Two of my favorite things are tabletop roleplaying games and maps. Maps, like comics, contain stories within them and present time, as well as space, in a functional and ideally beautiful way. I’ve been fortunate and thrilled to have recently completed a project which combines both these things… my newest book, DUNGEONS! ILLUSTRATED MAPS OF CLASSIC DUNGEONS & DRAGONS ADVENTURES, coming from Ten Speed Press on April 27. 2027!
So what’s the deal with this book?? If you’ve been following my work for the past decade or so, you may have seen the many ‘walkthrough maps’ I’ve done for the Dungeons & Dragons website. Starting as a single-page Tomb of Horrors illustration drawn for my editor at WotC Bart Carroll, I’ve since drawn over two dozen of these, many several pages (or the size of a giant oversize poster) in length. I’ve loved making these maps and illuminating classic (and new!) D&D adventures in my own style, with stick figures fighting terrible monsters, falling into totally unfair traps, and finding wondrous treasures.
Now, the best of these monster-filled maps are collected in a gigantic 80-page artbook! In addition to the maps themselves (and the stories of the adventurers who dare explore them), these books contain tons of other new artwork and writing by me, including a foldout map of the Sword Coast, snarky but accurate info on the worlds of Dungeons & Dragons, AND a handy one-page room-by-room guide to every one of the dungeons depicted, listing every creature, magic item and gold piece!!
Whether you’re an old adventure who’s already been level-drained, Polymorphed and Petrified, or a wide-eyed newcomer to dungeoneering, this is a book you will love. Run to the limits of your movement rate to your favorite bookstore/gamestore on April 27, or better yet, preorder it NOW online or directly from Ten Speed Press here!
Explore eight classic Dungeons & Dragons adventures through intricately illustrated and annotated maps, created by award-winning D&D cartographer Jason Thompson
Dungeons! takes adventurers on an exciting, action-packed, and often humorous journey through eight classic Dungeons & Dragons campaigns. Explore each iconic dungeon through thirteen deeply detailed full-color maps (plus a gatefold map of the Sword Coast) that are annotated with helpful tips, valuable guidance, and cheeky asides about the monsters, villains, and traps that lurk within. Follow your party through trials in:
The Moathouse of Evil (aka the Village of Hommlet)
White Plume Mountain
The Lost Caverns of Tsojcanth
The Underdark
Ten Towns
Hold of the Storm Giants
The Tomb of Horrors
Barovia and Castle Ravenloft
Perfect for fans old and new, experienced players and beginners alike will love Dungeons!’s immersive, illustrated walkthrough maps and clever gameplay notes. Discover (or revisit) the thrilling treasures and dangerous foes hidden within these quintessential D&D locations.
Many have dared brave these dungeons. Will you survive to the end?
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Probably a D&D supplement at ToyWorks, the toy store in Healdsburg, California. This would have been 1982 or 1983 so I would have been 8 or 9. When RPGs were (briefly) carried in mainstream kids’ stores because they were so weird and unknown.
Favorite TTRPG game world
There are so many. At the moment, possibly Luka Rejec’s Ultraviolet Grasslands. That unique mix of Marco Polo, Burning Man and Moebius/Druillet.
A published NPC that had a lasting impression on you
I can’t easily remember one.
First TTRPG you bought from its creator
Possibly The Dreaming Crucible at a convention in Oregon. I didn’t know about indy RPGs until fairly late.
TTRPG you’ve played the most
D&D5e, D&D3e (I hated the changes in 3.5 edition and prefer to think of it all as one blur of 3.x), Call of Cthulhu, Shadowrun. Dreamland, the game I’m playtesting.
A favorite TTRPG character you’ve played
Various characters in the four-year-long 3e campaign I played in. Cedric Tintaggon, the foreign cleric of Guan Yu, who came back from the dead after training in heaven Son Goku style. Raj Sanjeevani, the free-spirited wu jen based on Rajnikanth, and his assorted animal-folk assistants. Raj Sanjeevani’s evil, twisted demon-summoner sister whose name I can’t remember. Also a couple of Cthulhu and Shadowrun characters from way back in college: Hugh Grisly the cynical cigar-smoking pulp author. The three (they died one after the other….!) half-elf shaman sisters in Shadowrun.
