Savage Worlds uses playing cards for initiative: Each round, everybody is dealt a playing card and the rank of the cards determines the order in which characters take their actions. The system has the advantage of being quick, intuitive, and transparent. (It’s very easy to glance around the table and immediately see when people will be taking their actions.)

Here’s a variant of the same idea designed for D20 or D20-like systems.

PLAYING CARD INITIATIVE

THE DEAL: Each round, deal each PC and each group of NPCs a playing card. Characters with an initiative bonus are dealt extra cards equal to their bonus and get to keep the best card dealt to them. Characters with an initiative penalty are dealt extra cards equal to their penalty and must keep the worst card dealt to them.

(For example, Peter the Brave has a+2 initiative bonus. He is dealt three cards — the single card that everyone receives automatically, plus two bonus cards from his initiative: A ten, a nine, and a jack. He keeps the jack.

Brazz the Slow, on the other hand, has a -1 initiative penalty. He’s dealt two cards: An eight and a six. He must take the six.)

THE COUNTDOWN: Once the cards are dealt, the GM simply counts down from Ace to Deuce with characters taking their turns when their card comes up. In the case of a tie, actions can be resolved simultaneously. If the tie must be broken, resolve by suit order in reverse alphabetical order: Spades, then Hearts, then Diamonds, and then Clubs.

JOKERS: Jokers are wild. When you’re dealt a joker you can keep it even if you have an initiative penalty. A joker allows you to go whenever you want in a round, even if it means interrupting another character’s action with your full turn! In addition, you gain a +2 bonus to all checks and damage rolls for the round.

SHUFFLING: Reshuffle the deck after any round in which a Joker was dealt.

VARIANTS

TRADITIONAL VARIANT: Instead of drawing each round, you can simply draw once for the full combat. When characters take a readied or delayed action that changes their initiative, it’s recommended that players fish out a card of the correct value.

UTILITY VARIANT: Designate one of the players as the dealer. The GM can just tell them how many cards he needs and let them handle the actual dealing of the cards. Alternatively, if you’re all right handling simultaneous action resolution, there’s no reason the GM and players couldn’t have separate decks.

POKER VARIANT: For completely dissociated wackiness, let the players form poker hands by taking collective actions with various bonuses depending on the hand formed. Many poker hands, of course, would require some of the players to delay their actions for the round. (For example, two players with a pair attacking the same target could each deal double damage. What might a royal flush be worth?)

Go to Part 1

Light can be seen at great distances, which means that what a PC can actually see will often be determined by lights sources in a dozen different locations. When those light sources are only referenced in the location keys, it becomes almost trivial for errors to be made.

Player: Okay, we head through the arch.

GM: The arch leads to a vaulted chamber perhaps forty feet long lit with an eery red light which glistens off the blood streaming down the walls. The light seems to be pulsing from a glowing heart which hovers in the middle of the chamber.

Player: Man, I feel like we probably should have noticed that during the half hour we spent searching the room right next door.

Some modern maps will take advantage of their “photo realistic” appearance to denote illumination or light sources. For an extreme example, here’s a sample from Fane of the Drow (a product from what I refer to as the Effervescent Period of WotC cartography):

But I’ve struggle to find a method that can be used with perfect clarity, particularly when it comes to more utilitarian maps. (Like those that you would draw for yourself.)

Roger the GS, however, has recently proposed using a red starburst symbol. The resolution on his reference document was a little low for my use, so I’ve re-engineered it:

I like this symbol a lot. It’s simple, intuitive, and universal in its form. It doesn’t necessarily require the color-coding, but certainly benefits from it.

But let’s take a moment to consider the best way to use the symbol. For example we could use small versions of the symbol to indicate every light source, as shown in this map of a long hallway lit by sconces:

This has a lot of obvious utility, but could also very quickly lead to unnecessarily cluttered maps.

Another option would be to use a solitary symbol to mean “there’s a light source in this room”:

Less information being conveyed, but also less clutter.

A third option would be to use a slightly larger symbol to encode the size of the light source (as measured in its radius of illumination). The size require for legible digits makes this a poor fit for “every source of illumination”, but it combines well with the “one symbol per room” method:

Thoughts? Which method seems most useful to you?

Go to Part 4: Ceilings

This post is part of the RPG Blog Carnival for Cartography.

