Friday Fantasy: The Veiled Dungeon

Given the origins of the roleplaying hobby—in wargaming and in the drawing of dungeons that the first player characters, and a great many since, explored and plundered—it should be no surprise just how important maps are to the hobby. They serve as a means to show a tactical situation when using miniatures or tokens and to track the progress of the player characters through the dungeon—by both the players and the Dungeon Master. And since the publication of Dungeon Geomorphs, Set One: Basic Dungeon by TSR, Inc. in 1976, the hobby has found different ways in which to provide us with maps. Games Workshop published several Dungeon Floor Sets in the 1980s, culminating in Dungeon Planner Set 1: Caverns of the Dead and Dungeon Planner Set 2: Nightmare in Blackmarsh; Dwarven Forge has supplied dungeon enthusiasts with highly detailed, three-dimensional modular terrain since 1996; and any number of publishers have sold maps as PDFs via Drivethrurpg.com. Loke BattleMats does something a little different with its maps. It publishes them as books. To date, this has included the Big Book of Battle Mats: Rooms, Vaults, & Chambers, the Big Book of Cyberpunk Battle Mats, The Dungeon Books of Battle Mats, The Wilderness Books of Battle Mats, The Towns & Taverns Books of Battle Mats, and Castles, Crypts, & Caverns Books of Battle Mats. However, The Veiled Dungeon is something a little different, something more like Dungeon Planner Set 1: Caverns of the Dead and Dungeon Planner Set 2: Nightmare in Blackmarsh.

The Veiled Dungeon is a boxed set containing a set of maps, encounter cards, and a book of encounters and monsters, all of which can be used in the adventure in the book or used by the Dungeon Master to create her own encounters. It is designed as both toolkit and ready-to-play adventure and comes decently appointed in whatever way the Dungeon Master wants to use it. The adventure itself, ‘The Raiders of the Cerulean Ruins’, is designed for Player Characters of between Third and Fifth Level for Dungeons & Dragons, Fifth Edition. It comes as a boxed set containing twenty separate maps, forty monster cards, and a reference book.

The maps are done on double-sided seventeen by eleven light card sheets, in full colour and marked with a grid of one-inch squares. All are suitable for use with both wet and dry markers. They include hallways, corridors, dormitories, storerooms, workrooms, crumbling bridges over yawning magical chasms, grand staircases, magical circles, ziggurats, shattered rooms, courtyards and entrances, and more. They are bright and colourful and done in the style recognisable from maps from Loke BattleMats. They are also compatible with them, meaning that they can be used alongside all of the publisher’s maps to expand the playing area and add variety.

The monster cards are also double-sided and done in full colour. On the front is an illustration of the creature, which of course, can be shown to the players when their characters encounter them, whilst on the back is its full stats for easy reference by the Dungeon Master. There are one or two NPCs, such as the Veteran Scholar, but the rest are all monsters. Many of them are animated objects—animated objects to be found in the scenario—and it is clear that the author has had a lot of fun naming and designing them. There is the ‘Animated Scroll Storm’, which acts like a swarm of paper that inflicts paper cuts and on a critical can cast a random cantrip; ‘Bad Dreams’ is animated bed that inflicts ‘Things that go bump’ damage and if a target is prone makes them fall asleep ‘Night, Night!’; and ‘Belligerent Bookcase’, a ‘Vindictive Teacher’ that makes attacks against targets with an Intelligence of twelve or less at Advantage and will then ‘Throw the Book’ at them! The most fun, at least in terms of names, is the ‘Chest of Jaws’, that likes to grapple its targets and steal small items with ‘’That’s Mine’ and then hangs on with ‘Lockjaw’ for both Advantage and extra damage. The animated furniture is especially fun and all of the pieces could easily be used elsewhere—as could many of the monsters.

The Reference Book for The Veiled Dungeon is initially somewhat confusing. Is it, or is it not, a scenario called ‘The Veiled Dungeon’? Well, sort of, but first what the Reference Book does is actually break down the elements of the dungeon, not necessarily to help the Dungeon Master run the pre-written version which follows later in the book, but to help the Dungeon Master create something of her own, but still similar. The elements common to both the adventure contained in the box and the one that the Dungeon Master might create include the myth of the Veiled Dungeon and its invasive fog that shifts and walls that move. How scholars keep discovering it and as they dig deeper, becoming obsessed with exploring further, arousing the interest of a deity of madness and obsession, until they make one terrible discovery, and the fog is unleashed, wreathing its way through the complex, changing and twisting the walls and rooms and letting deadly new monsters in!

The Reference Book then takes the Dungeon Master through the different elements of the adventure. This begins with the maps and then provides tables for creating motivations, persons and organisations that might employ the Player Characters, the size of the dungeon and variations upon it, and then multiple different encounters. It breaks these encounters down area by area rather than by individual locations. The last part of Reference Book consists of the bestiary for ‘The Veiled Dungeon’. From ‘Activated Rope’, ‘Animated Scroll Storm’, and ‘Arcane Golem’ to ‘Veteran Scholar’, ‘Unwelcome Rug’, and ‘Wyrmspawn’, every monster gets a decent write-up, typically a paragraph in length. The more major monsters, like the ‘Malevolent Veil Fiend’ and the ‘Sentinel Statue’, get much longer write-ups, as befitting the threats they represent.

