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The Shattered Tower - Upper Levels

This… is a mighty tall tower.

Here are the 8 levels of the Shattered Tower that are above the break at level 5 of the structure. These levels float in the air above the base of the tower, slowly lifting and falling by about 18 inches vertically and maybe 12 inches side to side. The structure defies gravity, but seems anchored to this physical locus, unable and unwilling to be moved elsewhere.

(The lower five levels as well as the sideview that helps visualize how the levels co...

The Shattered Tower - Lower Levels

One of the quickest and easiest ways to indicate weirdness to players is to have something quietly and simply defying gravity. In the case of the Shattered Tower it may not even be immediately apparent… until you look up and see the break in the incredibly tall tower almost 180 feet above ground and that the upper reaches of the tower are only connected to the lower areas by a simple ladder.

The tower itself dates back to elven rule or possibly earlier and thrusts up silently from the ro...

Rhinoceros Containment Caves of the Iron Overlord

In late September, Billy Longino asked for some mapping ideas over on google+, so I threw him a title I was working on at the time – Rhinoceros Containment Caves of the Iron Overlord. He thought it was me trying to throw him off his game, but he worked through it and produced a really cool little map.

But it wasn’t really a joke, as I was in the middle of my own version of said map and was curious how he would interpret the name compared to my version (because his mapping style is quit...

The Coot's Egg

Obviously the name of this is a bit of a joke referencing the “Egg of Coot” from Arneson’s “The First Fantasy Campaign” (which some people take to be an attack on Mr Gygax, but was in fact aimed at Gregg Scott, head of Microarmor at the time).

An insanely large egg lies underground here, partially exposed by a small underground river and further excavations by parties unknown.

Some like to think it was a dragon’s egg. But the scale makes that unlikely at best – what...

The Giants Halls (map 1)

I don’t normally spread a big map release over several months, but this one I seem to be taking my damned sweet time at. The goal is to draw up a dungeon based upon unreasonably large hallways. The kind of thing that makes little sense from a construction point of view, but produces epic vistas for running battles and exploration.

In all there will be four maps in this set. I just finished the second one a few days ago and it will go live in November, probably along with the third. When ...

Crypt of the Child Kings

This is the real meat and potatoes of my fantasy games – small underground maps of caves that have been modified for human or subhuman occupation or use.

In this case, the cave has been converted into a set of crypts with a pair of preparatory rooms above and a small shrine in the largest cave, with several more crypts along the walls of the shrine (where the bodies of the high priests are said to be laid).

The crypts have lain quiet and abandoned for years. As Jens Larsen posi...

The Architect’s Isometric Delve

This map was drawn using the Dungeon Architect Cards as the baseline for the design and structure, like the map posted on Tuesday this week.

After seeing how my Tuesday map turned out, I wanted to try the cards again to make a smaller map; and since I had a new pad of isometric paper that I haven’t tried yet (from squarehex), I combined the two ideas together into one great tasting dungeon. Less than a dozen rooms make this a perfectly sized dungeon level for an evening of play (or two i...

The Architect’s Dungeon

In March of this year I backed a Kickstarter for “Dungeon Architect Cards” because I was in the consideration phase for the Dyson’s Deck of Delves project. The cards arrived in the mail in the beginning of July and sat in the console of the truck for a few months before I finally brought them inside and started messing around with them.

Each card is two sided and each side has a discrete dungeon section (a room or corridor) linked by doors to other sections, and a list of 12 “trapp...

Sir James' Lost Base

Sir James sought out an underground military headquarters from which he could command troops and maintain an eye on logistics but also be out of sight when needed. In the end he commissioned a pair of underground headquarters, neither of which was really completed before his death.

This particular structure was not only incomplete, but Sir James never used it as its designer intended, instead using it as a decoy base. Construction was never completed and the front entrance to the structure...

Backstage Pass - Season 2 - #9

And here we go!  Here's the maps going up on the blog for the month of October (which I have filed under Spocktober on my hard drive).