Go to Part 1

As we continue our Better Dungeon Maps project, let’s turn our attention to stairs. And basically, when it comes to stairs, there are two pieces of information we want encoded on the map: First, the direction the stairs are going (up or down). Second, where the stairs are going.

Let’s start by demonstrating the potential pitfalls of not encoding this information. I’ve often sung the praises of Jennell Jaquay’s Caverns of Thracia here before, but this is one place where it falls down painfully. Here’s a sample of maps from the module:

(click for larger image)

All of these maps connect to each other, but I doubt you’ll be able to puzzle out how those connections actually work. (Frustratingly, even the dungeon key won’t help you much.) When I was first prepping the module I spent the better part of half an hour trying to figure out which stairs connected to each other and then marked those connections on the map.

You can easily note, however, that the maps for the Caverns of Thracia clearly indicate up/down directions for the stairs. But it should be relatively easy to imagine what would happen if you removed those text labels, leaving you with undistinguished and enigmatical lines to puzzle over.

Fortunately, the problem of indicating directionality for common stairs is largely a solved one:

The stairs taper in the direction of descent. (So the lowest portion of the stairs is located at the bottom of the picture above.)

But adventure modules are still maddeningly inconsistent when it comes to clearly indicating where the stairs go, despite the fact that doing so is so utterly trivial:

For example, Keep on the Shadowfell indicates the destination of only one-third of the stairs on its maps.

(Another option I’ve seen is to key the stairs: So that Staircase A on Map 1 logically leads to Staircase A on Map 2. This can work. But since it’s usually just as easy to label the destination, as shown above, it’s probably the better option.)

SPIRAL STAIRCASES

Spiral staircases, however, aren’t quite so straight-forward. Here’s a typical example from I6 Castle Ravenloft:

It would be easy enough to supply a destination label for those stairs, but there’s really no way to tell whether they’re curving up or down.

Roger the GS has recently proposed this solution:

Which seems like a good stab in the right direction. My only quibble with this is that it is not immediately apparent at a glance which direction the arrows are pointing. (They could just as easily be indicating the direction in which the stairs are ascending.)

It’s tempting to apply the same tapering solution we use for straight stairs to the problem. To my eye, something like this looks fairly acceptable:

Even when extended to a three-quarters design, the iconography seems to remain fairly clear:

But when you need to show the stair case spiraling both up and down from the same level, the result is considerably less satisfying:

Hypothetically you could only have it taper at the absolute nadir of the stairs as pictured, but even with tweaking this seems very unclear to my eyes:

I’m increasingly convinced that labeled arrows may be the clearest way to go with spiral staircases. But do the arrows necessarily need to curve just because the stairs do?

Here the double visual coding of the symbol (somewhat unclear on its own) in combination with the arrows seems, to my eye at least, to have greater clarity than either by itself.

On the other hand, here’s a final example from Dyson Logos’ Ruins of the Gorgon:

Dyson uses a side-view map to make the destination of each stair relatively clear. (Although double-coding the info with a text reference could only add to clarity.)

At the end of the day, I still feel fairly stymied when it comes to providing a nice, clear icongraphy for spiral stairs. Your thoughts?

Go to Part 3: Light Sources

This post is part of the RPG Blog Carnival for Cartography.

Over the past 30 years or so, there’s really no question that dungeon maps have become prettier. For example, here’s part of the map from A1 Slave Pits of the Undercity (published in 1980):

And here’s a similar map from 2008’s Keep on the Shadowfell:

The fancier textures certainly look very nice. And they may tell you a little bit more about what you’re looking at. (The tables are made of wood, for example.) But for the most part, the utility of the map from Keep on the Shadowfell is essentially unchanged from the utility of the simpler maps from two or three decades earlier.

One of the ways in which “pretty” could be turned into functional utility, of course, is if the maps were offered in a format and size at which they could be easily turned into battlemaps and displayed on the table for the players to appreciate and interact with.

But setting that aside, how else could we improve the utility of our dungeon maps? Or, to put it another way, what information could we be coding onto our dungeon maps to make them more useful?

Let’s start with doors.

OPENING DOORS

The humble door:

I don’t know about you, but one of the first things my players want to know when they come to a closed door is: Which way does it open? They want to know if they can get access to the hinges or if they’re going to need to bash it down.

And does it open to the left or right? If people decide to start peeking through it or want to brace it against a nearby wall, these become important issues.

