The Holy Grail of Dungeon Representation

I read an interesting blog post today in which the author makes an eloquent and compelling case for describing dungeon locations (and, by inference, hex map locations) using only normal prose sentences and paragraphs, and without 

boldings, italicizations, underlinings, smallcaps, parentheticals, bracketed asides, sidebars, lists, tables, bullets, nested sub-bullets, color-coding, font alternates, and all the innumerable other invented methods to display text.

The thesis is that the use of these 'innovations' tend to be distracting and, perversely, makes the parsing of the information both more difficult and less interesting. The post concludes with a cri de coeur which I can certainly get behind: 'The character of writing should be embraced as humans have written for millennia: in sentences and paragraphs, one after the other.'

I find myself agreeing with this, although I am a confirmed middle-aged fart whose innate proclivities tend towards agreement with any thesis that stands athwart change - or, even better, which advocates return to the antique past. 

But then again I am also somebody who made an abortive attempt at writing a dungeon novel, which I consider, were such a thing to exist, to be the absolute pinnacle, the Platonic ideal, the holy grail of good representation of gameable material - something which is as enjoyable to read as a fantasy story but also usable to run games with. Or, as I put it back then:

The idea is: it's a collection of stories about adventurers exploring a dungeon, which follows their escapades in a sort of detached pseudo-Vancian narrative. Accompanying the accounts are maps, which can be pieced together. Periodically there are summaries consisting of big sections of the dungeon mapped out and keyed, detailing "the adventure(s) so far" - and at the end there is a full map of the entire thing, with contents, which you can then use to run your own parties of PCs through.

There are three reasons why I would advance the argument that this is indeed the pinnacle, and the best way to communicate the information. 

1. It recognises the fact that most RPG materials are bought for entertainment as much as for use at the table, and that indeed there is a market for RPG materials which will never be used for gaming.

2. It recognises that the human brain processes information in narrative form very effectively and that reading a dungeon as a story, or set of short stories, allows the DM to imbibe a mood and a 'thick', tacit awarenesss of the contents much more readily than would be the case with simple, inert room descrptions.

3. It recognises that fantasy fiction has reached something of a dead-end in terms of genre; that there are lots of RPG players who like fantasy fiction; and that there is therefore a big gap in the market for such a product.

The chief hurdle is that which confronts any creative act: procrastination. The next biggest one is actually doing it. To which I can only respond: