A couple of months ago, I wrote an article about using the random dungeon feature for a map depicting the innards of a magical artifact.
I decided that just randomly exploring it could end up being a bit boring, so I decided to give the players a bit of guidance, to give them targets to search for without giving them too much information about the dungeon. And what better medium for this than a player handout that is a hastily drawn partial map of the dungeon found on the corpse of some poor adventurer who never made it?
So, I dug into the list of styles available to see what could be useful for something like this. I was looking for something that looked hand-drawn, but also something that looked like it was done somewhat quickly, maybe with a bit of care, but not some map drawn by a cartographer sitting at his desk for hours. In the end, I decided on the Sticky Note Dungeons from the 2024 annual. It might sound like a weird choice initially as sticky notes don’t really scream medieval dungeon, especially since this was an in-game map supposedly drawn by an NPC. But that makes this style really work for this purpose is the fact that it has drawing tools and effects that allow you to draw lines that look hand-drawn, and the included symbols also looks like something someone could draw quickly. So I decided to used that as a base and customize it for my needs to get what I needed.
