Friday, February 25, 2011

A Zoo is a Dungeon Too

I was considering Zoopocalypse again the other night, and then started thinking about a zoo’s similarity to our games’ dungeon - its winding paths that lead to exhibits is rather like a dungeon's tunnels, leading to larger chambers and creatures perhaps never seen before… The fun of discovering something new in a zoo visit is something like what we create with dungeon crawls, enhanced with an element of supposed danger.

So I went looking for some zoo maps online and ended up getting totally carried away, downloading one after another to look at more closely for inspiration in creating my own maps later. Some inspire with their art and design; perspective, cut-away views, and colors being used to provide ease of navigation and more information. Others I could even see GIMP’ing, replacing the animal descriptions and icons with monsters, and turning the whole thing into a dungeon.

I went through just about every major zoo’s website in the U.S. and Canada I could easily find, downloaded their maps, and merged them into one gigantic PDF. I put in some interesting aquarium maps that I found along the way too, but I had to leave a lot out due to poor resolution. You can download it on Scribd if interested.

9 comments:

Anonymous said...

I love it when someone sees beyond what's there. Brilliant! It's obvious when you look at like that. It can explain some dungeon ecologies if some mad wizard was collecting specimans.

Great post!

Unknown said...

Cool idea. Next step is using the maps of Malls somehow as well.

Game Master Rob Adams said...

You know we ran a really cool game at a convention using All Flesh Must Be Eaten. There were zombies in the zoo and zombie animals. You should have seen the one player as he tried to use the zoo-mobile (the golf cart) to attack the zombie lion.

Game Master Rob Adams said...

Get some sewer blueprints. Those are great fun!

Doo said...

Great idea man!!

Eli Arndt said...

Hey a place for t he zombie elephant I converted!

Anonymous said...

Museums, of course. But I guess the big one is Disney: those theme park maps are insane.

Christopher said...

Cool idea! The different colored areas on zoo maps also make it easy to place different factions' territories.

ze bulette said...

@Stuart & richardthinks: That's what I'd been thinking too: The theme parks might be great fun for a zombie or post-apoc game, the malls I can see incorporating into large space ship maps for a Sci-Fi game of some kind (malls and zombies being too obvious).

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