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July Kraken

So much for being on top of things! It is sneaking past mid-July, and I haven't posted this month's Release the Kraken list!

For the new patrons - each month I post a list of 8-12 maps from the blog and we vote on which should be re-released under the free commercial use license.

This month's poll is now live! 

https://forms.gle/816mHbAoDuUC9Vwk7

Dungeoneer’s Survival Guide Perspective Map

When I got a copy of the Dungeoneer’s Survival Guide some 33 years ago, it was a flood of information, rules I would consistently ignore, scraps about the underdark for the first time since the D series of adventures…

And a collection of pages at the back on drawing perspective-based maps. Not the isometric (axonometric) projections of Castle Ravenloft, but grids set at various perspectives and rotations along with instructions on photocopying and cutting them up, or tracing them in...

Geomorphic Halls - Level 4

This is the fourth level of the Geomorphic Halls, a dungeon designed around my dungeon geomorph design to produce levels that have specific waypoints and landmarks, but also areas that shift and change between visits.

This is the final level of the Geomorphic Halls – except for that one small tunnel that has been dug out to the west, leading perhaps to other complexes or the fabled “underdark”.

The east side of this level of the complex is a span of natural caves and a quiet...

The Ruins of Greymail Clanhold

Greymail Clanhold has fallen. Word of the tragedy has only recently made it down from the mountains, but the stories paint a bleak picture of the hold being invaded and the dwarves destroying much of the structure to keep it out of the invaders’ hands.

But that is only part of the tale. There are still dwarves once of the clan in the ruins. They survived the siege through cannibalism and they were the ones responsible for collapsing the extensive hold to deny it to their foes – kill...

the Vanshiro Reliquary

A quiet structure for the contemplation and learning about the life and trials of the paladin Eneshra and their eventual transformation into the dragon Vanshiro who flew into the west and who’s occasional returns to these lands are a mix of myth, hearth-tales, and the one time it landed on this very hill  to speak to the Grand Eclesiast and deliver the three emerald scales.

Four generations later there is no longer a Grand Eclesiast at all. One of the scales was used and destroye...

Onyx Hill Ruins

There are many dark and cramped dungeons out there to explore – descents deep underground, delves into ancient confines…

But what is at the top of those first stairs?

Onyx Hill is capped by old ruins of a small fort. Shattered and broken remains of a pair of structures and the old wall remain, along with one squat stone guardhouse that boasts the only intact roof in the area. In the centre of the old ruins is the peak of the hill with a 60 foot tall square pillar of onyx resti...

The Half-Cask Tavern

Up near the docks, between the Clinkers district and the docks themselves is the Half-Cask. In an area known for its inns and taverns, the Half-Cask presents a very traditional “drinking hall” environment, making it popular with locals and travellers alike.

The Half-Cask is a friendly single-story tavern / drinking hall of fairly traditional design.  Stone foundations and lower walls are topped with raw timber walls and a heather-thatched roof. Operating without a “bar” per...

Backstage Pass - July 2019

And here we go, all the maps coming out this month on the Dodecahedron!

Thank you once again for being a patron of the Dodecahedron. Your support makes these floods of maps possible, and this constant flow of output has me always improving my skills. 

Release the Kraken on the Court of Summer Wines

The Court of Summer Wines is a well-to-do establishment that offers a wide selection of wines imported from near and far as well as a fruits, breads and sweets to be paired with such.

The food menu varies daily based on what is available in town, but Haspar (the owner) works hard to maintain a constant supply for his wine and drinks menu. The venue stopped serving harder liquors and brandies after one too many occasions where people would move on from wine to hard drink late in the nigh...

Release the Kraken on the City of Letath

Every month we go through our back catalog of maps and you decide which two should be re-released under the free commercial use license. For older maps I also work on upgrading the quality of the scan where possible.

Letath is a city that appeared in my “From Winterspire to Yoon-Suin” campaign a few years ago. It is a trading city on the eastern shore of the Persimmon Sea and is home to a major “military academy” where mercenaries are trained in exchange for 4 years of service i...

