Month: June 2021

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The Cobalt Flotilla: The Ships

Turtle Ship
Barge
Drua

And the rest:

I don’t often post 11 maps in one day. It feels like a lot, even if I did make those 11 maps for the purpose of making one big map. Anyway, I hope everyone’s good on ships for a while, because after drawing all these, it might be a minute before I do another one.

In any case, I’d say everyone’s collection of ship maps just got a lot more diverse. You’ve got three Japanese ships, a Korean ship, a Filipino ship, a Portuguese ship, a Fijian ship, a few kinda-sorta Chinese boats and a Polynesian raft. Hopefully they make your seafaring campaigns a bit more interesting.

All right, next up is the Château de Chenonceau, a magnificent French castle built across a river. Imagine the Twins from Game of Thrones, except they were an only child. And a lot classier. I’ve been looking forward to drawing it since I found the floor plans and I’m going to get to work the second I stop typing.

Well, I hope everyone likes the flotilla! It took a lot longer than I expected, but I think it turned out really well and there are a lot of possibilities for how to use it. Overall, I’d say it was worth it and, hopefully, most of you agree.

One last thing: I’d like to apologize for mentioning Game of Thrones. It’s been two years since season 8, but for some of you it may still be too soon. Stay strong, we’ll get through this together.

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The Cobalt Flotilla: Oscar Mike

Here’s the flotilla on the move. They’re keeping a pretty tight formation, but this is a pretty big map as it is and, if I spread the ships out much more, it would have ended up with a grid size of OMGxWTF.

Some of you might end up using the flotilla and you may want to run a naval battle. I say “may,” but, I mean, let’s be real: it’ll happen. Anyway, I’ve got you covered: here’s the Cobalt Flotilla Showdown Map. Good guys on the top, bad guys on the bottom. Unless the flotilla are the bad guys, in which case… look, I’ll let you figure it out.

Anyway, the last thing to do is make individual maps of the ships. That shouldn’t take me long, so I’d say it’ll be done in a day or two.

One last thing: you might be wondering why it’s called the Cobalt Flotilla. This map was chosen by the Cartographic Congress. Jon, who proposed it, explained to me that he was planning to populate it with kobolds, who come from German folklore, and that the word “cobalt” derives from “kobolds.” Thus, the “Cobalt Flotilla.”

I don’t know about you, but I didn’t even know kobolds were a thing outside of D&D. Now that I do, I can promise you one thing: from here on, all kobolds in my game will have German accents. I wouldn’t want to be historically inaccurate.

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The Cobalt Flotilla

Whew, okay! So, this is the thing I’ve been drawing over the last few weeks. When I started this, “an island made of ships” seemed like a simple enough idea. But, as it turns out, you need a lot of ships to make an island and ships kind of take a while to draw, so it turned into a bit of an accidental megaproject. Still, I don’t know about you, but I think it was worth the effort.

I suspect a lot of people will have questions about where the sleeping quarters are, so let me talk about that. Historically, most crew aboard ships usually slept in hammocks. Space is limited on a ship and beds are big. Hammocks, on the other hand, are small and can be stowed overhead during the day, allowing the room to be used for other things.

This many ships would require a ton of crew and a ton of hammocks. But hammocks aren’t interesting and I didn’t want to fill the map with them, so I mostly depicted the rooms as they would look during the day, when the hammocks are stowed in the rafters.

Since I’ve drawn all these ships, I figure I might as well use them for more than just this one map, so I’m going to spend the next few days making individual maps of each of the larger ships. I’m also going to make a map of the flotilla on the move. This shouldn’t take long, since everything’s drawn and colored and I just need to move stuff around. For patrons. I’ll be making annotated versions of the individual ships as well.

When I went into this, I didn’t think I’d be drawing something you could base an entire campaign around, but it’s starting to look like I did. There are a lot of things you could do with this, really. Let me know if you’ve got any thoughts about that.

Well, I’m gonna get to work on wrapping this stuff up! I should have more for you tomorrow, if not later today.

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The Cobalt Flotilla (Work-In-Progress)

These are the upper decks of the flotilla. The three levels below this are pretty close to finished as well, so I should only need another couple days to get it done. I hope no one was expecting this to be a reasonable-sized map, because it definitely will not be.

Okay, I’ve gotta go to sleep.

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I made a slight miscalculation.

The other day, I said I’d be coloring and releasing these ships one at a time. At some point, it occurred to me that that’s insane and that it’d be much faster to color them all together and post the separate maps afterwards. So I put all the decks of all the ships into one image to do that and… well, this is what that looks like.

