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The Oak King Dungeon & Keep

Today brings us one of the last explorations into the maps I drew in the Oak King three years ago and promptly forgot for all this time is this small fortification and the dungeons beneath.

Unlike most dungeons under a tower, these excavations have their own main entrance that is more easily accessed than the structure above. In fact, the way I pictured it was with a squad of unpleasant halfling assassins (grumpy about the lack of second assassinations after the first assassination of the ...

Dysonizing the Dwimmermount - Level 1

Dwimmermount is the mighty megadungeon penned by James Maliszewski and published (after a trail of long-ago events) by Autarch. It has a total of 13 levels (and several sublevels) that were mapped for the finished product by master cartographer Tim Hartin of Paratime Design.

I love enjoy Tim’s maps, but there are times where I just want to take up a piece of digital work and see how it turns out under my pens instead. So… last month I sat down and redrew level 1 of Dwimmermount 1:1 fro...

Froehlich's Circles of Madness

Strange magics require strange sigils, and sometimes those sigils leave their mark on the arcanist's mind. Sometimes the arcanist manifests the obsessive details of these sigils in drawings, in carvings, in tattoos, and in this case, in passages dug into stone.

These passages are not level, they are the creations of a mind twisted by magic. They are angled, they climb over themselves, they loop and twist and enter in rooms that are hard to describe to the layman - or to any person who hasn...

The City of Blue

The City of Blue

Ten pillars of pale blue crystal jut straight up from the island that has become the City of Blue in the unimaginatively named Azure Sea (which is actually a massive freshwater lake). The pillars are are almost perfectly square, set perfectly vertically to the horizon, and are roughly 400 feet wide (although scholars of the city will be quick to point out that they are precisely 396 feet, 2 inches, accounting for some sections having worn corners and edges). These pillars ...

Metivier Manor

I often get requests for manors, houses and various other “normal” structures. Honestly people, google for mansion floorplans. There are a lot of them out there. This is my manor. There are many like it, but this one is mine.

(And it has a dungeon and secret crypt in the basement because… because it is mine)

Metivier Manor is a moderate-sized manor house with a split second floor (with three rooms for the staff on their side of the second floor and a “secret” door betwe...

Kemp's Divide

Ages past the settlement had been built along the banks of the small cold river that flowed from the dark holes in the mountain. But several decades ago the lands shook, stones fell from the mountain sides, and the river ceased to flow.

Following the old river bed up into the heart of the mountain one comes to a cave where it is easy to see what happened. This is Kemp’s Divide, where a new cleft was torn into the mountain that rerouted the river into the depths below. Before the rend...

The 2015 Dodecahedron Cartographic Review

So, the files are off at the printer and I'm waiting on the proof copy to arrive before I put it up for sale. The print edition is a US Letter sized spiral bound 88 page book with almost all the maps posted to the blog in 2015 along with my commentary on them.

In the meantime, I'm putting together the "Electronic Edition" which is a PDF with the same contents but also includes an appendix with only the maps and no text.

The PDF version will be available in a few days and ...

The Giant's Halls - Complete!

Over the last three months I've posted three previous parts of the Giant's Halls. Today I finally finished the map with the fourth segment, and am retroactively releasing all four parts (as well as the combined map) under my free commercial license.

You can download the 4 individual maps and the combined map all at 300dpi from the blog post at https://rpgcharacters.wordpress.com/20...

First Backstage Pass of 2016 - Season 3!

Welcome to season 3 of the Backstage Pass program for patrons at the $1 level and above.

Excavations of the Oak King

Sometimes we found things in the ground and began to dig for more. Other times we started to dig, and found things. This unassuming stairwell cut into the rocky earth by the Elder’s Grave has little around it – no piles of dirt or debris from extensive excavations to indicate much of interest. But forty feet below, where the temperature settles to something basically cool and damp, the worked stone opens up to a massive cavern well over a hundred feet across and sunken a further 24 feet bel...

