A Guide to treasure maps?

[Swaoeaeieu]

Hello again, i am here once more to ask for some advice on how to be a good DM in my ongoing pirate campaign.
The time has finally come, by player request, and my own ambitions, i am finally going to try my hand at giving the players a treasure map and letting that be the centre of a few sessions.

problem is, i have no idea how.

i am guessing some visual representation of clues, maybe a riddle like thing. traps, tricks and other dangers along the way.
But i could really use some input. You guys are experienced right? anyone have any nice stories or ideas about the use of this kind of plothook?

EDIT IN SOME CONTEXT: My players are about to find a map not so much to a pirate treasure, but to what a race of fish people (kuo-toa) talk about as ''the promised land'' So the adventure will be less buried treasure and more Road to El Dorado type treasuremap.

Of course, a tricksy map can also be written by someone who found the Area of Worship before. But it wont be the same as a group of pirate who hid it, its supposed to be some sort of holy relic, at least according to barely inteligent fish people.

thanks in advance!

[InvisibleBison]

What I did once was give my PCs four maps, each with a different location indicated. The trick was that three of the maps were wrong in some of the details of the geography they depicted - a mountain range going farther than it should, a missing island, things like that - and the one map without any errors was the one that indicated the correct location.

[Ursus Spelaeus]

Just play it straight.
Give the players a map. Mark where the treasure is. Let the players plan out how to get to that treasure using the information available on the map.
Put obstacles in their path when they try to get to the treasure.

[Afgncaap5]

tl;dr - You probably want more "clues that a particular pirate crew would have an edge on solving" than actual "riddles that any smart person can solve." Or just make a basic map with an X and make the journey to the X a lotta fun.

______________________

I guess part of this would depend on how you've been portraying pirates so far. A map with clues, riddles, and puzzles is a fun idea, but it's also a weird one when you think about the motivation behind burying a treasure. I mean, pirates wouldn't want just anyone who found their map to be able to get their treasure and a riddle meant for associates to solve often comes with the issue that anyone who sees a riddle can solve it.

Now, if you want a world where that's just "the way pirates are" (or even just the way a very particular pirate is) that's fine. It doesn't make a lot of sense in our world, but in a kind of cartoonish, larger-than-life examination of what pirates look like it can still work.

A common solution to this that I've seen is the use of cryptograms or the use of symbols as a replacement alphabet. There, at least, players face a challenge a bit more esoteric than riddles where the pirates would have an edge because they allegedly already know the translation of the symbols or letters. In my experience, giving players a cryptogram to work on can be risky because sometimes only one player will really be involved and others will just sit out.

If you want the same *effect* as a cryptogram that can encourage a little more player involvement, giving the players the answers but no explanation of how the answers work can help people work together. To date the most successful thing like this I've done is giving the players a series of hieroglyphs and a sort of "Hieroglyphs-To-Common" dictionary that gave two or three possible meanings of each symbol based on the context of the phrase around it. For some reason this clicked with the whole group more than standard cryptogram solving, probably because one word at a time with three possible meanings feels less daunting than "Now, let's compare the most commonly occurring letters here with the most common ones in English and hope that the usage patterns remain consistent."

Unfortunately, *this* method is a lot of work for a GM, and just because I lucked in to a really, really receptive group of players doesn't actually mean that this kind of problem will translate well to other groups. Also, it's starting to move away from the pirate theme, because while a cryptogram is easy for a GM to set up it's not necessarily easy for a group of players to solve even if they're given information. So instead of Riddles, Cryptograms, or Symbol Manipulation, I suggest going for the more thematically deceptive Clues.

I mean, if I show you a map covered with runes, it might be frustrating but you can probably crack that code in few hours, maybe a day if I'm using a good code system (and maybe NEVER if I use some VERY good systems, but who wants to do that to their players?) Unfortunately, this is stopping the game and not letting players be pirates. The roleplaying aspect should be here to let the players feel like pirates when they get their hands on the plunder. Here's an example pirate map and scenario.

