Treasure Maps!
Dated: 04 Aug, 2025
4th August 2025 - The prompt for RPGaday today is “Message.”
Generally, the messages in RPGs are something that furthers the plot. Maybe it steers the party back into the right direction (not that I am suggesting anyone gets railroaded of course) or perhaps fishes them out of a hole. Messages I have used in the past have been:
- A letter from a Gnome character’s parent disowning her for going adventuring;
- A ransom note;
- A bill of sale detailing the sale of one of the player’s relations into slavery;
- A wizard’s shopping list;
- Several adventures were based on adverts pinned to the Dunromin Counsel House wall.
But the best kinds of messages I have enjoyed making are Treasure Maps!
I’ve done LOADS of them, sometimes burnt at the edges, sometimes stained with tea to make them look old, sometimes written in blood in a strange language. Brilliant fun!
They are, after all, an intrinsic part of the mythology around the hobby – Gandalf gave Balin the map that led them all through the Hobbit – the copy of the book I have has a big, fold-out copy of the map, complete with the final instructions; the moon-runes as revealed by moonlight.
SM13 The Tomb of Firkin adventure is based around a map drawn by the only survivor of a Dwarf expedition to the tomb.
In 1st ed D&D there was an assigned mapper – have you ever wondered what happened to the maps after the party had finished with them? We had a character who copied them and sold them to other adventurers, suggesting they leave it for a few months for some beasties to re-populate the area.
In the treasure lists for D&D you can roll a magical spell scroll or a protection scroll. In the old red box Basic D&D you could also roll a treasure map. I always loved that option! Just a random chance! I used this idea a lot – sneak previews of the next adventure; coded messages; all sorts. Pete Wake gave us one once (about 1983) that didn’t closely resemble the dungeon at all – a major passage and some rooms were missing and the scale was to-cock, which made it VERY interesting.
I once seeded the above “Treasure Map” into one of my campaigns (a little bit inspired by the Fellowship’s experiences in Moria), but the PCs didn’t search where it was. I re-located it. They still didn’t find it. And again…
Not that they might have called it a 'map' exactly. This was probably a good thing as I never actually got around to writing the adventure it linked to. But here it is, do with it what you may…
How we seed an adventure is key, it’s a part of the set-up, and who doesn’t love it when the DM passes over a stained a ragged piece of parchment bearing strange shapes and a foreign tongue?