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| An example of a Mind Map wilderness. |
Mind
maps are diagrams used to represent words, ideas, tasks, or other items linked
to and arranged around a central key word or idea. When using a mind map to
design a wilderness, the various locations are arranged as separate ideas and
connections are drawn between these locations to represent physical pathways.
Designing a wilderness as a mind map
is an organizational technique for game masters. It is used to design
wilderness adventures with substance and make it easy to manage that substance
at the game table. Players benefit by having a well-written adventure, but this post is primarily for game masters.
Mind maps
can be thought of as being similar to a dungeon; each room of the dungeon is an
idea, and doors are the lines which connect two ideas together. We will use
this terminology when describing the wilderness mind map. A scene in a forest
may be one of a waterfall falling into a deep stone basin of green water, but
we will call it a room. A small pathway carved into the side of a mountain will
be called a door.
The party’s motivation needs to be
considered before beginning a mind map wilderness. The hook or hooks for
enticing your players toward adventure should influence the design of your
dungeon. If nothing comes to mind at the start, hooks can develop during the
design process. Move forward in the process and be prepared write down any
ideas for hooks that come along. Game masters will need something to write with
and several pieces of paper to design their wilderness adventure.
The three
main elements to your mind map wilderness are rooms, doors, and in-betweens.
Rooms
Rooms
represent the major scenes in your adventure. All the encounters and challenges
are organized into rooms. A room in a wilderness mind map is depicted as a
bubble. Players enter and exit scenes in your adventure by following paths in
and out of these rooms.
The first step in drawing a mind map
wilderness is drawing a bubble to represent the first room. If the bubble is
too small to write a few sentences in, key that location to another sheet of
paper. Each room needs a short description to be read as the party encounters
it.
A room’s
description should be enough to give the players a clear image of the area and
to set the area apart from any others they may encounter. The description
should be short and simple.
Trees here cast a lot of shade, and it’s
comfortably cool. The grass is tall, dry, sharp, pulls at the hems of your
cloaks and scuffs the leather of your boots. A creek overgrown with weeds is
small enough to step over and flows from the east to the west.
The example
above uses the creek as a door by encouraging the party to follow it up or downstream.
Game masters cannot take for granted that the party will decide to follow the
stream, but he can discourage the party from moving in certain directions by
describing hazardous terrain.
Trees
here cast a heavy shade, and it’s comfortably cool. The grass is tall, dry,
sharp, pulls at the hems of your cloaks and scuffs the leather of your boots. A
creek overgrown with weeds is small enough to step over and flows from the east
to the west. A copse of thorn bushes to the north is wide and dense. Moving in
that direction will be difficult.
The
copse of thorn bushes is an obstacle the party would avoid if they are able.
The party could still walk around or through the obstacle, but they have given a
reason to avoid that direction. Ultimately, the players should decide if they
are going to avoid a hazard.
Some terrains are relatively safe,
and others are practically impassible. A copse of thorn bushes should be a
moderate hazard to the party. It should be unpleasant for those unused to the
trials of the wild and those who do not have abilities like woodland stride, but a concerted effort
to pass should yield results. A sheer cliff face is practically impassible for
everyone without significant climbing experience. It should represent a
significant danger to those who seek to scale it. Game masters should not completely
disallow the party from attempting pass a hazard beyond their ability, but they
should make the dangers apparent.
For organization, encounters occur
exclusively in rooms. They should be prepared ahead of time and be of an
appropriate challenge level. Combat encounters should make use of the varied
terrain in the wilderness. Fallen logs, shallow pools of mud, thick bushes and
large boulders are appropriate for encounters in a forest. Loose gravel, sharp
rocks, and dangerous fauna are compelling features of an encounter set in the
desert.
Doors
Doors are transitional scenes
between rooms. Doors are represented on the mind map by lines drawn between
rooms corresponding to directions the party may travel. A deer path, a creek, a
river, or a copse of bushes could be a door.
