The Friday before last, I thought it’d be fun to do some random, non-tile mapmaking. So I tried to think of a place where I could easily post about this and get nearly instant response and ideas for maps. The first place that popped into my head was the Traditional Games board on 4chan. For those of you not familiar with this site or board, I need to give a quick warning: this post has some content that isn’t suitable for kids, and probably will hurt your head if you’re an adult as well.4chan is a unique beast in that many threads get written and consumed extremely quickly, and are then lost forever; everything that falls beyond the page 15 mark (maybe different depending on the board) is gone for good, unless someone saved it or it got popular enough to be archived somewhere. In any event, the turnover rate for threads can be anywhere from a few days for good content to less than 10 minutes for crap. Aside from that, the board in question covers a variety of traditional games, so while RPers may dominate the conversation flow at times, you’re also competing with various card games and other game types as well. Main point: I’d have to get noticed and make sure the thread was popular enough to operate.
At the same time, I didn’t want to commit to more than I could make. So I devised a game for the community: any user who replies to the thread with a die roll and a dungeon name has a chance to have me draw a 5 minute dungeon with that name, but only if the d6 roll was 6. In hindsight, allowing any title was probably a poor life decision, but after ten minutes of careful deliberation, I posted the thread.
Long story short, it was a chaotic mess of inside jokes, terrible things, and a few serious people. And wouldn’t you guess which group got all the 6 rolls.
Below are the maps I drew. I’m not sure you can take any of them seriously, but if you find them useful, go for it. This is an experiment that half worked and half failed, and I’m tempted to take other mapping related concepts and see if community-driven content would work with them. But all in all, what is this I don’t even…
