Cloudex

Erasure - Rethinking My Outline

I return to this after a frankly obnoxious anxiety attack that left me a mess for a few days. I'm feeling better now, though that might not last long. Because after opening my notes and looking at where I left off, I was struck with a potentially vexatious thought: Should I take the shifting room gimmick of room 6 and turn it into the entire dungeon?

For context, I am currently very over the idea of making maps for virtual tabletops. I love drawing maps. I love scribbling rows and rooms over a piece of graph paper and scaling it up to gridpaper when I play in-person, but there's none of that joy for me in a virtual tabletop. Instead of drawing, I am either futzing with a scanner or fiddling with a map drawer and then taking that image and uploading it to a virtual tabletop. And from there, I have to futz with layers, tokens, and more, sapping me of all joy and patience.

My current outline requires nineteen new maps.

I did some prep work here already. I found some maps online. But even having found maps, that's still me uploading so many maps to Roll20 and getting them set-up to work seamlessly in play. And I think I still will have to make at least one (admittedly small) map out of whole cloth.

But what if I could dramatically cut that down? What if I only needed to find or make three new maps? That's incredibly tempting. Let me unpack the idea.

Room 06's gimmick is the adventurers investigate a single space across two memories. One set belongs to the party's friend Isabelle. The other belongs to the party's potential guide, Apolline, remembering when the room belonged to her sister, Isabelle's mother Celeste. There's some small puzzles with shifting the view of the room to find items present in one, but not the other, and that's about as far as I got before I took a few days off to think through the gimmick. And the tempting thought right now is to apply that gimmick to the whole d'Loup Estate.

I already have that map - I downloaded and set-up 2 Minute Tabletop's Haunted Estate map pack for an adventure previously. I could treat that one map as four separate instances, taking the content from the three zones I outlined for the various instances of Princess Juniper and giving each of them a different instance. I then can differentiate the zones by describing how the each Juniper's memories overlap with the space and bend it to their own will. The young Marquise Juniper's scenes at the ball of then Prince d'Amberville become her attending the same ball set over the map of a freshly constructed d'Loup Estate. The Princess Juniper's memories of being in Winterbough City, planning a war, become her managing parades, funerals, and attacks from inside the d'Loup household. The grief-ridden Languished Juniper's graveyard scenes get laid over the libraries and sitting rooms of her rival's home.

My initial thought is I can designate certain rooms in the estate as having scenes, so I don't have to write something up for each room in the estate. I effectively would overlay a pointcrawl onto the map that way. I can also designate certain rooms as shift points so I can set-up routes for the three Junipers to protect and contest in their stalemate of a war with each other.

The tricky bit is I am shifting my workload. I am cutting down on map work, but creating more writing work for myself and also forcing myself to go back and change my outline for a second or third time. I have the tools to help speed that up, but it does mean I am backtracking instead of pushing forward.

I'm going to think this one through for a bit. The idea feels good to me, and I really am sick of having to set-up maps in VTTs. But I don't know if it's better than just pushing forward and getting this adventure done.

Bonus: I realized as I thought this through that if I do change to a shifting single map space, I can also use that as an opportunity to work through my thoughts on an AD&D adventure I read last year, Castles Forlorn. That adventure promises a romp through a castle as it stands in three different time periods, but like a lot of AD&D 2e adventures, is better in theory than in execution.

#Beyond the Wall #Erasure #Winterbough #ttrpg