Drawing this map made my brain hurt and I’m genuinely worried that, by posting it, I’m going to cause other people’s brains to hurt as well. I think this has something to do with the floor being a wall and a wall being the floor, which… dammit, my brain hurts again.
Here, I made a diagram to explain it as simply as I could:
There’s some further explanation in the DM notes, but I think this covers the important stuff. As you can see, I had to change the way I draw significantly to accommodate some of the Fallen Tower’s peculiar needs. Like, there’s a map symbol for a door or a window, but there is no map symbol for “There’s a gap where a staircase used to be. In the wall. 30 feet up,” or “There’s a door, but it’s sideways.” So I had to draw in the sides of the walls to show those things.
A huge part of the time I spent on this was just figuring out how to present it in the most easy-to-understand way I could. At first, I had plans to complicate the hell out of this thing, but I decided to keep it fairly simple and see what you all thought. If the Fallen Tower doesn’t cause too much cerebral hemorrhaging, I may revisit this idea down the road and go a bit wilder with it.
Anyway, I do think this came out pretty well and I think it’d be an interesting place for players to explore. If you’re having a hard time wrapping your head around it, let me know and I’ll do what I can to help. It’s my fault you’re looking at this thing in the first place, so I kind of owe you that.
Next up is Brazenthrone‘s Freeholders’ Hall (27 on this map). It’s where the mushroom farmers live and it’s the second-to-last Brazenthrone map. After that, I’ll be drawing last month’s Cartographic Congress winner, a dwarven mining outpost built into the side of a cliff face. Then we wrap up Brazenthrone with the Old Palace. This journey of nearly two years is coming to a close.
