Derrick Kapchinsky you bring up an interesting point. For me, there’s an almost… uh, therapeutic? … value in R-Maps mess.

I’m often very fussy about the aesthetics of my gaming materials. I like clean, straight lines and good, easy to process documentation. So big messy R-Maps often itch at me the whole time I’m looking at them.

However, they do a good thing for me, even while they are irritating me with their messiness — they remind me that a roleplaying game is messy and big and often lacks easy documentation or central control. Every time I look at it and think “ugh what a mess” I force myself to think “yea, but it’s our mess.”

And that helps me, somehow, somewhy, accept the messiness of multiple-contributor fictional mess.

(It was actually Jackson Tegu who made me realize this. We were playing in a historical game where I was laying paper all over the table in big overlapping stacks. Durring a break he commented that all the paper had been off putting to him, as it was all messy. Until he just accepted that as the point — history is messy.)