Month: April 2021

Posted on

Glogdolp – Roofs

Not too much going on in the roof level, but there is one thing I wanted to mention. If you look around the buildings, you’ll see little triangles pointing to the walls. Those are to indicate where the doors are. It occurred to me recently that that might be useful for some people, so I decided to try it and see what you all think.

Anyway, next I’ll be drawing some tokens for the Black Loch. Drow and kuo-toa and Lim the Big Dumb Ogre and so forth. Those will probably be done in a day or two. After that, I’ll be drawing the map chosen by last month’s Cartographic Congress: a wizard’s casino. I’m thinking this is going to be more Monte Carlo than Vegas, but let’s see how it goes. In any case, after that, I think we’ll be headed back to the loch!

Posted on

Glogdolp: A Kuo-Toa Village

Here’s the annotated version.

Glogdolp is a kuo-toa village in the Black Loch. The main things they do here are mollusk farming and slaving. That big jail isn’t there to deal with widespread naughtiness.

Glogdolp is at the tail end of a larger kuo-toan nation called the Bluescale Empire, which stretches down the river to the south. They don’t have much of a presence in the Loch at the moment, but they have plans to change that. Those plans aren’t really happening in Glogdolp, but when we get to the nearby kuo-toa stronghold, you’ll get a look at the kind of nonsense they have in mind.

Basically, it’s crabs. Huge crabs. Like, stupidly huge crabs. Siege crabs. The Bluescale Empire is secretly breeding them and, at some point, they intend to use them to take over the loch.

Personally, I think Glogdolp would be a good place for a rescue mission. The kind that starts with a few potions of water breathing, so the party can sneak in through the underwater caverns. Or you could even have the party stop here to ask about something, then have them happen to see a bunch of slaves getting led into the cells. You know, start pushing some emotional buttons, get an argument going between the paladin and the rogue. We have to save them! We totally don’t. My god says we do! I don’t care about your god. You did when he was curing your Thayvian Crotch Leprosy!

Next, I’m going to draw a roof-level map of Glogdolp, which should only take a day or two. After that, I’m going to draw some tokens. Specifically, I’m going to make tokens pertaining to the Black Loch. So, kuo-toa, Lim the Ogre,  the orogs and drow of the Deep Spire, and so forth. If I’m going to draw all the places in the Black Loch, I might as well draw the people as well. That shouldn’t take long either.

By the way, if you don’t know about the tokens I made, there are around 270 of them and they’re free. You can download them all here.

Anyway, I hope you like the map! Let me know what you think of the Black Loch so far!

There are DM notes for this map available to patrons.

Posted on

Kuo Toa-Village – Work-In-Progress

I’m in the middle of coloring this at the moment. There are also a series of underwater caverns below, but I’ll show you those when it’s done.

The main thing the kuo-toa in this village do is capture travelers to serve as slaves or sacrifices. This is one of the reasons people stay at the godawful inn nearby. When the choice is either sleeping on a bed that smells like weapons-grade cat urine or getting brutally sacrificed to an imaginary fish goddess, most people would choose the former.

Posted on

The Chesterboro Arms – Lim the Ogre, Proprietor

Here’s the non-annotated version and here are the DM notes. This map is a part of the Black Loch.

The Chesterboro Arms is a straight up dump. Nobody thinks they’d ever stay at a place like the Chester, but then they find themselves in a REALLY scary part of the underdark. Wherever you look, there are bandits, monsters and all kinds of awful crap that wants to kill you. You probably shouldn’t even be there and you’re damn sure not sleeping there, so you press on. And you keep pressing on. And after a couple days of walking, you’d give anything just for a nap.

And then you see it: the Chesterboro Inn. Is the food good? You don’t care. Have the beds ever been washed? You don’t care. Is it safe to sleep here? Well, the innkeeper is the biggest ogre you’ve ever seen, so… yeah, probably. And, sure, the building looks like it’s going to collapse, but what are the odds that it happens today?

If you have questions about the Chesterboro Arms, you should understand that you’re supposed to have questions. I didn’t just set out to make this place crappy, I wanted it to be hilariously crappy. The outhouse is huge. You have to go through a bedroom to get to the storeroom. There’s a shed full of chairs. I don’t really have an explanation for that stuff, except that they seemed like things Lim the Ogre would do. Speaking of which, if you want to know the story of how an ogre opens an inn, that’s in the DM notes.

I’m going to draw another Black Loch map next, maybe the kuo-toa village. After that, I’ll do something other than the loch. You know, mix it up a bit. Anyway, I hope you like the Chesterboro! If your party ends up going there, please tell me how it went. I seriously want to know.

Posted on

The Vale of Pentandra

The Vale of Pentandra was a map chosen by the Cartographic Congress. Ben, who proposed it, wanted an elven city in the rainforest with a magical portal in the center, surrounded by two huge trees arching overhead.

The more I’ve thought about it, the more I like the portal. Sometimes, as a DM, you want your players to be somewhere really far away. And you don’t want to say, “You get on your horses, clap the coconuts for two months and you’re there,” but you also might not want to do three sessions of “stuff happens while you’re on the road.” Having a way to avoid either of those things in a way that feels natural can be nice. Ready to stop doing Chult stuff and start doing Waterdeep stuff? This might be a nice place for the party to hear a rumor about.

I apologize for this taking so long, but I wanted to get it looking right and that required a lot of changing things around this time. Also– feel free to laugh at me– I got everything done an hour ago, was ready to post this, and realized I forgot to put a scale on it. I managed to forget about that for the entire week and a half it took me to plan, draw and color this. YEP THAT’S ME PROFESSIONAL FANTASY CARTOGRAPHER RIGHT HERE.

Anyway, I’ll be getting to work on the Black Loch next. I’m going to draw the inn on the left side of the map. I know there are a million maps of inns out there, but this one is going to be a little unusual, because this place is owned and operated by a clan of ogres. And it features only the finest ogre furnishings. Ogre-crafted tables. Ogre-crafted bar. Ogre-crafted doors and walls. Starting to get the picture? Your players think they’ve stayed at a crappy dump of an inn before. They have no idea.