NOTE: The article below has BONUS ADVICE not included in the video, so it's worth your time to read and watch both.

Maps Are Your Friend

Today, we're talking about inspiration for adventures in your Dungeons and Dragons 5th Edition (5e) or any TTRPG game (OSR, Pathfinder, Shadow of the Demon Lord, Warhammer/WFRP, etc). One of our favorite ways to gain inspiration on demand is to look through our collection of old DUNGEON magazines and various modules--the classic modules of yesteryear--and just look specifically at the maps. It's not the actual adventure we're concerned with. Odds are, we've already run that module in the past. All we really care about here are the maps inside, so just throw the adventure away and let your brain go wild!

IMAGINE what else you could do with just the map. Ask yourself: Who lives there? What do they do? What do they want? Get out your copies of MONSTER MANUAL, VOLO'S GUIDE TO MONSTERS, MORDENKAINEN'S MONSTERS OF THE MULTIVERSE, and your third party monster books. Look through them until your brain clicks and you say, "Oh, yeah! This type of monster would fit so great here..."

Here's a prime example from our D&D collection: THE THIEF'S GOLD by Brian Wood. This is a module for Third Edition Dungeons and Dragons (3e) from the Legends and Lairs series by Fantasy Flight Games (FFG). It's about a thieves' guild counterfeiting ring. It's a cool adventure, but what's really cool for our purposes is it's got a brilliant map of the sewer system: a full color, detailed map complete with manholes, secret doors, drain pipes, all that stuff. You could use this map endlessly! Anytime you ever need a sewer system, BOOM! There you go. And if you need to change it up, you just flip it upside down or sideways. If that's not different enough, you can always move or add a secret door, throw in some traps or puzzles, whatever you want.

So the next time the players go in the sewers, this is your map. It's been recycled, but the players don't know it because you don't let them know that you're using the same map over and over again. Just looking at this map, you can't help but think, "What could be in the sewer system? Is it slime monsters? Is it were-rats? Is there some weird cult that's been driven underground?" It could be anything. Maybe it's a secret base for the bad guys or a smuggling ring, or creatures from deep underground have tunneled their way up. So you just think, "What would be really cool to have happen here?" And you can also think about what kind of terrain you want to change or add.

It's a sewer, so obviously, you could have poisoned gas--good old methane, right? You could have acid that eats equipment, you could have slime that forces Dexterity checks when anyone moves full speed. You could have disease--sewer plague from the DMG or something worse. All easy, all doable. When players enter a certain area, BOOM! Break out the terrain effects. Got wounded? Fell in the sewer? That's a DC 11 Constitution save to avoid catching the plague. And now players will be a lot more cautious. They'll be nervous, they might even be anxious and scared before the bad guys ever show up. That's great for you, and wonderful for them. Dungeons and Dragons--or any TTRPG--should be scary. That's part of the fun!

Remember that whatever monsters or bad guys you place in the location are on their home turf. Give advantage in certain areas or situations, give them Lair effects. They live there, they know every inch, so they will know what to do, where to ambush, where to retreat and regroup. The players won't.

Use Weather and Terrain to Alter Your Maps

We've got a 10 mini-book series that can help you change your locations called EXTREME ENCOUNTERS: WEATHER AND TERRAIN:

• ACID (includes acid and slime)
• AIR (includes cloud castles and high elevation/thin air)
• COLD (includes blizzards, sleet, snow, and winter storms)
• EARTH (includes caves, forests, hills/mountains, mines and quarries)
• FIRE (includes burning buildings, forest fires, lava, volcanic eruptions)
• NECROTIC (includes blighted, cursed, and undead areas plus necrotic diseases like the zombie virus)
• POISON (includes jungles, sewers, swamps, vermin infestations)
• RADIANT (includes badlands, deserts, summer heatwaves, sun and moon-touched terrain)
• SPIRIT (includes astral, ethereal, haunted, and Great Old One inter-dimensional nightmares)
• WATER (includes ferries, floods, rain, rapids, river crossings, rough sea voyages, waterfalls)

You can also get all 10 mini-books at DriveThruRPG (DTRPG) and Itch.io. These books are all 100% compatible with 5th Edition (5e).

Using Maps With Movie Plots

A sewer map like THE THIEF'S GOLD would be great for running a fantasy equivalent of the blockbuster movie, ALIENS. Get some alien Xenomorphs down in there! So you can see how just looking at a map like this can get your creative juices flowing. It's not about the map's original purpose--it's about what you can do with it. We''ll touch on this topic a few more times below, so stay with us!

Changing a Location's Purpose and Switching Terrain

Now if you're running a more topside and less underground adventure, you could grab a map like the one in COVENENT HILL by Ree Soesbee. This is another cool Third Edition (3e) DND adventure, this time from Alderac Entertainment Group (AEG), and it's got a beautiful map of a frontier forest garrison. Is it a friendly garrison that the players are stationed at and then they get attacked, kind of like the old John Carpenter movie, ASSAULT ON PRECINCT 13? They could be attacked, surrounded, or maybe they could use this as their base to go out and explore the area, to defend the nearby villages against whatever's out there. Or maybe they've got to go assault this place. Maybe there's an evil NPC who's part of the main bad guy's team, and he's moving around from fortress to fortress, and they know he's going to be at this particular garrison at this particular time. And so, BOOM! The players say, "Let's go assault it, and we're going to kidnap this guy." And then it's a stealth mission versus a "kill everybody" mission.

