Two Vicars and a Myrmidon Walk Into a Tavern...

For every little typo and copywriting error, for every bizarre and mercurial choice found in the old D&D tomes, there is someone out there who thinks it is both 

1. intended that way, and 
2. better because of it.

Don't get me wrong, I love delving into the material for new insights, but sometimes someone just wrote down the wrong number, or picked one at random. Even TSR's brightest minds had deadlines to meet.

However, today I'm going to try to pitch the idea that the B/X level titles are secretly pretty awesome. I'm going to talk about how level titles are horribly misunderstood, and then demonstrate how they are an extremely useful tool for both the DM and the players. Hopefully by the end of this article you will be excited to use them when creating and running your own B/X D&D campaign!

Yep, I'm talking about these.

Evolution of the Previous Campaign's Hex Map

Note: This entire post was an old draft I've had sitting around since early 2020. I went ahead and took a few minutes to finish it and post it. At the time I wrote it, I was still running the game and used the map below. Even though I'm doing a (sort of) different thing now, I thought this would still make a fun postmortem, so I've gone ahead and edited it a little and posted it.

 

Current Version of Regional Map

It has taken me almost three years of tinkering, remixing, and revising in Hexographer to get the map pictured above. Even now, I make monthly tweaks to the map, and large swaths of it are still a work in progress. This is the map that I used as of the most recent session of my campaign, but the story of how I got here is a long one.