent.

Map Assistance

As I mentioned recently, I'm trying to put together a map for Secrets of sha-Arthan. I've already got a continental outline for the whole world, but my focus at the moment is on a smaller region intended as a "starting area" for new characters and campaigns. Nevertheless, I have several problems and I'm hoping readers might be able to point me in the right direction for solving it.

Here's a portion of the continental scale map of sha-Arthan:

Because it's continental scale, those hexes are very large in size – about 90 miles across. That size is based on two factors: that sha-Arthan is roughly the same size as Earth and the number of hexes used in the continental map. I could, I suppose, redraw the continental outlines and then layer on a small hex grid in order to make each hex smaller, but that's something I can't easily do, given my lack of technical skills. If someone can suggest a relatively easy way to do this, so easy that even an incompetent like myself could do it, most of my problems go away.

Barring that solution, I was intending to break down each 90-mile hex like so:

Done this way, each of the sub-hexes within the 90-mile hexes would be 18 miles across. These 18-mile hexes would be further subdivided into 3.6-mile hexes. Both 18 and 3.6 miles are odd increments, to be sure, but that's what happens if I stick to 90-mile continental hexes. A possible "solution" is to create in-game units of measurements that correspond to 3.6, 18, and 90 miles. On some level, I like that, because it's potentially immersive, but it's also potentially annoying and easy to forget. 

Another possibility is to use a different set of divisions for each continental hex. The only reason I went with the five hexes within five hexes set-up above is because I was able to find some templates online. I'm not kidding when I say I am utterly incompetent when it comes to these matters, so it may well be that there are simpler configurations that will serve my purpose – that purpose being breaking down continental scale hexes into small, more manageable ones for use in play. 

Any ideas or suggestions you have to share would be appreciated. 

Retrospective: Traders and Gunboats

I've mentioned before that Star Trek was my first fandom. If you were a kid with an interest in science fiction in the early 1970s, there simply weren't many other options. Despite this, Star Trek wasn't heavily merchandised at the time, certainly not to the extent that Star Wars would be in a few years. Consequently, fans like myself had to make do with a fairly limited selection of Star Trek products to sate our lust for more information about Gene Roddenberry's vision of the 23rd century. 

A couple of items from that limited selection stand out in my memory, both of them created by the German technical artist Franz Joseph Schnaubelt, known by his nom de plume, Franz Joseph. In 1975, Ballantine Books released Joseph's Starfleet Technical Manual and Star Trek Blueprints. Each included lots of beautifully rendered maps and schematics of Star Trek space vessels and technology (and, fascinatingly, served as the basis for Starfleet Battles, but that's another story). Needless to say, I owned and adore both of them, spending countless hours poring over the secrets they revealed about the layout of the USS Enterprise and other Starfleet ships of the line. These books initiated my lifelong love for deckplans of all sorts, but particularly of science fiction vehicles – a love I'd later transfer into the realm of science fiction roleplaying games.

GDW's Traveller, which I first picked up sometime in 1982, was more than accommodating of my love of starship deckplans. Nearly every adventure released for the game, along with many of its supplements, included one or more deckplans of this sort. There were even separate but related games, Snapshot and Azhanti High Lightning, that included deckplans large enough to use with cardboard counters or 15mm miniatures. From the standpoint of someone like myself who loved starship deckplans, Traveller delivered the goods.

Which brings us to the true topic of this post: Supplement 7: Traders and Gunboats. Released in 1980 and written by Traveller's creator, Marc Miller, with assistance from Frank Chadwick, John Harshman, and Loren Wiseman, Traders and Gunboats is a 48-page supplement that provides information on, as its title suggests, merchant starships and patrol craft. The information is not limited solely to game statistics – though there's plenty of such detail – but also includes an equal amount of information on the place of such vessels within GDW's Third Imperium setting. The inclusion of both game mechanical and setting information makes Traders and Gunboats equally useful to players and referees, as well as to those using Traveller's official setting or one of their own creation.

