Maptacular Monday: Geomorph Utility

My dungeonmorph dice are in the mail on their way to me! Very exciting. That spurred me to figure out how best to use them–a problem I’ve been steadily working on since I first got involved with geomorphs.

EDIT: They arrived today! Hurrah!

I can place these in a grid that is A-F down the side and 1-4 across the top. So far so good. But how to populate them? Well, I feel really good about my geomorph stocker for Old School Hack that’s currently under construction (with both monsters and treasure, in an innovative format), but then putting together a room key remains problematic, especially on the fly; with the dungeonmorph dice (or really any geom0rphs) how do you assign locations?

Matt Jackson does a brilliant job with adding letters on the geomorphs. That’s good as far as it goes, but these don’t have letters. I have finally solved it!

Imagine each one in a 9 square grid, 3 to a side. Number them, 1-3 across the top, 4-6 across the middle, 7-9 across the bottom. Eyeball it–it need not be precise.

So then to do a room key, to point out an important location you can say “B3-7” and consistently know which geomorph, and that you’re looking at the lower left corner of the geomorph. If more specific locations are needed, note it in the description itself.

This is even better with the Dungeonmorph project, because it has a font, and I can type up the overall map and change the darkness of each area (different grays with the font color), and also have a table with that geomorph identified and the 9 box grid idea in place for extra detail. (To see what it looks like, you can check out the Lopelia Alchemal Fortress Ruin scenario I posted experimentally.)

Frankly, I like the cards even better than the dice; every option is in play, you are not limited to 1 of 6 options per die. If you are going to get anything from this project, as ironic as it is, I recommend the cards and font over the tititular dice; they are a curiosity, the font and cards are intensely practical.

My priority right now is to finish up “Fictive’s Talents and Templates 2” before the end of the year. While my geomorph stocker is not ready to share with the world yet, it may serve me well enough; when I get my Dungeonmorph Dice, I’ll give it a whirl.