The TTRPG you’ve spent the most money on but never played
I’ve managed to try a lot of things at least once; my basement has boxes full of D&D books that I’ve never used but I do play D&D. I’d love to play Ryuutama sometime. Fabula Ultima. Ultraviolet Grasslands and many of the other OSR-ish things I’ve read but not played.
Favorite TTRPG for its art
Agggghh, tough question…. most ‘lines’ of RPGs become inconsistent at some point don’t they? I admire folks who are able to make games and do both all the art & all the writing (like Luka Rejec). I also love the ultradetailed B&W lineart style of ’80s British fantasy that I associate with Warhammer and the Fiend Folio. And I love Erol Otus’s work, it got me into D&D.
Favorite TTRPG for its writing
Patrick Stuart’s writing is always inspiring.
Have you played a journaling game
I own Tim Hutchings’ beautiful “Thousand Year Old Vampire”, but no.
Have you played a hex crawl
Not really. Unless you count half-forgotten poorly-DMed games in elementary school or junior high. I’ve run “The Isle of Dread” once or twice but I didn’t show them a hex map.
Have you designed a dungeon
Yes. But I did this a lot more often when I was a kid than I do now; I have pages and pages of weird wilderness and dungeon maps from elementary school and junior high. When I was actually running D&D5e, it was so much easier to just pull together existing dungeons & adventures and repurpose them. Remixing. I have written two D&D5e dungeons: The Barber of Silverymoon and Six Faces of Death.
Have you played LARP
Yes. I love it. I was fortunate to play in several games with the “Enigma” Los Angeles LARPing group in college. All politicking/scheming science fiction oneshots. I sucked at the politicking but it was fun to make the costumes.
Favorite object one of your characters has owned
Not sure. In our D&D3e game, most of the cool magic items I acquired ended up as free consolation magic items after I died and created a new character (“…and you have X gp’s worth of magic items”). I guess in my very very first D&D game, in elementary school, my fighter acquired a Ring of Petrification which (due to clearly some very indulgent DMing) I was later able to use to petrify the Minotaur God.
Memorable relationship one of your characters has had
Not sure. In the Dreamland game DMed by my spouse, my character had never felt love, so they used a Passion Memory to conjure up “the one person they could fall in love with”, and it had an interesting effect. This didn’t exactly blossom into an ongoing relationship, though. I haven’t gotten to play in many love-story or relationship-driven games, though I’d like to try more.
Do you collect TTRPGs by a certain designer
I keep an eye out for new stuff from Luka Rejec, Patrick Stuart, Emmy Allen, David McGrogan, Jacob Hurst, and Zedeck Siew. I also like Sarah Doombringer and James Raggi’s writing. I don’t know why almost all of these ended up being “OSR” folks because I don’t find OSR *rules* particularly interesting but I like the kinds of fantasy things that end up getting written in that zone. Kenneth Hite, Robin D. Laws, Jonathan Tweet.
TTRPG you really want to play in 2023
Not sure. Maybe Mothership. Fabula Ultima.
Most memorable monster/villain you’ve confronted in a TTRPG
I’m usually the DM, so can I list monsters & villains I played instead? I played a lot of demented villains in the ridiculous KULT campaign I ran from 1995-1996; I think the most fun was the Ryuji Yamazaki-inspired mercenary who drove around in a Razide (basically a demon) bound in the form of a 1950s muscle car. I loved the condescending hyperarrogant gold dragon enemy in our old Babylon D&D game (very heavily modified from D&D5e’s “Rise of the Dragon Queen/Curse of Tiamat” campaign), even though the campaign ended abruptly so he only showed up for one or two sessions. The mysterious Red King, master of the Tiamat Cult. The vengeful half-black-dragon swordswoman and her frogfolk companion. Ammi-Saduqa, the Archmage of Babylon. The green dragon who talked in rhyme. It’s fun hamming it up and being a villain lets you do all the fun evil stuff and get all the crazed evil speeches (though the players always try to kill you before you can finish them).
