Shadows of Esteren Road Map

I ran Shadows of Esteren for the first time last night. the system really is as simple as it appears, and combat is extremely deadly. The party(3 PCs) got the drop on a guy in a cave and killed him before he could react to defend himself. The PCs started in the town of Smarag, where they were tasked by their mentor with instigating rumors of children disappearing in a nearby village. Turned out one of the villagers had gone mad and was dressing up in wolf pelts, killing the local livestock as a cover for his kidnapping of the children, and then cooking and eating those children. He hid all the evidence in a nearby cave, where the party camped out and saw him enter his lair.

So to help me in the future I did a quick digitization of the original map so that I could know distances traveled on the roads, the result is below.

Plans for Threshold

So I have finished finally detailing Threshold. Right now I just have the basic details filled in; the only people with names are those mentioned in canon sources, so most of the town is just Farmer and wife, or Innkeeper, etc. I am not going to make an actual map of the town yet, first I want to map the first 3 levels of a megadungeon under the town. I also am going to continue my thoughts from here and work on a series of posts exploring the purposes of a map in an RPG and how to effectively map urban areas. After I know exactly what I want from a town map I will come back to Threshold. Below I have provided a few screenshots of different ways to look at the town based on the current data.

Displays what each building is used for; majority of the new town is homes, significant number of inns and taverns scattered throughout the town, most workshops centered near southern wall, and concentration of shops along a single street in new town have given it the name of merchant street.

Different guilds of the town; merchants appear to be most numerous, thieves have extended control of island, and the hostliers also are a large guild given the number of Inns and Taverns

Distribution of population in the town, seems to be fairly random, I was hoping the population would be denser on the island

A sort of Height map of the city, the island and the inner town definitely have taller buildings

Materials of buildings, most of the stone buildings are old and left over from earlier settlements, this is also true of many of the mixed stone and wood building, and original stone building or the ruins of one were expanded with wooden structures. Brick is a newer source of building material, hence its rarity. Most of the town is made of wood because of the easy supply available from the nearby forests and Threshold is a center for shipment of lumber downstream.

Now that I know what is where in Threshold I can begin to design the megadungeon. My idea for it is this: underneath the town are ruins of an older city, and parts of it remain as cellars of some of the old buildings or buried just under the surface, so there are these disconnected buildings beneath the current town, and some of them have surviving connections to an old sewer or canal system below the ruins. The ruined buildings will act as the 1st level of the megadungeon, and the sewer system will be the 2nd level. From the the second level there will be a few select passages to the 3rd level, which will be a classic maze-like megadungeon. I also have a few ideas for lower levels, and I am thinking of connecting the lower levels to caves in the hills nearby inhabited by humanoid tribes.

Areas mentioned or detailed beneath Threshold in canon sources are caves and canal beneath the juggling ogre from Trouble in Threshold, a dungeon beneath the old mill from the Expert set, a maze of tunnels made by Purple worms from the Expert set, the cellar under the Crossed Swords tavern leads to old sewers from Night's Dark Terror, and the possibility of old Traladaran/Hutakkan ruins of Lugsid or Zadreth from Hail the Heroes. Other areas I want to detail for the 1st level of the dungeon include ruins of an old villa under the adventurers guildhouse which I have already made a basic layout for, and catacombs under the churchyard.

Town Generator

I've been working on populating the town of Threshold in Karameikos, and at first couldn't decide which businesses should be in the town and what ratio should be business to home. So I have finally come to a solution which satisfies me for now. I created a tool using excel based on information from A Magical Medieval Society: Western Europe and a few other random places. I based the numbers for adventurers on Alexis Smolensk's demographics posts. I made it so you can easily change the population of a city, both human and demi-human, to get results for different cities. This will make it much easier when I want to detail other cities I am planning to work on eventually.

Excel Town Generator

Being a Better DM

So, recently at the Save vs Poison blog, there was a post describing a failed game session. I want to talk about the discussion that has happened around the post both in the comments and here and here.

In the comments of the post, there is continual mention of different editions and the different play experience of different games or editions of D&D. I feel like everyone is focusing on the wrong thing. The author of the post talks about his players not adjusting to a different playstyle because of the edition he is running. My question is, why is the playstyle different if you are still the one running the game and it's D&D? A DM should be running the game in the same manner no matter what rule set they are using. D&D is D&D, why should it feel different if you use different numbers or dice to roll to hit or damage? The style or feel of a game should only change if you change genres; if you go from playing D&D to a horror or sci-fi game there should be a noticeable difference. As the DM you are in control of how the game feels, the impression the players get from the game, and just which rules to use when. When running a Star Wars game, the game should feel like Star Wars and be DMed the same whether using the d6 rules, the d20 rules, the the new Fantasy Flight games; it's should be immediately recognizable as Star Wars. The same goes for D&D, or Call of Cthulhu. It doesn't matter whether you are using Pathfinder or BX or 5e, D&D should feel the same when the same DM is running the game. The system is subject to the DM, if you want to run in an 'old-school' style then you should be doing that in every D&D game. If the players don't like playing a different system, that means the DM is changing how he runs the game. I agree with Alexis when he says that it is the DMs fault when a bad session happens, but we need to learn from that and be proactive in solutions. Don't blame the failure on the rules. The players enjoy most of your games, right? So if you change systems, but are maintaining genre and the base conceits of the game, then the factor which was unenjoyable was how you ran the game. Figure out what you did different and learn from it. If the players are exhibiting behaviors you want to avoid it is because that is what they learned from games in the past. Figure out how you can encourage different behavior though natural play. Every DM should always be working to better themselves, and never assume they know 'how to DM.' It may be easy to begin your career as a DM, but it can be extremely difficult to measurably improve. A good DM is constantly analyzing their game sessions, looking for mistakes and areas of possible improvement because it is the DMs responsibility to run a good game.