Sunday, April 11, 2010

0one Blueprints - did you know about these?


As a D.I.Y. sort of gamer, I always favor Judges-Guild-type stuff, like the Book of Villages, or Book of Caverns, etc, that are mostly a whole lotta maps with just a modicum of exposition and maybe some random tables thrown in for good measure. This is the kind of stuff that really gets me going - I may have had more fun with the blank sheet of graph paper in Keep on the Borderlands than with the rest of it (maybe ;). So I was tickled to stumble across 0one Game's Blueprints line.



This line is nothing but old-school blue-ink maps of locations like cairns, catacombs, thieves' guilds, dark temples, and ruined cities. Each is 20-25 pages long, with 4-8 pages of that being blue maps, then the same duplicated in black & white, along with a little suggestive exposition to build off of or dispose as you see fit: "beneath the church lie the catacombs, a dark and damp corridor littered with smashed coffers and the remains of unknown people". Then you get a page of fillable lines for each map page, so you can keep notes as you flesh out your dungeon: "Room 2: Trapped Corridor: ______________." Add in an introductory page, and a page of map symbols and there you have it: the building blocks for your own adventures, all for about $1.65.


I should mention, the maps themselves are fairly customizable. They are .pdf's, and each has a "Rule the Dungeon" button which, once clicked, allows you to add or remove map symbols, grids, room numbers, and so on. I particularly appreciated the feature that lets you remove the "fill" from each map (all the inked-in areas between rooms), as I'm stingy with printer ink.


For less than $10, I picked up Caverns of Chaos (which look like KotB's Caves of Chaos on steroids, huge!), Dwarven Stronghold (a really cool gate-to-gate under the mountains series of maps), Shrine of the Frogmen (cause I love shrines, especially if there's frogs involved), Church on Skull Hill (about 3 or four adventures worth of maps in here), and The Great City (laid out very similarly to the CSIO with a nice array of available supplements and expansions).

Now, those 5 products alone could keep me busy for a long time, but 0one has over sixty of these available, plus an immense Black & White dungeon, and the 10-level Mega, Dungeon Under the Mountain (wink wink).

11 comments:

  1. Very cool. I've used their floorplan/dungeon tile pdfs a few times, but I wasn't aware their dungeon maps were quite that good. Thanks for the pointer.

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  2. I've been thinking of getting their Drow City: Virtual Boxed Set.

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  3. Thanks Al,
    I must confess I wasn't aware of these!
    Off to do some shopping!

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  4. I've been tempted to order a few of those for quite some time, but have never pulled the trigger. Time crunch, more than anything. They certainly look very good and I appreciate you posting on them.

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  5. 0one Games does excellent "knock offs" (and I mean that with respect) - literally years worth of adventuring locales to explore.

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  6. I have several of their products...they're outstanding!

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  7. The Caverns of Chaos look amazing!

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  8. They are really awesome. I have a bunch but haven't had a chance to use them yet.

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  9. Man, I looked at some of the free previews. Those are nice. And really good, I woudl think, for those who don't want to do up maps ex nihilo, but still want to be able to customize.

    Thanks for posting that.

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