# An isometric dungeon, drawn by hand

> Guide book maps were technical illustration done by people who had to convey three dimensions on cheap paper. They're among the most beautiful drawings games ever produced.

August 18, 2026 · https://justog.club/stories/strategy-guide-map-page

A cutaway drawn at an angle, several floors deep. Rooms numbered. Stairs connecting levels. A
dotted scarlet line threading through the whole thing, which is the route somebody worked out so
you wouldn't have to.

It's a technical drawing, and it's better than most of the art in the game it describes.

## Why were guide maps drawn isometrically?

Because it shows structure and contents at the same time.

A plan view tells you the layout but hides what's in each room. A perspective view looks good and
lies about distances. Isometric projection — no vanishing point, everything at the same angle —
lets a reader see several floors at once, count rooms, follow stairs, and understand a space
without any of it foreshortening away.

Architects and engineers had used it for exactly that reason for a century. Guide illustrators
inherited a solved problem.

## What makes them so satisfying to look at?

Density with total clarity.

These drawings pack an enormous amount into a page — rooms, doors, items, enemies, a route — and
they stay readable because everything obeys one angle and one line weight system. Nothing overlaps
ambiguously. It's the same pleasure as a good cutaway of a ship or a cross-section of a building.

That legibility is also why they translate to fabric: the drawing is already all line, all
hard-edged, all deliberate.

## What's the dotted route doing?

It's a person's solution, printed on top of a place.

The map is objective; the route is somebody's opinion about the best way through. That's the whole
value of a guide — not the geography but the *path*, worked out by somebody who did it badly first
so you wouldn't have to.

It's also the only element in scarlet, which makes it the focal point in an otherwise uniform
drawing —
[one accent in a restrained palette carries disproportionate weight](/stories/limited-palette-prints-better).

## Can I map a real game?

The layout of a specific game is that game's design, and the published drawings have illustrators.

Guide books were commissioned, credited works, and the games they describe are somebody's property.
Publishers do license this — reissued guide art turns up as prints and merchandise — but it needs
clearing first.

An invented dungeon avoids all of it, and inventing one is genuinely enjoyable: it's a small piece
of level design done purely as drawing.

## Does it work for a real place?

That's the version worth making.

Any building somebody knows well, drawn as a dungeon with numbered rooms and a route through it. A
family house. A school. An office. A pub. The joke is the treatment, and the affection is in
getting the layout right.

That combination — technical format, personal contents — is
[the method running under most of what we write](/stories/theatre-crew-shirts).

## Is a drawing this detailed wearable?

At the right density, and the density is the whole decision.

A real guide page has hundreds of elements and would reduce to grey texture on cotton. The printed
version wants perhaps a quarter of them: fewer rooms, drawn larger, with the route still readable.
It should feel dense from a distance and be countable up close.

Room numbers are the fine element and want to be set considerably larger than a book would.

## Does it print well?

Yes — it's line work with a legend.

Uniform stroke weights, hard corners and flat symbols all hold up. The risk is line spacing: fine
parallel lines closer than the weave can resolve will merge, so the drawing wants opening out
slightly compared to a printed page. The dotted route should be fewer, heavier dashes.

Sand, cream and pale grey read as book paper. Two inks — black for the drawing, scarlet used only
on the route.

## How do I get one made?

Describe the place at [JustOG](/) — which building, how many levels, and where the route goes. Pick
a direction, drag the crop frame, see it composited on the real garment, and it's made to order and
shipped.

Designs other people have published are in the [shop](/shop).

Somebody got lost in there for eleven hours so that the dotted line could exist.