Maybe time to put my college Geology classes to work - I've always wanted to do a truly grand cavern-based dungeon instead of something artificial, although artifical elements are certainly possible.

Quote from: Werekoala;511589Maybe time to put my college Geology classes to work - I've always wanted to do a truly grand cavern-based dungeon instead of something artificial, although artifical elements are certainly possible.

Could be interesting! Caverns take so many shapes and forms, include so many things, and can exist in pretty much any sort of climate or terrain, for that matter. Could be part of some rock formations in the middle of a shifting swamp, or in the middle of some desertic place, or on some weird plane or whatnot?

Yup - I'll post my own thread once I have some stuff to put up - don't wanna clutter up this awesomness.

Quote from: Werekoala;511608Yup - I'll post my own thread once I have some stuff to put up - don't wanna clutter up this awesomness.

OK cool. Can't wait to see what you come up with.

(Thanks for the compliment, too. I don't mean to give you the cold shoulder)

Link to our volcano side-view map to make sense of what follows.

At first, I started looking for models of mines I could use to model level (1a) of our megadungeon, but then, not finding anything particularly enticing (a few pictures and side-views here and there, but nothing really conclusive at the moment), my attention went back to the Bandit hideout level (1c).

I know this is a level that might be somewhat self-contained, maybe including a few mysteries like an inactive teleporter or two, some haunted passages to level (1b) probably, and for sure a tunnel linking it to level (6), the Market Place, which collapsed some time ago and that the player could possibly dig through if they so choose (which would be far from being an optimum choice, since the level it links to would be far more dangerous than anything they'd meet in the hideout).

I took back my puzzling notes on the Bandit Hideout and added some more (the grey part is what I had until a few days ago, followed by what I added afterwards).

Bandit hideout. Victims abducted. Bandit 'King' and his court. Hounds he throws food at. Trained rodents. Group of Hobgoblin mercenaries. Mud. Giant Snake pit. Shoddy workshop with disassembled carts, teeth taken out of skulls. Toy constructs built by alchemist to entertain. Alchemist prisoner too? Prisoner for too long. Remains of Mi-Go tech. Alchemist experiments with bits of knowledge he does not understand. Horror creations. Head jars malfunctioning. Abductions to fuel the experiments in raw materials. Room with fusioned blob thing. Oozes of memory, crystals? Cave system. Crystal book. Chasm/ropes? Trying to create slaves the way the Mi-Go did, but experiments are far from satisfyingly successful. Doesn't really know how or why.

Now, these are the partial elements coming to my mind as I'm trying to visualize the environment. I see bits of situations or rooms and I just think about them, write down, and let it stew for a while. I might as well check out some ideas or material this makes me think of, like in this instance, To Snare the Pale Prince and Kings in Darkness, both Elric stories, which for some reason this idea of the "King of Bandits" made me think of, or the obvious HP Lovecraft influences with the Mi Go, or other bits and pieces of ambiance or monsters from various Hellboy comics, which I'm reading right now, and Dracula which is always in the back of my mind somewhere. This is going to get organized in our next step here, as we think about our level's layout and put it down on paper before mapping the whole thing itself.

One doesn't really need to think thoroughly about dungeon layout before actually putting pen to graph paper. It's something that you have to keep in mind for the reasons we outlined earlier (which are further explained in Melan's excellent breakdown of dungeon levels from various published modules, as well as the advice from Justin Alexander entitled "Jaquaying the Dungeon," both of which being excellent reads for the dungeon designer in all of us), but this can be put into action as you draw the map without thinking too much of the layout before hand.

Here, I'm going to give the layout a bit more thought before I draw the map. What I do is to basically organize my elements into rough areas on a diagram that represents my level, with the different connections between the different parts of the layout. I'm thinking here in particular about the way these elements are situated next to each other for the place to make a minimum of sense to me, about the different entrances and exits to the level and how they are positioned on the map, as well as the way each element is linked to each other, ensuring, among other things, that I do not have any areas that would have to be explored, or could not be avoided in any way, for the reasons previously mentioned.

What you get is something looking a bit like this:



The boxes on this diagram represent rough areas of the complex, maybe clusters of rooms joined to each other thematically at least. The court for instance could have an audience chamber, the quarters of the king of the bandits (marked 'king' on the map), some sort of pit to enjoy the giant snake devouring some visitors in the manner of Jabba the Hut, these kinds of things. It's not a final drawing by any means. It's just meant to give us an idea of where it is we're going as we draw our map, and what each area or cluster might be about as we do so.

