2023-11-07
Today, while drinking my morning tea, I once more spent some time eyeballing the dungeon maps in my copy of The Lost Dungeons of Tonisborg.
And I was once more wondering about the peculiar pattern, they have. Quite similiar to the snippets of the original Blackmoor Dungeon I’ve seen, somewhat reminiscent of the dungeon map in Supplement 2: Blackmoor, but markedly different from most other dungeon drawings I know. There seems to be a common pattern to those maps. Most strikingly, there are plenty of diagonals, but also a lot of triangles … triangles that somehow look like negativ forms of … some sort of stencil maybe?
See what I mean? Here is a snippet from a map of the original Blackmoor Dungeon:
Diagnonals and conspicuous triangles. Same thing here in a snippet from the redrawn Tonisborg maps:
Could it be that those maps where all drawn using some kind of stencil? Or maybe a bunch of slim rectangular objects that were piled on to a sheet of paper and then an outline traced around those objects? But what kind of object? Something roughly 1/4 inch wide which comes at various lengths? How about pencils?
Aha, do you recognize the pattern already? Tracing around those pencils is kind of hard, but it works, and here is the result:
I don’t know if this has ever been brought up, but it certainly makes sense to me. The pencils are kind of awkward to work with, but using flat rectangular pieces of metal of about the same width would make drawning those dungeon shapes really easy.
Does anyone know more about this?! Any idea what kind of objects might have been used as stencils?
If you have any idea to add to this, please drop me a note!!
Cheers!
Edit: a particular common method of drawing the dungeons would also explain how Dave Arneson’s Blackmoor maps and Greg Svenson’s Tonisborg maps look so similar without being actual copies, as hinted at here.
Please send any comments or questions to wandererbill@betola.de or @wandererbill@tabletop.social
Copyright: ~lkh • Di. Nov. 7 14:52:32 CET 2023 • License: CC BY-NC 4.0 • Hosted by: SDF-EU Public Access UNIX System - https://sdf-eu.org