From mechanics to topographics: when the map becomes the medium of the conversation

Late blogpost answering the Bandwagon call of Prismatic Wasteland.

During Covid, we played a lot with the family. I tried to introduce some dungeon‑crawling, but we quickly abandoned the dice and rolls to focus on the parts we actually loved: the maps and the scrolls. For years, I’d been deeply inspired by the walkthrough maps created by Jason Bradley Thompson (@mockman), so turning our gameplay into a mapping experience felt completely natural.

The map became our dice, our mechanics, and our shared language. We built the world as we went : adding details, coloring, erasing, commenting, imagining what happened to the characters and the places they explored. One long, continuous map, shifting perspectives as needed, became the center of every session.

That conversation lasted two years and eventually filled nine meters of drawings on a roll of Ikea paper, a sprawling scroll that captured our entire compaign.

 

The First map. Originally, it was detach from the mega scroll for a one shot dungeon-crawling.

 

 

The second adventure. With a stolen dragon banker, mesmerized digging dwarves and an illusionist mastermind. 

 

 

The third adventure. A city crawl I forgot about.

The 9 meters long scroll of continuous adventures.

 

 

Addendum after post :  Also, it kept the engagement with the game feeling more "safe" because the immersion was less direct. The monsters that were drawn were much less scary than the ones the game‑dad‑master described in the shared imagination space.