Ultimately, what makes Supplement 7 so appealing to me is its practicality. All of the space vessels described in its pages are small in size. The largest is no more than 1000 displacement tons, but the vast majority are in 100–400 ton range, which makes them perfect for use by – or against – player characters. That's one of the things that's always appealed to me about Traveller: it keeps its focus on the PCs and their adventures. It's true that Traveller can be vast in scope and certainly the official Third Imperium setting encompasses tens of thousands of worlds spread across dozens of sectors of space. Yet, the play of the game remains human-scaled, which is exactly what Traders and Gunboats supports with its information on smaller space vessels.

Of course, as you'd expect, given my preamble, it's the deckplans that still excite me. Here's a sample page featuring a few small (20–50 ton) craft.

Traders and Gunboats includes more than a dozen of these maps, most of which have proven very useful to me over my years of playing Traveller – so useful that I rank it up there with 76 Patrons in terms of how much I've used it at my own table. That's probably the highest praise I can give any RPG product.

Cozy Maps

Here's the thing: I am preparing a regional map for my sha-Arthan setting and I must confess that I am having some difficulty in settling on a scale. I know that fans of OD&D favor the five – or six – mile hex for reasons both historical and rational. My natural inclination, as a traditionalist, is to choose one of those scales for the map, but I worry that scale might be too small for my purposes. 

This is, as I said, a regional map, depicting the territory of the Empire of Inba Iro and its neighbors. This is the area through which I want to introduce the overall setting, where a new campaign of Secrets of sha-Arthan might begin. Even though it's only a portion of a much larger world, I want it to be large enough to sprinkle with lots of adventure locales and scenario seeds. At the same time, I want its size to be both manageable for the referee and comprehensible to the players. In my opinion, too many creators of fantasy worlds think Bigger is Better and draw their maps accordingly. My intention is something that's, if not exactly small, a bit more "human-sized," if that makes sense.

I've always been very fond of this map from Chaosium's RuneQuest, which depicts the lands of Prax:

While the map isn't perfect by any means, it comes very close to balancing manageability and comprehensibility. The area covered by the map is large enough to encompass lots of important landmarks/adventure sites and leave lots of space for the referee to place his own locales. Conversely, the map is also small enough that it isn't filled with lots of blank, empty spaces that take weeks for the characters to traverse. This kind of map feels "cozy," for lack of a better word and it's more or less what I'm aiming for with the first regional map of sha-Arthan, though I'm still wrestling with the specifics.

Do you have a favorite regional, "adventure scale" map for use with RPGs? I'm very curious to know which ones you like, because they might be helpful to me as I wrestle with making my own.

REVIEW: The Staffortonshire Trading Company Works of John Williams

Roleplaying games set in the past of the real world, whether played straight or including an element of the fantastical, have always been hard sells. A big reason for this, I think, is that gamers, even well-read ones with access to the vast store of information that is the Internet, often lack for practical resources to support play in past ages. By "practical resources," I mean the kinds of things that RPGs with wholly imaginary settings include without a second thought, like appropriate equipment lists, details about law and order, information about society and culture – or maps.

Now, maps might seem like a small thing, perhaps even a relatively unimportant one. After all, we all know what a castle or a mansion or a church looks like, right? Even assuming that's true – which experience has taught me it is not – the matter isn't as simple as it might appear, especially when you're dealing with locales within a specific time and place. One might know what a mansion house looks like in, say, England during the 1920s, but what about the 1820s? What about a mansion house in France or Germany or the United States? With enough qualifiers and specificity, the questions become a lot more vexed and the work of the referee much more onerous.

Enter The Staffortonshire Trading Company Works of John Williams (hereafter simply Works) by Glynn Seal. Written for and published by Lamentations of the Flame Princess, it's a beautifully made – and supremely useful – 126-page hardcover volume consisting of nearly 100 maps of 17th-century buildings and sailing vessels from Europe, North Africa, Asia, and the New World. The book's framing device, as presented in its introduction, is that the maps were all made by the Englishman John Benjamin Williams in 1674. Williams was employed as a cartographer and architect by the Staffortonshire Trading Company, a vocation that took all across the globe, from England to North America to Europe and into the Ottoman Empire and beyond. During his time with the trading company, Williams also acted as a spy for English crown, thereby providing an explanation for some of the more unusual places he visited – and created maps for – during his travels. 

