
Dungeon Scrawl: Old school maps in minutes - Caseee
https://dungeonscrawl.com/
======
hunterloftis
I love the style of this and tried something similar before changing direction
with Table of Sending.

After lots of testing, I settled on 2.5D tiles for the DMs who wanted to
sketch their maps 15 minutes before playtime:

\- [https://tableofsending.com/](https://tableofsending.com/)

The shadowcasting fog-of-war has also been awesome since the map is
semantically understandable:

\-
[https://twitter.com/HunterLoftis/status/1269396682233581568](https://twitter.com/HunterLoftis/status/1269396682233581568)

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ajuc
Looks great. Making maps is the worst part of being DM for me and playing on
computer sets high standards for map quality so I end up spending 90% of prep
time drawing maps :/

I've made a quick and dirty generator of outdoors maps for my hex crawler
campaign, maybe someone will find it useful:
[https://ajuc.github.io/outdoorsBattlemapGenerator/](https://ajuc.github.io/outdoorsBattlemapGenerator/)

It has export to FoundryVTT (.dd2vtt format), I find it so much better than
roll20.

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scott_s
Is the Escher-esque image under "Isometric Edit Mode"
([https://dungeonscrawl.com/images/pic10.png](https://dungeonscrawl.com/images/pic10.png))
a joke, or does the tool allow for physically impossible layouts? Or am I
reading the image wrong and it's a physical layout?

~~~
drdeadringer
This reminds me of the Dr Who episode "Castrovalva"; the Doctor and his
companions do spend some time running around trying to figure out the layout
until they realize what's going on.

I've entertained the idea of DMing that type of thing for a while now.

~~~
at_a_remove
Q1, Queen of the Demonweb Pits, had something similar if I recall.

~~~
simonh
There was an article in Dragon magazine back on the 80s about hypercube
dungeon layouts.

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at_a_remove
Even further back, there's Hunt the Wumpus, which I think was originally laid
out on a Platonic solid. Messing with adventurers is a time-honored tradition!

~~~
dragonwriter
The original Wumpus map I've always seen referred to as a “squashed
dodecahedron”, though since it only uses numbered vertices without spatial
coordinates there is no particular way to distinguish it from an actual
dodecahedron,

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andretti1977
I started using inkarnate [0] a few weeks ago. You can use the parchment style
to have maps with old looking style.

People use it both for world/regional maps and for town but also scene maps
[1]

[0] [https://inkarnate.com/](https://inkarnate.com/)

[1] [https://www.reddit.com/r/inkarnate/](https://www.reddit.com/r/inkarnate/)

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jjice
My dad has always talked about how much he loved having to draw his own maps
for games like Labyrinth [0] and Asylum [1]. He just recently played Breath of
the Wild and while he loved it, he mentioned how cool it would be to have to
draw the map there.

I love the spirit in this, great job!

[0]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Labyrinth_(1980_video_game)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Labyrinth_\(1980_video_game\))
[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asylum_(1981_video_game)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asylum_\(1981_video_game\))

~~~
scott_s
Your dad may enjoy the Etrian Odyssey series
([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Etrian_Odyssey](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Etrian_Odyssey))
for the DS and 3DS where a big part of the game is you drawing the map on the
bottom screen as you explore the dungeon.

Review of the latest game for 3DS:
[https://www.polygon.com/2017/10/17/16492092/etrian-
odyssey-5...](https://www.polygon.com/2017/10/17/16492092/etrian-
odyssey-5-v-beyond-the-myth-review)

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taormina
As someone who has been moved his DnD sessions to Discord with COVID going on,
and has made a "shareable map" out of Google Sheets, this looks fantastic!

~~~
SweetLlamaMyth
My table has made great use of [https://shmeppy.com](https://shmeppy.com) for
remote-play maps. The maps it makes are much less sophisticated (just painting
color on the squares and lines of a grid). What it gives you instead are
player/monster tokens that everyone can see, measuring tools, and "laser
pointers" to allow participants to draw attention to a region of the map while
speaking.

EDIT: also an awesome fog of war feature; how could I forget?

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nickthegreek
Gave it a spin. UI is pretty clean, good landing page and neat that it can do
isometric as well. Love the path tool. Wish there were dedicated Undo/Redo
buttons in the top bar. Only bug I found was that if you use the menu item to
'rough it up', ctrl+z undoes the rough up and the last item you created.

