Bard of Valiant

Image by MadeMistakes via Flickr

I was reading this post on RPG Athenaeum about why introducing a treasure map in your game can lead to fun and profit. this got me to thinking about how to make one and what the elements are of a good treasure map.

Who hid the treasure? Answering this question is going to answer more, such as where and what they hid. Pirates probably hid gold, jewels, art objects and perhaps the odd magic items. Smugglers might have hidden a particularly dangerous cargo. Someone hiding a family heirloom is going to hide it differently than either of the previous two situations.

What did they hide? Ask yourself what kind of treasure this type of person might want to hide as well as, what are your players going to be exciting if they find. An heirloom could be something very tiny while a smuggler’s cargo is going to take space.

Do your players need cash? Or do they want ioun stones? If you’ve decided it’s a smuggler’s cargo and your party would love to find a magical vorpal sword, it’s time to get creative and think about why someone would be smuggling vorpal weapons in the first place.

Where is it hidden? Something small could be hidden in a house while a large cargo might be in the wilderness. Did the person doing the hiding want it nearby for easy access or was it a typical pirate who hid it far from a town but someplace easily accessible by sea?

This is also a good way to introduce a different type of game to your campaign. If you’ve had several city games recently, putting the treasure in the wilderness gives players a reason to leave town and vice versa.

Where does the hider live? This is a very important, but often overlooked question. A treasure map is a set of pictorial directions leading from one place to where the treasure is hidden. To have a good map, you need to think about where the person doing the hiding is starting from, where’s home base?

If you don’t want your players finding this right away, make the starting point someplace the players don’t yet know or recognize. Later, you can introduce an element from the map into the game, such as a church steeple or distinctive mountain formation.

The danger is that players will have forgotten the map by the time you do this. If that happens, just give them intelligence checks or something similar, to see if their characters remember the map.

How would this person remember to get there? Again, this is important but sometimes overlooked. A treasure map is not a terrain map but rather a set of directions made so someone could remember how to get back to the spot where they hid the item. If the person who hid it isn’t very smart, the map might be extremely vague.

Elements to consider putting on the map are the usual recognizable formations but also dangers and traps. Would the “hider” mark these down so he could avoid them? Is the map old? He may have drawn things on the map that no longer exist or not put down things that have moved in since that time.

Conclusion Asking yourself these questions before you draw your treasure map will give you something much better than the usual ‘X marks the spot’ map as well as a much more authentic handout for your game.