The main thing I’m trying to say is that this might take a little longer than I’d originally expected. That’s 17 ships and boats, with a combined 35 decks. Which is kind of a lot. Anyway, I may need a couple more days on this, so I wanted to let everyone know. Well, I’m gonna dive back in! I’ll be back when I’ve got them done.

By the way, that raft in the bottom right is the Kon-Tiki. Okay, back to work.

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This is all of the ships.

Sorry for the crappy photo, the only decent camera I currently have access to is the one on my wife’s phone and she’s out of town.

This is all of the ships in the Cobalt Flotilla, crammed into one picture as best as I could. The plan from here is this: I’m going to color these individually and post the maps of the larger ships as they get done. After that, I’ll finish coloring the rest, put them all together into one map and post that. And then I’ll post the smaller boats as tokens.

All in all, I’d guess this will take 5-6 days and you’ll be getting about six maps in all. Five of the big ships, plus one of the whole flotilla. Okay, I’m gonna stop typing and get to work!

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The Cobalt Flotilla (Work-In-Progress)

As it turns out, drawing an island made of boats requires a lot of boats. I’ve got two and a half more pages of boats drawn on top of this. Two more and we should be good.

I think this is gonna be pretty cool. All right, I’m gonna go draw more boats.

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Ollin’s Borehole – Unfurnished

I don’t have too much to say about the unfurnished version of Ollin’s Borehole, but I have a ton to say about the next map, so let’s talk about that instead.

The Cobalt Flotilla is a home for a nomadic, seafaring community. It consists of a number of vessels, large and small. Now, the thing that makes the flotilla unique is when they come together. They tether their ships to each other, lay out planks and rope bridges to connect them and form a sort of island where they can all get together to trade, make decisions as a group, and so on.

To make it more interesting, I decided that I wanted all the ships to be really different. There will be some European-style ships, of course, but a lot of European ships tend to share a similar basic shape and layout and I wanted to draw some REALLY different ships in there. So I did some research and I found a few. Where did I find them, you ask? Asia. Allow me to introduce some highly interesting ships you may not be familiar with:

  • Atakebune – A Japanese warship, largely used as boarding vessels. (Wikipedia)
  • Turtle Ship – A Korean warship with a completely enclosed upper deck, covered with spikes to deter boarders.
  • Karakoa – A double-outrigger raiding ship from the Philippines.
  • Drua – A double-hulled ship for Fijian chieftains.

I’m also going to include some riverboats, rafts, longboats and smaller vessels to give it even more variety.

Also, I’ve decided to draw the ships separately. I’ll make a map of the assembled flotilla tethered together, of course, but drawing them separately means I can make maps of each individual ship as well so you can use them independently. And I’ll make tokens of the ones that are too small to warrant their own map.

Anyway, I just wanted to let you know what was happening. I’m gonna go draw some boats!

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Ollin’s Borehole – An Abandoned Deep Gnome Mining Outpost

Ollin’s Borehole is a sapphire mine in the Black Loch. Well, it was a sapphire mine until some duergar bandits found the place, smashed their way in and killed everyone. Since then, it’s just been another hole in the ground. But, as holes in the ground go, I think this one is pretty interesting.

I wrote… let’s call it “the framework of an adventure” for this map. I’m hesitant to call it an adventure because there are a few things missing from it, most notably the monsters. I left them out because I wanted to make it flexible for parties of any level. So, if your players are level 2, this place is full of kobolds. If they’re level 10, it’s full of umber hulks. You get the idea. I also don’t specify the amount of loot to be found, largely for the same reason. Basically, I left out the stuff that I’d typically change when running an adventure that was made for parties of a different level than mine is.

Anyway, it’s called “The Lost Sapphires” and it’s in the DM notes. I’m curious what you all think of it, so I’m giving it away to everyone. It’s nothing complicated, just a single-session dungeon run, but it’s an easy way to get your party into Ollin’s Borehole. I can’t promise you’ll love it, but I can promise it will explain why there’s a big pile of beds at the bottom of the pit.

And I can promise that you will have a 15-minute argument about how much those beds should mitigate falling damage if your party’s rules lawyer lands on them. I apologize for that in advance.

I’ve got an unfurnished version of this map on the way, which I’ll have for you tomorrow. After that, I’ll be drawing the Cobalt Flotilla,  a floating community made up of a bunch of ships lashed together, forming a big, wooden island. And then I’ll be drawing a historical map, the Château de Chenonceau. It’s one of those places that’s straight out of a fantasy map, except people actually built the thing in real life. As inspiring as I found it, it seems like the least I could do is draw a map of the place so it can have a few more battles.

There’s an annotated version of this map available to patrons.