Making Better House Maps for D&D

A shorter post this week, as a real-life wave of weddings to attend and other commitments have given me way less writing time over the past month. I stumbled upon the image below while exploring the previews about the new "Bastion" system in the 2024 Dungeon Master's Guide--which releases tomorrow. I haven't decided exactly how much I'm going to cover the new DMG (whether or not to do a full first impressions writeup like I did with the 2024 Players' Handbook), but I do know I'm going to write more about the Bastion system because it is possibly the part I'm most interested in seeing the full rules for.

But in the meantime, while I wait for the release and to actually collect my thoughts about it--a couple of weeks--here's a rant about maps, and about this map specifically.

This is meant to be a house or outpost for the party, rendered in the work-in-progress virtual tabletop that Wizards of the Coast is trying to make. It looks like a fairly standard D&D dungeon--a bunch of rooms, connected with hallways, and mostly rectangular. There's furniture to make combat more interesting, there's clear light sources, and there's a bunch of different types of rooms, each of which promises to have a function in the new bastion system.

But like. Who would live here? Who would build this? Why is there so much dead space?

Making More Realistic Buildings

I want you to think about wherever you live. How many hallways are there? My apartment has zero. My parents' house has one, with the bedrooms branching off of it. The school that I teach at is built like a giant square, with one hallway running in a loop around it, with each classroom door in the hall.

Now, think about how much dead space there is. The answer in all three of my cases is none. A wall is the connection between rooms. A hallway connects doors, but the rooms themselves are not weirdly spaced out. Every room directly shares a wall with its neighbors, and the wall is as small as it can be while still serving as a separator. What on earth is going on in the weird void space between the Kitchen, Arcane Study, Bedroom, and Teleportation circle?

Can you still have long, twisty passageways in your caves? Absolutely. But there's simply no place in a human-made structure for massive chunks of blank space. It should be a room. If you can avoid hallways, you probably should--you only need hallways when you have adjacent rooms that should not have a door directly connecting them.

The reason for this stems, in large part, from history. Building materials--stone, wood, or mud--is often expensive. Building a thicker wall means vastly more cost. At the same time, a building is meant to protect what is inside it, with larger structures (like castles) being designed to prevent attackers being able to get inside any part of the structure.

So in our image example, what stands between the Pub and the Teleportation Circle? Is that exposed to the outside? Is it a little alley? If so, this bastion completely fails at being any sort of defensive outpost, which is what most large-scale constructions would have been in the medieval-renaissance mixture of D&D's historical roots. Is it a supremely thick wall? Well, that's going to be costly. Why not just put them adjacent to one another, with a normal wall running between them (rather than a 5-foot-thick, full square of space)?

This weird snaking mix of long passages and needless void space is common in a lot of D&D maps because it creates choke points and clearly delineated combat zones. But while a cave could form that way--and a lot of old-school D&D was set in caves--in person-created buildings, it is simply impractical.

In contrast, this is the map from the haunted house in Ghosts of Saltmarsh. Looks at how much more compact that is! That's a house someone could reasonably live in and build. There's no random, extraneous dead space. There are hallways (like between rooms 2 and 3) without being unnecessarily winding and long. The rooms actually attach to the sides of the hallway, like they do in a real-world hallway.

The trick, of course, is to make sure that each room is still big enough for what you need to happen there. Room 9 on the map is supposed to be a combat zone for the party against 4 creatures– no way all of that is taking place in that one room.

But if you're letting the players design their bastions and charging them by the room, you should also consider charging them for any major dead space that they're going to be filling up with building material.

Conclusion

This week's post is short, but be sure to subscribe for what's coming up soon! Coming next week, I have an interview with an ENnie-award-winning writer for Pathfinder 2. Don't want posts delivered weekly? You can subscribe to my monthly newsletter instead or in addition, where I'll link everything I wrote that month, as well as spotlight a few bonus links to other creators and link to any new products I've released.