Your Map IS the Adventure | Advanced Gamemastery

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Robert Louis Stevenson would have been a great game master! USA Today Bestselling Author and ENnie Award-winning RPG designer Justin Alexander joins the author of Treasure Island to explore the adventures found in any map!

SO YOU WANT TO BE A GAME MASTER

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Editor: Sarah Holmberg

Twitter: @hexcrawl

0:00 Treasure Island
2:40 Creating Adventures from Maps
4:27 Starting from the Map

[quarkbent]

"If you wish to expand upon your idea, focus in deeper on it, not simply around it." - a quote I can never paraphrase properly about expanding creative endeavour by narrowing the focus; a map is a very good way to narrow down to a specific!

[tocovski]

Apparently the map led you to winning two ennie awards 😄
Congrats!

[dragonshadestudios]

Massive truths in this video. Few things motivated my players desire to explore the world and generally "do things" quite like crafting a 6x5 foot map and putting it front of the players.

[davidioanhedges]

"..a mine of suggestion" - I have run two campaigns which started with a map, and a villain with a plan
The names suggested plots, and encounters, places were later populated by characters, and details ., . the map stayed the same, but somehow grew as the campaign proceeded

[artistpoet]

I used to spend most of time drawing maps. Dungeons, towns, castles, mansions for D&D; space ports, star systems, space liners and colonies for Star Frontiers and Traveler. And so many wilderness maps.
Decades later, I still fill the odd page or dozen of my sketch/design journals with small maps. I've learned from various DungeonTubers who feature solo game play that map drawing and design is as much solo play as going through Four Against Darkness or Ironsworn.

Hmmm. might be a fun exercise to draw a map of the environment described in a novel.

[karlcrosby]

Justin, I am so grateful for you taking the time to do these videos and also for So You Want To Be A Gamemaster. I listen to it on Audible with my 9 year old (a budding gamemaster) and he quotes parts from it after. It's PHD level gamemastery - thank you so much for sharing your insights.

[seanfager]

Mass produced, thin canvas is dirt cheap. A buck a sheet, sometimes. Over brew some strong tea by ~10 minutes, and it makes a solid dye. Flirt the edges with a candle, blowing regularly, and all the machining on the perimeter is replaced by irregular scorching. You end up with a solid Community Theatre level 'ye olde map' for your campaign. Not accurate enough for hex crawling, but a heck of a prop for the players.

[samurguybriyongtan]

This was an exciting video. You seemed very inspired to share it. great script. I’m inspired to look over maps that I’ve drawn and dream in them.

[Hjorth]

I work with maps daily, so maybe that is why I have trouble approaching making a map from imagination. It would probably be a great exercise and a lot of fun, but when one is used to look at the process of presenting the technical data in a readable manner, going for exciting is a very alien concept for me.
I really would love to learn to do it, though. I love maps, especially fantasy

[sternhutjes]

We just started a D&D campaign by drawing a map with the whole group through a modified version of The Quiet Year. The world already feels so rich and dynamic and we won't need to read a bunch of lore to understand what has happened and where things are at.

[jackmorrison]

There is an old Runquest module "Griffin Island" ( itself a remake of the older Griffin mountain)which embodies the topic of this video to perfection. It starts with the players getting their hands on a huge map of the fabled griffin island, with lots of information on citadels, inhabitants and a lot of misterious handwritten notes, like : "the elves here fear fire" "danger" "maybe here"... . The map itself turns out to be a bit dated but provides lots of hooks, starting information, incentives, and is just plain gorgeous. The module is a mix between sandbox adventure and campaign setting. IMHO the best fantasy module ever written and precisley because of the player handput map. Just by looking at it you want to go there, want to explore the isalnd, find out who wrote the notes, ... It was far from a ready to play adventure, requiring lots of work, but that was fun too.

[MyEarTrumpet]

Thanks for the inspiring quote from Robert Louis Stevenson.

[timothygutierrez]

Love how are you took timeless ideas and revealed them anew. Where did Stevenson’s original quotes come from?

[CitanulsPumpkin]

The world map I use to spark the world building for my homebrew campaign is the first "map of internet communities" comic from the XKCD web comic.

[estebanrodriguez]

Numenera's map is truly wonderous. I had an idea for a campaign in the beyond, the PCs live in a settlement atop of strange spires that tower over a dangerous jungle. The settlement is almost cut from the rest of the world, and I even gave unique names for the creatures that inhabited the jungle.

[JaimeVallejo]

Thanks for the video Justin! Very inspiring.

I believe that solo TTRPGs and sandboxes have been experiencing a revolution in recent years, but the creation of beautiful and unforgettable maps isn't benefiting from that momentum. We see how campaigns unfold among a mishmash of boring hexes. We are missing more analog map making games 😊

[karlbolt]

Thanks Justin! Watched Disney’s Treasure Island at age seven and drew the map countless times. Nobody could finger-trunk-tree & devil’s-rock like this guy. Then at age 10, I had Forgotten Realms Gray Box Map with the areas surrounding The Sea of Fallen Stars and was like, oh yeah, let’s do this s$&@!

[tonysladky]

Man, I really need to buckle down and start making this effing map because one of my ideas for when I'm next up in my group's GM rotation is the epitome of this concept...

[num]

Great video. Thanks for sharing your thoughts, Justin. Looks like I may have to revisit Treasure Island, just for an easy, fun read. It's been about a decade since I read it last.

[jrpipik]

I wisely started with a map, and made the story fit (generally with meticulous care for distances). The other way about lands one in confusions and impossibilities, and in any case it is weary work to compose a map from a story — as I fear you have found. - JRR Tolkien