One Page Dungeon Contest 2014 - The Oracle Caves

As I've done the previous three years, this year I produced an entry for the One Page Dungeon Contest. This year's entry came in just under the wire; I had four different ideas that I worked on at one point or another, then I went ahead and completed one I started in 2011 and never finished. Inspiration is a fickle mistress.



This year's entry is The Oracle Caves, which was one of the adventure locations from my 2011 wilderness entry, Wilderlands of Dire Omen. I had thought that, for succeeding years I could flesh out the world with further One Pagers, sort of gradually building a complete free setting. Blah blah fickle mistress blah blah. Anyway, the ideas for the Oracle Caves have been bouncing around in my head now for three years, I guess that was long enough for them to gel properly.

https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B1gbLqXS723cN2xaT0VYUjB4ZkU/edit?usp=sharing


The map I ended up making was huge -- I'd had in mind that it was a big place with plenty of room for improvisation, but had underestimated how much space that would take up on the paper. I ended up shrinking it a lot in order to make it fit, which means a lot of detail is lost. The full map for the caves (minus insets and labels) can be found here. I didn't give myself enough time to prettify the damn thing, so it looks really ragged.

I find the constraints of the one-page requirement liberating -- I have a tendency to unnecessary detail in language, and have to pare my text down mercilessly in order to make it fit.

I used Paint.net to do the compositing of the image, the Isomage's Random Cave Map Generator for the individual sections, and Microsoft Word to compose the document itself.

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