Consider a map where there's a big red X on an island, and next to the X is a note saying "Beneath Bertha's Bite." You go to the island, locate the X, and find a very obvious set piece letting you know that pirates have been there (a few empty and cracked sea chests, a broken mast, a cannon, some rusted scabbards, even some skeletons who look like they died fighting.) Of note is a skull on the ground that doesn't have a connected mandible. Smart players will figure out that the skull is "biting" the ground, will dig there, and will find a treasure chest with two-thousand gold, fifty platinum coins, a few rubies, and a jolly roger, along with a couple of potions. Woo, Standard treasure suitable for a monster of a CR equal to the PC's ECL!

But wait! Before the players leave the island, have them run afoul of pirates who were just behind them. Somehow, have a member of these other pirates reveal crucial information about the crew they sailed with ten years earlier, and mention that in the glory days the captain called their surprisingly destructive cannon Bertha, the gun with a bite that could ruin any ship it struck. Now things make more sense; the treasure the players found was a decoy! Only members of the original crew would know that Bertha was the cannon, and not the skull. Firing the cannon and going to where the cannonball lands will take the players to a different patch of land, one where there aren't any signs of pirate activity. Digging at the spot the cannonball hits may take some time, but will soon reveal a *huge* treasure, one more befitting an actual treasure hunt.

Now, was any of that particularly challenging or taxing? Of course not. Players are smart, and they'll figure this out. But there are twists to it. Finding the treasure requires a code (the message by the X) and a key (the information provided by the pirates). The pirates were prepared for treachery and betrayal, so needing information that only the crew would have can help the players feel in on the action.

Treasure Maps are lots of fun, but only because of the story that comes attached to them. Come up with a story for a pirate and a crew and figure out why this map is crucial. Treasure Island doesn't endure as a classic because the map was particularly challenging, it endures because the map itself was a secret and because of the stories of paranoid betrayal and retribution surrounding Captain Flint's plunder. If you come up with a good story that makes your players have to think and retrace the steps of pirates, your players will remember that a lot longer than following a map to its indicated location and solving a riddle.

Now, I like your thoughts about the map warning about different hazards along the way. Most people expected to go after the treasure will probably know about those things without needing the map to tell them about the problems they might face, but if we just imagine a larger group of pirates with a rapid turnover rate it becomes a little easier. In this case, I'd recommend making the clues more like warnings or easy clues. A cave on the trail to the spot the treasure is hidden might say "Bribe for Hungry Sanders" which could mean to bring gold for the ghost of a pirate that was killed when the treasure was first buried, or possibly just a lot of fresh fish for Hungry Sanders the king-sized alligator so that he doesn't attack the players instead. And, of course, simple traps with complex solutions. To crib a page from Indiana Jones, if you were to recreate the "Name of God" challenge from The Last Crusade, you might write the phrase "The Name of God" followed by "Jehova", and then a very shaky hand below that might say something like "Trap made by Latin-speakers" (adjust for setting appropriate figures, naturally.) That basic model of "Here's a puzzle!" "Here's a clue to the solution!" And then, right when it's too late, "Wait, you don't have the full context..." is good both for simple puzzles where instant death is avoidable on failure (or even for comedy in other scenes.) Players who have Bardic Knowledge will thank you for this, but don't let that be a complete workaround.

[Swaoeaeieu]

Wow, thanks for all the great stuff so far guys.
But now i feel like an idiot for not putting more context in the opening post...
My players are about to find a map not so much to a pirate treasure, but to what a race of fish people (kuo-toa) talk about as ''the promised land'' So the adventure will be less buried treasure and more Road to El Dorado type treasuremap.

Of course, a tricksy map can also be written by someone who found the Area of Worship before. But it wont be the same as a group of pirate who hid it, its supposed to be some sort of holy relic, at least according to barely inteligent fish people.

[Telok]

Another thing you can do is to have a map of the island, with an X on it, but no information on where the island is or what the geographic features to find the treasure are. The companion to this is the diary of one of the pirates. That contains information on how to get to the island ("On the first day of winter we left port without crewman <name> because he was in jail for <crime> and sailed into the morning sun for three weeks.") and perhaps some clues to what dangers they'll face along the way ("We sailed around the island and approached from the lee side.").