We see the different lines linking our areas which are like main passage-ways, connections, corridors maybe, and so on. The dashes link different areas through streams of water or tunnels between different pits and the like. We can also see our five different main entrances (which I just came up with, and would mean we would need some type of spacial representation of the immediate surroundings around the tower ruins to make sense of them meaningfully as the players explore the area,  which means a secondary, surface map later on).

This basically starts us on the way to structure our ideas, might bring some other ideas enriching the whole (the location of the Snake Pit for instance just gave me the idea of connecting it to the Court with the Jabba the Hut type pit maybe, which then led to other pits being linked underground as well), so that in the end, when we put pen to paper, we have a much better idea where it is we are going with this layout.

Note that the fact this diagram looks like what a chart showing relationships between factions or NPCs in a game setting might look like, or how the links between various clues or elements in an investigation scenario might be organized prior to play, is no coincidence at all, here. Fundamentally, there is no difference between Melan's analysis of dungeon layouts and Justin Alexander talking to us about the Three Clue Rule: it's all about managing the players' choices, not by trying to trap them into a prefabricated suit of rooms or clues or events, but by giving them even more choices and alternative courses which you then manage on an action-reaction basis which forms the core of the game itself, rather than trying to work the group towards a predefined outcome that would need to occur one way or the other for the game to be remotely satisfying once played.

Also note that the process can be repeated at the macro and micro level of our level (and indeed dungeon) design, the particular areas of the diagram in their actual layout repeating the same principles of non-linearity. If you take this to its natural extreme, what you end up with is a map looking like this:



Which is one of the first levels of Castle Greyhawk, taken and magnified from this original picture of Gary Gygax as he was running OD&D for the ENWorld moderators a few years prior to his passing:



Here's a link to the full thread discussing this picture and map over at Knights & Knaves.

Now, as I started drawing the level itself, I didn't want for it to look like this. I wanted it to have a more organic structure. More realism if you will (Gary would beat me on the head if he knew I was using that particular expression).

I look around for various layouts I like, kind of like models for inspiration. I notice Weem's Caves of Chaos map, which is pretty cool in and of itself (and usable for online gaming at high resolution, hint hint). There's also some of PatW's layouts on Knights & Knaves which I like a lot, aesthetically, like this one and that one, in particular. That's basically the material you can see on that brew picture I took for fun a few days ago (along with the uncompleted diagram reproduced above):



And now we're ready to map. I'm going to talk about a few basic considerations to keep in mind as far as the content of the rooms, the enemies, the treasure, etc are concerned next time, and we'll start seeing the level coming together bit by bit, hopefully.

Bookmarked!  This is great stuff, and a challenge to me to up my game.

But, humble as they are in comparison, I have a few additional thoughts for the OP.

Quote from: The Butcher;501805How many levels should I have ready at session #1?
How do I keep PCs interested right from session #1?
...
How do you like your dungeon? Mythic underworld, quasi-realistic underground complex, or something else entirely?
...
Also, since I don't know shit about archeology, how the fuck do things like entire cities get buried over time? And how would it possible to explore them without, you know, shoveling all the dirt away first?

You can start with only the first level completely done if you have a map and a themed encounter table ready for whatever connects.  That way if the PCs do press on, you can check for populated/empty rooms and what's in them as they go, without having it be a totally random roll out of the monster manual.  Your themed level table may double as the random encounter table at first, but to be thorough I revise it for my "real" random encounter table after I finish properly.  The drawback is this can conflict with providing meaningful choices, i.e. a blind choice of left or right as opposed to the smell of compost coming from the left and faint tapping echoes from the right.  So don't use it as an excuse not to finish levels eventually, but for myself I'd never start a game if I waited until I'd prepped properly.

For player motivation for mega-dungeons I like a gold-as-xp rule, or at the very least xp for spent gold or carousing.  You may already be there since you said old school, but since I hadn't seen it called out it's worth mentioning.  Arbitrary as it is, it really works for this kind of game.

I like my dungeons "straight" close to the surface, getting weirder as you go deeper or farther in.

