Draw Your Own Floor Plan: Lava Pool Dungeon

Lava Pool Dungeon

This is a belated follow-up to two posts I made back in 2013, where I scanned maps from my youth drawn on photocopies of the "Draw Your Own Floor Plan" sheet in the back of the module B2.

Again, there's no surviving key for this map, but I'll note a few features:

As previously, black squares are pits and yellow squares are falling ceiling blocks.
2: Stairs lead down to a lower room, shown in outline. I'm not sure about the zigzag.
6: End of the corridor is the mouth of a monster! Note the little eyes and arms.
7: Ramp sliding down to a pit. Update: IIRC, this is from a similar trap in Tomb of Horrors.
9: Bridge over part of the underground river influenced by the river in the Sample Dungeon.
12: Trap where pressure plates at each end trigger the spiked walls to crush together.
13: Magic Pool. Not sure how the tiny area to the south was supposed to be accessed.
14: East side of room is cavern, with a secret door in one crevice.
15: Trap door in floor leads to tunnel under river and on to room 16.
16: The trap to the north of the room is a falling net. 
17: Waterfall, drawn falling down the edge of the map.
18: Crevasse in the middle of the corridor. The style of the crevasse is from the map features Key in Moldvay Basic, page B58.
20: Platform/Altar on the edge of a lava pool. The black spot in the lava may be a rock, or some sort of monster.

See also Drawn Your Own Floor Plan I and Part II. I just updated Part I when I realized that many of my friend's trap features were influenced by the Traps list in Moldvay Basic.

The Zenopus Archives website has a gallery with all of these maps in one place.

Draw Your Own Floor Plan, II

Three Level Dungeon, click for a larger view

Here's a three-level dungeon I drew on a copy of the Draw Your Own Floor Plan sheet from B2. It's in the same style as the previous map by my friend E.H., with green ink dungeon walls (presumably because the grid is in black), red secret doors, yellow 10' falling blocks (here outlined in green ink) and black pits. It also shows the influence of the Holmes Basic rulebook in two places: the levels are Lvl 1, Lvl1 up, and 2nd Lvl, like the first three levels of Skull Mountain, and there's an underground cave with a beach and water (Room 21) per the Sample Dungeon.

Some of the other traps on the map:
Room 3 - The "L" on the door indicates it is locked.
Room 7 - The brown-colored trap at the entrance is a blade that swings out sideways when the door is opened. The wavy lines along the walls are curtains, surely concealing a hiding monster. Boo!
Room 8 -  In the hall leading to this room, the circle with a line in the hall is a "pendulum ball" trap (ball swings down from the ceiling). There's also one at the entrance to room 12.
Room 15 - A key I have elsewhere indicates that a "red man" is a teleporter, though it's possible I had something else in mind here.
Room 17 - At the bottom of the stairs to the east is a "pendulum blade" trap (blade swings down from the ceiling). 
Room 19 - The entrance to this room is just a wall, which may mean it was bricked shut. Perhaps the teleporter sent you here. Or I just forgot to draw a door, as there seems to be one missing between rooms 26 and 27. 

I do have two pages of unfinished notes for this dungeon, including the two upper levels, but I think they date from several years after I originally drew the map. In this conception some kind of evil cult had taken up residence in the lower level and was intent on summoning an evil horror in room 19.

Draw Your Own Floor Plan

The Cyclops' Treasure. Click on the map for a larger view

One feature of the module B2 Keep on the Borderlands, in both the original Holmes edition (1st and 2nd printings) and the revised Moldvay version (later printings), is a single sheet of detachable graph paper on page 27 of the module. This sheet is labeled DRAW YOUR OWN FLOOR PLAN in the same Futura font used in the module, Holmes Basic and the first three AD&D hardcovers. The grid area on the sheet is 10.25 by 7.5 inches at 4 squares per inch, giving 41 by 30 squares. The back side of the sheet (pg 28) contains a blank table for listing ADDITIONAL NON-PLAYER CHARACTERS. 

This sheet is part of the guidance for new DMs found on pages 1-7 and 24-28. The page preceding the graph paper is a map of Area 16 of the Keep, labeled GUILD HOUSE FLOOR PLAN, which shows two levels of the Guild House at a scale of 2 feet per square. It's the only area of the Keep with a map at that level of detail. This floor plan is described on page 24 in the section DESIGNING FLOOR PLANS, as an example of how to detail the buildings of the Keep, followed by the instructions to "lay out as many buildings of the KEEP as you can". So it's clear that the graph paper was intended for drawing the floor plans of more buildings. However, I never used it that way...

Shortly after learning how to play Holmes Basic D&D from some neighbors who had the same set, I found out my best friend E.H. had also learned the game from his older cousins. He had the Moldvay Basic and Expert sets, so he also had a version of B2. One of our fathers photocopied the graph paper page for us, and for a while we used these sheets for drawing our dungeons. E.H. also introduced me to his method of drawing dungeons with colored pens, generally with the dungeon in green ink and each trap or other feature in a different color. I retained one of his maps from our youth, which I recently returned to him after scanning, and this is shown above as an example.

I always thought my friend's maps turned out better than mine, in part because he had finer-tipped pens. This particular dungeon started with rooms 1-19 that he drew, with rooms 20-24 added by myself at a later date. Unfortunately, no corresponding key remains, and I have only the vaguest memory playing this through this dungeon. Other than room numbers, the only words on the map are "Cyclop Trease" (Cyclops Treasure, I believe), which means room 15 probably had a Cyclops from the D&D Expert Set.

I don't remember all of the notations he used, but a black square is obviously a Pit, a red "S" is a secret door, a yellow square is where a 10' Ceiling Block falls, a red square is a 10' fire wall, a blue-lined circle is a falling net (I may have added these later), and the blue lines in the corridor are a Moaning Corridor. Other possible features:

Room 2 - Ice (I think I added this later)
Room 6 - Magic Pool "whose waters have strange effect"
Room 7 - Red lines = Spray "that attracts Wandering Monsters"
Room 8 - Curtain in front of circular pit that may lead to red Chute near room 20
Room 9 - Hexagonal room with statue?
Room 9a - Gold behind some kind of special door?
Room 15 - Black lines = Spring-fired Darts
Room 16 - Room-filled with Poison Gas
Room 17 - Red line = Flying weapon that attacks "only if disturbed"
Room 18 - Yellow circle with BC? or BL? Blinding Lights?

Our early dungeons were typical Funhouse Dungeons / Monster Zoos, each room having a different monster essentially in stasis until encountered, without reason or connection to the other rooms. But they were perfect for us at that age (late elementary school). I would see E.H. every other weekend when he visited his father, and we would take turns DMing each other through our dungeons, each of us controlling an entire party of our own characters, typically 4 or 5 characters each.

The title Draw Your Own Floor Plan remains etched in my mind, and I even considered using it as a name for this blog. Instead I plan to post other maps drawn on this paper in a gallery on the ZA site. 

Did anyone else use this graph paper for their maps? Searching on the net, I found one other blogger who posted a map he drew on this paper: The RPG Corner's Own Floor Plan.

5/20/15 Update: Looking over the list of Traps in Moldvay Basic reminded that E.H. started with B/X, and the traps he used were clearly influenced by that list. I've bolded the ones that seem to correspond.