The tools are there for the Dungeon Master to create her own version of ‘The Veiled Dungeon’, but the Reference Book also includes its own pre-written adventure, essentially the designer’s own version of ‘The Veiled Dungeon’. This is ‘The Raiders of the Cerulean Ruins’. The Cerulean Ruins are an important ‘Site of Special Arcane Interest’—or ‘SSAI’—currently being excavated by the Yore Institute. The latter hires the Player Characters to investigate the complex after contact has been lost with its staff and students. It is part-scholar, part-archaeological dig, that gets increasingly darker and weirder. The Player Characters will initially gain some information about the status of the complex from a former employee who has turned ‘ruin raider’, but it does not quite prepare them for what they find. Much of the fittings and furniture have been twisted into malevolent monstrosities and there is a growing sense of madness and chaos, the deeper the Player Characters go. Progress through the dungeon is intentionally compartmenalised. This is done by making the Player Characters need to find keys to unlock particular sections of the dungeon. This is not only a device to have the Player Characters explore every section, but also to prevent them from haring through the dungeon, so forcing the Dungeon Master to clear the table of one set of maps and then set up another.

In the epilogue to the adventure there is an interesting line: “One of the scholars also points out that they have uncovered rumours that might lead to another set of ruins similar to this one!” Which, should the players and their characters follow up on, would enable the Dungeon Master to use the tools to create a new version of ‘The Veiled Dungeon’ of her own, which almost exactly, but not like The Cerulean Ruins. What happens if the Player Characters do follow up on this lead is not explored in the Reference Book, sadly, since some overarching plot could have provided more motivation and storytelling possibilities than simple repetition. Nevertheless, ‘The Raiders of the Cerulean Ruins’ is a good scenario with a decent mix of exploration and combat and a few clues to help the players and their characters work out what is going on.

Physically, The Veiled Dungeon is a handsome boxed set. Everything is well presented. The artwork is excellent and the cartography is as good as you would expect.

The Veiled Dungeon is a slightly odd product, both an adventure and a toolkit to create similarly themed adventures. It perhaps could have done with advice to connect the adventures or provide a bigger plot perhaps, so that the Dungeon Master would have found it easier to create and link, if that is what she desires, the variants upon ‘The Veiled Dungeon’. Nevertheless, whether she is running the included ‘The Raiders of the Cerulean Ruins’ or a version of ‘The Veiled Dungeon’ of her own devising, the contents of The Veiled Dungeon are going to look good on the table.

Mapping Your Gothic

Given the origins of the roleplaying hobby—in wargaming and in the drawing of dungeons that the first player characters, and a great many since, explored and plundered—it should be no surprise just how important maps are to the hobby. They serve as a means to show a tactical situation when using miniatures or tokens and to track the progress of the player characters through the dungeon—by both the players and the Dungeon Master. And since the publication of Dungeon Geomorphs, Set One: Basic Dungeon by TSR, Inc. in 1976, the hobby has found different ways in which to provide us with maps. Games Workshop published several Dungeon Floor Sets in the 1980s, culminating in Dungeon Planner Set 1: Caverns of the Dead and Dungeon Planner Set 2: Nightmare in Blackmarsh; Dwarven Forge has supplied dungeon enthusiasts with highly detailed, three-dimensional modular terrain since 1996; Loke BattleMats publishes them as books; and any number of publishers have sold maps as PDFs via Drivethrurpg.com. 1985 Games does none of these. Instead, as the name suggests it looks back to the eighties and produces its maps in a format similar to the Dungeon Floor Sets from Games Workshop, but designed for use in 2025 not 1985.

Dungeon Craft: Cursed Lands – Game Pieces of Dread is a box of terrain geomorphs, some forty-six sheets of them! Each sheet is of light card, covered in plastic so that it works with both wet and dry erase markers, and marked with an eight-by-ten grid of one-inch squares. All of the sheets are depicted in full vibrant colour. Some are also marked in dotted lines which indicate lines where the Game Master can cut and sperate buildings, ruins, trees and flowers, threats and monsters. Some sheets depict single locations, locations, or monsters, such as a shop, a ruined windmill, a coffin makers, homes occupied and unoccupied, a church or temple, taverns and inns, wizards, necromancers, spiders, wraiths, gargoyles, wolves and hounds, black cats, murders of crows, chopping blocks with axes, a great tree hut, flaming skulls, and more. There is a lot of cemetery features, including statues and headstones, ground sections which have skeletal hands reaching up ready to claw at the Player Characters or pull themselves out of the earth, giant skulls and broken gates, and so on. Which sounds all great, but there is more to each of these sheets, and that is because each is double-sided.

Dungeon Craft: Cursed Lands – Game Pieces of Dread does not simply reprint the same locations, objects, and creatures on the other side. In some cases, it reprints the same location or object, but with a change in status. For the most part, this is to show the roofs of buildings, but for other pieces, the other side is very different. For example, the other side of the chopping blocks with axes shows piles chopped wood, the various creatures and monsters and NPCs are shown by day on one side and by night on the other, trees are shown with foliage on one side and without on the other, and so on. Whilst the reverse side of most building tiles show their roofs, others do depict up floors of the same building. Thus simply flipping the counters and locations over doubles usefulness of the Dungeon Craft: Cursed Lands – Game Pieces of Dread as well as helping to keep parts of a location or encounter secret until the Master Master is ready to reveal them.

Dungeon Craft: Cursed Lands – Game Pieces of Dread is obviously designed to work with a fantasy setting such as that for Dungeons & Dragons, Pathfinder, or any number of retroclones or fantasy roleplaying games. Indeed, Dungeon Craft: Cursed Lands – Game Pieces of Dread would very well with the Curse of Strahd and Vecna: Eve of Ruin campaigns for Dungeons & Dragons, Fifth Edition. Of course, the most obvious use for Dungeon Craft: Cursed Lands – Game Pieces of Dread is with the Ravenloft setting, which has a particular gloomy, Mitteleuropean feel to it. This does not necessarily limit it to the mediaeval pulp horror of Gothic, since the look and feel of the locations depicted in this map could be any time from the sixteenth century to the twentieth. So not just Ravenloft, but also Masque of the Red Death and Other Tales, as well as any pulp horror adventure where the heroes might encounter vampires and the undead, venture down streets swathed in shadow and passing moonlight, and out into cemeteries to dig up bodies to check to see if they are truly dead! Chill would work very well with Dungeon Craft: Cursed Lands – Game Pieces of Dread, as would any roleplaying game with a Pulp sensibility, whether that is Pulp Cthulhu: Two-fisted Action and Adventure Against the Mythos or Achtung! Cthulhu, especially if the Investigators wanted to vampire hunting or the Nazis were recruiting! Lastly, combine with the BattleMap: Turned Earth/Graveyard pack to create the locations of uprisings of the dead and the BattleMap: City/Dungeon pack for town streets where the undead can lurk and prey on random tourists whilst the locals know better than to be abroad at night and lock their doors!

