Stationery & Maps

Basically: I was inspired by Dwiz’s post about how ‘the maze game’ of charting sites was central to early D&D in contrast to later approaches which abstract or give knowledge of the map for players and their characters (contrast with Josh McCroo’s approach which has the party receive a blank map—itself a fun method!), as well as an entry in Gumbo’s AD&D series about how maps in that game specifically facilitate fast travel while escaping a site or returning to deeper levels (i.e., it’s not just for the sake of note-taking). I doodled some rules I wanted to play with in my homebrew pirate game this weekend (AHEM Cinco!) and Elmcat was very encouraging about what I had come up with. So here we are! Maybe Wuffus will consider this a late entry in the blogwagon.

There are two resource items in my game which players can freely stock at havens before or during their adventure: rations (for recovering on the road) and ammo. Now I’m introducing a third called stationery. Imagine paper and ink but cutesy bootsy or maybe just plain boring, whatever most suits your character. You can spend stationery to draw maps of expanses while traveling or sites while exploring.

This produces one of two types of maps. Travel maps are very straightforward: whoever’s navigating just gets advantage on their check; also, someone who navigates an uncharted expanse can draw a map if they spend stationery on a successful check. Site maps let you move quickly through a site (I wrote five times as quickly, but I’d probably treat it more as taking a turn to pass through the equivalent of an entire dungeon level); someone has to spend stationery for the crew to be able to physically draw a map, or else they can neither back-track very easily nor fast-track at all.

An interesting, unwritten consequence is that (useful) maps technically count as treasure! So the crew can decide to sell a map for an easy freebie treasure after they decide they’re done with wherever they just went. Maybe that should be written down. Whatever.

Something else I thought was very interesting was Elmcat making an analogy of site maps to torches in typical D&D, with an added effect that they have direct implications for how you as a player can interface with the game. When a torch is extinguished, your character can’t see; but when you run out of stationery, you as a player can’t draw maps. This finally satisfies my old side quest for meaningful and non-arbitrary resource management during exploration, whereas for a little bit I had just been like, I guess eventually you get beat up and have to go home.

Finally, there might be other uses for stationery besides mapping. I just think the idea of having paper and ink and deciding what to use it on is really cutesy bootsy. I don't know what other uses might be, but I'm excited for it to be another toy in the box.