Little Tower of the Oak King

Once again we had to the pages of the Oak King for a map I had drawn and then pretty much lost at the beginning of 2013. Inspired by Gus L.'s cartography over on his Dungeon of Signs blog, I started drawing small representations of the structures as I drew them. This was my first such attempt, I believe (I do this a lot more now, but still not as often as I should).

A little tower overlooking a small cliff, this is a pretty archetypal adventure location down to the ruined upper level of th...

Paradise Control

When Garry Hamlin asked for an underground casino map for his D&D game, I immediately had a flashback to the classic Operation: Sprechenhaltestelle adventure that came bundled with the 1980 & 1981 editions of TSR’s Top Secret RPG by Merle Rasmussen. One of the organizations hidden beneath the streets of the city is Pair-a-Dice, a full-fledged casino floor set underground.

Now, realistically an underground casino in a faux-medieval environment would most likely resemble a p...

The Giant's Halls (Map 3)

Over the last two months I’ve posted two of the four maps of the Giant’s Halls. This third installment fits on the south side of the second map and is the main entrance to the halls.

This map really shows the origin of the halls as a dwarven construction – with multiple passages and chambers that would be of annoyingly small size for giants. In my home campaigns the dwarves native to the setting are a race of giants who have shrunken over the generations since they abandoned their du...

Kubicka's Roots - The Polluted Tree

Many small towns and hamlets have an old tree near their centre – a reminder of the transience of time and the seasons, and the ability of the community to continue and thrive through the ages.

But when fell powers sneak into the village and corrupt the town, what better place than in the very roots of this symbol.

Kubicka’s Tree is a massive oak in front of the inn at the centre of town. But the tree is failing, growing strange rot that the locals are unable to cure and that...

Temple of the Snake

The worship of the Snake is a recurring theme for evil fantasy religions with a long history of awesomeness and strange cold-blooded civilizations that predate humanity. So when Chris Williams asked for a Temple of the Snake God, it just made sense – bringing forth memories of Thulsa Doom and the module I’m currently running for my D&D5e crew – Dwellers of the Forbidden City.

There are three entrances into the temple (and the possibility of climbing up to the second floor and jus...

Small Fort & Dungeon from the Oak King

At the beginning of October I opened up “the Oak King” for the first time in over two years. The Oak King is a hand-made book with a lovely rough paper I was gifted for Christmas of 2012 and which contains a number of maps that I drew over the next few months. The paper, however, wasn’t conductive for use with my primary pens of the day, and also doesn’t work well with the fine markers I use now (Sakura Microns and Mitsubishi Uni-Pins – both bleed excessively on this paper).

Thus...

Lino's Islands in the Sky

Not all land masses sit comfortably on the ground. Some insist on picking up and floating away, doing their own things it would seem. Some of these have been wrangled by people with access to flying machines and mounts and in the cast of Lino’s Islands, several smaller islands were lashed together and built up.

Lino’s Islands are an almost idyllic pair of hilly islands with a small rocky flat-topped lump off to one side. The rocky island is home to Lino’s Keep, and the smaller almost...

Backstage Pass - Season 2 #11

Here we go with the last Backstage Pass of the year. 

I had a comment recently that one patron would prefer these to be in a zip file or a similar archive so all the maps could be downloaded at once instead of getting a list of maps to click on. Before I switch over, I would like some more feedback on the idea from the rest of the Backstage Pass holders - would you prefer these in a single bundle or disseminated as I currently do?

A Dungeon with a Message

Every now and then I get an idea that I think will be fun to draw. Sometimes I actually follow through on it.

They aren’t always the best ideas.

There are times when I just want to run a game with a moral, a message… a game that teaches something important that the players will take home with them after the night is over and the dice put away.

I think this might be exactly the right dungeon for such a game.

(This is a freebie post - I'm not charging my pat...

Hejmarko - Jando's Arch

The settlement known as Jando's Arch (Hejmarko in the local tongue, a contraction of "Home on the Arch") presents one of the more memorable vistas of any city in the realm. Built on a stone arch jutting into the Egret Sea, the combination of the natural stone arch and the waterfall where the short-lived Feino River enters the Egret Sea present a sensory experience that few cities can compete with.