The adventure then is to find the book and the port of call that the ship left from. They they follow the clues in the book and check them against the map.

[Darrin]

Some spitballing:

1) MacGuffin Chase. In it's most basic form, a treasure map is a MacGuffin. The term itself comes from Hitchcock movies (coined by screenwriter Angus MacPhail, who worked often with Alfred Hitchcock), but the concept is much, much older, and can be found throughout all fiction and various mythologies. Quest for the Holy Grail (in whatever form) is a MacGuffin Chase. The MacGuffin is some artifact or object so powerful or desirable that a wide group of heroes or factions are searching for or competing for control. In a well-plotted MacGuffin/Grail Quest, the MacGuffin will change hands several times with clever heists, diabolical betrayals, and various reversals-of-fortune. Since the concepts of combat and property in D&D is so binary (positive HPs = "fight to the death"/"all my property is mine", negative HPs = "fight until dead"/"my stuff is now your stuff"), I would recommend against using this plot device outside of the typical D&D "Quest" structure: "Map shows location X, go to X, kill everything that moves, collect loot." D&D ties narrative control to HPs, and negotiating that narrative control largely consists of combat/attacks/damage. It does not work as a good model the more fluid hijinks for a clever cat-and-mouse game of MacGuffin Chasing. But it's best to mention this first because every other strategy we discuss is going to revolve around complications to the basic MacGuffin formula.

2) Plot Coupons. If chasing after one MacGuffin makes for a great story, then obviously what would be more awesome than chasing multiple MacGuffins? Originally described by Nick Lowe in his essay "The Well-Tempered Plot Device (http://news.ansible.uk/plotdev.html)" as sort of a dysfunctionally co-dependent love-hate-letter to various fantasy novelists, it obviously has practical implications for role-playing games based on fantasy novels. Lowe points the finger at Tolkien for starting the whole thing, but I think Tolkien shows some surprising restraint in restricting his MacGuffins to... well, a single ring of invisibility. We could very easily point to much more notorious authors for abusing this concept. As Lowe points out: "It's so easy, they all cry; you save so much energy by just smuggling a few choice plot coupons up and down the map."

For a Treasure Map, the easiest method here is to chop the map into multiple parts, and then send the PCs chasing after the various pieces. But this can be a little harder than it looks... unless you divide up the information very carefully, there are certain parts of the map that may be more valuable or have more important information than the others. For example, the part with the "X marks the spot" can be so important that having the other pieces of the map is pointless. The PCs may then skip large chunks of the narrative just by ignoring the parts of the map that don't interest them. You can mitigate this by making every piece of the map important, or every piece gives a clue to a larger puzzle: the guardian of the tomb can be defeated by sunlight, the giant bees don't like smoke, the secret passage can be unlocked with the amulet from the high priestess, etc. As you can imagine, this requires a great deal of work on your part, much more than "collect X rings/swords/amulets/keys to unlock Y".

3) Puzzle Key. The map itself is meaningless or useless unless it's manipulated or used in a particular way. This works great in movies/novels: the amulet in the map room (Raiders of the Lost Ark), the Mad Magazine Fold-In (Romancing the Stone), the moon letters on Thror's map (Lord of the Rings). In RPGs... um. Well. If the entire plot depends on the PCs figuring out a puzzle or riddle, then make sure you have a "back up" plan (or a monologuing villain that can "accidentally" explain the puzzle to the group of frustrated players that wants to strangle you).

