TOPOGRAPHY 101 FOR DUNGEON MASTERS

When Dungeons and Dragons (D&D) game evolved the Dungeon Crawl dynamic, it became extremely popular. We are talking about the Map & Room key format for writing adventures, also known as Site Adventures, and the game mechanic of Dungeon Exploration. It became so natural with Game Masters, that they took it for granted, running other games as if they were running D&D, ruining some games in the process. The reason for this widespread acceptance of the Dungeon Crawl is because the map of the labyrinth in which the adventure takes place - the layout of the rooms containing monsters, traps, treasure and secret doors, connected by corridors – also serves another purpose – it is the Flow Chart for the adventure, or the story which the players are exploring. Events of the story are contained in the rooms connected by corridors linking it with next events.

Dungeon crawl evolved so ubiquitously and no other form of fantasy role playing gaming had proved as successful. Look at many books written on urban adventuring, wilderness design etc., and none reach the elegance of generating a Dungeon, outlined above. That’s because as we saw, a D&D dungeon has more than one function. There is another concept similar in elegance to Dungeon Crawl, that can be useful to GM’s running outdoors tactical encounters. That concept is Terrain and Terrain based Topography. You can use this to represent almost any tactical encounter in the Outdoors, and it may be just as functional as the Dungeon Map.

Concept of terrain was a military invention paralleling the development of military engineering, which replaced castles and walls with the Casement and Breastwork in the new age of artillery. It is not what fantasy gamers think of terrain. A gamer, military or fantasy, might consider things like Plains, Mountains, and Forest to be terrain types, but that would be incorrect within the confines of this discussion. Plains and Mountains are Land Forms. Terrain features number few, specific and are self-exclusionary. One can be one and only one type of terrain, and not other. One can use them as building blocks to build outdoors encounter maps that will really be functional in the game.

This system assumes a flat terrain as default. Terrain types can best be viewed as obstacles to crossing clear terrain. I will not include topographic symbols here, you can google or better yet, figure them out to your liking. You DO NOT need topographic contour lines to mark elevation. Keep it simple, especially for a fantasy role playing game. The classic and the most ancient terrain concept is a PASS, as in a MOUNTAIN PASS, followed by the main terrain types: HILL, RIDGE, SPUR, and RAVINE. The lesser and more specific terrain types are as follows: SADDLE, DEFILADE, and BERM.

A MOUNTAIN PASS is simply a relatively level ground through a mountain range, where you can march a column of men or drive a wagon. A pass can be a simple gap between two gnarly hills that you can walk around, or it can be a trail hundreds of miles long, where to get off it means risking plunging off cliffs and crossing mountain glaciers. Mountain passes have historically become strategic military objectives because of their values to trade and communications. It is not really a terrain type, but it shows how military topography developed. You do not need a terrain symbol for it, since your characters are essentially following a road. You can describe the Passes for gaming in terms of locations and encounter tables, drawing it on your large-scale campaign map as a road.

HILL is self-explanatory – a summit point of a high ground. You draw it as a dot at the high point of a shape representing your hill from above. Some kind of a circle, contour lines to taste if you can read them easily and visualize the shape. High ground has obvious tactical implications.

RIDGE a ridge is a line in the high ground where you stop climbing up and start walking down. Your view of surrounding areas is cut off by ridges. You defend a hill with a defensive position, you defend a ridge with a defensive line. Topographical symbol for a ridge is a line. Hilly terrain on your map will be represented by a series of circles representing hills and lines representing ridges. Different lines will represent any roads and passes.

SPUR a spur is simply a shorter ridge running off a longer ridge. Required when mapping real world Mountains.

RAVINE is a natural trench cut into the ground. You have to bridge them for your troops to cross them. You can also sneak up and down a ravine to cover the ground unseen. You can draw a ravine as two dark lines running together or as a wider channel on small scale map, showing steepness of the walls of the ravines and ground features.

SADDLE is a feature consisting of two adjacent hills with a passable gap between them (“The Saddle”). In this case a hill can be a two-story pile of dirt on a small scale adventure map or a gap between two mountains that would qualify as a full scale Mountain Pass.

DEFILADE is a Pass or Ravine that is so narrow, that your troops can only get through them by walking in a single file. Topography was largely develop to move a battalion sized column of your troops from one location to another.

BERM – Great wall of China, Adrian’s Wall. A man-made feature separating open ground into two. Specifically refers to a two a three-story pile of earth around a military camp in the desert, of to block off one territory from the other or to make a grade crossing for the train tracks. Breastworks is a type of a Berm fortified with concrete and bricks to stop cannon-balls and further fortified to stop charging men.

You can represent any kind of an outdoor tactical encounter or an adventure using the system of symbols described above. These symbols can be used on large or small scale. Terrain describes the relief of the surface applied to troop deployment and to troop movement. You can set up a wide variety of tactical scenarios using these symbols. If you want to add the forest setting, you can add it as cover and describe the forested area in terms of Cover and Concealment that they provide. In case of Mountains, a mountain can be as complex as a dungeon adventure. You can best describe a mountain in terms of Land Forms which it consists of. Your mountain will have a Summit, a number of Ridges, various valleys between the ridges, glaciers, caves, settlements and various specific geological features such as Cirques and Washes, which will present additional challenges to players. You can do a key to a Mountain, or any other major geographic feature, just as you would do a dungeon room key.