Ever experienced bleed
As a player: yes. Mostly while playing horror games. There is nothing more fun than being scared in a game!! I was playing GURPS “Flight 13” in college and I was reacting so much to the body horror that the DM told me I didn’t need to make any fear rolls because I was already roleplaying so well, haha.
As a DM, getting these moments from players is the greatest thing you can do. I don’t mean just fear of course. Making folks really hate the villain, making them really want to save the imaginary people from some imaginary horrible fate, etc. Making them feel a sense of wonder when they discover that the entire universe is a bubble enclosed in an infinite ocean. I’ve always been happiest as a DM in these moments.
How did you get into TTRPGS
I was a little kid during the first RPG boom and I knew I wanted to try this, and the moment I played my first D&D game (DMed by my mother’s friend’s teenage son), I realized this was awesome.
In 2008-2010, I collaborated with Victor Hao (an incredible artist) to create two volumes of a graphic novel series, my shonen manga/tabletop mashup King of RPGs (vol 1 and vol 2). It came out after the ‘manga boom’ had peaked (and non-Japanese ‘manga-style’ graphic novels had never benefited even during boomtime, a fact I should have known) and sold terribly in bookstores, though it did great for me in person at conventions. After a few weak attempts at doing a webcomic sequel, I’ve since abandoned it to the graveyard of old story ideas. (At least it appeared in print and had a sort of ending!!)
Looking through old files recently, I discovered a bunch of notes I’d written describing the cosmology of Neo-Pegana, the game universe created by gamemaster Theodore Dudek (for Mages & Monsters, the world’s most famous tabletop RPG) within the universe of King of RPGs. If you can take an imaginary world seriously for the duration of a comic, then why can’t you take an imaginary world within an imaginary world seriously? I had presented some-but-not-all of this in the fanzine King of RPGs: Secrets of Neo-Pegana, but I finally sold out of those, so here I present the background of Theo’s (primary) game universe. This specific text was written as background info for a hypothetical King of RPGs video game, which of course sadly never was completed.
**********************
Neo-Pegana
Neo-Pegana is the world of Theodore’s Mages & Monsters campaign as seen in King of RPGs volumes 1 and 2. It’s a dangerous, gritty, swashbuckling world with an African/Middle-Eastern/Central Asian look, a world of vast deserts and deadly jungles.
Neo-Pegana, a world roughly the size of our own, is mostly an arid desert. There are some oases, fertile forests and grasslands, but mostly the world is very dry and getting drier. In the current time – two generations after the Great War of the Inner Lands seen in King of RPGs volume 2 – the world seems to be perilously close to destruction from climate change. The sea level has sunk 100 feet since the Great War, and shrinks more every year. As the ocean shrinks, wrecked ships are exposed on the ocean floor – along with ruins of sunken cities apparently built at a time when the ocean was even lower. There are legends that once the earth was destroyed by a flood, but now, everyone fears that it will be destroyed by drought. The scarcity of water has caused wars and uprisings.
The other great threat to the world is the Plants. Giant plants towering thousands of feet high, these great jungles exist on the edges of the world, slowly growing. The jungle in the shadow of the Plants is wetter than the desert, but it is infested with giant insects and fierce monsters, making it uninhabitable. Year by year, the Plants slowly spread.
The world is flat. If you travel far, far to the edges, things start to get weird and time and space become distorted. You eventually come to a giant wall that towers into the sky, beyond which no one has traveled. But in a few jagged, mountainous places, if you climb to the height of 10 Mount Everests, it is said that you can climb to the top of the Wall. Beyond is an unearthly desert landscape of twisted wood. If you keep traveling, you come to the Edge of the World, where the earth drops away into an infinite jungle, the Jungle of Night, thousands of miles below. And sometimes, from the Edge of the World, you can see Trogool, the ultimate god, Keeper of the Book.
