Month: October 2021

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Fort Bourtange – Second Update

This is the linework for Fort Bourtange finished and ready for coloring. I’m planning to crop this map to a few different sizes, since I don’t think most people will need this much space around the fort. This will be the largest size, however, and is intended for people who want to do something crazy with it, like have a full-on battle between two armies. I’m not gonna lie, the grid size on it is absurd.

I also wanted to mention that I’m not going to draw the upper levels of the buildings here. The best way to explain the reason is that I think including them makes the map worse. They’re all small– mostly attics and lofts– and there’s nothing interesting going on up there. If I include them, that means doubling the size of an already huge map, which means more to load on a VTT or more to print for the table. Mont-St-Michel had interesting stuff on the upper levels, but this place doesn’t and I think it’s better to just leave it at one floor. Hopefully, everybody’s cool with that.

Before I get to coloring this, I want to share a few things I’ve learned while doing research for this map:

  1. William the Silent, who ordered the construction of Fort Bourtange, looked like this. I have never seen a 500-year-old portrait of someone who looks anywhere near as badass as that. Everyone else is a ponce in a wig. But that dude? That dude is serious.
  2. Fort Bourtange has three drawbridges. One of them has a bathroom on it and it’s still in use. Don’t swim in the moat.
  3. This is unrelated to the fort, but super interesting: Grutte Pier was an early Renaissance Dutch man the size of Andre the Giant. A mercenary group called the Black Band raided his village and killed his wife, after which Pier started a peasant rebellion. Later, he became a pirate. This guy was the D&D character you created when you were 15, except he was real. This was his sword.
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Fort Bourtange – An Update

Here’s where things are at with Fort Bourtange. This is all of the fort’s structures, including about 40 buildings, 6 bridges, a few wells, some watch posts and a windmill. The next step is to scan all this, arrange everything and draw in the rest.

While I normally draw almost everything on paper, I’m going to be drawing the rest of this map on my pen tablet. That means the landscape, moats, trees, plants and so on. I don’t think you’ll notice any difference, I just want to let everyone know what the plan is.

Finally, after the lines are done, I’ll be coloring it, which will probably take a week or so. I’ve been hoping to get this done by the end of the month and I’d say things are on track for that so far.

On a side note, here’s something interesting I learned. There are about 50 residents of Fort Bourtange today. That seems like a pretty unusual place to live, right? Like, if you told someone you lived in a star fort surrounded by a moat in the Netherlands, you’d imagine that would narrow down the location quite a bit. That’d have to be here, right?

No. There are five places in the Netherlands that fit that description. Five. Fort Bourtange, Naarden, Heusden, Brielle and Willemstad. Apparently, there are thousands of Dutch people just casually living in star forts in the year 2021.

Man, I really have to go there one of these days.

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The Flying Rook

Here’s the annotated version and here’s the unfurnished version.

The Flying Rook is the sort of place wizards build to show off. Anyone with the power to keep this architectural Frankenstein standing is no joke, but– just in case anyone wasn’t fully convinced– they made it fly as well.

I didn’t have any particular purpose in mind when I added the windmill, but, the more I think about it, the more I’m wondering– and hear me out here– what if it was a propeller? Like, what if this whole thing was kind of an airship? That’s not for everybody’s game, of course, but it’s an idea you could roll around in your head if you want to do something a little different.

So, now that we’ve got that 13-story building taken care of, I’ll be moving on to something considerably bigger. Naturally.

As I mentioned before, I’ll be drawing Fort Bourtange, a magnificent 16th century grapeshot dispensary star fort in the Netherlands. It’s a big place, but I believe it’s all one level, so it shouldn’t take an unreasonable amount of time. I think I might get it done by the end of the month, but I don’t want to make any promises.

I’ll be making an unfurnished version of the map as well so you can use it as a village instead of a fort if you prefer. And it actually was a village for a few centuries, so that’s not a stretch.

Well, I’ve been champing at the bit to get started on this map for a couple months now, so I think I’m gonna go do that. Let me know what you think of the Rook!

There are DM notes for this map available to patrons.