Last week, while translating John Harper's micro-TTRPG World of Dungeons: Turbo Breakers, I discovered the wonderful world of one page dungeons, starting with Michael Prescott splendid production at trilemma.com and also the yearly One Page Dungeon Context.
While crawling through the OPDC 2021 entries, I discovered a great map by Brett Simison: Escape of the Torment. With my experience on building "animated" PDFs (on Undying Dusk and another game I'm currently working on), I thought it would be fun to "animate" this great adventure, and here is the result:
The goal of this "animated" PDF is to provide the GM with a simple PDF document displaying a map, so that they can show it in full screen to the players during the game session, and click on elements of the map in order for the scene to evolve.
I initially though about building this with HTML, CSS & Javascript as a web page, but on second though it thought that generating a single PDF could be more handy for GMs, with the added benefit of not requiring an online connexion. It was also a bit simpler for me not to worry with being adaptive to the browser screen size.
In order to extract the images from the original PDF, I used LibreOffice Draw
with a custom Python script, included in the ZIP archive.
The archive also includes the build_animated_EotT.py program used to generate the animated PDF, using fpdf2.
I hope the PDF will be useful to some GMs. I think it would be a good fit for a D & D or 7th Sea adventure. I personnally plan to use it in my Blades in the Dark campaign.
The overall approach of animating TTRPG sceneries / battlegrounds as PDF documents could also be applied to other maps! Of course it does not offer as much expressivity as a Roll20 / Foundry interactive map, but it can be a handy, simple alternative, and very fun to build for Python coders! 🐍
