dysonlogos

the Bast’Inn

Built into a squat hexagonal stone “tower”, the Bast’Inn (pronounced pretty much as “Bastion”) is a popular drinking establishment, especially during nice weather as it sports a second-story patio with six additional tables.

While owned by the Stonefinger dwarven clan, the Bast’Inn isn’t popular with any of the local dwarves – Stonefingers, Hammershapers, Deephelms, or Bronzeforged. Only the occasional out-of-town dwarf can be found here among the predominantly human cli...

Royal Catacombs of Adrih

Somewhere beneath the temple of the Shinning Lord are the catacombs of the last of the line of King Adrih. With the sacking of the temple, there has been no better time for treasure hunters to find and loot the old tomb.

The catacombs themselves are partially collapsed and sections have an inch or so of stagnant water – reminders of the recent destruction of the temple above. They are guarded by otherworldly hounds locked in the last chamber behind a magical portcullis that prevents m...

Pillar of the Igesej Loremaster

Built of pale stone in the twilight of the Humut Crater, the Pillar of the Igesej Loremaster was originally built by an arcanist studying the object that formed the deep angled crater – believing it to be a god or portion thereof.

Today the small tower is home to the Igesej Loremaster, a strange fellyfish-like sage who floats gently through the tower reading and storing information on psychically imprinted crystal matrices.

The tower layout is fairly straightforward. Long U-shap...

Backstage Pass - February 2020

I knew I was forgetting something when I posted the Release the Kraken poll this month!

THE BACKSTAGE PASS!

Here's the 9 maps that I'm planning to release this month on the blog. It includes two more decks of the redraw of Expedition to the Barrier Peaks as well as the usual monthly Inn or Tavern, a few "dungeons", a village, and a small fortified holding.

Kabrel's Tower

When travelling through the badlands to the City of Copper Bowls, a distant tower can be seen looking down over the caravan road. While no caravan traffic leads from the road to the old tower, with a bit of looking a foot path can be found that sees infrequent use.

Kabrel’s Tower sits quietly on a stone outcrop looking over a small stagnant pond that collects rainwater from the area. The tower isn’t much – thirty feet tall with a peaked roof. From the second floor you can look ove...

February Kraken Poll

Wait, what is this?

The Kraken Poll being released at the beginning of the month? Have strange pod people abducted Dyson Logos and finally replaced him with a fully armed and operational mapping station? Or has he finally caught up with everything for a while?

MADNESS

For the new patrons in the audience - every month I try to put up a poll where we can pick some maps from the blog's...

Release the Kraken upon the City of the Frogs!

Originally drawn in the summer of 2018, The City of the Frogs is being re-released today thanks to you under the Release the Kraken thingamabob!

Some cities just stink. Built over drained swampland and mostly relying on surface sewers, Uogralas is unfortunately one of the smellier urban centres of the land.

Uogralas is known as the City of the Frogs because of its swampy origins and the city’s patron god, Ugrale, a great toad-like deity dedicated to brickwork, construction, and ...

Release the Kraken on Hurren, City of the Elders!

Every month we go through our back catalog of maps and re-release a few under the free commercial use license. The first of these for this year goes way back to 2011 and was drawn in a small moleskine notebook... It is also one of the first city maps to be released on the blog. For this re-release, I’ve tuned up the scan a bit and am releasing it at a much higher resolution than the original.

Hurren is known as the City of the Elders because it is the seat of the Council of Five, a ga...

Return to the Barrier Peaks - Deck II

In these remakes of the Expedition to the Barrier Peaks maps, Deck II (and later Deck V) are the decks where my style shines through a bit. These decks (or ‘tween decks) have large inaccessible areas of machinery, hull, structural supports, power storage, and all the infrastructure that keeps the other decks operational.

The original map of Deck II is best remembered as the level that has Gary Gygax’s initials drawn into the bulkheads & machinery of the level. I was unable to re...

Return to the Barrier Peaks - Deck 1

Few modules have dug their way into my brain the way Expedition to the Barrier Peaks has. When I pulled the module out to adapt it as the capstone adventure for my first D&D5e campaign, I realized that I still remembered which numbered encounters were which, the sequence of the colour coded key cards and what they signify, and what creatures were still trapped down on the lowest deck…

But I also remembered the hundreds of nearly empty rooms containing dust, bits of ruined furnitur...

Let's start the Krakens up for 2020!

Late as usual, here's the poll to vote on which maps will be released under our free commercial use license this month!

https://forms.gle/m3cUoTg45fXiVFd16

Walled Temple

This walled temple space can serve many purposes or deities. I drew it based on three concepts primarily – the love of asymmetry in Tsolyani temples and general construction in the Tekumel setting, the columns of Greek & Roman designs, and the temples on the planet Athenas in the Borderlands 3 game.

What we have here is a large enclosed courtyard with a small building near the main gate for the gate...

Tombs of the Silver Army

This three-tiered tomb complex contains a number of reliquaries, crypts, and memorials of Jeberiath’s Silver Army – warriors embedded permanently into their silver-wrought armour to fight against the Sarahdu menace.

While the war was won, Jeberiath’s Silver Army bore the brunt of the defense and less than a handful were left at the end of the battles – and those few bore such spiritual and mental wounds that they left Jeberiath and wandered the world in their ruined armour seeki...

Frank Mentzer's Dungeon

In a series of posts about running D&D games in public, Frank Mentzer (of BECMI D&D fame, and with a lot of other D&D credits to his name) discussed the importance of having a “generic” dungeon ready to run and shared the one he has used 30+ times to date.

And he was cool with me redrawing the dungeon. The floor plan is established, and he has a general knowledge of what is in each branch of the dungeon, but final decisions are made on the fly during the game session so ...