Physically, Dungeon Craft: Cursed Lands – Game Pieces of Dread comes in a sturdy which also contain a single introduction and instructions sheet. Beyond that, the rest of Dungeon Craft: Cursed Lands – Game Pieces of Dread is all maps that can be easily adjusted with the addition of the various terrain pieces and marked up and wiped clean as necessary.

Dungeon Craft: Cursed Lands – Game Pieces of Dread is an appropriately gloomy and gothic-themed box of maps and geomorphs. In comparison to other Dungeon Craft boxed sets from 1985 Games, Dungeon Craft: Cursed Lands – Game Pieces of Dread is not as vibrant (since of course, it is set in the shadows) and it does not include quite as much variety in its pieces. Nevertheless, this is a good box of maps, floor plans, and map tiles, and for the Game Master using miniatures and wanting to take her campaign into the gloom of the gothic where only the moonlight shines and vampires stalk the night, Dungeon Craft: Cursed Lands – Game Pieces of Dread is packed with everything she will need.*

* Stake not included.

Mapping Your Jungle

Given the origins of the roleplaying hobby—in wargaming and in the drawing of dungeons that the first player characters, and a great many since, explored and plundered—it should be no surprise just how important maps are to the hobby. They serve as a means to show a tactical situation when using miniatures or tokens and to track the progress of the player characters through the dungeon—by both the players and the Dungeon Master. And since the publication of Dungeon Geomorphs, Set One: Basic Dungeon by TSR, Inc. in 1976, the hobby has found different ways in which to provide us with maps. Games Workshop published several Dungeon Floor Sets in the 1980s, culminating in Dungeon Planner Set 1: Caverns of the Dead and Dungeon Planner Set 2: Nightmare in Blackmarsh; Dwarven Forge has supplied dungeon enthusiasts with highly detailed, three-dimensional modular terrain since 1996; Loke BattleMats publishes them as books; and any number of publishers have sold maps as PDFs via Drivethrurpg.com. 1985 Games does none of these. Instead, as the name suggests it looks back to the eighties and produces its maps in a format similar to the Dungeon Floor Sets from Games Workshop, but designed for use in 2025 not 1985.

Dungeon Craft: Jungles of Dread is a box of terrain geomorphs, some forty-six sheets of them! Each sheet is of light card, covered in plastic so that it works with both wet and dry erase markers, and marked with an eight-by-ten grid of one-inch squares. All of the sheets are depicted in full vibrant colour. Some are also marked in dotted lines which indicate lines where the Game Master can cut and sperate buildings, ruins, trees and flowers, threats and monsters. Some sheets depict single locations, locations, or monsters, such as a ziggurat, parts of a broken statue, plateaus with caves and sinkhole, the upturned hull of a ship caught up in some trees, a inn, city buildings, and even a giant serpent. Others depict a series of hide tents, one large and several small, a handful of ruins, sections of undergrowth and some cages, a pair of pterodactyls, four patches of quicksand, and several monkeys and leopards, and last, but not least a tyrannosaurus rex, some velociraptors and some turtle warriors, and some pteranodons. Which sounds all great, but there is more to each of these sheets, and that is because each is double-sided.

Dungeon Craft: Jungles of Dread does not simply reprint the same locations, objects, and creatures on the other side. In some cases, it reprints the same location or object, but with a change in status. Most commonly, the ziggurat, the broken statuary, and ruins are depicted again, but covered in vines. Empty animal cages are full on the other side, burning tents are shown blackened and smoldering, areas of quicksand have people trapped in them and screaming on one side and empty on another, and the insides of buildings are revealed, for example, the upturned hull of a ship turns out to house a tavern. Similarly, many of the reverse side of the monsters and creatures are different, in the case of the creatures showing them at night, their colours muted, whilst the monsters on their other side are blighted or even undead. Which begs the question that every Game Master is going to want to ask after perusing the contents, which is, “Are my players ready to face a zombie tyrannosaurus?” Thus simply flipping the counters and locations over doubles usefulness of the Dungeon Craft: Jungles of Dread as well as helping to keep parts of a location or encounter secret until the Master Master is ready to reveal them.

Dungeon Craft: Jungles of Dread is obviously designed to work with a fantasy setting such as that for Dungeons & Dragons, Pathfinder, or any number of retroclones or fantasy roleplaying games. Indeed, Dungeon Craft: Jungles of Dread was actually designed to support the first two chapters of the Tomb of Annihilation for Dungeons & Dragons, Fifth Edition, whilst its companion set, Dungeon Craft: Fallen Kingdom supports the other chapters in the campaign. However, there are no game stats in Dungeon Craft: Jungles of Dread and it is an entirely systems neutral gaming accessory. Given its jungle locales, Dungeon Craft: Jungles of Dread would work well with a Pulp sensibility, whether that is Pulp Cthulhu: Two-fisted Action and Adventure Against the Mythos or Achtung! Cthulhu. It would even work with some Science Fiction roleplaying games and miniatures wargames rules, especially those that employ inches for their movement scale. All of this can be done flat on the table or used with the BattleMap: Jungle City. This is a large twenty-four-by-thirty-three inch map which provides a grid onto which the various locations, objects, and creatures can be placed.

