In “My First Book,” Robert Louis Stevenson tells the origin story of Treasure Island, a book which I’ve just had the pleasure of reading this afternoon. It begins when Stevenson was a lodger at the Late Miss McGregor’s Cottage. One of his roommates was an artist who would spend afternoons at the easel, and Stevenson would periodically join him. On one such occasion, Stevenson:

…made a map of an island. It was elaborately and (I thought) beautifully coloured; the shape of it took my fancy beyond expression; it contained harbours that pleased me like sonnets; and with the unconsciousness of the predestined, I ticketed my performance ‘Treasure Island.’

I am told there are people who do not care for maps, and find it hard to believe. The names, the shapes of the woodlands, the courses of the roads and rivers, the prehistoric footsteps of man still distinctly traceable up hill and down dale, the mills and the ruins, the ponds and the ferries, perhaps the Standing Stone or the Druidic Circle on the heath; here is an inexhaustible fund of interest for any man with eyes to see or twopence worth of imagination to understand with!

No child but must remember laying his head in the grass, staring into the infinitesimal forest and seeing it grow populous with fairy armies. Somewhat in this way, as I paused upon my map of ‘Treasure Island,’ the future characters of the book began to appear visibly there among imaginary woods; and their brown faces and bright weapons peeped out upon me from unexpected quarters, as they passed to and fro, fighting and hunting treasure, on these few square inches of a flat projection.

The map that appears above is, sadly, not the map that Stevenson drew that day. Much later, when he had completed his first novel, he submitted the map along with the manuscript to the publisher. Unfortunately, the map became lost in the post (or, perhaps, the publisher misplaced it). In either case, the horrified Stevenson had to recreate the map from memory, with great difficulty because he also had to comb through his own text to make sure all of the continuity was correct with the new version of the map.

In this, Stevenson was in some way reversing the process by which the novel had actually been written.

I had written it up to the map. The map was the chief part of my plot. For instance, I had called an islet ‘Skeleton Island,’ not knowing what I meant, seeking only for the immediate picturesque, and it was to justify this name that I broke into the gallery of Mr. Poe and stole Flint’s pointer. And in the same way, it was because I made two harbours that the Hispaniola was sent on her wanderings with Israel Hands.

I suspect that many a game master will recognize themself in Stevenson’s tale — whether it was the dim recesses of a dungeon, the vasty wilds of a hexmap, or the starlit expanse of a Traveller sector map.

Oft have I found myself peering at a published map and found my eyes drawn down into its enigma: If I stepped onto that street, what would I see? What strange mysteries lie beneath those mounds?

But even more often have I walked in Stevenson’s footsteps, beginning an adventure not with an outline or a scene list, but by seizing graph paper and letting my creativity flow through the geography.

This is not, of course, the only way to begin an adventure. (I am equally likely to start with, say, a revelation list.) But take a dungeon, for example. An interesting arrangement of chambers invites the imagination to fill them, and I find the encounters “peeping out,” as Stevenson suggests, from between the gridlines. The same is true of a wilderness map: My hand will chart the Silverwood before I ever learn what might lie beneath its boughs.

“The map is not the territory.” When dealing with the representation of reality, Alfred Korzybski’s saying means that we cannot capture all the complexities of reality in our representation of it; there is a vast wealth of detail that cannot be captured. But when it comes to imaginary creation, the meaning is almost inverted: the representation of the map is all that exists because the details have not yet been created; but that howling void will, like any vacuum, suck you down into it, providing a lattice on which all the detail of a world can spill out.

I’ll let Mr. Stevenson have the final word here:

I have said the map was most of the plot. I might almost say it was the whole… It is, perhaps, not often that a map figures so largely in a tale, yet it is always important… It is my contention — my superstition, if you like — that who is faithful to his map, and consults it, and draws from it inspiration, daily and hourly, gains positive support, and not mere negative immunity from accident. The tale has a root there; it grows in that soil; it has a spine of its own behind the words. Better if the country by real, and he has walked every foot of it and knows every milestone. But even with imaginary places, he will do well in the beginning to provide a map; as he studies it, relations will appear that he had not thought upon; he will discover obvious, though unsuspected, shortcuts and footprints for his messengers; and even when the map is not all the plot, as it was in Treasure Island, it will be found to be a mine of suggestion.

The concept of an RPG sandbox campaign often gets mixed up with a lot of other things. Some of these are common structures used for sandboxes (like hexcrawls). Others are just misnomers (like sandboxes being the opposite of a railroad).

(Quick definition: A sandbox campaign is one in which the players are empowered to either choose or define what their next scenario is going to be. Hexcrawls are a common sandbox structure because geographical navigation becomes a default method for choosing scenarios, which are keyed to the hexes you’re navigating between.)

