A Cartographic Compendium

One of the best books—and the most useful—of 2021 was The Staffortonshire Trading Company Works of John Williams. Published by Lamentations of the Flame Princess, this is a systems neutral supplement—which means it is not written for use with Lamentations of the Flame Princess Weird Fantasy Roleplaying—which can be used with almost any roleplaying game. It is a collection of maps and illustrations based on seventeenth century historical references, first from the British Isles, then across Europe to around the world. Shops, taverns, hovels, fortifications, early industrial buildings, churches, universities, and so much are mapped in painstakingly beautiful detail and made easily accessible in the one volume. To fair, I am not unbiased, since this was a volume that I edited—but the cartography is both clear and easy to use, and that is not something that I am responsible for. That would be down to Glynn Seal, designer and publisher of the Midderlands setting through his Monkey BloodDesign. Not content with providing the maps for The Staffortonshire Trading Company Works of John Williams and the Midderlands setting, the cartographer has drawn and produced his own set of maps. Actually, not one set of maps or two, but three.

The HandyMaps series consists of three packs—HandyMaps – Buildings & Structures, HandyMaps – Towns & Villages, and HandyMaps – Dungeons, Caves, & Strange Locales. Each of the three was funded via Kickstarter— HandyMaps – Buildings & Structures, HandyMaps – Towns & Villages, and HandyMaps – Dungeons, Caves, & Strange Locales, and each consists of several double-sided cards in A5-size—148 mm × 210 mm, each done in black and white, and depicting the maps, plans, and floor plans of various locations. The cards are sturdy and in general unmarked with details. There are no numbers or names applied to them, enabling the Game Detail them however she wishes and so use them in her campaign as she likes.

HandyMaps – Buildings & Structures consists of twenty-six cards. They have a floorplan of a building on one side and an illustration of the building on other. The floor plans are done in black and white, whilst the illustration is in full colour. They are drawn on a five-feet grid and are marked with possible suggestions as to their use. So, the first map in the pack looks like a church, complete with a statue, a balcony above the ground floor, a tower, and what might be crypts below possibly accessible from a sewer. The suggestions for floorplans are church, temple, village hall, and gallery. Still connected to the sewer via the basement, more mundane is the two-storey warehouse/storage business, crate and barrel maker, ironmongers, and ship and crew hire, which stands over an open storage or possibly, a marketplace. Other buildings include an industrial site, which could be a forge, glassblowers, or pottery maker; a museum, art gallery, or temple which extends far underground, but has a statue atop that is a nod to one of the goblins in Monkey Blood Seal’s Midderlands setting; and a lop-sided building which could be an eel seller, a cooked eel seller, an eel breeder, a fishing tackle shop, or a dwelling. An obelisk might be a monument, a dimensional anchor, memorial, or summoning device, blow which a shaft extends down into the ground where there is a strange room… There is a huge variety to these maps. Not just from one set of floor plans to another, but there is variety and flexibility with individual floor plans too, since each has multiple different suggested uses. For example, the coastal tower with basement and cave tunnels to the cliff face is first listed as a lighthouse and its illustration and floorplan certainly suggest that. Alternative uses are listed as watch tower, smuggler’s den, wizard’s tower, or signal tower. Thus, the Game Master can show her players the illustration on the front and flip it over to show the floor plans, and even if the Player Characters have seen the building before and been inside, they do not what might be inside or to what use the building is being put to.

HandyMaps – Towns & Villages is in some ways the least useful and the least flexible of the three packs, mostly because the buildings are often obvious in what they are. However, the suggested uses goes a long way to mitigate this. It consists of maps of various towns and villages, including a walled town overlooked by a castle, a town of concentric walls, a large village with field boundaries marked around them, a river port, a hamlet surrounding an abbey on a hill, a port with a castle or fort on a spit of land, and a village threaded through a cave system in the middle of a river. These are all standalone pieces, but with this set, the Game Master has access to twelve cards and thus twenty-four maps, and thus a variety of maps and locations and layouts. Which means a decent selection of towns and villages with which she can populate her campaign world.

HandyMaps – Dungeons, Caves, & Strange Locales returns to the format of HandyMaps – Towns & Villages with maps on both sides of the cards. There are twenty-four cards in the set and thus the Game Master is provided with a total of forty-eight maps—or at least that is what the number of cards would suggest. In fact, there are more, because some cards contain two or three maps of smaller locations on a side, so there are closer to sixty maps in the set rather than simply forty-eight. Again, like HandyMaps – Towns & Villages they are not named, but being primarily dungeon locations, they are marked with secret doors, elevation changes, and the like. They are typically marked with a five- or ten-foot grid. Where necessary side elevations are provided for clarification. What is obvious about the set is its wider scope for inventiveness and the cartographer’s mixing of terrains. For example, a system of flooded cave or an underground river system leads to tomb or a lakeside cave opens up to network smaller caves in the rocks in the lake leading to rough hewn rooms what could be cells or tombs, and together with what could be a chapel leading off the main cave, could be a monastery or a set of catacombs. Some do stand out, such as the waterfall above a pool from which juts a giant finger of rock through which a tunnel leads to an underwater cave or lair; a ruined tower with stairs descending to a cave system that has been painstakingly worked until it resembles a skull; a large mine marked with damaged rails for the mining carts; an elongated cave network that curves out of a worked building into the form of a snake.

What the HandyMaps – Dungeons, Caves, & Strange Locales pack is not is a set of dungeon geomorphs, that is, dungeon sections designed to be cut out and laid down so that they connect to each other and so form a larger whole. There is still room for such a product from Monkey Blood Design, but with HandyMaps – Dungeons, Caves, & Strange Locales, all of the maps are designed to be discrete, although an inventive Game Master could connect them if she so wished.

Physically, each of the three sets in the series—HandyMaps – Buildings & Structures, HandyMaps – Towns & Villages, and HandyMaps – Dungeons, Caves, & Strange Locales—is solidly produced. They are presented on stiff grey card, the floor plans and maps being crisp and easy to read, and the illustrations of the buildings in the HandyMaps – Buildings & Structures done in muddy, almost washed-out colours. If there is an issue with the three sets it is that there is no index card listing the floor plans and maps and none of the cards or maps have a number or letter. The inclusion of such a letter or number would make the maps easier to use as the Game Master can note down which map or floor plan she has used and as what. Of course, if the Game Master has access to the PDFs for these sets, then she can save, print, and mark them up as she likes. They are also very useful for online play.

Maps play such an important role in roleplaying, especially fantasy roleplaying, that having maps to hand is always going to be useful. They can serve as inspiration, and they can fulfil a need if the Game Master wants a particular map or floor plan. The individual locations and floor plans—especially those of the HandyMaps – Towns & Villages and HandyMaps – Dungeons, Caves, & Strange Locales—lend themselves to campaign building, the Game Master adding them as she fits to a larger map where her campaign or world is set. Then of course, each map pack is a lovely thing to have and the three map packs do fit in a sturdy box also available from the publisher.

Altogether, the HandyMaps – Buildings & Structures, HandyMaps – Towns & Villages, and HandyMaps – Dungeons, Caves, & Strange Locales live up to their name—handy and maps. Useful as inspiration as much as maps, Glynn Seal’s excellent cartography in the series will help bring a game to life and for the modern Game Master are even more useful for online play.