![]() So I was quite happy when I received an Honorable Mention in the One Page Dungeon Contest: Here you’ll find everfalling rivers, endless stairs, and mobius chambers. The Halls of the Mad Mage twist back on themselves in impossible spatial contortions. The design of the Halls was inspired by M.C. And for this contest I was inspired to whip out a One Page Dungeon of my own: The Halls of the Mad Mage. So, long story short, there was a contest. And thus, for me, its value is primarily in its use as an exercise: The artificial strictures of the form force you to become more creative while reminding you that simplicity has its value. Of course, there are a lot of things the One Page Dungeon can’t do. The entire dungeon is literally laid out in front of you. With a One Page Dungeon you don’t have any notes to flip through: You have your rulebook, a single sheet of paper, and your dice. If you’re willing to embrace that lighter design ethos, the One Page Dungeon is not only great for its ease of prep. I think a lot of us fall into the trap of thinking that our adventure notes need to be rigorous documents, but the reality is that, when we embrace our own ability to improvise creatively, that level of detail is more than over-kill. To a certain extent, the point of the template is to emphasize that you don’t need a lot of laborious prep to run a successful adventure: With nothing more than a dungeon map and a couple of pertinent notes, a GM can use his creativity at the game table to take care of everything else. Basically, the One Page Dungeon is a template for designing a complete dungeon in one page. For those not familiar with the One Page Dungeon Concept, the idea was originally conceived by David Bowman ( Sham’s Grog & Blog) and then developed by Chgowiz ( Old Guy RPG Blog) and Amityville Mike ( Society of Torch, Pole, and Rope). There’s a Windows demo on the site, and once I’m able to wrest my PC laptop from my wife, I’m going to give it a whirl.Awhile back, ChattyDM (Philippe-Antonie Menard) announced the One Page Dungeon Contest. Obviously, as a Mac fan, that bit got my attention - the platform could certainly use a mapping utility like this. The program’s written in Java, and while the initial version - scheduled for release in April - will run under Windows, they’re hoping to do Mac and Linux version as well. I didn’t see much on the site about the adventure designer component, but apparently it’ll allow you to import and edit statblocks, which can then be assigned to objects within maps. Of course, they’ll probably cost me $60 to print on my inkjet printer. The maps look simply gorgeous, combining photo-realistic graphics with a faint - but discernable - grid. It’s a combination mapper/adventure designer reminiscent of what Fluid had planned for the aborted Master Tools. Ultimately, responsibility for fixing and updating eTools passed to Code Monkey, for reasons never fully explained. Of course, Fluid did get screwed by Hasbro after the WotC take over, and it’s hard to say how many problems resulted from the radical re-tooling that was forced upon them. It was buggy and underpowered compared to the open source PC Gen. On the other, eTools was … disappointing. On the one hand, the Character Creator that shipped with the PHB 3.0 was probably the best such tool I ever used. ![]() I just saw an ad for Fluid’s new mapping/adventure creator program, Dundjinni, on the back of Dungeon Magazine yesterday.
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