Big Map Progression

Someone recently, in a post or Discord message, talked about the value of just running the dream game. This is in the wake of O/U and Cataphracts both reshaping how (I think) many people think about what is possible within the TTRPG hobby. The result has been several people chasing elements of both of those designs and experiences but I think the core idea of a dream game is worth exploring generally. 

It often feels like conversations with the TTRPG hobby space online fall into discussions about theory or about the conditions of the hobby as industry. Both of these are valuable but I think many people would benefit from talking about what they want to do as players or referees absent a theoretical framework. So this is me doing that. 

What is Big Map?

Big map is this:

Blurred because I like the sense of mystery, and because I hope some of you will play it someday.

   
It is hard to tell from that image but it is something like two feet tall and four feet wide. It took my around eight hours to draw. It is a single floor in a planned megadungeon. I like the idea of a megadungeon a great deal but my preferred fictional world paradigm is modern fantasy horror. So an idea took shape.

Named after a song, as one does.

It combines ideas from ongoing conversations about layers of information, asymmetric play, the scale of a mega dungeon, and a bespoke mythology and setting. All components that make it a high investment effort by me and eventually by the potential players. This is part of the reason a ruleset like Violence. which can fit into around twelve half-letter pages is appealing for the project.

As of today I have "finished" keying the first floor and the surface layer. When I began the project I was not working with a physical workflow. I was working almost exclusively in Google Sheets. Hence, the surface map looks different.

Here's half of it.

I cannot recall who I was talking to exactly who was extolling the virtues of physical media, but at some point I decided to shift my ongoing work there. So we get the physical map. 10' squares on a roll of 1/4" graph paper, a depiction of an enormous underground facility. The first floor has been keyed with 180 entries, which is already cool enough, but the thing that has sung for me in the keying is not just the scale. It's an organizational method.

I have previously bounced off of Obsidian pretty hard in the past but I've always been tempted by the promise of hyperlinked personal writing. With the shift to physical something came by at just the right moment. A brief surge of interest in a classic method of organization. A shoebox. Or its equivalent, the Zettlekasten, as introduced to me by Viridian Void.

My first box. One full floor. 180 rooms along with inhabitants, artifacts, submaps, and more.

There are so many benefits I have found from this method of organization over a notebook. It has unlocked physical creation for me in a way that nothing else has. It scales to my needs, it maintains connections between areas and it allows for physical cut-and-paste action in the smoothest way possible. 

An example would be that I wrote a dozen room keys that I realized didn't fit where I wanted. Or rather they should be on a different floor. I simply removed those index cards and shifted them within the box. Instant solution for reorganization. I find it both adaptable and encouraging. A stack of cards is a great motivator for me in a way that a blank page isn't. It's eating the elephant made physical.

A single example card, a key for a single room. Numbered with Floor, section, and room number.

The back of each card has additional space, including links to other cards, other documents.

But I cannot do everything I want to do physically. I want to one set of information to one set of players (operatives crawling the dungeon) and a second set to a second group (managers within a shadowy corporate enterprise). That means there needs to be meaningful information to control and shuffle back and forth. So I'm trying my best to make it, in two ways.

Short files of useful secret information with gameable benefits.

The first are clearance files. Short lore documents that include gameable information and frequently mechanical benefits, including "un-black-boxing" rules.  

Digital handouts discoverable by operatives on the ground, useful to themselves and their managers.

The second are logs. Even shorter handouts that give gameable information to the operatives that may also have value to their managers. The players can only talk between these layers in mediated fashions at mediated locations. They are playing linked but distinct games. 

This all smacks, I know, of "read my novel" style "here's my lorebook" GM prep. But the "Dream Game" in this case isn't so much about the lore as it is the interplay of who knows what. The initial player handouts are a page max. The rest is meant to be unfolded during play. Not in a predictable way, but as a wide spreading sandbox. I don't know if it will work, and it fact it probably won't, but that's not the point of prepping a Dream Game. 

The point is the prep, the dream, and what it generates for you. I'm making this, not because I think it's theoretically laudable or novel or special. I'm doing it because I want to see players operate in a world that values somethings that are often glossed over during TTRPGs. Secrecy, planning, knitting together hidden information, missing out on the deeper truths, and asymmetry. 

I'm sharing this partially to celebrate my own success with the prep, my own enjoyment of it, the dedication I didn't know I had that allowed me to key 249 rooms, make dozens of handouts and lore snapshots. But I hope that it also encourages you to pursue that, because what I've learned in the process that publishing this or even running it are just part of the joy. Sharing the process, playing with it, feeling what it inspires and what it makes me reconsider about games and the world, those are just as valuable. It's made me more confident in my taste, my writing, and my skills. 

So I hope you can do the same. I hope you can prep for your dream game and eventually run it. I hope you do it for you. Because it's worth it.

A Bear, Violently.

There is no pre-existing set of statistics for the greatest foe in all of roleplaying. This is because a bear is a different thing in different Violence. scenarios, idiosyncratic as they are. But it's not hard to leverage the existing rules for supernatural entities to model an ursine creature. After all, for much of humanities existence, they may as well have been monsters.

Bears are the great lumbering shape, terrifyingly fast for their size, smarter than you'd like and more able than you'd think. When roused to violence they are among the greatest terrors a human can face down. But they are not immune to the frailties of mortality.

To Hit: +2 (Size and Bulk)
Shooting: N/A
Melee: 2d8. Always causes 1 Injury regardless of result. 2d10 on second and further consecutive attacks as the hug or clamp their jaw.
Harm: Bears are tough. Thick fur, thick skin, layers of fat and muscle. Small calibers won't do and even heavy calibers need to be placed just right. More often than not, you'll need to be loaded for bear. 

1-16: Fat and muscle. No effect.
17-22: Pain and rage. Injury, the bear lashes out and makes an extra melee attack.
23-25: Real pain. The bear is injured and shrinks back, blood matting fur.
26+: Downed.

Want to make your bears more fearsome? Make them driven off instead of downed. Make them unkillable. Give them armor, as appropriate for your world and situation.