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prawn
Hopefully this catches the eye of someone in the thread who'd know: I have a
5yo and 7yo who have loved playing some version of ad-hoc D&D I invent on the
fly but it inevitably breaks down at some point because I haven't accounted
for something along the way.

What's the most basic setup I could use in terms of character attributes,
dice, calculations, etc. They love even the most basic imaginative adventure
so I'd rather something be easier to play quickly than take a lot of time
learning. 20+ years ago I played some basic D&D and then some other rip-off
(Rolemaster?! Swear it started with J though.)

I have an old Heroquest set somewhere but haven't been able to find it in my
parents' attic.

~~~
kleiba
_but it inevitably breaks down at some point because I haven 't accounted for
something along the way_

Could you give more details? That might be helpful in providing some ideas.

~~~
prawn
For example, I might have instructed them to roll for three character
attributes. And then they encounter an enemy which has hit points of some sort
and maybe attack and defend numbers. And then I realise that something about
their character attributes doesn't really gel with how I'm trying to get them
to roll dice against that enemy. Or, wait, they need to jump across a pit but
did one of their attributes apply (strength, dexterity) and how would it
modify their rolling target.

My memory of childhood D&D stuff is very foggy which probably hinders more
than it helps.

I think I need to know what the simplest set of character attributes and enemy
values might be that can withstand some basic sketch-map-as-you-go exploration
and fighting. Is it strength, dexterity and wisdom, out of 20? Or two or five
attributes?

~~~
kleiba
There are so many ways you could handle this. But I think the most important
thing to remember is that not _the system_ should be the focus of the game but
_fun_. Don't just improvise the plot (according to your player's actions), but
improvise "the system" as well -- after all, it's yours, and your only duty is
to make it fun for your kids.

Forgot a certain ability on your streamlined ability sheet? Well, who says
they all have to be determined beforehand like in DND? Just make them roll new
ability specs just when you need them.

Or simply make due with what you've got, e.g. by adjusting what you originally
had in mind for the enemy attack with what is possible within your simplified
system. And for the next game, slightly update the system whenever you've
identified an oversight.

Don't sweat it, the exact rules are not so important, as long as your players
can rely on consistency (as a proxy for fairness). For kids, I think, in the
end they're gonna love it when they can just roll some dice every now and then
and observe how what their characters do results in success when they roll
well and (non-catastrophic) failure when they don't. Other than that, I would
imagine the theater-of-mind aspect, i.e., the plot and the general world
setting will probably be much more important.

~~~
veilrap
Modern (5e) D&D even explicitly encourages this with it's skill system. DMs
are encouraged to just pick a stat (or even let their players pick a stat)
that feels like it's applicable to the situation, then then add that to their
roll.

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xwdv
I would like to see a randomize button that creates something random and then
lets me edit it to my tastes. It's just so exhausting to plan an entire
dungeon from scratch.

~~~
johnzim
One thing I found fun was to start by blocking out one room, then another and
another and basically switching between tools - the geometric shape too for a
tower or two, and then start linking them up.

After a little bit of noodling you start to feel the outline of a building and
then you can be a little more deliberative.

In my experience, the hard part about planning out a dungeon is filling it
with encounters.

There's another creator (Donjon) which doesn't make maps as prettily or easily
as this one but it does allow you to basically do what you're looking for:

[https://donjon.bin.sh/d20/dungeon/](https://donjon.bin.sh/d20/dungeon/)

~~~
probabletrain
You can actually import generated Donjon dungeons into Dungeon Scrawl using
the TSV file

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mhd
I've played around it a bit since someone recommended it a few days ago. Great
for coarse dungeon layouts, but would probably need some more detail-oriented
"finishing" if I'd want to use it for VTT play. Once we're going back to real
dice, this might come in handy, if I'm ever doing a dungeon-heavy campaign.