Physically, Dungeon Craft: Jungles of Dread comes in a sturdy box which also contain a single introduction and instructions sheet. Beyond that, the rest of Dungeon Craft: Jungles of Dread is all maps that can be easily adjusted with the addition of the various terrain pieces and marked up and wiped clean as necessary.

Dungeon Craft: Jungles of Dread is a fantastically themed ‘Lost World’, ‘Valley of the Dinosaurs’, box of maps and geomorphs. For the Game Master using miniatures and wanting to take her campaign into the jungle where secrets and dinosaurs remain hidden, Dungeon Craft: Jungles of Dread is simply a good choice.

Solitaire: Dragon Dowser

The world of Praelar dying. It was driven to the point of collapse by climate change and then exacerbated by colossal poisonous tornados called ‘spore storms’. It was then that dragons appeared. They came from a world parallel to us to save us. They drew Dragon Essence extracted from their unhatched eggs and used it to power machines long-buried under the spore fields that cleared the poisons from the air and the water, and even began to abate the spores storms. Yet humanity took advantage of them. The Mecharch leaders took the power of the dragon yolk and reprogrammed the machines as devices of war before sending them out to slay dragons and take their eggs. As one dragon after dragon died, the Mecharch leaders gained power and many eggs were lost or abandoned, or broken. There are those who see this as an injustice and have rallied around to rescue the remaining eggs and not only save them, but raise the hatchlings. Their hope is that the newborn dragons would heal Praelar and restore the communities to what they once were.

This is the background for Dragon Dowser: A Journalling Game for One Player, in which the player will use his dowsing crystal to overcome the elements, uncover ancient secrets, battle long-buried machinery, and in the process, save the last of the dragon eggs. It is published by Hatchlings Games, best known for Inspirisles, the Deaf-aware, sign-language as magic, Arthurian roleplaying game. In comparison, Dragon Dowser is more anime-inspired, though not heavily so and leaves much of its setting to be interpreted, created, and written down by the player. It is a solo journalling game in which the aim is to locate abandoned dragon eggs and return to a Sanctuary. However, this requires the expenditure of resources. If the Dowser succeeds before all of his resources are expended, the hatchling can be reared to adulthood and together change the world. It requires a standard deck of playing cards, a six-sided die, a set of tokens, and a journal for the Dowser to record his story. As an alternative to the deck of playing cards, the game has its own deck of cards. These have their art and text, so that the player does not have to refer to the book for the card descriptions.

The game requires some set-up before play begins. The first is choose one of four Dowsings. These correspond to the Ace cards of the four card suits and determine the story’s element, season, and theme, which all together suggests where the dragon egg might be. For example, the Hearts dowsing is associated with water, spring, and community, and the egg is lost to the currents of a river and washed away downstream from the chasing soldiers. The player chooses one of the four and draws twenty-three cards from the deck. Together with the selected Dowsing, these are placed face down in a six by four grid. Two Sanctuary cards are placed either side. The player’s die is put on one of these Sanctuary. Together, this forms the play area.

On a turn, the player moves from one card in the play area to another. A card can give the dowser more Resources or force him to expend them. Cards also have a Description and a Prompt. For example, the ‘3 of Hearts’ has the Card details, “I should trust my instincts… and my crystal more!”; the Description, “A stranger you meet at a crossroads says there are a clutch of dragon eggs to the north. You follow the path to straight into an ambush.”; and the Prompt of, “Describe the fight. How do you survive the ambush?”. Lastly, its Effect of -4 deducts Resources from the dowser’s pool. It is possible for the dowser to move in any direction, including returning to a card that has already been flipped over. Doing so will trigger the effect upon the Dowser’s Resources, but not the Description and the Prompt. The likelihood is that this will cost the Dowser in times of Resources, so it is better to keep moving forward and continue the search. At each stage the player describes what happens to his Dowser, taking inspiration from the Description and the Prompt. Both are written to be open-ended rather than proscriptive, allowing the player to engage his imagination.

If the Dowser finds the Dowsing he drew at the start of the game, he has found the egg. It is then his objective to return the egg to one of the Sanctuary cards. In doing so, he has succeeded and the game is over. There are still years of nurturing and training of the hatchling to come, but those are outside the scope of Dragon Dowser: A Journalling Game for One Player (though there is potential in a sequel to the game here). If the Dowser runs out of Resources before then, the play comes to an end, the Dowser has not succeeded, but he has not died. This does not mean that the Dowser cannot try again, whether from a rearrangement of the current spread of cards or from a completely fresh spread. It is also possible to discover other Dowsing cards or Aces in the grid of cards. This a definite moment of sadness for the Dowser as he has discovered the site of broken eggs. At this moment, he has the opportunity to offer a eulogy or a ritual to the lost hatchling.

The rules to Dragon Dowser are simple and easy to learn and play. This makes it suitable for younger players and this is helped by an extended example of a Dowsing that shows how the game is played in just a quick read through. The fact that the Dowser cannot die—just try again—also makes it suitable for younger players.

Physically, Dragon Dowser is well presented. It is a small, landscape format book with some excellent artwork, much of it replicated from the game’s cards. The writing is clean and simple, making the game easy to pick up and play. With only half of the deck being used at any one time, there is plenty of replay value in the game.

Dragon Dowser: A Journalling Game for One Player is both a solo journalling game and a map game, both of which require some Resource management. Proper handling of the latter will keep Dowser exploring, but the random nature of turning over cards and exploring means that the Dowser and his player is going to be constantly challenged, constantly weighing which up card to move to next. There is a high degree of luck in that the Dowser’s objective card—the Ace or Dowsing card—might be flipped over early in the game or much later. (One way to offset that might be to place it in the lower half of the cards drawn to form the grid.) Overall, Dragon Dowser: A Journalling Game for One Player is a charming journalling game that leaves a lot of room in how the player interprets the game’s prompts and how he tells his Dowser’s story.

