Crypts & Sewers

There are times when I don’t know quite what I want to draw and I just start to doodle a map – letting the pens and the back of my mind wander around the page creating stuff. Of late it seems that my pens and that quiet part of my brain have a thing for crypts and tombs.

Here we have a set of crypts associated with two different churches. In total there are three entrances to these catacombs from the surface – the upper two both linking directly to churches which use the catacombs to bury their dead, and the upper-right stairwell leading into the rectory of the closer church.

While the left hand set of catacombs is rougher and is used exclusively for the burial of the deceased, the structures in the right-side catacombs are much better maintained and involve a lot of heavy masonry work – implying that the church above uses it for more than just a burial site (in fact, assuming that most of the doors are locked, it would appear that they bury very few people down here, having only a few crypts directly attached to their chambers and passages).

The southeastern structure may well be an underground place of worship for the gods under Lankhmar or similar creatures / deities / fell beings. This is further supported by the access point between the rectory understructures and the local sewers on the right edge of the map (an access point that is secured by a portcullis that is in turn controlled from a secret room).

The western structures are much older and decayed, showing a lot of wear to the areas that are worked. These crypts have been here for ages – since the city was young and the old masters of the lands would be buried here. These crypts and tombs often have multiple bodies within them, usually separated onto their individual stone shelves, but sometimes laid one upon the other, until their clothes have disintegrated with age and their bones mixed together by gravity and whatever else may dwell down here.

Thanks to incredible generosity of the patrons of the Dodecahedron Patreon Campaign, this is the fourth map released under a free commercial license this month. You can download the Crypts & Sewers map at 300dpi (and learn more about the free commercial license) from the blog post at https://rpgcharacters.wordpress.com/2016/04/12/crypts-and-sewers/