4) False Treasure. This is a complication to either throw off amateur treasure hunters with a lesser prize, or sometimes teach a moral lesson: "The real treasure is friendship!" Gygax used this in the original Tomb of Horrors with a false treasure room, complete with a mummy posing as a demi-lich, with the idea that greedy or short-sighted players would be satisfied with some trinkets and head back to town, loudly bragging about how they had conquered the ultimate deathtrap dungeon. In Tales of the Golden Monkey (1982 TV show), the first episode revolves around a chase for the statue of a golden monkey, but at the end of the first episode it's revealed the statue is made out of brass rather than gold. The temple where the statue was found was the real "golden monkey", made out of solid gold, but was covered with debris/vegetation so nobody noticed its real value. You can also play this trick on the villains, where they steal the "obvious" treasure (later finding out it's a fake or worthless), leaving something behind that the heroes discover is the real treasure. To a certain extent, the adamantite doors in the original Tomb of Horrors could be a variation on this theme: the module was run as a competitive tournament at conventions, and the group that brought out the most treasure "won" the tournament. One group of players won when they realized the adamantite doors on room 24 were much more valuable than anything else they could carry out of the tomb, so they took the doors as treasure. There's an in-joke in the 3.5 update that says the doors are now steel because "it's too expensive for the demons to keep replacing adamantine doors".

5) Misunderstood MacGuffin. The treasure turns out to be not so much a monetary reward but something the PCs don't expect. In the Jewel of the Nile (sequel to Romancing the Stone), the "jewel" turns out to be a person, a spiritual leader identified by a prophecy. In certain novels/movies, it could be unlocking a new ability or superpower (mind-reading/telepathy, teleportation, precognition, talking to giant sandworms, etc.). Another example: in the I11 module "Needle", the king sends the PCs out to retrieve a magical stone obelisk. If they bring it back, it turns out to be a portal to another world, and the PCs have to go through and deal with the residents on the other side. So the treasure is really just a jumping-off point for a different type of adventure.


Anyway... my advice would be to start with a treasure map and three plot coupons: three gems, three weapons, or three of whatever suits your fancy. Pick an artifact that can do something catastrophically bad or monumentally good (preferably both). Let's say... the Crown of Atlantis, which can sink a continent (or at least a presumptuous island), or raise up the lost empire of the Atlanteans. Get the Ivory Trident, the Golden Net, and the Silver Carapace into the Temple of the Ancients and you get the Crown. The map shows you where the trident is located. Runes on a stone slab at the temple tells you where to get the net. Using the net/trident together in some way points you to where the Silver Carapace is hidden. Then come up with several unscrupulous groups that desperately want to sink/raise something. Start with a Patron who wants to help the PCs (but has a secret agenda), and a Villain that needs the crown for something not entirely villainous (cure a magical disease/curse), and throw in a Face-Heel-Turn and/or Heel-Face-Turn where you think it appropriate.

[JoshuaZ]

There's been a lot of good advice but one thing I'd like to suggest is an important background thought: Why did they hide the treasure? Why did they then make a map to it? Answering these motivating questions can help a lot.

[Swaoeaeieu]

Some spitballing:


That is some amazing advice, seems you dont just write compendiums on rules, but also everything else :D


There's been a lot of good advice but one thing I'd like to suggest is an important background thought: Why did they hide the treasure? Why did they then make a map to it? Answering these motivating questions can help a lot.

I added some context earlier, and it is not so much a map to hidden treasure but a lost cave of great worth (rumors of something very valuable inside ofcourse). So it is not like it is something someone hid away, more like a map to a very hard to find place.

[Vogie]

I added some context earlier, and it is not so much a map to hidden treasure but a lost cave of great worth (rumors of something very valuable inside ofcourse). So it is not like it is something someone hid away, more like a map to a very hard to find place.

With that description, it sounds like you're describing the Cave of Wonders in the Disney Aladdin movies.

You could actually steal the concept wholsale, as it's just a plot device for the vizir to hunt the MacGuffin, but the idea of a:

Remote magical cave with rumors of magical artifacts
Hidden location that cannot be open without the keys
A pair of keys that, when combined in the right area, both direct the party to the opening and then reveal the hidden location.
Another unrevealed requirement that they won't know until they reveal it.


In Aladdin, the key is a two halves of a gold Scarab, the location is out in the desert, and the unrevealed requirement was the "Diamond in the rough" character trait.
In National Treasure, the key is two halves of a special pipe, the location is a old unassuming street corner, and the unrevealed requirement was that there wasn't another location to travel to.

Basically, in each set up, there are three parts to the "map", and even having 2 of the three won't help - you have to have all three.