Poster-Sized Maps: A Bit Lost

I own Dragon Mountain, the Waterdeep City System, and the Night Below boxed set among others.  I remember ooh-ing and ah-ing over the bright, poster-sized maps that accompany the books in each set as I explored the contents (10 in the case of the City System!).  Even the much more recent Tales of the Shudder Mountains comes with a modest poster-sized area map (though not the extravagent 2' by 3' size that started showing up quite a bit after Undermountain).

The maps are really quite lovely, but I've yet to work out any real USE for them at the table!

Consider the choices:

1. spread out the map on the table ... the WHOLE table, mind you. Now players can see the dungeon laid out before them ... and that's precisely the problem.  "Should we take that secret door over there or just keep going straight?"  Getting lost isn't possible and at one stroke you've removed both the exploration and resource management aspects of the game.  The boundaries of the dungeon are now safe and known, even if the actual contents of each room remain unrevealed.

2. the DM tries to place the map behind a screen ... a really, really big screen.  Remember, these maps are from the TSR days ... there were only two DM screens printed, each with three panels and big enough to screen about one and a half sheets of paper ... just a bit too small for an open module.  They were also thin as could be and would topple easily if a die was cast too vigorously.  Add dice, a pencil, let alone any minis ... nope, just not room back there!

I can only assume that Wayne (from the excellent WaynesBooks.com) sits on ALL the collectables that he sells ... perhaps for scale, but since he's probably a hobbit, it's still pretty confusing. 

3. place the map on the floor at the DM's feet / a side table ... now I'm craning my neck to peek at a room number and layout several feet from the text that describes the room (vs, let's say, on a module cover 6" away).  Even if the orientation is the same, I'm much more likely to either make a mistake or require more time to avoid one.

Here's a prime culprit in Ruins of Undermountain.  The complexity IS the challenge ... but if I let the players see the map, then I've removed that challenge.

4. oragami.  I can try to predict where the PCs will roam and do some speed oragami to get the map positioned properly ... but good luck!  The appeal of these settings IS their grandeur and vastness.  Racing from one end of Waterdeep to the other, peering in shops and dodging enemies is exactly what the scale encourages, but if I'm folding and fiddling with sixty square feet of city map, the flow of play is spoiled and the sense of expansiveness is gone ("Oh look, he just knocked his screen over again.").

We can solve things now digitally of course ... but that wasn't an option when these strange and striking gaming tools were published and sold.  Laptops were just beginning to show up at the table, and touch screen tech wasn't in the home yet.

Dwimmermount's separate map book and Stonehell's stacked one-page dungeon quadrant system (though not without their own limitations) are attempts to invoke depthless grandeur without losing functionality.  I don't know how Barrowmaze approaches the same problem, but I bet the solution is similar.

So, apart from today's work-arounds, did anyone back in the day ever figure out how to actually USE these huge, magnificent, unique, and apprently impractical tools?  

Voices from the Mines of Madness

Recently I ran Mines of Madness as a 5e one-shot for some teens.


Scott Kurtz and Chris Perkins serve up some silly-hard fun with a comic and deadly tone much closer to White Plume Mountain than Princes of the Apocalypse.


So Lander, the party's curious thief, buys it spectacularly in the very first encounter--massive damage, no death checks, no Spare the Dying ... none of that.  Just ... dead.  

Given how hard it is to die in 5e, the players were surprised to say the least, but after a moment of gaping they got right back into character.

"Should we say some last words or have a moment of silence or something?"


"I guess so."

"I hardly knew him.  We weren't very close, but then a purple worm ate him instead of me and I feel like we've had a lot more in common since then."

"Yeah."

"That was beautiful."

A bit later, a significantly more cautious party encountered a cockatrice.

"What do we do?"

"Well, I could try to shoot it from here..."

"No!  I can't remember if you turn to stone if you look at it, or if it looks at you--and that really matters right now!"

They decided not to risk it and headed off to explore in a different direction.  Reed the Halfling, a nominally Lawful Good fighter / tank electing to linger near the back and leave risks to others despite various bonds and flaws that painted him as fearless and doggedly loyal ("He's going through a phase; it's just something all halflings go through.").

Encountering a hall full of undead dwarves, the now very cautious party decided to use a distraction to try and slip past them rather than wading into combat.  Reed's player scanned her character sheet: 

"This is for all those haters who said you wouldn't need an iron pot!"

The distraction bought them the time they needed and the explorers went on to avoid several other encounters before meeting their doom.

It wasn't until the end of the session that we realized we'd played for hours without a single combat since Lander got swallowed back at the very start of things--that initial pulse of extreme danger had caused the players to shift gears and focus on exploration and survival rather than just bashing monsters.
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Have you had similar experiences where that first encounter set the tone?

Do you find that all your halflings go through that stage too?