THE MAP IS NOT YOUR FRIEND
Traditionally, roleplaying has been fixated on maps. This goes back to the earliest roleplaying games, which were fantasy games in which plot development was confined to clearing out room after room of monsters who lived like apartment dwellers in underground complexes. Many people still enjoy this style of play and we don’t want to knock them for it. It does enforce a certain mind set which can bog down a Feng Shui game, though. Specifically, the problem is using two-dimensional maps as the main way of visualizing the action being described in a scene.
If you haul out a map at the beginning of a fight scene and lay it on the table, you’re causing your players to stop focusing on the action scene in their heads and instead directing them to a dead, lifeless piece of paper; now they’re like a bunch of football players planning a play on a chalkboard instead of a bunch of football players running like crazy and tackling like mad. It may be extremely useful to you th have a floor plan among your notes, so you can judge where all of the combatants are. Just don’t show it to the players! And don’t treat it as gospel: a map should be, like any of your rough notes in preparation for an adventure, subject to revision as you go along.
Revealing your map locks you into a precise conception of the area in which the characters are fighting. If you just describe the place with words instead of plunking that map down, you can keep your options open. In Feng Shui, you want to be able to decide on the spur of the moment that there just happen to be awnings hanging over the walkway between buildings, or there is indeed a ledge big enough for that hoodlum to jump off of.
Sometimes you’re going to have to give in and show your players some kind of floor plan or diagram to help them visualize where they are. Never show the a nice, neat map from one of our adventure books. Or a nice neat map of your own creation, for that matter. Instead, whip up a rough sketch that conveys the bare minimum amount of information. That way, if you decide in the midst of a fight you need a spiral staircase complete with banister in the middle of that ballroom, you can add one just by sketching as you go. The messier and more incomplete the map, the more room there is to fill in the blanks.
An alternative to maps are color pictures from magazines. Travel or architectural magazines often have excellent photos which you can use as the basis of your set design. You can show these to your players to help visualize where their characters are, and they will stimulate the imaginative process instead of hampering it.
