The Stygian City: Into the Pit

Our gigantic dungeon starts here, in a small village called Ekersfield. The villagers live in and around the top of the pit, mining iron ore from the level below. This is the nice part of the pit. The welcome center, if you will. Past this point, most of the pit’s inhabitants get a lot less friendly.

So, there’s an unusual problem with this project and its kind of unavoidable. See, the map above is finished… but it’s not. If you look at the uppermost level, you can see the windows in the sides of the lower levels of the pit. But on the bottom level, there aren’t any. That’s because I haven’t drawn the maps below this yet and I don’t know where they’ll be. So I’m going to have to update these maps after I draw the next ones. Which will also have to be updated later. And so on. A bit of a pain, but no big deal.

For patrons, I’m also making modular versions of the maps. These are individual floors which can be rearranged as you like. Here’s how they work: first, the lower level windows won’t be shown on the sides of the pit. And second, all the stairs descend counter-clockwise. The stairs won’t always be in the same place, but they’ll always move in the same direction and, if you want, you can rotate the map to get them close to each other. With only three floors, that isn’t super relevant just yet, but there will be a day when there are 20+ floors and it will be then.

Thus begins another very large project. They always seem too big to ever get done, but they always do. Brazenthrone took two years to draw, but it got finished. The Black Loch took a year and a half, but it got done too. I think this will take less than a year, but we’ll see. In any case, it’ll be done one day and, hopefully, you’ll like it. But for now, how’s it looking? Off to a good start?