The included maps are quite varied, covering fairly mundane locations (shops, houses, churches), more socially sophisticated ones (mansions, colleges, palaces), highly specialized ones (ships, water mill, lighthouse), and the truly unusual (cockfighting theater, mineshaft, whaling station). Furthermore, a number of singular locations also receive attention, such as Dudley Castle, the Kremlin, the Palais de Tuileries, and the Jamestown settlement of colonial Virginia. As you can see, the locales are remarkably diverse, both in terms of purpose and geography. There's naturally a heavy focus on western Europe, with England and France predominating, but that doesn't in any way detract from the utility of this book to anyone playing or refereeing a game set in the 17th century.

All of the maps include a key and a scale and many of them also include an illustration depicting the building or vessel. These illustrations are as useful as the maps themselves, since they serve as visualization aids – something that's very important in historical RPGs in my experience. After all, it's one thing to know what a generic mansion or church looks like, but what did such things look like in the 1600s? Beyond that, these illustrations include significant additional details, like the materials used in their construction, which adds to the sense of time and place that are vital to the success of historical roleplaying game adventures. 

Of course, this attention to detail should come as no surprise. Glynn Seal, the author and cartographer of Works, has previously produced numerous fantasy RPG products whose maps are similarly detailed and useful. Likewise, Lamentations of the Flame Princess products are always exceptionally well made, with superb paper quality and binding. This one is no exception, featuring as it does thick, parchment like paper that adds to the illusion that this is a book from the 17th century. Merely as an artifact, Works is a joy to hold and peruse. That it's also so useful to players and referees of any RPG set in the 17th century, only increases its value.

The Staffortonshire Trading Company Works of John Williams is available in both print and PDF formats. If you're interested in seeing what the interior of the book looks like, Glynn Seal has provided lots of photographs and a helpful video here.

A Delightfully Blank Canvas

William Church's map of Prax from the second edition of Chaosium's RuneQuest remains one of my favorite RPG maps ever. The other day, for reasons that will become clear later, I found myself perusing a different Chaosium RPG, Stormbringer. The game's original 1981 boxed set includes, among its many goodies, a fold-out wall map of the Young Kingdoms that's also the handiwork of Mr Church. 

Please enlarge!

Though the map of the Young Kingdoms lacks the wonderful little details of the Prax map, I nevertheless find it quite compelling. Michael Moorcock and his evocative names – the Sighing Desert, the Weeping Waste, the Silent Lands, among many others – deserve a lot of the credit for that, of course, but Church also did a great job of bringing this classic fantasy setting to life. In fact, I might even argue that, in this case, the sparseness of the map works in its favor, particularly as a map for use with a roleplaying game. The map practically invites players and referees to fill in the blank spaces and make it their own, as any good RPG map should. 

Hex Help

Much as I adore the incomparable map of the Flanaess from the World of Greyhawk – perhaps the best RPG map ever – over the last few years I've really come to appreciate the style of hex map that appeared during the Moldvay/Cook/Marsh era of Dungeons & Dragons. Though nowhere as artful in their presentation as Darlene's gorgeous work, the B/X hex maps do nevertheless have a beauty all their own, one born of clarity and utility. They are very easy to read and to use in play, especially if, like me, you are saddled with eyesight that's nowhere near as sharp as it once was. This fact alone counts for a great deal nowadays.

That's why I'd like to prevail upon the collective knowledge of my readers. Are there any programs out there that might enable an incompetent Luddite such as myself to make rough approximations of these maps? Once upon a time, there was a program called Hexographer that came close to doing so, but its current iteration looks much too complex for some of my limited skills to use effectively. Are there any alternatives readily available or must I buckle under and learn how to use this new version of Hexographer?

By Hand

Last month, I mentioned that I'd be participating in Dungeon23, a challenge to create a 12-level, 365-room megadungeon one room at a time over the course of 2023. One of the reasons I decided to take this up was because I'd already intended to begin more extensive playtesting of the rules for my The Secrets of sha-Arthan RPG this year. Having a large subterranean locale ready for players to explore would help me in this effort, as well as providing me with an opportunity to flesh out the setting further. Thus was born the Vaults of da-Imer.

