Traditional fantasy maps are excellent for inspiration, but there’s a reason most board games don’t use freeform poetic maps: they don’t present inherently clear and strategic choices.
When creating a location for adventure, organization of information is paramount to presenting clear choices to the players. Whether or not you show your map to the players, having one for yourself can tighten up your design and facilitate the language you use to describe what the player characters are experiencing. The clearer you can be in your language, the more you can control the experience of the game.
By organizing my world into rooms and transitions, I’ve been able to vastly improve the underlying structure of my settings and adventures.
The World is a Room
Remember the old King’s Quest point-and-click adventure games? In these games, you travel around the world by moving between different screens. One screen might show the western gate of a town, and if you travel west, the next screen shows the deep woods that stand to the west of that town. When you move between these screens there is a quick fade, but it’s inferred that there is some physical geography between the two screens that isn’t depicted. This is the transition. Within these screens, there are a number of objects to interact with. Some are clues, some are items, some are NPCs, and some are objects that lead to hidden screens.
Text-based MUDs work in a similar fashion. Each location in the game world is a “room.” Each room has a description, some words of which are interactable. To move between rooms, you either type a compass point direction, or “enter,” “exit,” “up,” or “down.”
Traditional dungeon maps operate in much the same way.
Organizing the world into rooms allows for very precise control over the information the players have access to, and allows movement within the game world to take on the same simplicity, structure, and tactical choice as it has within the dungeon.
Presenting Choices to the Players
When the PCs arrive in a room, objects present make it clear what things they can interact with; transitions make it clear where the players can go. Based on my map of Birtash, I can tell my players easily what their movement options are from the Wealthy Troll: a verdant street leads off toward a gleaming marble temple, a bustling street filled with crowds leads off to the market square, and a worn, slanting street leads down to the main gate. In my experience, players enjoy making a choice from a few clear options more than they enjoy having an overabundance of choices but no clear paths to take.
Transitions
The transitions between rooms need only be simple, flavourful descriptions. If a transition contains interactable objects or transitions to other rooms, it isn’t a transition — it’s a room. In essence, if the players stop moving within a transition, they are now in a room.
Hiding Transitions
You can hide transitions inside rooms as interactable objects. For example, my players are trying to find the secret lair of an apothecarist named Oriust in the town of Birtash. With a poetic map of a sprawling town, it would be difficult to meaningfully hide the lair because the players would either a) never find it, or b) have to rely on a task roll or getting directions in order to find it. Also, there would be no reasonable way for the players to stumble upon the lair without having already learned of it. If the world is a room, though, the players could physically search for it and even stumble upon it by accident.
In the Market Square room of Birtash, I have my description of the merchant stalls, the carts, the fountain, and so on. I also describe a large stack of crates and barrells with a tarp over it in the southeastern corner of the square. Now, the players may ignore this, and that’s fine — it’s a hidden transition, after all. But if they go poking around in those crates and barrels, they’ll discover a dark, narrow alleyway behind the stack. The alleyway leads to Oriust’s Lair.
This exploration-based discovery is very satisfying to the players because it’s a result of a choice they made as opposed to the luck of a roll. Admittedly they could make the choice to ask NPCs for the whereabouts of the lair, but there’s no reason you can’t combine that option with this one: as we know, it’s best to create problems with multiple solutions.
Gates
Gates are barriers which require keys in order to pass. I use the word gate because gates more often block access than doors do, but I admit “doors” goes better with “rooms.” Gates can be placed in front of any transition, and can take the form of a physical barrier, an NPC, or be hidden. The key to a gate can be any number of things: a physical key, money, an item, a task roll, a keyword, information valuable to the gate, or just finding the gate if it’s hidden.
Gates can also be placed in front of just about anything you want to keep the players from having free access to.
Gates can control the flow of movement on your map.
The Flow of Movement
What rooms can be accessed from this room? What interactable objects does this room contain? Do any of these objects lead to other rooms? Are there any gates in this room?
All of these questions help clarify the flow of movement on your map.
NPCs as Rooms
NPCs can be thought of as rooms which contain their own objects and transitions. For example, in Birtash’s Market Square, there is a middle-aged herbalist woman named Tiall. Tiall also has a hidden transition to Oriust’s lair, as she has worked with him before. In order to open the transition, however, the players have to gain Tiall’s confidence, or inquire about poison-making.
An NPC room can contain any of the following: a description, information, quests, clues, transitions to other NPCs/rooms, or items (magical, equipment, quest/plot). Any of these can be hidden or gated just like in a regular room.
You can add an NPC room to your map if it has transitions to other rooms.
Afterword
This is just one way of organizing a game world. I have found it to be useful in conjunction with my theory on room design. The main benefits to me are clarity of choice for the players, ease of use in play for the DM, increased depth of exploration-based play, and an increased tightness of design in preparation.
May this inspire you and help you improve your games!
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