Your Adventure Calendar

Given the origins of the roleplaying hobby—in wargaming and in the drawing of dungeons that the first player characters, and a great many since, explored and plundered—it should be no surprise just how important maps are to the hobby. They serve as a means to show a tactical situation when using miniatures or tokens and to track the progress of the player characters through the dungeon—by both the players and the Dungeon Master. And since the publication of Dungeon Geomorphs, Set One: Basic Dungeon by TSR, Inc. in 1976, the hobby has found different ways in which to provide us with maps. Games Workshop published several Dungeon Floor Sets in the 1980s, culminating in Dungeon Planner Set 1: Caverns of the Dead and Dungeon Planner Set 2: Nightmare in Blackmarsh; Dwarven Forge has supplied dungeon enthusiasts with highly detailed, three-dimensional modular terrain since 1996; and any number of publishers have sold maps as PDFs via Drivethrurpg.com. Loke BattleMats does something a little different with its maps. It publishes them as books, such as the Big Book of Battle Mats: Rooms, Vaults, & Chambers, but the publisher also offers its maps in a year long, one map per month package. In other words, a calendar! However, the calendar offers a lot more than just a map per month. Every month comes with an adventure of its very own.

The Calendar of Many Adventures 2024 is almost like any other calendar that you hang on the wall. Exactly twelve inches it folds out to reveal each month as you would expect and an illustration as you would expect. The calendar is mostly as you would expect. Days of the week, month after month. One thing to note is that the traditional days and festivals are not marked. So, no Good Friday or Easter Monday, no Spring Bank Holiday, no Halloween, no Christmas Day or Boxing Day. Consequently, the user will need to add them himself. Instead, there are less traditional days, such as ‘International GM’s Day’ on March 4th and ‘Talk Like a Pirate Day’ on September 19th. However, instead of some random fantasy picture, every month we are treated to a map. An ice cold, ruined village with a bridge over a frigid river for January, a tropical beach with a ruined boat on the shoreline and a fallen moai a la Easter Island, and a mine tunnel with tracks and trucks and a work and storage area. Each map is marked with two-inch squares and is nicely detailed, such as hats and documents on a table.

In addition, each month is accompanied by a QR code. This downloads two items. First is the map itself for that month. Of course, the physical copy of the map can be used at the table, whilst the digital copy can be used online. Of course, the maps can also be combined with maps found in other Loke BattleMats products, especially the Giant Book of Battle Mats series. The second is a single adventure for that month, a PDF for use with Dungeons & Dragons, Fifth Edition, which is designed to be used with the map. They average as being suitable for Third Level Player Characters, but most can be played by Fourth Level Player Characters. Most f the adventures are eleven pages in length and come with ‘5E in 5 Minutes’, a quick primer (or remainder) of the rules, advice on running and balancing the adventure, hook to get the Player Characters involved, background for the Game Master, an introduction for the players, a description of the map and what the Player Characters will encounter, a suggestion as to what might happen next, and then the stats for both the monsters and the NPCs for the scenario. Names for monsters, NPCs, and special items are colour coded to indicate that they are given further detail at the end of the adventure.

For example, ‘Out in the Cold’ is the adventure for January, 2024. It is designed for a group of Third to Fifth Level Player Characters. The village of Derrow has fallen on hard times, its rich hunting grounds spoiled by heavy, icy winters and monsters that kill the stock and terrorise anyone who dares enter the surrounding forests. The local lord, Galfrin Albrent, hires the Player Characters to retrieve an artefact currently on display in an inn in the rundown village of Derrow. When they attempt to do so, a curse is activated throwing the Player Characters into the Winter Realm and a very snowy, ruined version of Derrow. It is here that the main events of the scenario take place on the given map. The Player Characters find themselves trapped here and as they try to find a way out—or a way back—they are attacked by wave after wave of wintery Derrow Wolves and it gets colder and colder. The Player Characters need to survive long enough to do so, and once done, the scenario ends. There are four suggestions as to what could happen next or in later adventures, and stats for an NPC who could accompany the Player Characters if they need help, another NPC, and the villain of the piece. Oddly the NPC, the bartender at the village inn, is given more detail than the villain, in terms of background.

‘Out in the Cold’ is a short adventure, offering no more than a single session’s worth of play, but it is serviceable and easy to drop into a campaign. It is followed by ‘Together We Stand’, a more complex affair for February in which the Player Characters are hired to investigate an alchemist’s lair under a tavern as part of dispute between rival guilds; ‘Fear Under the Sun’ for March opens with the Player Characters shipwrecked and washed ashore, coming to the rescue of cute creatures as the ground shakes; and for April, ‘How Green Your Garden Grows’, the Player Characters come to the aid of a local midwife and herbalist whose garden of prize-winning plants and flowers is under attack. This is important because the award for best garden is due to given very soon. Unfortunately, Granny Green, whose garden is under attack has under attack, has secrets of her own…

Physically, Calendar of Many Adventures 2024 is decently presented, bar of course, the traditional holidays on the calendar. The maps are as well done as you would expect and they are all compatible with the rest of the maps from Loke BattleMats. The adventures themselves are well written and easy to use, and short enough to drop into a Game Master’s campaign, perhaps a side quest or diversion. Plus, whilst the adventures might be written for use with Dungeons & Dragons, Fifth Edition, they are easily adapted to the retroclone of the Game Master’s choice.

The Calendar of Many Adventures 2024 is a very nice product, providing the Game Master with a selection of easy to prepare scenarios that she can drop into her campaign. The format is fun and if the scenarios are not connected this year, then perhaps for next year, the Calendar of Many Adventures 2025 could contain a linked set of adventures to form a mini campaign throughout the year.