Though I was very excited by the prospect of detailing the Vaults, one aspect of this project gave me pause: mapmaking. Even in my youth, when I had the time to devote to such things, I was never very good at cartography. Of course, back in those days, I also wasn't very self-aware and so my obvious shortcomings didn't much affect me. I'm not so lucky in my middle age; I am keenly aware of the inadequacy of my mapmaking skills. However, I am elected to proceed nonetheless, drawing the Vault's maps by hand, in the hope that doing so might, if nothing else, encourage me to keep at it until I reach some mediocre level of proficiency.

To that end, here's the first map I drew for the Vaults of da-Imer. It's from a section of Level 1 known as "The Threshold." I've opted to give the Vaults a node-like structure rather than the more traditional approach to dungeons. Hence, Level 1 consists of five complexes of 4–8 rooms, each effectively its own "mini-dungeon" within the larger whole of the Vaults. I've never done a dungeon like this before, let alone one consisting of 365 rooms, so it'll be interesting to see how it turns out in the end.

Frontiers of Adventure

Thanks to Traveller Map

When Traveller first appeared in 1977, GDW's  game of science fiction adventure in the far future followed the model of Original Dungeons & Dragons in being a generic ruleset without an explicit setting. Of course, like OD&D, Traveller's rules included within them assumptions that laid for the groundwork for an implied setting. An illustrative example of what I'm talking about is the relative slowness of interstellar travel and the concomitant lack of a separate (and faster) form of interstellar communications. Thus, Traveller may not have included its own integral setting, at least initially, but its rules certainly pushed referees in certain directions as they created their own settings, much as OD&D had done before it.

This situation didn't last long, though. Starting with the appearance of Mercenary in 1978, GDW started including references to "the Imperium" in its products. Initially, the Imperium was just a stand-in for any remote interstellar government of the sort that Traveller's rules implied. By the time of the release of The Spinward Marches in 1979 (if not before), it had started down the path that would soon make it the explicit setting of the game. From my conversations with the late Loren Wiseman and others, this shift in emphasis was one that players of the game wanted, based on feedback that GDW received from them. I can hardly blame them for catering to their buying public.

More to the point, I've always loved the Imperium. By the time I began playing Traveller, there was very little sense that the game had ever been a generic ruleset without an explicit setting and I was quite content with this situation. That said, most of GDW's efforts in describing the Imperium were focused on its frontiers, sectors of space like the aforementioned Spinward Marches and the Solomani Rim. Likewise, the various third parties licensed by GDW to produce their own materials setting set in and around the Imperium tended to follow their lead, whether they were Judges Guild or Gamelords or FASA. By comparison, there was little or no material set in the core sectors of the Imperium.

I was reminded of all this recently because a good friend of mine offered to referee a Traveller campaign and he chose to set it in the Crucis Margin sector, in the region trailing the Imperium. The sector is in close proximity to the Imperium, as well as the Solomani Confederation, the Two Thousand Worlds, and the Hive Federation but none of these major interstellar powers has any presence here. Instead, there are multiple smaller governments, usually no more than a dozen worlds in size – the very same model I used in my Riphaeus Sector campaign. 

I think it's pretty obvious why this is such an attractive set-up for a RPG campaign setting: frontiers are where adventures happen. Sometimes this is quite explicit. For example, there are The Keep on the Borderlands for D&D and Borderlands for RuneQuest, to cite just two very obvious examples. Back in the realm of science fiction, there's Star Frontiers and Star Trek, whose televisual inspiration dubbed space the final frontier. I rather suspect that one of the reasons that RPGs set in the modern day generally do poorly is that most of them lack a clear frontier and thus the possibilities for adventure are more limited. The only exceptions I can think of are horror games like Call of Cthulhu or Vaesen, where I would argue that the supernatural (or at least extramundane) constitutes a frontier of sorts.

