Actually, development started before Dyson's Photoshop product, and sure it leans on his style, but the hatching existed before and was popularised by him. It's a common style across many existing dungeon mapping tools, and just one of the styles offered by the tool.

I'm glad to hear that! The style is very popular in the drawn maps I've seen. I haven't been interested in maps for long and don't pay too much attention to digital map programs. I associate the style with Dyson, as that what I've heard other people do. I first saw you tweeting about the program after I saw Dyson's tweet and the Dungeon Scrawl site says the development began on May 8th, which is why I thought the timeline looked a little suspect. I'm happy to hear that's not the case.

FWIW, I just pulled open my red-box era OD&D books and the maps are all hatched in various styles when underground, but stippled (kind of a grassy texture) to indicate exterior; so e.g. a for a keep in the side of a mountain it would be clear which walls abut solid matter and which are stone.

The maps in the basic set use circles rather than lines for the hatching though.

I was hand-drawing cross-hatched style maps on graph paper in the early 90s when I was a teenager running my own campaigns, and I certainly don't claim to have invented it either..

Mine didn't look quite so good though. ;-)

Yeah, this was kind of my mindset, too. Hatching is certainly an old trick, and I see the "Dyson hatch" is somewhat distinctive - but for me, knowing "old school" maps, it didn't stand out from the other offered styles - and certainly lived up to the promise of "old school" look and feel :)

Is this somehow distinctive from Dragon Magazine / Dungeon Magazine from the late 80s in a way I'm not seeing? Or eg. the various TSR boxed settings with dungeons?

I never read those magazines and I can't say I'm an expert on dungeon map styles, but it's the hatching done in the dungeon walls that Dyson is known for (e.g., https://dysonlogos.blog/2011/09/03/dungeon-doodles-a-crossha...).

It looks like the person that made this program started playing around with the idea May 9 (https://twitter.com/probabletrain/status/1259172635776294912) a day after Dyson started tweeting about his program (https://twitter.com/DysonLogos/status/1258797586464542723).

I think Dyson's program is just a Photoshop extension and Dungeon Scrawl looks way more powerful, but it's worth pointing out the very similar timelines and styles.

Here's someone playing with the concept even earlier though. It did the rounds on reddit at the time, so I'd assumed it was the inspiration.

https://twitter.com/watawatabou/status/1197194111171940352

(in aother tweet, @watawatabou attributes the style to Dyson, though the idea of doing it programatically).

Dungeonscrawl is definitely inspired by Dyson.

Here are some tweets by the maker:

https://twitter.com/probabletrain/status/1259172635776294912... https://twitter.com/probabletrain/status/1258821040937013248...

That cross-hatching-in-the-walls thing is fairly distinct, and I saw it immediately on Dyson's blog but not on a quick survey of old Dragon/Dungeon maps. That said, Dyson is clearly going for that aesthetic mostly, so it could be convergent evolution, and I'm hardly up to date on current styles for maps in other places.

Just taking a look at Dungeon Magazine on archive.org and it seems that crosshatching in walls is pretty common, at least in the early editions.

https://archive.org/details/Dungeon_Magazine_002/page/n25/mo...

https://archive.org/details/Dungeon_Magazine_002/page/n45/mo...

https://archive.org/details/Dungeon_Magazine_002/page/n51/mo...

https://archive.org/details/Dungeon_Magazine_003/page/n31/mo...

https://archive.org/details/Dungeon_Magazine_003/page/n41/mo...

The style really reminds me of old Chaosium maps, from the 1980s.

Dyson's tool (which is more like an art asset) is pretty much Photoshop only, which is prohibitive to some. I signed up for their Patreon when they first previewed it, thinking I could use it with Affinity Photo. There's some layer combination features missing that means it's PS only.

This is a very common hatching style that I have seen countless times.