The secret of the world is: Neo-Pegana is a sandbox. Technically, it’s a world based on the sandbox where Theodore used to play when he was younger (as seen in one panel in volume 1). That’s why there is no permanent source of water, and why it is being invaded by massive weeds and grasses; it is a pretty overgrown sandbox. (The sandbox thing is metaphorical, of course; the inhabitants of Neo-Pegana aren’t literally 1 mm tall, else a single drop of rain would destroy one of their cities.) Theodore is Trogool, the ultimate god, but since he went to college he has not had time for his old sandbox creations.
The Gods and Creatures
Trogool, the great god, first made human beings out of metal, but they displeased him. Then he made human beings out of wood, but they displeased him. Then he made human beings out of oil that bubbled up from the earth, and they pleased Trogool. They were much taller and more beautiful than the people of earth today, and when they died their bodies did not decay. But after many aeons, they too displeased Trogool, and he ended the world and took the early humans away to paradise. Finally he made human beings out of animals, and it was good. He placed us in a walled garden rich and fruitful with all the things of the earth, and this is where we live today.
—from the Book of Pegana, the main religious text of Neo-Pegana
Theodore played with metal, wooden and plastic toys in his sandbox. After he got older and went away to college, a few plastic action figures were left in the sandbox, buried in the sand. These abandoned action figures, angry at being left behind, decided that they were gods. Using the power granted to them by Theodore/Trogool, they decided to make creatures in their own image for they, themselves, to play with.
These “gods,” known as Ya, Ha, Snyrg, made life by mutating and evolving animals. They took the kinds of little animals that lived in Theodore’s overground sandbox—insects, lizards, snakes—and evolved them into all kinds of forms, including humanoid ones. Their goal was to make creatures like themselves, but their initial efforts were imperfect. They created lizard people, snake people, beetle people, cricket people, frog people and so on. But by killing and killing, the three gods’ creations could be perfected; and over time, the most aggressive and warlike of these races started to spontaneously evolve into new shapes closer to that of the bloodthirsty Ya, Ha and Snyrg. These ‘civilized’ races were known as humans, and (over the many cycles of drought and flood) they soon forgot that they were descended from the barbaric animals. The Azirites and Toldeeans of today do not know that their ancestors were the feared snake men and scorpion men, although they still venerate the snake and scorpion as totems.
There were two other action figures buried in the sand as well. One was Yam, the dragon, an action figure older than the rest, who Theodore used to use to bash the sandcastles and the other action figures. Instead of evolving existing animals, it split off bits of its own plastic and put its power into them, creating dragons. This is why each dragon has a pearl of solidified oil or coal tar inside it, and why dragons are beasts of fire and metal and destruction. The other action figure was Belzoond, an old cotton-velveteen doll that one of Theodore’s friends had left in the sandbox during a birthday party. Since it was made of cotton (unlike plastic like Ya, Ha, Snyrg and the Dragon) it made life forms from plants, creating elves, gnomes and halflings. But these races became overconfident, decadent and evil, and were eventually surpassed by humans.
Today, despite the loss of a few of the original races (such as orcs, who were all wiped out by the other races), there are many strange creatures in Neo-Pegana. Most of the life forms are enlarged versions of insects and microscopic life, such as giant rotifers, tardigrades and bugs of various sorts. (The works of Ernst Haeckel have great inspiration: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kunstformen_der_Natur) Others are weird versions of ‘normal’ animals like camels, horses, cows and sheep, which were made by Ya, Ha, Snyrg and Belzoond from their imagination of what those animals should look like, having only heard of them, not seen them. Neo-Pegana is also occasionally troubled by invaders from other worlds: the terrible ants and other things which dig up from the infinite underground (since the sandbox has no solid bottom), the giant worms and evil creatures like the Hounyhyms which live among the Plants (i.e. the lawn), and even beings such as the birdlike Gibbelins, which dwell far away beyond the night sky, in the Tree of Heaven.
The Religion
The main gods of Neo-Pegana, Ya, Ha and Snyrg, are all worshipped mostly through idols. Since the gods themselves are plastic, they prefer their idols to be made of plastic, but it is a rare material. Very rarely, the gods can also possess people and turn them into their avatars, like the snake man who was possessed by Ya and turned into the focus of a new religious cult, Yaldabaoth the Thrice-Wounded.
