If you're interested in old-style dungeon levels, this is a really neat post over at Zenopus Archives:
Gygax's Dungeon Level from Hall of Many Panes
It's got a great breakdown of the level visually, themes common in Gary Gygax dungeon levels, and elements you can see I learned from for my Megadungeon mapping lessons and my Felltower levels.
An aside: Arneson was obsessed with diagonal maps, if you dig up the First Fantasy Campaign. Very annoying to map at the table. We didn’t even try mapping when playing Blackmoor a few months ago—the GM just handed us the map.
ReplyDeleteI use a lot of diagonal corridors. But I've learned that normal-shaped rooms are just easier on everyone. Weird sizes, strange map angles, and so on don't make for navigation challenges, just language and communication issues at the table. Like gridless, no-scale maps, you're just annoying each other to no real purpose (in my experience anyway.)
Delete