Mapping Your Heists

Given the origins of the roleplaying hobby—in wargaming and in the drawing of dungeons that the first player characters, and a great many since, explored and plundered—it should be no surprise just how important maps are to the hobby. They serve as a means to show a tactical situation when using miniatures or tokens and to track the progress of the player characters through the dungeon—by both the players and the Dungeon Master. And since the publication of Dungeon Geomorphs, Set One: Basic Dungeon by TSR, Inc. in 1976, the hobby has found different ways in which to provide us with maps. Games Workshop published several Dungeon Floor Sets in the 1980s, culminating in Dungeon Planner Set 1: Caverns of the Dead and Dungeon Planner Set 2: Nightmare in Blackmarsh; Dwarven Forge has supplied dungeon enthusiasts with highly detailed, three-dimensional modular terrain since 1996; and any number of publishers have sold maps as PDFs via Drivethrurpg.com. Loke BattleMats does something a little different with its maps. It publishes them as books.

A Loke BattleMats book comes as a spiral-bound book. Every page is a map and every page actually light card with a plastic covering. The fact that it is spiral-bound means that the book lies completely flat and because there is a map on every page, every map can be used on its own or combined with the map on the opposite page to work as one big, double-page spread map. The fact that the book is spiral bound means that it can be folded back on itself and thus just one map used with ease or the book unfolded to reveal the other half of the map as necessary. The fact that every page has a plastic covering means that every page can be drawn on using a write-on/wipe-off pen. It is a brilliantly simple concept which has already garnered the publisher the UK Games Expo 2019 People’s Choice Awards for Best Accessory for the Big Book of Battlemats and both the UK Games Expo 2019 Best Accessory and UK Games Expo 2019 People’s Choice Awards Best Accessory for Giant Book of Battle Mats.

The newest release from Loke Battle Mats is the Big Book of Battle Mats: Rooms, Vaults, & Chambers, which presents “Battle maps for Tabletop Roleplaying Ideal for Heists and Other Exciting Encounters!”, marked in either one-inch squares. Unlike other map books from Loke Battle Mats, the plain maps, simple floors without any detail or furnishings, are left until the end, so the volume gets straight to presenting interesting locations that a Game Master can add to her game. It starts with a tavern, all wood flooring and trestle tables on one page, but a stone-floored cellar, connected by a set of stairs on the opposite page. Next, there is some kind of office, which could be town hall or a minor guild hall, but next to that is a gaol with several cells, so together the two maps become a watch house or town guard station complete with its set of cells in which hold suspects or prisoners. Similarly, there are work desks and an office on the next map, but a room with shelves containing books or papers on the other, turning the location into a records office or a library, a plain series of tunnels snake around the map only to connect to room via a hole in the wall (either dug open or blown open with magic of even explosives), whilst an unremarkable work area is turned into something interesting—the backstage of a theatre—because it connects to a stage and auditorium on the opposite page, and an innocent-looking restaurant hides a gambling den complete with dueling room should satisfaction be demanded on the opposite page. Other maps depict warehouses and sections of a sewer system—the latter easy to line up with the sewer maps in other map volumes from the publisher, a sauna complex, a museum foyer complete with triceratops skeleton on display, an abandoned house complete with cobwebs, and even a banqueting hall and kitchen.

The maps are also nicely detailed in places. Food in particular features throughout, whether that is the lonely plate on the desk in the room backstage or sumptuous choice of dishes laid out on the banqueting table, but there are also numerous tools, weapons, and pieces of armour dotting the various locations as appropriate. Another feature is that the maps do not always specifically work for the fantasy genre. They will work in others too. For example, the inn and gambling den would be perfect for the nineteen twenties and thirties, the sauna complex feels very modern, and the museum foyer with its triceratops skeleton would work in numerous genres.

The main feature of the maps in the Big Book of Battle Mats: Rooms, Vaults, & Chambers is their capacity to tell stories. Want the Player Characters to tunnel into the vault of a bank? There is a tunnel and map with a broken wall for that, as well as vault on another map. Or, for a bank robbery, take the office and gaol and make the cells individual vaults. The gambling den is perfect for a raid by the police or a rival gang. The stage is ripe for an interrupted performance. All the Game Master or her players and their characters have to do is supply the details of the interruption. Essentially, depending upon the story being played out, the multiple maps can be used as the Player Characters move from one location to another as events unfold. In addition, because the maps in the Big Book of Battle Mats: Rooms, Vaults, & Chambers depict urban locations, they can often be used again and again, especially in a campaign which takes place in one town or city.

Physically, Big Book of Battle Mats: Rooms, Vaults, & Chambers is very nicely produced. The maps are clear, easy to use, fully painted, and vibrant with colour. One issue may well be with binding and the user might want to be a little careful folding the pages back and forth lest the pages crease or break around the spiral comb of the binding.

It is clear that a lot of thought of has been put into the design of the Big Book of Battle Mats: Rooms, Vaults, & Chambers. Although not every room or map in the collection is either exciting or inspirational, they can all be useful. The best of them are and many of the maps will inspire a gaming group to use them as locations and more, using them to help create the stories they roleplay. The Big Book of Battle Mats: Rooms, Vaults, & Chambers is a really useful sourcebook for city campaigns and its capacity to help tell stories is very nicely thought out.

Mapping Your Castles, Crypts, & Caverns

Given the origins of the roleplaying hobby—in wargaming and in the drawing of dungeons that the first player characters, and a great many since, explored and plundered—it should be no surprise just how important maps are to the hobby. They serve as a means to show a tactical situation when using miniatures or tokens and to track the progress of the player characters through the dungeon—by both the players and the Dungeon Master. And since the publication of Dungeon Geomorphs, Set One: Basic Dungeon by TSR, Inc. in 1976, the hobby has found different ways in which to provide us with maps. Games Workshop published several Dungeon Floor Sets in the 1980s, culminating in Dungeon Planner Set 1: Caverns of the Dead and Dungeon Planner Set 2: Nightmare in Blackmarsh; Dwarven Forge has supplied dungeon enthusiasts with highly detailed, three-dimensional modular terrain since 1996; and any number of publishers have sold maps as PDFs via Drivethrurpg.com. Loke Battle Mats does something a little different with its maps. It publishes them as books.