Entire cities may get built underground on purpose.  Petra's been mentioned; also check out the underground city of Derinkuyu (side map, isometric overview).  With a good enough map that's a game-able dungeon straight up.  Humans built that in the real world, and we don't even have darkvision or stonesense.  Also check out qanats, underground irrigation/cooling systems that blow sewers away as an excuse for dungeons underneath functional surface cities.  (The side view there is simple, but they could get complex.)

Cool post. I'm going to share what I think about elements of level design like creatures and treasure placements pretty soon.

The XP for GP component of O/AD&D is something I closely associate with the feel of the game, now, because it has a significant impact on the way the exploration plays afterwards. About 2/3 of your XPs might come from treasure (on average) under this paradigm, as opposed to bashing monsters on the head, which leads to an adaptation to the resulting environment on the part of the smart player: the goal becomes to avoid needless fights, sneak around as necessary, get to the treasure without confrontations when possible, which means you need to scout, seize your opponent, understand the dynamics of the place to get the most reward out of it. It enhances the importance of tactical choices on the part of the players, since confrontations are not the automatic answers for your character to level up (or die).

Likewise, the chirurgical awards of XP for objectives fulfilled in the dungeon does help (objectives predetermined by the smart player, not the DM - see AD&D PH p. 101+).

Love those links you added at the end of your posts, Saladman. Very inspiring stuff!

We’ve talked quite a bit about the importance of providing meaningful choices to the players, so that they can manage their exploration however they want, they can get invested in their own successes or failures, and can own the game while you are basically role playing the environment and playing an action-reaction game based on the environment you build prior to the game.

We do not want linear paths, or bottlenecks the PCs would have to go through, or would have to confront to get the adventure going. Instead the path itself is the adventure. Their choices, whether they take left or right, whether they camp here or there, confront this group of creature or sneak past them, parley with that vanquished opponent or choose to slaughter everyone down to the last henchman, all these things have an impact on the way the game unfolds, including, perhaps most importantly, the end game itself, whatever it might become as a natural result of play.

This doesn’t mean you are just running some kind of magical tea party and haven’t prepared for whatever the players might throw at you. One of your roles as DM is to come up with the environment and challenge the players, keep them on their toes, allow them to make these meaningful choices we just talked about, and have the world evolve as a result of the input they are bringing to the game milieu.

This is why our level diagram took the shape it did, with its loops and different paths of exploration between our would-be clusters of rooms: to enable these choices, rather than hamper them.

Now, as we map the first areas of our Bandit Level, it’s good to have a few other ideas derived from the same principle, that variety is the spice of life, and what provides meaningful tactical choices to our players, as it comes to the particulars of those areas themselves. I’m reminded of some thoughts Papers & Paychecks had on this particular subject over a period of time that I found extremely pertinent and useful, so I’m going to paraphrase quite a bit here as I put this thing together.

There should be a variety of battle fields and tactical environments. This means that some rooms are small, and others are huge and hard to defend. Some have multiple entrances and exits, others don’t. Some rooms are clustered together, and others are not. The players have to adapt to circumstances, have to keep thinking tactically on their feet to not lose ground, to keep loot they’ve acquired, to secure their camps and fallback positions, and so on, so forth.

The content of said rooms must itself vary. No room after room of orcs guarding the same-sized pies over and over again. Some of the rooms, lots of rooms actually, must remain tactically empty. This makes the rooms that are not empty the hot spots of the exploration, with chases, moving combat positions, control of the battlefield being an asset for the players thinking on their feet, and a plague to those who don’t. The players can manage their discoveries. They’re not interrupted all the time because of the next monster in the next room. They can plan and organize themselves. They can fortify areas, build camps and even work on zones of influences they control in the dungeon.

If you want an idea of the proportions being used in a classic dungeon layout like this, I’d say that about half to three quarters of the rooms are left empty in the end. The rooms that are not empty will contain monsters, or might instead contain just treasure, hidden, trapped, guarded or not, while a few rooms will probably just feature traps and hazards with no treasure to be gained.  

Some treasure is guarded by monsters, traps and other hazards, and some is not. A good guideline here is that the more valuable, the more easy to carry the treasure is, the more likely it is to be kept by some monster or threat or another. Copper pieces, heavy pieces of furniture, are hard to carry along and bring back to safety. These might be treasures lying around, or easily reached. Silver pieces and huge tapestries which are easier to dispose off might be guarded or locked away in the upper levels of your dungeon. Gold, gems and jewel are portable and extremely valuable: these are hidden, well guarded, trapped, owned by chieftains and other tough opponents.

