Launch Day draws ever closer on my D&D4E campaign, and it’s no secret that I plan to share a lot of material here: hopefully this is more than just mere vanity at work, and you will all find some useful things contained herein.

To my way of thinking, it appears that there’s different categories of “material” to share, which will likely appeal to different readers, and that should be a good thing. Some things you can expect in the next couple weeks are (1) a player handout describing the background setting and base town and surrounding area for their 1st-level characters, and (2) a player/character questionnaire that will help me match up my campaign with the players’ expectations. Through these materials I hope to show off the kind of thinking and preparation I employ as DM and see how that compares to other gamers’ experiences.

Now from a publishing perspective – well, I guess presentation is really the word – I’m not sweating it too much on these first things, because it’s basically just a lot of text, which is easily reformatted at a later date without my heartache. Though I will say right off the bat that I am at a loss for decent mapping solutions, and would love to hear what works for others. We have three mapping situations to deal with, basically: dungeon, outdoor, and town/city.

Now I think I can hack something together for dungeons, since we’re all on board with the fake squarish geometry of it all. I’m pretty sure I can use my favorite open-source vector-art program – Inkscape – to get a grid-and-tile thing together in rapid order. But I’m far from thrilled about this because, as a veteran web amateur who loves the HTML/CSS divide, I get cranky about content and presentation being intermingled. I’d honestly love to use some sort of text front end to specify a dungeon layout and then have a parser program crank out a .svg or .png output from it. That way I can start out with really sparse and ugly “dungeon tiles” but make these nicer at a later date and – voila! – republish my dungeon maps all spiffy and keen. Pragmatically, I won’t have the time to do this, as my party-in-waiting doesn’t really want to sit around idle another for six months while I tinker on the computer. “Just scribble it out on graph paper and let’s go!” is the refrain, and yeah, they’re right. So the early dungeon maps you’ll get from me are likely to look like hastily digitized recreations, or they may even be just the actual scans. But that will get better over time.

(Just as my fiancee is only into football season for the snacks, I might only be into 4E for the fun of tinkering with new tools. Misplaced ardor, you say? So sue me…)

Town/city maps will be a bit of a punt for now. While it’s hard to not get all tingly and excited looking at the base town map of Fallcrest in the new DMG (pg. 199), in truth the party seldom needs a real map of a town to do the things they typically do in towns. I’m much more likely to put together a list of important buildings they might frequent (what inns and shops and important NPC personages they will find) and let them navigate their way through town via Q&A. If I feel there’s a need to have a specific part of a town ready for an encounter (the market, the back alley of the tavern), it’s going to have to be done in squares anyway, so we’re back to doing it however it is we do dungeon maps.

Outdoor maps are a bugger, no two ways about it. I see there’s a couple tools out there like Tristan’s Map Maker (seen at right), but those are some pretty crude results, and ease of porting into some other document remains a question. There’s lots of map tools out there for various computer gamers, and I wonder if any of them has become a favorite among pen-and-paper gamers for this purpose? I can’t imagine specifying an outdoor map abstractly as per a dungeon, unless its using some sort of hex tile system, and even that sounds like a burden. So it’s likely that initially players (and readers) are going to get hand-drawn renditions of the local geography, as needed. I’d love to hear about better ways, though.

Now, when it comes to packaging up an adventure and sharing it, I might have a bit of an advantage over others in that I’d already want to have collected everything I need to run the adventure into one stack of paper before I start running. I hate paging through the Monster Manual in game time, so I’d much rather cut-and-paste the monster data I need right into my adventure notes.

Oh, sure, that sounds simple enough, but it’s not. What exactly am I cutting and pasting anyway, thin air? More likely I’m re-entering text, one monster at a time as needed. That’s not too bad, given that I’ll only need 8–10 different monster types for a single adventure. But again, when I think about the presentation aspect and how best to share a finished adventure, I’d like to have the monster blocks formatted similar to how they appear in the book form.

You can’t match the fonts exactly without resorting to piracy or spending hundreds on the commercial fonts, but I found a pretty good free match for the font used in the monster blocks in Vera Humana 95. You’ll need to download the normal (verah.zip), bold (verahb.zip), italic (verahi.zip), and bold italic (varahbi.zip) fonts individually, but they’re all there, and once installed they work as a single font. You can get some very nice homemade versions of the attack icons from Mad Irishman here, or Vance’s 4EDings here (where, as a bonus, you’ll find a flamewar about the pirated “official” fonts…), and I’m on the lookout for any others that you know of.

So, for monster blocks right now, I’m actually working on a toolchain that takes that basic info as stored in a text file, cranks out a monster block in CSS-styled HTML, which I can then cut-and-paste into a Word document of the adventure. (Eventually to be converted to PDF…) This allows me to remake monster blocks in different shapes and styles for basically zero effort down the road if I need to. To the right is an example so far, though you can see I haven’t gotten the attack icons in yet…

And for NPCs and maybe even characters, I aim to implement a similar thing using the dCharacter/dt system I described a few weeks ago. At the risk of sounding like a broken record, by separating the content and presentation, I should have the ability to crank out a full 2–page character record or a 4×6 “combat only” reference card with equal ease and precision. But once again, also, and sadly, I’m sure it’s going to be weeks or even months into the campaign before I get this system up to speed.

As you can see, there’s a lot that goes into keeping good records as a DM. Even if you don’t intend to post and share your creations (which you really ought to consider), just for the sake of posterity you might want to end up with a little more than just the backs of the napkins upon which you scrawled out your works of genius.

Or, if that sounds too hard, you can just read along here and laugh as I take on the same struggle!