Other conflations are subtler. A particularly common one is to conflate simulationism with the sandbox structure. One major appeal of the sandbox can be that it allows players to feel as if they’re “living in the world” because they’re free to do “anything,” which has a fairly large overlap with what people enjoy about simulationism.

But simulationism is not required for sandbox play.

A good example of this is the chardalyn dragon from Icewind Dale: Rime of the Frostmaiden.

SPOILER WARNING!

When the PCs approach a particular location on the map (Xardorok’s fortress), this triggers an event in which the dragon flies away to cause some havoc. In discussing this as part of a sandbox scenario, I was challenged: How could it be a sandbox if it was dramatically triggered by the PCs’ approach?

(Note: I’m just talking about triggering the dragon flight here. Shortly thereafter Rime of the Frostmaiden ALSO has an NPC show up to trigger a linear plot that ends the sandbox. I’m not talking about her. Just the dragon.)

The confusion here is due to the conflation of the sandbox structure and simulationism. A simulationist wouldn’t trigger the dragon based on the PCs’ approach. They’d probably do something like have Xardorok’s construction of the dragon be on a schedule with the dragon being released when Xardorok completes it, regardless of whether or not the PCs have found Xardorok’s fortress yet. (There are also other simulationist techniques that could be used here.)

But a sandbox isn’t dependent on simulationism. There’s nothing about dramatically triggering an event which is incompatible with the players remaining empowered to choose and define their scenario.

Go to Icewind Dale Index

I’ve talked in the past about how D&D 5th Edition doesn’t teach DMs how to run dungeons. In fact, it doesn’t even teach them how to key a dungeon map (or provide an example of a keyed dungeon map).

(To understand how weird this is, consider that the 5th Edition Starter Set includes a detailed explanation of exactly how a DM should use boxed text, but still doesn’t tell the DM how to run the dungeon that’s included in the sample adventure. Like, there was a perceived need to very specifically explain how you read text out loud, but not a perceived need to explain how you’re supposed to run a dungeon… the thing that’s actually unique to being a GM. But I digress.)

By contrast, the original edition of D&D in 1974 contains very specific instructions for both things: How to prep a dungeon and how to run the dungeon.

This is not some newfangled failure on the part of 5th Edition. It’s the end of a very long trend line (briefly interrupted, but only partially reversed by 3rd Edition) in which the D&D rulebooks have slowly stopped teaching DMs how to run the game at arguably its most fundamental level. 4th Edition, for example, still included instructions for keying a dungeon, but, like 5th Edition, failed to include any instruction for how a DM is supposed to run the dungeon.

Virtually the entire RPG hobby is built on three core structures:

1. Dungeoncrawl (often genericized to location-crawl)

2. Combat

3. Railroad

And virtually every published RPG has assumed that GMs already know to run a dungeon (because they learned it from D&D, right?).

So what happens when D&D stops teaching new DMs how to a run a dungeon?

Well, at that point all you have left is a railroad leading you from one combat encounter to the next.

PAYING THE PIPER

Although I’ve been talking about this problem for several years, it’s always been mostly theoretical and anecdotal: I would run into new GMs who were struggling because they’d never been taught a proper scenario structure; or I’d get e-mails from similar GMs who were thanking me for my essays on game structures or node-based scenario design or the like.

This is partly because, despite D&D no longer teaching these things, there was still a legacy of knowledge in the hobby: First, published scenarios were being designed by people who had learned how to prep and run dungeons decades ago, and new DMs could frequently intuit a lot from the published example. Second, many GMs were first players who learned to play from GMs who had, similarly, learned these things when they were younger.

Of course, these are basically oral traditions. And, like all oral traditions (particularly those which aren’t being deliberately passed on), they’ll degrade over time. Unsurprisingly, the first stuff to get lost are the procedures that were happening only behind the GM’s screen; players learning only from their actual play experiences only saw what those procedures created, not the procedures themselves, and therefore could not learn them.

Nonetheless, this legacy knowledge persisted.

Recently, though, I’ve been digging through stuff on the DM’s Guild and it’s become clear that the problem is no longer theoretical: It’s very real.

EXAMPLE 1: I’m reading through a module. The entire concept is that the PCs are exploring a ruined castle. But there’s no map of the castle. There are room-by-room descriptions of the castle, but no map to show how these areas relate to each other.

It should be noted that there ARE two other maps in the book: Encounter maps depicting specific rooms. So it’s not a budgetary issue. Cartography could have existed.

So I’m just confused, until I remember that… Oh, right. D&D doesn’t teach this any more.

EXAMPLE 2: This time it’s a whole collection of one-page scenarios. The creators have popped over to Dyson Logos’ website and grabbed his Creative Commons maps, and so every single scenario has a map.