[Patreon Exclusive] The Twelve Goats Tavern

This month's Patreon Exclusive is a single-page recto-verso page detailing the Twelve Goats Tavern. It is pretty system-neutral although tied in with one of my favourite adventure modules - the Isle of Dread.

The floorplan of the tavern was released on the blog in May. This adds a new side view illustration of the tavern, as well as more detailed description of the owners / employees, location, and a sample menu.

As with all the Patreon Exclusive releases, this is a thank you for ...

Return to Dyson's Delve - Levels 5 & 6

Today we return to my classic “Dyson’s Delve” with another pair of maps from my 2019 redraw of levels 5 and 6 of this mini-mega-dungeon.

Level 5 is known as the howling halls and is essentially an abandoned section of the dungeon. The creatures that made the upper levels their homes find it unsafe to descend this deep, and the creatures below are only now exploring this far up. Instead, t...

Isle of Kheyus

There are many small independent island cities in the Copper Seas that I have visited in my attempts to navigate out of those quiet and confusing waters. Today we look at the Isle of Kheyus, where the remnants of ancient civilizations have the locals cowed and eking out a living in fear of the past coming back to haunt them.

Kheyus was once home to a massive city of some ancient civilization that covers much of the northern end of the island. The city has been reduced to ruins down to t...

Red Talon's Lair

Cut from the stones of the Weirding Mountains by the drowned priests to craft a gateway for their mad god, this small complex has been “abandoned” for a few hundred years since the collapse of their order.

All the masonry of the complex was made of red stone brought up piece by piece by the Firestand scavengers from those undersea ruins. In the intervening years, much of the masonry has fallen or been removed, leaving the complex a mix of grey stone of the mountains interspersed wit...

Geomorphic Halls - Level 3

This is the third level of the Geomorphic Halls, a dungeon designed around my dungeon geomorph design to produce levels that have specific waypoints and landmarks, but also areas that shift and change between visits.

As we continue down into the Geomorphic Halls I get to experiment with different types of configurations. This level uses 4 geomorphs loosely scattered around the level – but in a tight mess of corridors, rooms and other connections. This particular map does something I g...

The Tomb of Za'az

Designed after multiple iterations and revisions over weeks of painstaking design by the magus Braincain007 in the land of Reddit, the Tomb of Za’az was then recreated by the drug-addled crafthall halflings of clan Logos.

A classic “dungeon for the sake of a dungeon”, the Tomb of Za’az has never been home to the mythical Za’az, and only achieves the title of Tomb because of the two adventurers who died here in a previous delve. It is a manifestation of the archetypal “place ...

Oubliette of the Forgotten Magus

An abandoned throne room, flanked by cobweb-covered statues, this dungeon was designed and dug out to be something far grander than it is now.

Originally dug out for access to the underground river here, these dungeons are damp and quiet, home to massive cave spiders that hunt blind fish in the river. And of course, the Forgotten Magus. Paranoid and arachnophobic, the long-dead magus hides in one of the two small “closet” spaces in the dungeon, occasionally running from one to the o...

Ashryn Spire

Potent wizards locked away in their towers working on mighty magics… This is the way it has been in tales, and thus this is the way many wizards operate to this day. Ahsryn Spire is such a wizard’s tower, erected to provide a safe space for wizardly work far enough from civilization that no one should take too much interest, and defensible enough that if they do take interest there’s very little they can do.

Fingers of otherworldly minerals reach up from the roof of the tower, dra...

The Fire Beetle Ale House

A “basement tavern”, the Fire Beetle is built underneath “Trinkets & Secrets”, a fortune-teller’s storefront and the closest thing to a “magic shop” as you’ll find in Letath.

The Fire Beetle Ale House is a classic fantasy tavern – dark, windowless, smokey, serving ale and whatever hot stew is on that day. Entry is by a set of stairs down practically underneath the entrance to Trinkets & Secrets. As expected, it has an anachronistic bar with a grizzled but frien...

June Kraken Voting!

It is time - let's pick which maps get re-released this month under the free commercial-use license.

(For those new to the Patreon; every month I post a list of 8-12 maps to pick from. The top voted maps are re-released on the blog under the free commercial use license, bringing us up to 6 commercial releases every month.)

https://forms.gle/bQcuroTDq8Q87Xiy5

Robrus Beach Cave

The black stone cliffs of Robrus loom over Rat Crater Lake – the dark stone looking perpetually wet and somehow tainted by the often rainbow-sheened waters in the crater.