A Loke BattleMats book comes as a spiral-bound book. Every page is a map and every page actually light card with a plastic covering. The fact that it is spiral-bound means that the book lies completely flat and because there is a map on every page, every map can be used on its own or combined with the map on the opposite page to work as one big, double-page spread map. The fact that the book is spiral bound means that it can be folded back on itself and thus just one map used with ease or the book unfolded to reveal the other half of the map as necessary. The fact that every page has a plastic covering means that every page can be drawn on using a write-on/wipe-off pen. It is a brilliantly simple concept which has already garnered the publisher the UK Games Expo 2019 People’s Choice Awards for Best Accessory for the Big Book of Battlemats and both the UK Games Expo 2019 Best Accessory and UK Games Expo 2019 People’s Choice Awards Best Accessory for the Giant Book of Battle Mats.

The Castles, Crypts, & Caverns Books of Battle Mats is a ‘Set of 2 Battle Map Books for RPG’. As a set, it comes as two volume set of map books in a slipcase—open ended at either side for easy access. Each of the two volumes is a twelve-inch squire square, spiral bound book, with each containing sixty maps, all marked with a square grid. These start with a pair of maps with just a plain, but quickly leap into depicting particular locations. There are castle walls with towers and stables, great spiraling stairs, a mess hall, temples and dormitories, libraries and ritual rooms, ornamental gardens, befouled sewer tunnels, and caverns set across a variety of terrain types, and much, much more. And this is more or less the same in each of the two books. This does not mean that the maps are exactly the same in each book. Rather they are thematically similar and this leads into what is perhaps the greatest feature of the Castles, Crypts, & Caverns Books of Battle Mats.

Each two-page spread of the two volumes of the Castles, Crypts, & Caverns Books of Battle Mats consists of two linked maps—physically and thematically. The Game Master can use either of the maps on the two-page spread on their own or together, as a twelve by twenty-four-inch rectangular map. That though is with the one volume. With two volumes together, the Game Master can combine any single map from one volume with any single map from the other, and if that is not flexible enough, any two-page spread from one volume can be placed next to a two-page spread from the other, in the process, creating a twenty-four by twenty-four-inch square map. What is means is that the Game Master can connect the two sections of castle walls to create a longer section, the sewers can be extended, and the mess hall, dormitories, and other sections placed together to form a barracks, for example. As with the other titles in the range, this gives the Castles, Crypts, & Caverns Books a fantastic versatility which the Game Master can take advantage of again and again in choosing a combination of map pages from the two volumes to create location after location, and then use them to build encounter after encounter.

The individual maps are excellent, being bright, vibrant, detailed, and clear. They are easy to use and easy to modify. A Game Master can easily adjust them with a write-on/wipe-off pen to add features of her own. This is especially important if the Game Master wants to use a map which has previously featured in one of her adventures. She can also add stickers if she wants new features or even actual physical terrain features.

There are four books in the series—the Castles, Crypts, & Caverns Books of Battle Mats, The Wilderness Books of Battle Mats, The Dungeon Books of Battle Mats, and The Towns & Taverns Books of Battle Mats. There is a difference between the Castles, Crypts, & Caverns Books of Battle Mats and the other titles which is both an advantage and a disadvantage for this set of books. The difference is that instead of focusing of one or two themes, such as dungeons or towns and taverns, the Castles, Crypts, & Caverns Books of Battle Mats obviously focuses on three. This gives its a flexibility which means it slots easily alongside a wider range of maps from the other three books in the series. For example, the castle maps from the Castles, Crypts, & Caverns Books of Battle Mats can abut against the street maps from The Towns & Taverns Books of Battle Mats or the caverns added to those in The Dungeon Books of Battle Mats. However, it is not quite possible to create a complete castle or fortress or other buildings or similar buildings with this book set. Rather, it feels as if the Castles, Crypts, & Caverns Books of Battle Mats is a book of abutments, sections that support and expand the maps in the other entries in the series, ratehr than being a standalone product. Consequently, they are not necessarily that easy to use on the fly, to ready up an encounter at a moment’s notice. Instead, they are easier to use as part of the Game Master’s preparation and then have everything necessary to play. Then obviously, the maps cannot be used over and over lest familiarity become an issue. Neither of these are issues which will prevent a Game Master from using the Castles, Crypts, & Caverns Books of Battle Mats, but rather that she should be aware of them prior to bringing them to the table.

Physically, the Castles, Crypts, & Caverns Books of Battle Mats is very nicely produced. The maps are clear, easy to use, fully painted, and vibrant with colour. One issue may well be with binding and the user might want to be a little careful folding the pages back and forth lest the pages crease or break around the spiral comb of the binding. Although there is some writing involved in the Castles, Crypts, & Caverns Books of Battle Mats, it is not really what a Game Master is looking for with this two-volume set. Fortunately, the writing is a little sharper than in previous entries in the series.

There is no denying the usefulness of maps when it comes to the tabletop gaming hobby. They help players and Game Masters alike visualise an area, they help track movement and position, and so on. If a gaming group does not regularly use miniatures in their fantasy games, the Castles, Crypts, & Caverns Books of Battle Mats might not be useful, but it will still help them visualise an area, and it may even encourage them to use them. If they already use miniatures, whether fantasy roleplaying or wargaming, then the maps in the Castles, Crypts, & Caverns Books of Battle Mats will be useful—but only to an extent and then really only best used with the other volumes in the series. Still there are so many fantasy roleplaying games which Castles, Crypts, & Caverns Books of Battle Mats will work with, almost too many to list here…

The Castles, Crypts, & Caverns Books of Battle Mats is full of attractive, ready-to-use maps that the Game Master can bring to the table for the fantasy roleplaying game of her choice. As with other entries in the series, the Castles, Crypts, & Caverns Books of Battle Mats is both practical and pretty, but its broader focus that it is not quite as useful an accessory for fantasy gaming in general with the rest of the line.

