I arrived home late tonight -- a long day at the office, and then dinner with clients -- but this delivery really capped things off, in a good way: Barrowmaze 2, along with two Tomb-of-Horrors style illustration books, and the mega-map, arrived in the mail.
Greg Gillespie did a terrific job with Barrowmaze. The room descriptions are just long enough to be evocative without burdening the DM with endless walls of text. In addition to the artwork in the illustration books, the Barrowmaze adventure book itself is crammed with illustrations.
My only quibble is the hard-cover book binding. We in the OSR need to find a better way to package these old-school adventures, that allows the DM to keep the adventure books open and flat on the table, rather than using traditional book binding which results in the pages flipping unless you break the bookspine or place weighs on the page-edges to keep the book open.
Fantastic product. I feel bad for those of you who missed out on this megadungeon crowdfunding project.
I really like the big fold-out map. I only pledged to get the PDF and the hard-cover (which I'm still waiting for).
ReplyDeleteSo is Hyperborea part of the haul or is it just there for scale?
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ReplyDeleteI dislike hardcovers AND foldout maps. A boxed set for something big is best for me. Keep the booklets inside made of soft paper or with detached harder covers like old modules. Keep maps as something I can hide behind my DM's screen.
I'm with Jason. I like the old modules with the map on a detached cover and a booklet that can lay open the table. Adventures have lost all their utility as game aids over the years.
ReplyDeleteI've beennusing the hardcovs or sometime and don't have any of the trouble you've mentioned.
ReplyDeleteSure, if I were TSR I might do things a bit differently but I'm obviously not that :)
Seems like the preference would be for a spiral-bound module with a detachable map/cover.
ReplyDeleteSpeaking of covers, who did the art on the 'Hyperborea' book?
ReplyDeleteBest option for me would not be spiral-bound. Both kinds (the one made of plastic strips and one made of wire) cut into the paper too much. Instead it should be looseleaf with margin space for the DM to 3-ring holepunch and reinforce with those little paper stickers, or else slip pages into plastic sheet protectors and put those in the 3-ring binder.
ReplyDeleteMy favorite method, hands-down, is the One Page Dungeon format. If you have additional notes on the back that's fine, but if you can fit it all on the one page then the back can be a second dungeon area. I like the idea of the back side being general notes for the DM on how the front works, but once you get it you won't need to flip back and forth a lot. I made a small valley sandbox with multiple 3-5 level dungeons and several reclaimed villages in a ruined city using that format and it was fantastic.
Binder clips or elastic bands are good for holding hard-back books open without breaking the spine. Many new RPG books use a softer card-stock for the covers, which may show some abuse from binder clips. If that is a concern, a square of cardboard can be used as a buffer between the binder clip and the cover.
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