What if instead of a garrison in the forest, it's on a mountaintop? Or what if it's in a swamp? And now you can change up the terrain and say, "Now it's this type of villain that's in there!" It's that easy. Maybe the garrison is fully manned and well-stocked. Maybe it's low on supplies, understaffed, and desperate on morale. Maybe it's abandoned... how recently and why? Is it a mystery where the inhabitants went? Were they slaughtered and left to rot? Were they turned into undead or other monsters and now hiding out beneath it? The answer is whatever you want it to be.

If you need a more generic location, like a house in a city or on a country estate, you could grab a map like the one in RAVEN MINE by Greg Benage and Christian T. Petersen. Again, this is a Third Edition (3e) Legends and Lairs adventure from Fantasy Flight Games. You open it up and inside, you've got a beautiful wizard's mansion, complete with two levels, a tower, and everything. So anytime you need a fancy noble mansion, BOOM, you got it!

Probably one of the most reused maps in our collection is the old classic, THE KEEP ON THE BORDERLANDS by Gary Gygax, from First Edition D&D (1e). It's got a huge cave complex ("The Caves of Chaos"), and it's on multiple levels. You can see the different elevations (ridges) and everything right on the map, and where the trees are. And some of the caves are rough and unworked stone, and some is worked stone... It's a beautiful map, and you could use it endlessly for all kinds of barbarian tribes, humanoid tribes, or bandits. Or, just an old abandoned city of cave-dwellers like you see in the American Southwest. What happened to the civilization that lived there? Maybe they were overrun by monsters, or the water ran dry, or the wild game fled, or the crops failed when the soil went bad. Or maybe it was a disease or curse that took them out. Again, you can do whatever you want.

NOTE: The original classic THE KEEP ON THE BORDERLANDS module has been expanded and updated for Dungeons & Dragons 5th Edition (5e) as INTO THE BORDERLANDS by Goodman Games.

Reflavoring Maps: Choke Points and Factions

Reusing maps is an awesome way to get inspired. As GMs, we can't help but collect maps. If you've been running games for a while, you must have a huge bundle of maps, right? It's a wonderful resource. Use it. If you're a new DM or GM, there are free maps out there. As we said before, don't just look at them and go, "It only looks like this. It has to be this way." No, no, no! Go in and reflavor those maps to be the environment or terrain you want, to have the bad guys you want. Turn the map on its side or upside down, maybe move an extra room or tunnel to another map.

Look through the maps that you feel are really dynamic, that might have CHOKE POINTS, that might have different ways that different FACTIONS can move through them. And then ask yourself, "Okay, what is the reason that made this point really important to be in? Why this part of the map or the section is being used?" That helps you with adventure HOOKS, or where FACTIONS are being placed and how they affect each other.

When Players Catch You Recycling Maps...

One of the things you can do if players call you on the same/same of the maps, if they even figure out you're recycling them, is say, "Yeah, this does seem awfully familiar..." Maybe that's because the same architect designed all these different dungeons. There's an adventure hook right there! Maybe this architect is the guy who's designing all the bad guys' bases so they have a certain uniformity, and maybe clever players can exploit that. They can track the architect down and follow him to where he's building the next evil base. This creates a RETURN OF THE JEDI-type plot. So the Death Star (the villain's base) is unfinished, and the bad guys are building it, and then the players come in and blow it up. But think about what an unfinished base means: dead ends, stairs that go nowhere, hazardous material left lying around... That can be a lot of fun. The unfinished nature of it becomes its own thing, flavoring everything.

Or, instead of representing (relatively) new construction, all these recycled maps could be the ancient ruins of a dead civilization. The same ancient civilization made this thing. So of course, it looks the same... Right?

Regarding Out of Print Modules...

We've been gaming for decades, so we've built up a huge collection of rare and out of print modules, magazines, and books. We've referenced these (DUNGEON Magazine, THE THIEF'S GOLD, COVENENT HILL, RAVEN MINE, and THE KEEP ON THE BORDERLANDS) as examples of the maps WE use to gain inspiration, but that's all they are: examples. There are tons of free or cheap maps online, so don't be discouraged if you can't get these specific modules we talk about above. We're not suggesting you need to run out and pay collector's prices or go down an internet search rabbit hole trying to find them.

In the case of THE KEEP ON THE BORDERLANDS, you don't have to, as you can get a cheap digital reprint at DTRPG, along with the sequels like RETURN TO THE KEEP ON THE BORDERLANDS and KEEP ON THE BORDERLANDS: SEASON OF SERPENTS, or Goodman Games' 5e updated version, INTO THE BORDERLANDS.

FFG's Legends and Lairs series (THE THIEF'S GOLD, RAVEN MINE) doesn't seem to be available in reprints, but fortunately, Alderac's 3e mini-modules like COVENENT HILL are available at DTRPG.

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