Use a variety of creatures. Not just intelligent humanoids, but a little bit of everything: oozes, constructs, undead creatures, animals and so on. Variety is the spice of life, variety ensures choices are significant. If you fill room after room with clusters of goblins, you shouldn’t be surprised if your Magic User blasts through each area memorizing the same spells over and over and over again. When you vary the creature types, the spells the MU memorizes all the time might not be adequate. There’s no instant solution to every problem. So the MU with the help of his companions must explore carefully, try to understand the nature of their opposition, formulate plans, sometimes fall back and memorize the right spells to get what they want out of some particular situation or another.

Speaking of variety of creatures another important tip comes to mind: don’t always use the same tactics whatever creatures you’re playing; use tactics appropriate to the creature types you’re using, and have these tactics reflect on the composition of the level itself. Some opponents like some animals or undead are just dumb. They stand there banging their heads against the walls ‘splush… splush… splush...’ don’t use tactics per se, just charge moaning ‘meat… meat…’ and that’s it. A starving wolf who feels threatened goes for the jugular if cornered, or uses animal tactics surrounding the opponent with the members of his pack if not. Role play the environment. It's your job as a DM.

Vary your opponents’ types and tactics.

Which makes me think : I also agree with P&P that having rosters of creatures is a good thing, particularly when we think about intelligent and/or non-negligible opponents scattered throughout the dungeon. It’s a good thing to know how many orcs are on the level. It allows the PCs to effectively have a tactical impact on their environment: they can have strategies, go for guerrilla tactics, they can wipe out the opponent, and then, can move from one level to the next knowing that they won’t have to face yet-another random orc party. It makes them feel like, throughout the campaign, they’ve actually accomplished something. They know for instance that some spiders might still be encountered on level 3, and maybe some creatures from other levels might still lurk here and there, but they’re pretty sure they solved the bugbear problem down there.

You don’t need a roster for everything that can be found in the dungeon certainly (particularly when talking about stuff like rodents and vermin and basically the kind of opponents that can reproduce quickly or get access to the dungeon from the outside with ease), but you probably should have a good idea of what the numbers and compositions of the major intelligent forces throughout the dungeon actually are.

One last point, and that’s about the variety of environments throughout our levels and dungeon in general. Customizing the environment and having some areas feel like they have “themes” going through them is a good thing. But don’t customize every single area of the dungeon. For something to feel weird and stand out to player’s scrutiny, it should be beyond a baseline that’s already been established. If there is no mundane, there is no weird possible. So with the first levels of the dungeon you want to build up expectations at least to some extent. You want to provide a baseline the players can learn about and deal with meaningfully. They can create tactics and strategize about their environment.

Then, you can introduce the special and the weird.

Create a set of reasonable expectations that land some results for a time, and then challenge them. Same thing with the creatures they meet throughout the dungeon: use some amount of fairly known creature types and critters, and then start introducing your own weird takes on them. Build expectations, and then challenge them.

Alright.

I’ve talked about a lot of stuff in the form of advice and guidelines and such but our map isn’t going anywhere with all this talk.

First, to draw a map we need a legend, an idea of the symbols we are going to use throughout our level so we can make sense of it all. There’s a set of symbols that is fairly common throughout TSR publications. This is more or less the set I’m talking about:



Now, I’m notorious to deviate from this baseline on a regular basis because I kind of map as I go and don’t think about this or that symbol before posting the finished layout online. Then I get asked what the hell this or that blob represents on the map. So I’m going to make an effort and try to stick to this set of symbols for once.

I start mapping the dungeon on a moleskin notebook I keep with me to write down ideas and such. I take one of the exits we have as a starting point, and basically go from there, referring myself to our level diagram periodically to know where the corridors lead, what features I might have to place next on the map, et cetera.

For this present level, I started with the “Well” entry point on our diagram. After I mapped a bit and erased my mistakes or just what didn’t look good to me quite a few times, I end up with this on the first page of my draft:



And then continue on the next page, growing the level bit by bit, adding features, naming some areas, trying to visualize the environment as I do so. I don’t come up with everything on the spot: you’ll notice that some doors are missing, that there are no traps written on the map, or creatures placed. I have some ideas I may write down here and there, but not everything comes to me that way. I’ll often go back on the layout and add or erase things, modify what I’ve got because that doesn’t fit my expectations, and basically work at fitting the pieces of the puzzle into a coherent whole as I’m mapping the whole thing and quite often some time afterwards too.



