More on Dungeon Mapping and Darkness

Here be Monsters

My last post triggered another one of these reactions:

There is an element in old school d&d that having players map their own map based on the DMs descriptions is prone to a misunderstanding and incorrect mapping, which is a part of the game that Gygax really seemed to be into, as much as his "gotcha!" Tricks he seemed to encourage. So when the party goes back into the dungeon and find out that they mismapped the section of the graph paper with a dungeon corridor by 30', it's more frustrating that fun.

Once again, I get it. People think it is annoying to try and make a map.  This is an aspect of the dnd that has been excised from the rules in the last few editions. My internet friend quoted above continued on with this other common thing you hear often when talking about player mapping:

Logically, if you've been somewhere before, chances are you'll have a good idea how to navigate back to a location the next day (unless you fell down a pit or some other involuntary moment happened)

As logical as this may seem it is not true for being underground. I have been in a pitch black cave with a torch (an electric torch, which is better than a flaming stick). You can't see a whole cavern at once and it is very difficult to get the dimensions or a mental model of the space in your head. It is super easy to get lost in a dark cave:

From our first step into subterranean darkness, our hippocampus, which so reliably guides us through the surface world, goes on the fritz, like a radio that has lost reception. We are cut off from the guidance of the stars, from the sun and the moon. Even the horizon vanishes—if not for gravity, we’d scarcely know up from down. All of the subtle cues that might orient us on the surface—cloud formations, plant-growth patterns, animal tracks, wind direction—disappear. Underground, we lose even the guide of our own shadow.

Down in a tight cave passage, or in the bounded folds of a catacomb, our field of view is blinkered, never reaching beyond the next twist or kink. As the cave historian William White observed, you never really see a whole cave—only one sliver at a time. When we navigate a landscape, wrote Rebecca Solnit in A Field Guide to Getting Lost, we are reading our surroundings as a text, studying “the language of the earth itself”; the underground is a blank page, or a page scribbled with language we cannot decipher. https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2019/02/getting-lost-cave-labyrinth-brain/582865/(You should seriously read the whole article. I am going to get the book the article is base on.)

Here is another account of people getting lost in a cave once their light went out they had no mental model of the cave and couldn't navigate out. Then check out the Wikipedia article on Mine Exploration.

Player mapping is I think supposed to simulate this. When a player asks how big a room is and their character has a torch with a 30' radius of light. I imagine and sometimes describe to the players how they need to travel from one end to the other counting paces while their comrades wait in the darkness. One wall disappears. you count. Then a corner appears. You turn. the corner disappears there is a door way, you pass that it is engulfed in darkness then another corner. Eventually you have the perimeter. Then you push out blindly into the middle of the room. slowly. You might trip. If you've been quiet enough it is conceivable that there is still something sleeping there. 

Patrick Stuart from of False Machine has written a lot about light on his blog during the writing of Veins of the Earth

http://falsemachine.blogspot.com/2014/03/light-is-initiative.html

http://falsemachine.blogspot.com/2014/02/the-lume.html

http://falsemachine.blogspot.com/2013/06/the-law-of-light.html

Here is an interesting narrative about the role of light in underground combat:

http://falsemachine.blogspot.com/2013/12/ever-so-quietly-we-gained-on-them.html

 Under these conditions it is highly plausible that you might make a mistake mapping fumbling around on your tiny island of light in a sea of darkness scraping your grease pencil or charcoal nub on your vellum or sheet of papyrus. Here is another excerpt from the Atlantic Article; Apparently real world delvers had just as much trouble mapping as frustrated Dnd players:

Even when they did manage to make measurements, meanwhile, the explorers’ spatial perception was so warped by the caprices of the environment that their findings would be wildly off the mark. On a 1672 expedition in Slovenia, for example, an explorer plumbed a winding cave passage and recorded its length at six miles, when in reality, he had traveled only a quarter mile. The surveys and maps that emerged from these early expeditions were often so divergent from reality that some caves are now effectively unrecognizable. Today, we can only read the old reports as small, mysterious poems about imaginary places.

Maybe you still aren't convinced. Maybe you think that the artificial seeming dungeons would not be as disorienting as natural caverns. Plenty of people have gotten lost in the Paris catacombs. Here is one account. I would also encourage you to watch this Youtuber get lost in the Paris Catacombs; notice how feeble the light seems and the knee deep water. 

These maps make me think of the early maps that cavers would make, "a mysterious poem about an imaginary place."

 

 

Also imagine the party members that stand still shrouded in darkness watching this orb of light move off in the distance with no accurate way to no how far away the light is. Imagine the dread they feel when they think that the light might go out and their comrade is alone in a sea of dark and they have no idea what happened. You can see some of that in these videos made at the artificial caves under Castle Valkenburg in The Netherlands (these are the caves I was in. It was amazing; if you ever have the chance take a tour of these caves).

It's interesting that these maps were labeled by of exploration. It supports my idea that player maps are often adventure logs rather than surveys.

 

 

So you may think player mapping is annoying and you might not think it is fun but it the way that Dnd recreates the disorientation of being underground and the trouble of mapping labyrinths while robbed of all the things that humans use to orient themselves. If you do not want to simulate that in your games that is more than fine. You have the support of the last three version of Dnd. However, If you think that your character would not need to make a map and that your character would "have a good idea how to navigate back to where they were before," you are just wrong and have a very unrealistic idea about what it is like to be underground.

Also check out what the caves under Castle Valkenburg with a bunch of flashing lights