Having a single familiar map you love and adore will give you a great tool to use when your game goes in a direction you never expected.First of all: You cant leave this stage until you finished the main quest and you cant come back, if you have left it. The intent of this article is to give you ideas for a single map you can keep on hand for those occasions when you're caught flat footed and need a solid dungeon with no prep at all. Obviously as we run our games we'll use lots of different maps. One map may not be enough for you but I'd recommend starting there and branching out to your second, third, fourth, and so-on when you absolutely need a different map than the one you have. If you're familiar with your single ldeal map, if you can close your eyes and visualize it, it will be easy for you to use it during your game. The fewer items we have in our kit, the easier it is to grab the thing we need when we need it. Other times, however, keeps our D&D improv toolkit small. Dyson's map library let's us pick from nearly 900 maps, for example. Most of the time we can pick and choose which map we want for a given situation. Why would we limit ourselves to just one map? Why aren't a bunch of maps more useful? After all, my own book, the Lazy DM's Workbook includes ten maps of the ten most common locations we'd come across in D&D. You can also check out the wonderful maps of Mike Schley and pick up high resolution versions of them for $2 a piece. It's one of the best D&D sites on the net. When looking for your own ideal map, I can't recommend scanning through Dyson's map library enough. This map happens to be included in the appendices of the Dungeon Master's Guide so you likely already have it on hand!Ĭaves of Chaos from Keep on the Borderlands remastered by Dyson Gray, Teos Abadia, and myself illustrated by Mike Schley and available on his website

Note, I'm only showing the bottom half of the map here. Tears of the Crocodile God designed by Will Doyle, cartography by Mike Schley, in Dungeon 209. Here are a few maps people chose and some of my own that I think work particularly well. I found this topic inspiring enough to ask on Twitter what maps people would use if they could only use one. This list isn't perfect but hopefully it helps you consider what your own criteria are for finding an ideal map. The map should be easy to use and easy to improvise while running a game.The map should be easy to print on single sheet of paper.The map should have a mixture of worked stone and natural formations.The map should be big, but not TOO big.The map should have multiple entrances.The map should have some sort of cross-slice such as a river, a ravine, or an earthquake that splits it up.The characters might see the final room even if they can't get to it. I'll also be adding a few of my own criteria specific to the purpose of finding a single versatile map: I'm going to use some of the criteria found in excellent articles like the Alexandrian's Jaquaying the Dungeon and DM David's 5 Tricks for Creating Brilliant Dungeon Maps from Will Doyle. Which map is your map? Which map is your go-to map when you don't have anything prepared and need a map to run your game right now? What map can you print out, stick in your kit, and use for the next 40 years? Criteria for a Single Awesome Mapīefore we start digging through maps, let's decide what makes a great map we can use again and again.

Hopefully this article will help you answer a question you may never have asked yourself: But I will help you find your own ideal map and we're going look at a few great examples. If you enjoy this article, check out Sly Flourish's bestselling books, weekly newsletter, YouTube videos, twice-weekly podcast, and fan-supported Patreon, all offering tips to help you run awesome D&D games.Ĭlickbaity title aside, I'm not going to give you that one single map. What if you only had one map in your DM kit? If you could only use one D&D map for the rest of your games, which map would you grab? This idea resonated strongly with my lazy dungeon master philosophies. Dyson in his wonderful printer-friendly style.

New to Sly Flourish? Start Here! The Only Dungeon Map You'll Ever Needĭyson of Dyson Logos, the best site for D&D cartography on the internet, posted about how D&D BECMI creator Frank Mentzer used a single map over 30 times when running D&D in public.

Dungeons of chaos maps