You can see there that I have the area named "Snake Pit" on the diagram take the form of this round structure up on the page with this pool of water or something in the middle of it, and some underground tunnel linking it to this area further east shaped like a cross, which I think is the area marked "Shrine" on our diagram (not entirely sure at this moment if that is going to stay or going to be changed down the road).

There's an interesting thing that happened as soon as I started drafting the map on the first page, by the way: this is this inclusion of areas of the dungeon that are completely unknown even to the current inhabitants of the level (which were probably used by the people who build the tower in the first place, i.e. the people who also built the troglodyte habitat on the side of the volcano up there, or the Builders/Mi-Go prior to that, maybe), as well as different areas which are spreading down a flight of stairs, like there are actually two different sub-levels intertwined with each other on this map (visible on the bottom of the first page, then going on the second page with a room spreading under the corridor stretching eastward at the bottom there, and another area stretching right around the round structure/Snake Pit too, if you follow the flight of stairs around).

These pages copied together on my “clean” copy of the map look like this at the moment:



The whole area covered so far here on our clean map represents this reddened part on our level diagram, more or less:



This is growing, bit by bit. I'm having quite a bit of fun with this actually.

We'll see where that leads us for next time.

I've been asked by messages to give examples of "classic" megadungeons that would come to mind, in terms of published materials and modules and whatnot.

One of the problems with the megadungeon format is that it goes hand in hand with the campaign format, since the megadungeon is the focus of the environment the PCs keep going to and back and forth, right? (that's actually the critical difference between what I would call a 'real' megadungeon and a 'lair', no matter how big it ends up being: the megadungeon is meant to be the focus of the campaign and the dynamic location of numerous adventures from there, while the lair isn't)

So in fact, you can't publish the classic megadungeon experience "as is", because it's an environment that's gigantic to begin with, and an environment that's dynamic and keeps evolving with the players' input on the other hand.

That's why all attempts to publish megadungeons are just providing a frame and a static environment that should be understood as such by the DM and really used as a starting point, not an end point or finished product, if you see what I mean. It's the case of all modules and scenarios structures, obviously, but probably especially in the case of the megadungeon experience, IMO.

There's one such published frame we've talked about recently, that's the Anomalous Subsurface Environment of Patrick Wetmore (the guy I called PatW in my sources of inspiration for the Bandit Level before).

Note that it's just a starting point with a first level.

Other examples of frames like that include Rappan Athuk, the huge dungeon environment published by Necromancer Games, Dungeon Crawl Classics #51: Castle Whiterock from Goodman Games, The Upper Works of Castle Zagyg published by Troll Lord Games (which could be complemented by Joe Bloch's Castle of the Mad Archmage, or even the first boxed set of Undermountain published by TSR (the second boxed set can be ignored).

The T1-4 TSR module Temple of Elemental Evil is as classic a megadungeon and surrounding wilderness sandbox as you can get, too. This is actually what makes it work: look at T1-4 as a dynamic environment, and it's one of the best modules ever. Look at it as a static affair, and it is going to SUCK, especially the Temple itself, since it'll become boring and repetitive, instead of this dynamic space with lots of stuff you can do.

BTW, in T1-4, Lareth's hideout in the Moathouse could be called a "lair" in our distinction above, while the Temple itself would be that proto/published "megadungeon" frame we just talked about.

This thread is nothing short of amazing.  It made me register on the forum.  Wow.

Quote from: ScrivenerB;522279This thread is nothing short of amazing.  It made me register on the forum.  Wow.

Thanks mate, welcome to the forum! Glad it's useful to you! I've been going on with the mapping of the Bandit level during the last few days and should have an update for this thread fairly soon. Cheers!

First post in the advice to build a megadungeon (with master list of subsequent posts).

Since last time I went on with the mapping of the level of our mega-dungeon featuring, among other things, the hideout of the bandits living at the foot of our volcano. The "Bandit Level" as I call it evolved from the first sketches you saw in the previous posts, one chunk mapped at a time, taking my time in between to pause and refresh, think about a few ideas I had while visualizing the environment, take a few notes, think about something else.