One of the few things most of the Neo-Peganans agree on is their religious texts. These texts are seven books based on books Theodore was reading at the time and named his campaign world after, the works of Lord Dunsany (1878-1957): http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_Plunkett,_18th_Baron_of_Dunsany
The Books of Neo-Pegana
The Book of Time
The Book of the Gods
The Book of Welleran
The Book of Dreams
The Book of Wonder
The Last Book of Wonder
The Book of 51 Tales
Although these cryptic texts actually describe things which did not take place in Neo-Pegana, the inhabitants believe that they did, and they have mostly named themselves (and their world) after things from the books. (NOTE: As far as I can tell, the works of Lord Dunsany are out of copyright, which is why I’ve ‘paid tribute’ to them in King of RPGs, the same way that people use names from H.P. Lovecraft’s Cthulhu Mythos stories. If there’s any doubt, though, we can just subtly change the names.) The tales have been passed down through oral tradition and have changed a lot in the process. However, it is said that the original books exist somewhere, buried under the ocean waves and desert sands, and that one day the seven books will be discovered and the gods will rise and all of the good people of Neo-Pegana will ascend to heaven.
This end-of-the-world prophecy is the core plot of the video game. As the ocean shrinks, various factions start to seek out the books to cause the end of the world. The heroes must race against time to stop the villains from getting all the magic books, like G.I. Joe racing against Cobra in an old G.I. Joe cartoon from the ’80s. Meanwhile, they must also find a source of water and save the world from death by drought. And of course, to do all this, they must go to the End of the World. ***
Hey everyone! I’m working on a variety of things I can’t announce quite yet, but in the meantime I wanted to share one bit of fun news. The two ‘official’ Dungeons & Dragons adventures I wrote for dragonmag.com are now available on DMsGuild with additional artwork and corrections!
The Barber of Silverymoon(levels 4-6) – People have been disappearing at night in the city of Silverymoon. Some vanish entirely, leaving behind whispered rumors of fiends or other evil creatures having spirited them away. Others return strangely altered, with their memories of having been kidnapped wiped clean and their minds strangely dulled…and always with AMAZING HAIRCUTS. Can your adventurers discover the secret which threatens Silverymoon? Will they put their lives, their souls… their very HAIR on the line to save the town?
“Barber of Silverymoon” is a fun one-shot adventure I wrote for the release of “Volo’s Guide to Monsters.” It features some cool magic items (sort of…), traps and tricks, and a diabolical barbershop that makes Sweeney Todd look like Nadine Labaki in “Caramel”.
Six Faces of Death (levels 11-13) – An alien being, dark omens, and vanishing ships send the adventurers to a mysterious island newly appeared in the Sea of Swords. But can the characters uncover the mysteries of “Changing Island” in time to save Faerûn from the weird and terrifying invasion of the… SIX FACES OF DEATH?
“Six Faces of Death” is a two- or three-night dark-fantasy adventure created for the release of “Mordenkainen’s Tome of Foes”. You can run it as either comedic and roleplay-oriented, or as pretty deadly. After I wrote it I realized I’d written an OSR-style adventure for Dungeons & Dragons 5th edition…. which I’m happy about. If you’re a player who likes being dropped in a strange environment and figuring out what’s going on, or a DM who lives describing gross and surreal things, this is for you.
Best of all, both these adventures are FREE downloads! So there’s no reason not to create a DMsGuild account (if you don’t have one already) and go get them! Check them out! Many thanks to Scott Fitzgerald Gray for editing and polishing the text and for Bart Carroll for commissioning them and making them possible.
Two of my favorite things are tabletop roleplaying games and maps. Maps, like comics, contain stories within them and present time, as well as space, in a functional and ideally beautiful way. I’ve been fortunate and thrilled to have recently completed a project which combines both these things… my newest book, DUNGEONS! ILLUSTRATED MAPS OF CLASSIC DUNGEONS & DRAGONS ADVENTURES, coming from Ten Speed Press on April 27. 2027!