None of the dungeon maps are keyed.

In some cases, this is because the locations aren’t designed for exploration (fair enough), but often the adventure features huge paragraphs of text trying to describe the contents of the dungeon room by room in a kind of narrative ramble.

The final kicker? These are 5-star rated products on the DM’s Guild. It’s not just that these particular creators didn’t know any better; the audience doesn’t know any better, either.

CONCLUSION

“How to prep and a run a room-by-room exploration of a place” is solved tech from literally Day 1 of RPGs.

But D&D hasn’t been teaching it in the rulebooks since 2008, and that legacy is really starting to have an impact.

Over the next decade, unless something reverses the trend, this is going to get much, much worse. The transmission decay across generations of oral tradition is getting rather long in the tooth at this point. You’ve got multiple generations of new players learning from rulebooks that don’t teach it at all. The next step is a whole generation of industry designers who don’t know this stuff, so people won’t even be able to learn this stuff intuitively from published scenarios.

UPDATE: This article was written primarily for the existing audience of the Alexandrian and it kind of assumes a shared framework of knowledge; it’s a “here’s an additional thought that builds on those other thoughts I’ve previously discussed” kind of thing. Based on the comments below, it appears that the article has somehow broken out into a MUCH wider audience. Although I did link to its immediate antecedent in the opening paragraph (Game Structures – Addendum: System Matters), that is clearly not getting the job done in terms of orienting new readers. If you’re feeling confused or angry or think I’m hating on 5th Edition here, I do encourage you to check out not only that addendum, but the entire Game Structures essay which discusses scenario structures in detail.

A few specific notes:

(1) A location-crawl structure (which is what the dungeoncrawl structure D&D used to teach is a specific example of) is not limited to old school dungeons. It’s not even limited to dungeons.

(2) Location-crawls are not the only scenario structure, but the argument that D&D has somehow grown beyond them doesn’t make a lot of sense: Every published D&D module from WotC features a dungeon. The fact they aren’t teaching new DMs how to effectively run the scenarios they’re publishing is clearly a problem. Beyond that, the basic skills of a location-crawl are also applied to other scenarios structures like raids and heists.

(3) Even if D&D had grown beyond location-crawls, the D&D core rulebooks don’t include instructions for designing or running any other scenario structures, either.

Where did the concept of “Session Zero” come from?

Open Query from Twitter: What social system makes sense in a magical world where monsters are very real? Because feudalism doesn’t make a lot of sense to me. Nor do castles.

If monsters that cannot be defeated by non-magical means are so prevalent, feudalism arguably makes more sense, but it will be based on the strength of magic, not the ability to afford armor / horses.

If wizards are rare, expect lots of Wizard Kings. If they’re common, perhaps magical oligarchies or you end up with Merlin’s Pentagrammic Table instead of Arthur’s Round as foundational myth.

If magical puissance is not inherited, expect lines of succession through Apprentices to become common and then heavily formalized to prevent constant succession crises. If the gift of magic is randomly bestowed, this will also create more social mobility than was true in historical feudalism, but it will be largely driven by chance.

Castles can also make sense in this setting of constant dragon-scale threats. But expect the walls to be magically warded and the construction of vast underground vaults to which people can flee from aerial assaults.

Oh! Hey! We just got dungeons under the castle!

As population centers grow beyond the point where everyone can run into the castle protection, expect the city walls to be larger and more elaborate. The distinction between “inside the walls” and “outside the walls” will be more sharply defined.

Cities will be protected by powerful artifacts or ancient protective rites like the Dragonstaff of Ahghairon, which keeps dragons out of Waterdeep, will also be common if they are possible in this cosmology. Warfare may almost require sending in small strike teams (i.e. PCs) to sabotage these wards.

In the absence of such wards — or perhaps to accent them — expect the construction of “fallout shelters” in various places around the city. One can easily imagine these excavations breaking through into natural caverns, abandoned mineworks, or even ancient tunnels of similar purpose left by some elder civilization, and thus ultimately ending up tangled together into a maze which most likely also connects to the dungeons beneath the castle. (More disturbing would be the possibility of running into something digging up from the other direction.)

Despite all these preparations, expect that humans will fail to maintain sovereignty in many places. Dragon Kings and Abolethic Collectives and Demonic Hegemonies provide alternatives, not all of them necessarily dark lords.

City-states ruled over by demigods may also be common, or were common before the gods withdrew from this world in accordance with the terms of the Godspeace.

Speaking of which, expect the balance of power between Church and State to look very different, with divine magic the only counterbalancing power to the Wizard Kings. The result, though, would be heavily dependent on the nature of the contract between spellcasting clerics and their gods.