Also this month I'm working on trying to exercise my drawing / illustration skills doing the #DRAWLLOWEEN challenge, so if you follow me on facebook or google+ you will see how these drawing exercises work out for me.

More Ruins of the Forbidden City

As my D&D5e campaign continues in the titular city at the heart of of the classic 1981 module “Dwellers of the Forbidden City”, I find myself drawing out maps of more and more structures from said ruins.

This particular set of structures is mostly in ruins, but also has a large section of the temple that has survived the destruction brought about by time, ancient calamities, and the gradual sinking and liquifaction of the land as it gets boggier. There are also areas in the more ru...

A Green and Pleasant Map

A companion piece to the Red and Pleasant Map I posted on Tuesday, this map was inspired by the gardens of Voivodja. A city block-sized chunk of city, surrounded by streams with a few bridges connecting it to its neighbours. While mostly covered in greenery and small trees, the remnants of the city below are more clear here than in most gardens, with a few entrances into the city itself as well as visible walls and towers.

When I was drawing this I pictured a group of adventurers encounter...

A Red and Pleasant Map

I am an unashamed fan of the machinations of Jez Gordon who works as a layout and graphics god for a few small press releases every year. Among last year's masterpieces of his work we had Zak Smith's Red and Pleasant Land (winner of a fistfull of ENnie awards) which he laid out and added a few maps to.

Combining the inspiration from reading the book with my love of the black, white and red isometric map that Jez drew for it (if you don't yet own a copy of this awe-inspiring book, you can s...

Upwards into the Portal Nexus!

On Tuesday I posted the Portal Nexus – the ground floor and side view of a set of towers with no obvious ground-level entry that I picture as housing a set of portals from one place to another – a sort of portal clearinghouse or transit hub for busy teleporters. In many cases I would stop with the one level, letting it serve as a general layout for the upper levels as well, but I felt that this set of towers deserved a little more (and a few more portals). So here are the next three levels, ...

The Portal Nexus

Once again it is not much of a secret that I have a love for towers (and a recent love for drawing lots of circles on a piece of paper and calling it a map). For this one I wanted a set of towers with no obvious entry (at least at ground level).

What it evolved into as I drew it is a cluster of interlinked towers that enclose a series of portals to other towers in other realms.

While the ground floor only has two portals at this point (the magic circles at the two end towers) an...

The Ruined Ha'Tak Temple

There’s a structure in the Forbidden City with five small pyramids poking out of the roof. It was once either a museum or a temple – definitely a place where people came to contemplate (their history, their gods, all of the above?)

The east side of the structure is partially collapsed, with one wing having almost fully given way and crashed down into the street.

The five pyramids in turn were taken over by the local dwellers as nests for their giant wasps – ea...

Dreaming Feather's Tomb

While I have many a tower map on the blog, I seem to be lacking in ziggurats and stepped pyramids – wonderful constructions that evoke ancient civilizations, mysteries, and probably hidden treasures.

Dreaming Feather was one of the last rulers of the Dyonis Empire – shrugged off by most histories as a freak and sign of the end of the empire because she was a psionically gifted siamese twin who ruled for only nine years.

As one of the later rulers of the empire h...

The Temple of Marid Scurn

Temples, churches and religious structures tend to both be large (because they are built with the help of a whole community instead of a single person or family) and central to a lot of games (because in a world where gods have direct power over the world, it seems to make sense that their churches would wield significant power also).

Thus they make great game fodder.

This map is of a church and two nearby structures (although the northern structure didn’t quite f...

ReQuasqueton

Sometimes you find inspiration in another map. Initially I started drawing this map based only on three corridors, and somewhere along the way I realized that it was starting to feel like Quasqueton - the dungeon from the classic module "B1 In Search of the Unknown".

So I went with it and stole a few elements from the classic map, and tried to compress the whole In Search of the Unknown experience into a single small dungeon map instead of a massive sprawling complex - complete with...

Backstage Pass Season 2, #8

Here they come patrons! Thanks again for supporting me in this endeavour to produce more and better maps. This month I really feel I went all-out for most of these maps - some of them took most of a week to produce, making it a bit of a trick to get 9 maps together for the month.

