Mapping with Sandboxigons
Point-crawling dungeons and wilderness
Update 2017-08-14: The Dungeon Template has been amended and monochrome PDF files are now included in the post.
A while ago Doug Anderson’s work on Sandboxigons inspired me to create some templates elaborating on his fine example. The template set has both the basic Dungeon Template, which can be used for indoor and outdoor mapping, and a couple of map key pages for making easy references to the Cartesian coordinates on the map. The pages I created have room for punching holes in the borders so they can be used in a binder. The numbers at each edge are coordinates to adjoining maps.
For my own amusement I created a couple of maps:
By popular demand here are the templates in PDF Form:
Editable SVG files in a Zip File
These are great! Thanks to both of you on this collaboration.
Glad you like them, you are most welcome.
Which of these links is the Anderson Sandboxigons Template like the one completed at the top of the article? I think I missed it.
Ah… that would be because I forgot to include it… which would really be the point of the article, lol. Well, it was a moment of absent mindedness. I’ve added the link, and an image of the sandboxigons. All is well.
http://breeyark.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/Anderson_SandBoxigon_Template_Blue.pdf
The “Dungeon Template” is something I came up with. The octagons can be used to orient figurines.
Appreciate the post.
This is one of my favorite things on the internet. Beautiful and functional. Thanks for making it!
One possible error: surely the northeast corner of the dungeon grid, (0, 1), should head to (1, 1) to the east, and not (1, 3)?
And one very dorky suggestion: would it be possible to do a pass where the dungeon coordinates go 0-9 rather than 1-0? I find it confusing to have 0 be the highest, rather than the lowest, coordinate (though I get that it correlates to the numbering of a d10– is that why it’s done this way, to allow for random coordinate selection?) It may just be that I work in software and everything in that world is numbered beginning with 0…
Thank you again for these!
I have corrected the typo at the top right for the dungeon grid.
I don’t want to renumber the grid, I have no problem with rolling 1 to 10. I’ll make the template available in svg format though so you can edit the thing with Inkscape if you like, bear with me…
Editable SVG files are now part of the post. They can be edited with Inkscape. Fonts are not included, you’ll need Airstream, King Arthur, Times New Roman, Franklin Gothic Medium, and Octohedron.
http://breeyark.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/08/SandBoxOctogonSVG.zip
These are really nice! Though my laser printer can’t handle the colors well (original TSR would chuckle knowingly, oy). Would you consider sharing a black version?
Photoshop/GIMP for a black version?
Monochrome PDF files are now available…
Great resource! Any reason the dungeon template is lighter than the others?
Not sure but I’ll take another look at that.
Do you know if there any set measurements for each octagon? For example, in Pathfinder 1e, each hexagon on a map equals about 12 miles from point to point.
Hi FRYZ,
I can’t really remember if Doug had a particular scale in mind. If you remember Gygax map of KOTB he used a square grid. Really, for an outdoor map the scale could be anything you want. It depends on how rigorous you want to be and how you would like to scale up or down. There’s no reason why it has to be a 3×3 pattern at all but I was kind of thinking 300 ft can be divided into 900 x 900 ft, which makes one of the 3×3 squares 100 ft for dungeon mapping, so you get a 10×10 map; which neatly segways into those map tiles everyone seems to really like with the two exits per side. Take a look at the dungeon map template. There, basically the Octagon could be considered to facilitate orientation within the “square”.
You don’t have to use an arbitrary number. Out door map scale could be how far can a character walk in one day, half a day, quarter of a day. Something practical.
Greg
Sorry for the late reply, but many thanks! Those are some brilliant ideas (so I hadn’t considered any at all, lol)!
Glad you are enjoying them, Doug Anderson’s work was definitely the spark!