The Ravenloft Engine Trilogy's Automaps
By Daniel D'Agostino, 2024-03-10
Over the past year, while writing my extensive Menzoberranzan walkthrough and preparing a similar one for Ravenloft: Strahd's Possession, I've used these games' automap system heavily. These two games (both 1994) and their sequel, Ravenloft: Stone Prophet (1995), in fact use the same engine, so I collectively refer to them as the "Ravenloft engine trilogy" despite the fact that Menzoberranzan is actually based in the Forgotten Realms.
There's a lot that can be said about these games, but I'd like to specifically talk about their automap system. These are not the only games to have automaps, and certainly not the first. But we're talking about early pseudo-3D first-person role-playing games (RPGs), just a couple of years after Ultima Underworld, which broke new ground in various aspects (including texture mapping) and in fact came with its own rich automap system. Thus, I feel there's historical value in discussing the features of the automap system of this nowadays often overlooked trilogy.
Basic Features
The Ravenloft engine is a curious case of first-person RPGs that blends both smooth movement
and grid-based 'blobber' movement, in the sense that you can switch between the two at any time
through the Options menu. The automap system, in turn, combines these two aspects. The explorable
areas appear on the automap as a grid of cells, but other features (e.g. items, the party, NPCs,
or monsters) are overlaid at a
Unlike Ultima Underworld where automaps have a fixed overall area, each map in the Ravenloft trilogy varies considerably in size, from tiny one-room abodes to massive areas such as the desert of Har'Akir in Stone Prophet. The automap system provides the means to scroll vertically and horizontally across each map. As in Ultima Underworld, you can page through different maps and also write or erase your own notes. Each note you write on the map can have up to four lines but the character set is limited to uppercase characters and certain symbols.
Saving and Printing
The Save button on the automap writes the explored portion of the current automap to a file under the AUTOMAPS folder called something like AUTO123.MAP, where 123 is the number of the current map in the game. For a long time, I had no idea what you were supposed to do with this exported file, but I was able to reverse engineer its format (shown below) to extract a lot of the map data that helped me generate maps for my Menzoberranzan walkthrough.
| Character (hex) | Meaning |
| 20 | Unexplored |
| db | Wall |
| dc | Inset (bottom) |
| dd | Inset (left) |
| de | Inset (right) |
| df | Inset (top) |
| fa | Floor |
| fe | Furniture |
| b2 | Secret door |
| ba | Door (vertical) |
| cd | Door (horizontal) |
| 42 | Tree |
Unfortunately though, the maps are written at grid resolution, so many finer details are lost, such as items and NPCs, or exact placement of trees and furniture. The walls are also all represented using the same character, so the way they visually connect to each other needs to be computed via further analysis of the map.
In the midst of all this, the question remained: why would a game allow you to export a map if you had no way to import or otherwise view it? The manuals of Strahd's Possession and Menzoberranzan only mention that they can be "viewed in any text editor", but I had done that, and it was difficult to make out the forms of each level, with characters displayed like gibberish.
Speaking of gibberish, fellow gamer gibberishh helped brainstorm this problem, and together we soon realised that the maps could be viewed as glorious ASCII art when viewed in DOS programs of the time, such as type or edit, their Windows equivalents, or even in Notepad using the Terminal font.
Author: gibberishh
Author: gibberishh
Author: gibberishh
In fact, this is supported by the manuals' notes about the automap's Print facility which state that the "IBM character set" (i.e. that used by DOS) is required for maps to be rendered properly when printing. Thus, although I haven't tried the Print functionality as it's particularly tricky to set up under DOSBOX, it's clear that the Save and Print features were intended to output the same kind of ASCII art rendering of the current automap.
Furthermore, rendering the automaps using the Save and Print features actually did include notes written by the player. These would be displayed by a letter of the alphabet (or more than one, should there be more than 26 notes on the same map) within the map grid, with the same character and corresponding text displayed below the map as footnotes. Any notes written outside of the map area would be missing from the rendered map but still be listed below it among the footnotes.
Global Save and Restore
Menzoberranzan and Stone Prophet have an additional map sharing feature not present in Strahd's Possession. The two disk icons at the bottom, on either side of a globe, are used to global save and global restore the current map, respectively. Global save writes a binary file (different from the Save file format) under the GSR folder called something like AUTO123.MAP, where 123 is the number of the current map in the game.
Global restore loads that map data, potentially from an entirely different game using a different party. It works like a toggle, and when activated, displays the portion of the current map from the global save in addition to that explored by the current party, using different colours to distinguish between them.
The Cut-Away Map
Menzoberranzan has a cut-away map, a special cross-sectional view of all the important maps in the game, which is documented on page 26 of the manual and shown in my Menzoberranzan walkthrough. It shows the party's progress by means of a graphical depiction of each level as it is reached, and gives an idea of how far underground the party has ventured.
The cut-away map is given to the party in-game by the NPC Manahath, in the first level of the Descent into the Underdark. Each available level on the cut-away map is shown black-and-white until the cursor is moved over it, at which point it becomes coloured. Clicking on a level takes you directly to its automap. You can also click on the draftsman's tool in the top-right portion of the map to display all levels in colour.
Teleportation
When you cast the Teleport spell in Stone Prophet, the game leverages the automap system to let you choose the destination to teleport to. You can teleport to any square on the automap that you have explored via line-of-sight, including areas beyond apertures which you had not been able to reach using other means.
Summary
A brief look at the automap system used by the Ravenloft engine trilogy shows an extremely versatile system that does a lot more than spare you the trouble of drawing maps on paper. In fact you are able to take detailed notes and erase them, export your annotated maps to a file, print them, share explored territory with other adventurers, see a cut-away map, and teleport to any location, with some of the latter features only available in some of the games.
The automap is also essential as a frequent point of reference in Menzoberranzan, whose low visibility and labyrinthine caverns are extremely difficult to navigate otherwise.