Until then, I have to cope with the oddities of running DungeonDraft with
Wine.

~~~
mey
Yeah once we go back to an actual table (2021?) this will be amazing. I can
see using this to sketch out a dungeon before breaking down into smaller maps
in DungeonDraft for VTT.

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vertexmachina
I'm currently playing through the old Zelda games that don't provide an in-
game map. This looks like it could be useful.

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ArtDev
This tool is awesome and perfect timing because I am writing an adventure for
my daughter and her friend to play :)

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grawprog
It looks pretty awesome from the bit I could play with it. It would be nice if
it worked properly on mobile also. Just being able to hide the tool bars and
pan without the keyboard would help a lot.

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rgovostes
I've been kicking around an idea that would also require a similar sort of
browser-based drawing tool. Is there a good library for building these, or do
I start with a blank <canvas>?

~~~
azhenley
There are a lot of graphics libraries out there, but I’ve been using PixiJS.

[https://www.pixijs.com/](https://www.pixijs.com/)

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macca321
I haven't really done role-playing about 20-years but aren't dungeon crawls a
bit simplistic compared to freeform adventure story telling?

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richard_mcp
The "old school" style they're advertising is mostly based off of Dyson Logo's
maps. I think it's interesting that this seem to come out after Dyson started
teasing a similar program for his Patreon subscribers. On one hand, it's a
great looking piece of software, but it feels a little scummy to write
software that heavily leans on Dyson's style and then directly compete with
him.

~~~
e12e
Is this somehow distinctive from Dragon Magazine / Dungeon Magazine from the
late 80s in a way I'm not seeing? Or eg. the various TSR boxed settings with
dungeons?

~~~
kemayo
That cross-hatching-in-the-walls thing is fairly distinct, and I saw it
immediately on Dyson's blog but not on a quick survey of old Dragon/Dungeon
maps. That said, Dyson is clearly _going_ for that aesthetic mostly, so it
could be convergent evolution, and I'm hardly up to date on current styles for
maps in other places.

~~~
pharke
Just taking a look at Dungeon Magazine on archive.org and it seems that
crosshatching in walls is pretty common, at least in the early editions.

[https://archive.org/details/Dungeon_Magazine_002/page/n25/mo...](https://archive.org/details/Dungeon_Magazine_002/page/n25/mode/2up)

[https://archive.org/details/Dungeon_Magazine_002/page/n45/mo...](https://archive.org/details/Dungeon_Magazine_002/page/n45/mode/2up)

[https://archive.org/details/Dungeon_Magazine_002/page/n51/mo...](https://archive.org/details/Dungeon_Magazine_002/page/n51/mode/2up)

[https://archive.org/details/Dungeon_Magazine_003/page/n31/mo...](https://archive.org/details/Dungeon_Magazine_003/page/n31/mode/2up)

[https://archive.org/details/Dungeon_Magazine_003/page/n41/mo...](https://archive.org/details/Dungeon_Magazine_003/page/n41/mode/2up)

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jeremyleach
This is really great, I love the clean UI and ease of use. This must have been
a huge amount of work!

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woah
Panning does not work in safari

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bdefore
Could use a link to jump into an existing example map.

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scottoreily
[https://dungeondraft.net/](https://dungeondraft.net/)

~~~
kleiba
Amazing! Windows only, though :(

~~~
mhd
Their big feature for the next major release is a Mac version, and until then
it works quite okay in wine. Probably better in Linux/Wine, as that tends to
have fewer graphics bugs.

My enjoyment factor of both DungeonScrawl and DungeonDraft is a bit different,
as with 'Scrawl it's awesome sketching a big event location, whereas with
'Draft I get a Bob-Ross-ian spark when adding minor details. A candle here, a
floating corpse there, some cobwebs and fungi…

I can pair DungeonDraft with FoundryVTT, where you can get virtual lighting
support imported from the maps. So you don't have to "paint" your walls twice,
once for the pure visuals and once to see where vision and movement is
blocked.

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greenhatglack
Any chance of splicing each grid as a unique PNG and building it up in JSON
like Tiled when exporting?

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gentleman11
I can’t really tell what this is. Is it just a drawing tool that applies
styles, or does it procedurally generate dungeons for you? If it doesn’t
procedurally generate, it would probably still be more fun to just use graph
paper and some coloured pens

~~~
BorisTheBrave
It just draws things.

This one generates dungeons:

[https://watabou.itch.io/one-page-dungeon](https://watabou.itch.io/one-page-
dungeon)