Skybridges of Sharn III

The City of a Thousand Eyes

The City of Towers

We return to the towers and skybridges of Sharn again this month with another set of towers and plazas designed to work with the map I drew of the bridge intersection in “Eberron – Rising from the Last War” and last month’s Skybridge Nexus map.

Today’s effort brings us a slightly denser selection of towers – but still the smaller narrow spires and not the arcology-sized massive towers that hold entire neighbourhoods ...

The Blind Lamia's Cave

As the first adventure of the new campaign, we have chosen to rally behind the cleric in their search for artifacts and relics of Saint Sadon the Orange – a champion of Irmos the Victor. The small village of Iyesgarten provides little direct information (it is said that their church once held Sadon’s pauldrons – but that church burned down so long ago that none in Iyesgarten even remember where it used to be).

However, a helpful merchant told us of an ancient sage in the hills sou...

Iyesgarten Regional Map

For the new campaign of the new year, we started with a map of the small village of Iyesgarten, the last piece of quiet civilization in the Satrapy, and then tightened the focus down to the Iyesgarten Inn – because what adventuring group doesn’t spend at least some time at the local inn in search of adventure?

Now we look out a bit to see where these adventures will be held – the local region around Iyesgarten in the south and the fortified town of Will O the Wisp in the north. 2020-01-13 21:36:15 +0000 UTC View Post

Backstage Pass - January 2020

Hey, there's already two of these posted, but here's the full set of 10 maps being released this month.

That's right, amazing patrons, I'm finally almost fully caught up!

The Iyesgarten Inn

The main attraction of tiny town of Iyesgarten is the Iyesgarten Inn. Once a small inn and adjoining blacksmith now combined into a single inn about a decade ago. The side that used to be the smithy (on the right) still smells like iron, woodsmoke, and the donkeys that worked the bellows.

Owned and operated by Ramona & Leonhard Mannheim, the Iyesgarten Inn employs people from almost every family in the village for one job or another throughout the year.

While the Mannheims are...

New Year, New Campaign… New Starting Village!

A new year is here and it is time for a new campaign! And a classic trope of the fantasy campaign is to start in or near a small village – big enough that it can provide some equipment, rumours, NPCs to interact with, and even a few mysteries – and yet small and distant enough that it acts as a final point of civilization before you head into the unknown.

For this campaign, this is the village of Iyesgarten (pronounced Eyes-Garden).

Even smaller than distant Hommlet, Iyesgarte...

The Whispering Outpost

Once a defensive border fortress looking over lush fields, the whispering outpost guards nothing but sand and scrub now - far from any borders.

Not destroyed by siege or strife, the Whispering Outpost has been left to collapse quietly as the lands around were stripped of life by the Efreet Aznakath Flamehenge. As the last troops were moved from the area, they dismantled the main gates of the outpost to prevent it being used as a strongpoint by bandits or rebels. The rest of the damage t...

Release the Kraken on Ssa-Tun's Lake of Milk

Every month we go through our back catalog of maps and you vote on which two should be re-released under the free commercial use license. I took the top three this month, bringing the total number of maps released under this license in 2019 to 70.

When activated through specific rituals “when the stars are right”, the three pillars of Ssa-Tun act as portals to anchor points in the Alabaster Hells. One of the three pillar-gates leads here, to a small cavern containing a la...

The Wreck of the UPFS Skerples

Half buried in dirt, the wreck of the UPFS Skerples looks like some sort of massive bone or ceramic growth at first glance. The super-ceramic hull of the ship is almost completely unaffected by the crash landing here – any damage to the outer structure was caused by much higher-energy arcane systems mounted on some other vessel that fought with it in the skies.

Whatever arcane weapon system did manage to breach the hull, it also wiped out the entire crew in a single flash of super dim...

Release the Kraken on Spectre's Tower

Every month we go through our back catalog of maps and the many patrons over on Patreons vote on which two should be re-released under the free commercial use license. Our second map this month is was drawn way back in 2014.

I like towers, I particularly like them when the entrance isn’t completely obvious. This reminds me of a fort at a park I used to play in as a kid – you had to walk down a long concrete pipe (basically a sewer main pipe) under a hill to get to the tow...

Woodrest Manor

A moderate sized manor house built of thick and heavy stone, the most noticeable thing about Woodrest Manor is the four-story tower on the northeast side. Built a century or two ago, it is the handiwork of a young Bruldrugg Solidshield and his clanmates (Bruldrugg is now the elder of his family, and the Craftmaster of the Mountainmark clan).

It is currently the home of Gurtri Stelzner, an alchemist with ties and contracts to the Imperial capital. Gurtri lives alone in the tower, allowin...

Release the Kraken on the Temple Walk

Every month we go through our back catalog of maps and the many patrons over on Patreons vote on which two should be re-released under the free commercial use license. Our first map this month is a recent creation drawn in August.

Colloquially known as “God Alley”, the Temple Walk is a set of courtyards and walkways winding between 13 different shrines, temples, churches and reliquaries to ...

Sharn Heights - Skybridge Nexus

In the airy heights of the upper levels of Sharn are places where the towers thin out and the connections between them are almost artistic instead of utilitarian. Sweeping bridges connect fine spires and unlike the lower levels of the city, few buildings have been added to these bridges – leaving them open and clean-looking.

Here we have a nexus of skybridges connecting six towers. Tower levels near a nexus like this are usually designed to be “public facing” – featuring large l...

Releasing the Last Krakens of 2019

It is time to select the maps that will be the last ones re-released under the free commercial use license this year!

So head on over to the google form, choose your favourite, and we'll probably bring three of them up instead of two this month just so we can have a nice 70 total maps released under the license this year.

2019-12-18 19:58:32 +0000 UTC View Post