So here are the 9 maps for September... backstories will come as the maps get posted to the blog (as well as the sequence being finalized which determines which are getting released under the commercial lic...

Scart's Descent

Introduced earlier this week, Lord Scart of the Hemron Coalition was a name-level fighter who took over a series of insanely meandering and twisting goblin warrens and converted them into his base of operations known as Scart’s Hall.

A hundred and fifty feet beneath the meandering tunnels and chambers of the Hall are more warrens that were also converted into storage and barracks… and a descent into even deeper recesses under the earth.

Like Scart’s Hall, the ...

Scart's Hall

In a departure from the norms of dungeon development (where foul goblinoids and monsters invade the subterranean works of other races), Lord Scart of the Hemron Coalition took over a series of crudely-cut but extensive goblin warrens and spent twelve years with a large team of engineers and sappers to establish Scart’s Hall.

A combination of masonry and finished raw stone gives Scart’s Hall a finish similar to most surface castles, except (as most guards would point out) that it...

Redstone Shrine (with time lapse video!)

One thing with running the classic “Dwellers of the Forbidden City” module – there’s a lot of opportunity to draw up ruined and partially ruined temples and other buildings to scatter throughout the area as most of it is presented from above at a scale of 50 feet per square.

And since I’m running that module currently, I’ve started drawing up some of the buildings that I expect to have turn up during play. This one is a small shrine where the floors and interior surfaces...

The Floridungeon

A while back someone commented on how many of my recent dungeon maps were distinctly bound by the limits of the page (that is to say, they were quite square or rectangular in overall design). So I figured I would make sure to do one that was bound by something other than the shape of the paper...

It happened to coincide exactly with someone else asking for a dungeon in the shape of a particular U.S. State.

The end result is the Floridungeon.

In play...

Small and simple maps can often produce about one evening of play when you incorporate travel times, investigation and research and a few good twists and encounters once at the location in question. This particular map was designed for exactly that – being a small temple setup that exists along an underground stream that in turn is part of the ancient sewers beneath The Forbidden City (from the classic Dwellers in the Forbidden City module).

A mix of caves that have been smoothed ...

The Ledge Tower

When it was built, it probably bore some fancy elven name that translated into “Spire that reaches from the soil to the stars” or similar nonsense, today this tower on a hard stone escarpment is merely known as the Ledge Tower.

Not a strongly defensible position, the tower has three distinct entrances as well as those created by siege and nature in the centuries since its construction. At one point the tower was probably at least sixty feet taller than it is now, but all that re...

Backstage Pass, Season 2 #7

Oops! This was supposed to be posted before I posted Nesbitt-Hill on Tuesday!

Here is the backstage pass for August, 2015!

Nesbitt-Hill

When noted on a map, most would expect the tiny village of Nesbitt-Hill to… well… be on a hill. In fact, the land around village is uniformly flat and hill-free. The small town was built up around an inn at the intersection of two trade roads – an inn established by Burgen Nesbitt-Hill and his family.

Nesbitt-Hill is a very small farming community with only two stone structures – the inn proper and the church just to the south – which are used as shelters in times of troub...

Pregello Fortress

Along the wide banks of the Onur River are a number of small fortifications dating back to various Kale city states that were once the backbone of trade and travel along the river and the badlands to the east.

Originally a trio of towers, Pregello Fortress was constructed by Ezwer the Long on the ruins of older Kale structures. Pregello is a small fortress built up around two squat towers and a single towering spire that stands out over the Onur like a spike driven into the stony ri...

Tavistock Manor

Again with the compass-derived maps this month, I bring you Tavistock Manor. A three-story manor house that seems perpetually for rent on the north side of the city.

Tavistock Manor is settled into a lovely huge estate for a rental property, requiring a fair staff of gardeners and groundskeepers to keep it looking decent. Thus the property seems to have waves of excellence and decrepitude, depending on finances of the owner and renters. The property as a whole is generally too big f...