A Science Fiction Map Kit

One of the fascinations with Traveller is with its starships. Ranging in size from one hundred tons up to hundreds of thousands of tons, the players are exposed to them in the rules fairly on—during the process of character creation. Careers such as Scouts, Merchants, and Nobles all have the possibility of giving the characters starships of a small, but capable size. Of course, a starship will take the Player Characters from star system to star system, from adventure to adventure, but the starship also becomes a home too. As a home, the players doubtless want to know what their starship looks like and if they have a role aboard her, as no doubt they do, where their normal station is and where their stateroom is. Then of course, starship deck plans are just like maps. They provide locations to visit, to adventure in, to explore, to attack and defend, and so on. Which can of course be for the theatre of the mind or with miniatures. Starships in Traveller are also highly technical, designed to be realistic within their setting of the Third Imperium, with much their displacement and tonnage given over to fuel, power plant, and jump and manoeuvre drives. There are plenty of supplements dedicated to starships in the Third Imperium—official and unofficial, but of these few, barely a handful are dedicated to the really large starships, space stations, and other big installations and locations. This is where Starship Geomorphs comes in handy.

Starship Geomorphs is a vast collection of geomorphs—or map sections—which can be slotted together to form larger locations in a wide variety of layouts. This includes starships, space stations, buildings, and massive structures. They are all designed using the architecture and map iconography of Traveller, so there is a high of familiarity for long-time fans of the venerable roleplaying game. However, none of the geomorphs are official Traveller content despite their compatibility. Further, their use lends itself to form and function rather than technical design, with the geomorphs here being slotted together to create their locations and ships rather than the Game Master designing a ship using the rules for naval architecture and adhere to the rules for realisation as a set of deck plans. Consequently, Starship Geomorphs possesses a greater utility than a set of deck plans for a single starship or location might.

Presented in landscape format, Starship Geomorphs opens with an introduction and an explanation of the geomorphs. These are organised into standard, edge, corner, and end sections. In addition, there are aerofins too, the aim being to reduce the starships being more aerodynamic and less boxy. There are suggestions too to flesh out a ship design, including its overall look, occupants, gear, age, level of wear, sounds heard aboard ship, and more. There are suggestions also, to add flavour and detail, including what might be found in the ship’s locker and down a ship’s corridor. Other uses of the geomorphs suggested include combining them to create space stations, like the small Dyson-Class modular Star port, corporate facilities, and so on. In the case of the sample starship and sample corporate facility, references are provided to the particular pages where the geomorphs can be found that make up the particular object or location.

The bulk of the book is understandably given over to the geomorphs themselves. They begin with a multipurpose geomorph, a research area geomorph, cargo bay—full and empty, engineering/sensor ops, flight hanger/crew area, brig/prison, arboretum—upper and lower, a drop capsule/troop deck, an auditorium, a sports complex, high passage (first class) passenger deck, promenade decks—food/retail and casino, cloning facility (or alternatively low berth facility), bride areas, gunnery and sandcaster decks, and much, much, more. Some are quite mundane, such as the battery deck, office space (or cubicle farm, proving that office design does not get better in the future), waste processing, and so on. Very quickly the Game Master can put together a troop or fighter carrier, an exploratory or laboratory vessel, a passenger liner, an imperial throne ship (yes, there really is a throne room geomorph!), a strike vessel complete with weapon turrets and barbettes, and more. Punctuating these are some delightful cross section three-dimensional illustrations of the various geomorphs, including a ‘Flight Hanger with Launch Tube’, a cargo bay with an armed crewman outside ready to shoot some scuttling creatures inside, a corridor with doors off and a window through which can be seen a poor, glowing man having suffered a strange mishap in the laboratory, a low berth area, a steerage compartment for passengers travelling on the cheap, and lots more. There is a sense of humour to a few of these, but in the main, they help bring their locations to life and add an extra dimension to the deck plans.

This is just the starships possible with Starship Geomorphs. Space stations and star ports are also possible, again using many of the same geomorphs. However, mix up the office space, auditorium, lobby, and so on, and what you have is a corporate building. The arboretum, promenade areas with and without casino, swimming pool, and passenger decks all combine to form a hotel, with the steerage decks becoming the equivalent of a coffin hotel. There are tram and train layouts, interstitial spaces for between floors and decks, connecting bridges between buildings and space station sections, and a lot more.

Starship Geomorphs is cleanly and clearly laid out. The writing is fairly light in tone and there are notes here and there throughout. The geomorphs are all well done and easy to use.

As a book, Starship Geomorphs is a superb catalogue of maps, plans, deck plans, and more. If there is an issue, it is that there is a high number of geomorphs labelled ‘Multipurpose’, in fact too many of them, to the point where their purpose is lost without the Game Master going through them one by one. Another issue is perhaps that whilst the print version is lovely, the PDF is actually of greater use because the user can separate the geomorphs and put them together onscreen. Further, Starship Geomorphs is not just of use for Traveller, but will work with any Science Fiction roleplaying. Thus, Star Wars: Edge of the Empire, The Expanse, Star Trek Adventures, Star Frontiers, and Cyberpunk Red—all of these would work with a lot of the geomorphs in Starship Geomorphs. If Starship Geomorphs is missing anything, it is a guide or suggestions to create particular ship’s deck plans or building floor plans, but there is plenty of inspiration to be found in the individual geomorphs. The geomorphs can of course be used to create locations for confrontations between miniatures in skirmish wargames.

Starship Geomorphs is delightfully, usefully utilitarian and inspirational in its design and purpose. This big book of map sections is a terrific addition to the toolkit of any Game Master running just about any Science Fiction roleplaying game or even wargame.

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.