I have been asked to list the tools I use when mapping. These usually do not vary: I use a range of Staedtler pencils (Staedtler Mars Lumograph, 12 pieces, ranging from "F" to "8B" in tone - I only used the F pencil for all the sketches you have seen so far, since the shading of the map is one of the last steps in our level design), rulers and protractor, compass set (including small and large compasses, the "large" one being the compass you are probably accustomed to), a good white eraser, and some graph paper I create to my own specifications and print from these online templates.

Mapping chunk by chunk, areas get some of their features modified, shifted, erased or refitted. Parts evolve in such a fashion, from one mapping session to the next, on my moleskin notebook:





Individual sections like these are then copied onto the general, final map/draft of the level, like this:







This process gradually gives us a picture of the whole final level, as you can see from this next photograph:



There is still a major section of the map missing, which is the cave system in the NE section of the level. This cave system I sketched apart, since these are much more complicated to get right for me: a cave system can be drawn in any number of ways (it doesn't need to follow the lines of the grid in any way shape or form, basically), so it's customary for me to try several configurations before finding something that fits both what I have in mind and what I already came up with in other sections of the map.

This is a draft version of the cave system I did by copying the outline of the dungeon on a separate sheet of graph paper:



Once I was satisfied with the results I then copied this draft onto the final version by taping to the sheets of graph paper together to then hold them against the light of the day outside, retracing the outline of the caves with a pencil, as shown here:



Now, scanning both sections of the map and putting them together using photoshop, we have the bare bones, unshaded, and mostly unfurnished version of our final layout:



You can compare this draft to our original Bandit level diagram if you want and maybe recognize some of the areas we started talking about earlier:



As you might have noticed from the previous scans of the moleskin notebook, I not only adapted and reconfigured some earlier ideas, but also added lots of little notes and thoughts about all those various rooms and traps and corridors as I mapped, scribbling stuff in the corners, adding names on the map, and so on, so forth. This is an organic process: you start by thinking of an outline, then organize your ideas into a workable whole (a diagram), then use that framework to actually come up with the final layout, adapting these ideas as you go, coming up with new ones, taking notes in the process, etc.

There is still a lot of work to be done (since the map itself is far from final, with a sublevel under this one and a mezzanine level that need to be mapped as well, not to mention the surface level that needs its own representation, of course), but we will soon start keying our map to really try and pin down the level as we visualize it now: what are the challenges, the traps, the puzzles, the inhabitants of this level, the features that are worth describing on this map, what do they do, how they operate, etc. This will have a snowball effect on the various tasks that remain to be done, and will slowly bring everything together into a coherent whole. Once we have that picture of the level nailed down, we will figure out how to make it come alive using a bunch of tools which will make our lives easier in actual play - tools such as wandering monster tables, relations between the factions of the dungeon and the like. We will be ready to run the game from there.

Stay tuned for more.

Great maps Benoist. Usually i stick with a mechanical pencil and ink it in with different kinds of pens and markers later. Not too familiar with the pencil types you listed. What are the advantages of each one?

Thanks Brendan! First lets show you what pencils I am talking about here: Staedtler Mars Lumograph pencils.

Staedtler has been a leader in graphic and geometric tools for decades now. It's the standard by which I judge anything I use, actually (I was actually taught graphic design in Catholic school back in France using Staedtler tools). Whether we are talking pencils, ink pens, erasers, compass, rulers, you name it: that is awesome stuff. Relatively expensive compared to the competition, but well worth it if you want a precise, clean job well done.

The advantage of drawing with pencils as opposed to anything else is that you control what the lines end up looking like. I sharpen pencils using a pen sharpener like everyone else, but sometimes also use a knife, sharpening the tip by hand for sharper results.

The pens in a Mars Lumograph box cover all ranges of shading - from very light tones (F) to very greasy, strong tones (8B). Using a combination of different shades/strengths of pencils, you can contrast your lines better and make some elements stand out as opposed to others. You can also have lines stand out, and do the actual shading with lighter pencils, so you have a broad range of contrasts to play with in the end. It helps make the map useful to the eye, by selecting the elements you really want to see first in the final draft, as you play the game itself.

I also use Staedtler pencils for my greys, Berol Prismacolors for my colored stuff (though I also like caran d'ache) and Koh-I Noor Rapidograph pens for my pen and inks.

That being said, I do more and more work with various mapping programs or graphic programs these days.


Love the maps, Ben, BTW.