The biggest hindrance to the growth of Hejmarko is the very terrain that makes it so pictures...

Christina's Caves

I don’t often work with colour, but my recent acquisition of a few coloured pens in the same style as my usual pens used for my maps made me want to try something with a LITTLE bit of colour as highlighting.

So when Christina Trani (who is one of the many awesome people supporting my cartography through my Patreon Campaign) was looking for advice on populating her dungeon, I couldn’t help but offer instead to take a try at redrawing it.

A significantly more linear dungeon tha...

Three-Branched Barrow Mound

Barrow Mounds are a huge part of our fantasy mindset - probably because they feature prominently in a few major works of the genre combined with their connection to things ancient that we still discover to this day.

This barrow is a massive mound, built up over generation after generation as it grew. The original barrow is to the back of the mound (top of the map) and has been joined by two more recent additions that have extended the mound significantly.

Because the mound has be...

Freebie Dwarven Mines Update

Early in the Patreon days I posted the above map of the dwarven mines to the blog - minus the grid. 

I generally don't like going back to a map and adding a grid after the other post-production work is done, because the grid never QUITE fits right. You can see that in the far left part of the map where the last grid square of the corridor is almost half cut off. 

But I got a request, and it was a map that I was pretty sure I could manage to do fair justice to, so I'm posti...

The Giant's Halls (Map 2)

Last month I posted the first part of the Giant’s Halls. This map sits to the south of the first one and is a bit less multi-leveled. Again, this is a dungeon of massive hallways connected to smaller chambers and some immense ones. I’m thinking of this as a dwarven town in the Tolkien genre of massive halls of great height that span out into the depths and would look incredibly impressive lit by thousands of lanterns, but now sit dark and quiet, taken over by monsters more suited to the brob...

Asteroid Base

A wonderful staple of science fiction of most genres is the secret asteroid base used by the pirates, a small military or para-military force, or the illegal raritanium-mining conglomerate.

This map presents such an environment, albeit drawn for those sci-fi games that also come with artificial gravity – so Star Wars and Traveller right off the bat. Built back from the landing bay designed for two small cutters or similar ships, the base consists of

- a raised command area over...

Temple Compound

Temples and churches are a fairly common sight in a fantasy city, but few maintain a standing military force without having a massive structure or complex to house them in. In the case of Keegan’s Temple, the finances were not available to build a massive church / temple / armoury complex. Instead a smaller temple was built in a walled compound donated to the church.

The compound has a main gate and a smaller postern gate for servants and deliveries. Wooden structures along the walls ser...

Brenton's Watch

Towers. Can’t have enough towers. This particular tower was inspired by a request by Louis Brenton for a tower concealing a secret cult meeting area.

Brenton’s Watch is an old watchtower, one of dozens scattered along the borders of the old Andlic Kingdom. Now it is basically an abandoned stump of stone about an hour outside of Treffinor. Far enough away that no one cares, and close enough that people can still get there quietly and without too much preparation.

If you were t...

Warrek's Nest (with treasure map!)

The very beginnings of an underground citadel that never was, Warrek’s Nest expanded on an existing cave and was meant to become a massive multi-leveled underground structure. The location was chosen because of the presence of water, easy access to farmland, and limestone which was easy to dig through. However, no one expected the limestone to be home to rock worms, and the water to have small subterranean access to a nest of obscene eyes.

Construction soon came to a stop, and Lord Warre...

The First Breach

The first of the dwarven earthships to come to this world failed to breach the surface and its engines failed somewhere beneath the Plains of Harr – now the Harr Badlands after centuries of war between the Kale and the armies of men.

After the fighting was over, dwarven engineers sealed off the ancient ship, but only after bringing the ship’s mind up from the depths and building a small temple or memorial for it. The ship’s mind still resides in the great hall of the First Breach, of...

BackStage Pass - Season 2 #10

Here's our second-last backstage Pass of 2015. Since I brought back the backstage pass I've been actually kind of impressed with my ability to keep ahead of it this time around. 

Here's a secret: the backstage pass for December is actually ready now.

So here's the maps for November!