Each
door has some descriptive text as segue to the next room. The description
should be brief, mentioning the approximate time traveled and the general
terrain, and not go into details about landmarks. If the door’s description is
too long or too interesting it would work better as a room. The remarkable
events of the party’s journeys are handled primarily in rooms. The game master
needs to usher the party through the door quickly and introduce the next room
before the party gets distracted. Doors need to represent enough distance to
contain an in-between and obscure the exact dimensions of the mind map
wilderness. The time it takes the party to travel from one room to another
needs to be long enough to contain an in-between and obscure the exact
dimensions of the mind map wilderness. An hour per door (roughly 4 miles) makes
for a very large wilderness, while 10-minutes per door (less than a mile) will make
a relatively small wilderness. Doors in
a wilderness dungeon differ from doors in an actual dungeon in that the party
cannot peek into the room or listen at the door before deciding to enter. By
the point that the party can see what is in a room they have already passed
through the door and have effectively entered the room.
When the
party moves through a door, they contend with the environment and risk becoming
lost. The scout leading the party may use his Survival skill to avoid becoming
lost. One character may make a survival skill check each time the party moves
through a door. The base DC for this skill check is 15, but the DC can be
influenced by the terrain and environment. Success means that the scout has shown
the party the right direction, and they arrive in the next room without
significant delay. If the survival check fails by four or less the group takes
twice as long to get to their destination, in addition they must make
constitution checks with a DC equal to the failed survival check to avoid
becoming fatigued by the terrain. Characters that are already fatigued instead
become exhausted. A survival check that fails by five or more means that the group becomes so lost they double
back to a room they’ve already been.
In-betweens
A
dungeon has walls, but the wild has hazards. In the wilderness, the party has
more freedom and can move in any direction they like, but they must make their
own trail. The game master encourages the party to go in certain directions
with hooks and obstacles, but it is only a matter of time before the party goes
a place he has not detailed. Role-playing games are improvisational, but game
masters can have a plan by creating several modular rooms in advance. These
rooms are called “in-betweens” because they can be sewn between two rooms as they
are needed.
In-betweens
are easy to place, but they take just as much time and effort to design as any
other room. Encounters with monsters or hostile animals can encourage the
players to stay on the beaten path, but every encounter in an in-between does not
need to be a random encounter. An in-between containing a cave can be placed in
reserve so that game master is able to place it when the party is in need of a
secure place to rest and recover. If the players are losing interest in
exploring the wilderness, the game master can place an in-between containing a
fight to renew the player’s interest. In-betweens containing undiscovered ruins
or natural wonders can create a sense of discovery.
An in-between is placed by drawing a
line from the room that the players are leaving and a room that the players
will ultimately enter, and label the line as a specific in-between. Game
masters can also label a door that already exist as an in-between so that they
can place modular elements to the map as they are needed. Once the game master
has placed an in-between he can begin describing the room as though it were
there all along. When the party returns to an in-between it behaves as any
other room.
The
party may want to deviate from a pathway or an in-between before arriving at a
room. Game masters can place in-betweens the same way as placing an in-between
from any other room. A line is drawn and connected to the nearest room and
labeled as an in-between.
A game
master has the discretion as to whether or not to place an in-between. If the
party deviates from prepared paths and it seems too early or an inappropriate
to inject a mind map, an ad-hoc door can be drawn between the room that the
party is leaving and an adjacent room. This ad-hoc door behaves like any other
door; he gives a brief description of the transition and quickly introduces the
next room.
Landmarks and Maps
The party often backtracks to places
they’ve already been, and they should find those locations in the same place
they left them. Landmarks which can be seen from anywhere in the dungeon, like
mountains towering in the distance, should always be in one direction. These
landmarks can be used as a point of reference when navigating the wild.
A mind
map wilderness is not a fully illustrated map with each distance and each rock
placed in proper order, but the general dimensions of the forest can be detailed
with the mind map. The exact barring of a room on the mind map does not
directly correspond to the barring of the location it relates to on a map, but
a compass rose can be used on a mind map to indicate what directions the rooms
are relative to one another. For example, if the compass rose indicates that north
is toward the header of the page, a room closer to the top of the mind map is
farther north than those beneath it. A
room to the right of same mind map is more eastern than a room to the left. This
is an abstraction, however. A room drawn on the mind map two inches farther
left and a little higher than the party’s location is not necessarily several
miles west and a few degrees north.
An in-game or prop map with exact
coordinates will be an obstacle to a game master managing a mind map
wilderness. Grid wilderness is discussed in the next chapter, and works very
well with detailed maps. If the party has a map at their disposal it should
provide a circumstance bonus on survival checks to avoid getting lost, but even
with a map navigating the wilderness is a matter of overcoming obstacles and
circumnavigating the many impassible terrains.