Naturally one can just make a judgment call. But how nice would it be to have this information encoded on the map? (If for no other reason than to make sure it opens the same way when the PCs come back.) It seems like it would be pretty easy.

Ironically, the first module ever published for D&D included this information on the map. Here’s a sample from The Palace of the Vampire Queen, published by Wee Warriors in 1976:

(The circles represent secret or concealed doors.)

So, that’s one option:

We could also simplify that design by removing the swinging arc to leave a simple open angle:

Another option, recently proposed, is Roger’s “Elvis Door“:

I’ll be honest that I’m not much of a fan of the Elvis Door, largely because nothing about it intuitively says “door” to me. And even after staring at it for awhile, I’m not entirely sure I’m reading it correctly. For example, when I look at it in actual practice (on a map designed by Telecanter), I keep trying to read the slant as indicating that the door is being pushed on the slanted side (which I’m fairly certain is actually the exact opposite of what the symbol is supposed to be communicating).

One last option, a simple arrow:

This symbol has the disadvantage of only indicating the direction of the door and not its direction of swing. (Although it might be useful for a door that actually swings up like a garage door.

What are your thoughts? Which symbol (or symbols) seem to intuitively make the most sense to you?

For my mileage, I’m increasingly liking the doors from Palace of the Vampire Queen. I was initially skeptical of the extra arc line, but I’ve found that in actual practice this makes it much easier to use the maps. (Without the arcs, the simple angling line tends to simply “fade” into the rest of the map and disappear.)

Go to Part 2: Stairs

This post is part of the RPG Blog Carnival for Cartography.

More “Fun With Vornheim“, this time dealing with the aftermath of a magical catastrophe.

As a backdrop detail, rumors surge through the city streets about an explosion in the Mages’ Quarter. To determine the aftermath of the explosion, I roll on the “Magic Effects” table on page 60:

“Caster’s body turns to living tarlike substance — cutting, thrusting, and piercing weapons lodge harmlessly in it. Objects must be removed before effect ends or caster dies.”

I’m going to arbitrarily say that happens to (2d100) 38 people, who go rampaging through the streets before getting contained by the town guard.

One of the PCs, however, decides to take a greater interest in the catastrophe. Using the “Contacts” rules from page 39, he knows he has 3 contacts he can tap.

Who are they? We use the City NPCs table on page 50 and we get:

• Brazz the Slow, Hunter: An expert in the geography of the Underforest. He’s suspicious of “top-folk”, but bribe-able.
• Madchen Unwern, Barrister: She will betray anyone who trusts her, then confess and beg for mercy. Enjoys beekeeping and horticulture.
• Deelia Wyrd, Half-Elven Shoemaker: She has an obscure ceremonial obligation to do some strange but subtle ritual at dusk every day. May or may not actually prevent genuine dire mystical consequences. (Let’s say that at dusk each day she must bind the imps to make her shoes. Without that geas placed upon them, the imps would be free to assassinate the Pale Goddess and free the Dark Spirit of the City.)

So the PC starts hitting up his contacts. What do they know? We roll on the “Contacts” table on page 52:

• Brazz: “No, but if you’re interested in that, I have another proposition for you.” (Brazz doesn’t know anything about the explosion in the Mages’ Quarter. But recently he has been encountering animals in the Underforest which have been transformed into similar tar creatures. Most of them seem to be coming out of the Chasm of Blue Fire.)
• Madchen Unwern: Says she doesn’t know and seems afraid to say. (She was approached last week by a wizard who went missing in the explosion. She knows she met with him, but now her files on the case are missing… and so are her memories of the meeting.)
• Deelia Wyrd: “Mmmm… maybe — let me see, can you come back tomorrow?” When the PCs come back, something has happened. (Hmm… I’m not sure. Maybe one of her imps disappeared during the explosion and hasn’t returned? Maybe she can dig up some background details on the wizard who was killed in the explosion? Or she can tap her mystical resources to find a tome describing previous appearances of the tar creatures? Fortunately, I’ve got some time to figure it out.)

That’s what Vornheim: The Complete City Kit has to offer. Pick up a copy and start having fun!

UPDATE: The author of this book has been credibly accused of being a serial abuser and rapist. Although I am leaving this post up, I cannot recommend that anyone purchase this or any of his other works, as he has also demonstrated that he will use income from projects like this to continue harassing his victims.