The cliffs are pierced here and there by small caves – places where inclusions of softer stone have been washed away by the waters of Rat Crater when the water level here was 20 or so feet deeper. Most are narrow little crevasses and defiles, but one is significantly larger and has become home to an ogre mage and a...

June Backstage Pass

Hang on... I seem to be on top of things right now. Backstage pass out on the first of the month... I'm in the process of putting together this month's Kraken poll (probably to be released tomorrow so I don't flood your inboxes today)...

Ah, I must be procrastinating on something else important! (looks sideways at pile of commissions that need to be done by end of the week...)

Regardless, here's this month's Backstage Pass!

Release the Kraken on Control!

The second map chosen this month to be re-released under the free commercial use license is Control – a map based on a joke that I drew as part of Mapvember in 2016. This re-release brings the original map up to 1200 dpi and pure black and white.

This tomb on the edge of the desert of the gods is the resting place of four Huecuvas of unusual intelligence for their ilk, as well as a few guardian mites that served them in life and still serve them now.

In life the four Huecuvas we...

Return to Dyson's Delve - Levels 3 & 4

Deeper into Dyson's Delve today, as we remake the maps of levels 3 & 4 in the style of my more recent Ghosts of Saltmarsh maps.

A level a crypts, and then a level where two manitcores terrorize the local gbolins who are further hobbled by a small group of lizard men who operate in the secret chambers around the edge of the level.

2019-05-30 18:06:00 +0000 UTC View Post

Return to Dyson's Delve - Levels 1 & 2

(This is a few days late - the day I posted this to the blog, Patreon was down, and then I forgot to post it here until today when I was here to post today's update!)

It has been nearly a decade, so let's return to Dyson's Delve!

There's been a slight change in my mapping techniques that I'm showing off as we return to the classic mini-megadungeon in the style of my maps in Ghosts of Saltmarsh.

2019-05-30 18:04:30 +0000 UTC View Post

Patreon Exclusive: Dyson's Hex Selections

This month's Patreon Exclusive release is a selection of hand-drawn hexes I put together for my own use and was then quickly informed that others would like to use them too.

Originally this project started out with me wanting a poster-sized page of 1.5" hexes that I could throw down on a table, draw on, play on, and then toss. Staples / Business Depot does "Engineering Prints" at up to 48" x 36...

Release the Kraken upon the Blessed Monastery!

The first map you chose this month to be re-released under the free commercial use license is The Blessed Monastery (which joins the Oratory of the Eleventh Blessing under that license which is the building on the upper right of the Monastery map)

Up in the Fox Hills is a small monastic order. They make mead and honey, study liturgical texts, and commune with their god of the harvest. The monastery grounds include a number of stout stone structures dominated by a large church that remai...

Geomorphic Halls - Level 2

We are in the last 9 hours of the DungeonMorph Dice kickstarter – so perfect timing to release level two of the Geomorphic Halls!

This one takes a cluster of 4 geomorphs as the heart of the level. Since so many geomorphs interconnected can result in a lot of unreachable areas, there are two different staircases down from this level to level 3 (so one should be accessible), and if all else fails, there’s still that one staircase down from level 1 that bypasses level 2 completely.

May Kraken Poll

Hey now... it appears that I forgot to post this at the beginning of the month. Because of course I did.

So!

We need to pick out a couple of maps from the back catalog for re-release under the commercial use license. I've picked out a dozen, you get to pick which ones we end up with.

https://forms.gle/eDTPQauThRHQdFni6

The poll should be open until Saturday.

Geomorphic Halls - Level 1

Ever since I started drawing Geomorphs, I’ve had the intention of making a dungeon that took advantage of them to have sections of the dungeon that change from visit to visit – visually based in part on the map of Lankhmar in the old Lankhmar D&D sourcebook.

Thus, every time you enter the dungeon, some sections remain the same, and some sections change. Further, due to the vagaries of geomorph design, some sections may become completely locked out in some visits, and some hard-t...