If we turn back to Traveller, it would seem that GDW learned this lesson as well. Most of the editions of the game after its initial one were explicitly set not just in the Imperium setting but during a time when there were lots more frontiers. MegaTraveller (1987) shattered the Imperium in a civil war that resulted in the foundation of antagonistic successor states, while Traveller: The New Era (1993) takes place when much of interstellar civilization is rebuilding in the aftermath of that same civil war. I suspect a big part of the appeal of post-apocalyptic games like Gamma World is the way they take a staid, familiar setting, like Earth, and fill it with frontiers again. 

None of this is to suggest that it's impossible to have a satisfying roleplaying game campaign set in the core areas of a stable society, but, as I scan my bookshelves, looking at the games I have played most often, I see few obvious examples of them. I don't think that's mere coincidence.

Mapmaking as a Game within a Game

When I first heard about Dungeons & Dragons, an aspect of the game that both fascinated and confused me was that it didn't have a board, unlike any other game with which I had experience up to that point. The lack of a board was something I remember reading in the many newspaper accounts of the game I saw during the late Summer and Fall of 1979. How could it be a game without a board? Furthermore, many of the media accounts of the game also talked about how the players made use of sculpted miniature figures to play. Figures? But no board? What was going on? 

My confusion only increased after my encounter with Dungeon! over the Christmas break of that same year. Dungeon! most certainly did have a board and it certainly seemed quite similar to D&D, though it didn't make use of any sculpted figurines. In time, I made more sense of it all, thanks in part to various gaming mentors, who showed my friends and I the "right" way to play D&D, including the fact that the game's "board" was a hand-drawn map that a player drew as his party of adventurers explored a dungeon. This lesson from my elders was potent and, to this day, I continue to associate D&D strongly with maps and, more importantly, mapmaking. 

Mapmaking is an aspect of D&D that, so far as I can tell, has largely disappeared or at least has been downplayed over the years. In the present moment, one might even say that it's been superseded by technology like virtual tabletops that obviate the need for graph paper and pencil. Nevertheless, maps themselves remain an important part of gameplay. Nearly every adventure, whether prepackaged or homebrewed, includes a map of its most important locales and, in many of them, exploring that map is a central feature of gaming sessions. 

From my extremely anecdotal survey of the situation, I have the impression that many gamers today don't really miss the days of making their own maps. Some have even admitted that they never really enjoyed mapmaking, which they found, by turns, tedious, frustrating, and generally unpleasant. I completely understand this point of view, especially when you consider the kinds of dungeon maps that frequently appeared during the first decade of the hobby. They're filled with mazes, one-way and secret doors, teleportation traps, shifting and sliding walls, dead end corridors, and similar annoyances, all of which are specifically intended to foil or at least hinder accurate mapmaking. Where's the fun in that?

The question is more than fair in my opinion and I don't begrudge anyone who has limited or no tolerance for the vicissitudes of mapmaking – or the labyrinthine dungeons that necessitated them. At the same time, I think it's a mistake to think manual mapmaking has simply been supplanted by virtual tabletops and the like. It's increasingly my feeling that mapmaking – by hand, based on the referee's verbal descriptions – is a key activity of the game, since D&D is as much a game of exploration as it is of, say, combat. I'd also argue that it's a game with a strong element of puzzle solving and tricky dungeon maps play a big part in facilitating that element of the game.

None of this is to suggest that D&D can only be played with manual mapmaking, only that something is lost when it's not included. That's why certain races, character classes, spells, and magic items have or grant abilities that pertain to exploring the physical environment of a dungeon – finding secret doors, sloping passages, etc. It thus seems pretty clear to me that, at least as envisioned by Gary Gygax (and probably Dave Arneson as well), the play of Dungeons & Dragons revolved around, at least in part, "solving" the puzzle of a dungeon's layout, much in the same way that players did in early computer games like Wizardry or Telengard.

I don't know. I'm still trying to figure this out for myself. It may well be that manual mapmaking is simply a transitional technology that isn't nearly as integral to the way its creators intended D&D to be played as I'm suggesting here. Nevertheless, I can't shake the feeling that there's more going on than we realize and that the large scale abandonment of fumbling around with pencil and graph paper is another step on the road to a fundamental shift in the way Dungeons & Dragons is conceived and played.