Author: MattMilby

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The Streets of Vlyn’darastyl

This is a battlemap for the Drow City of Vlyn’darastyl. It’s mostly meant to be a backdrop for encounters your party might have in the city, but I figured I’d throw a tavern, a shop and a small market in there to give it a little extra utility. By the way, these buildings don’t actually correspond to anyplace on the city map, so don’t go crazy trying to find them. Hopefully no one did that before reading this far.

I’m going to draw a roof-level version of this map as well, which should only take a day or two. After that, I’ll be drawing the map chosen by last month’s Cartographic Congress, the Infected Citadel. This is a small, dwarven hold that’s been tainted by the Far Realm. Things will look fairly normal at the top, but, as you descend, it starts to get stranger and stranger, until reality just completely breaks down at the bottom. Like, the floor becomes a thick mass of worms writhing around giant horse eyeballs. And there’s an eight-eyed fish head sticking out of the wall. Or something like that, I don’t know.

Honestly, I have no idea how I’m going to draw this place, but I’m very much looking forward to figuring it out. I promise you that it will be full-on crazy time.

Anyway, I’m gonna go post the last five proposals for the Black Loch Conclave. Let me know what you think of the map!

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Eel’s Maw Stronghold

The kuo-toa get no respect. I don’t mean from lorebooks, I mean from DMs. When you’re writing an underdark campaign and you need a powerful empire, who do you think of? The drow, sure. The illithids, of course. Maybe the duergar. But the kuo-toa? No, those are trash enemies for random encounters. I mean, sure, sometimes they play a significant role in a story, but they hardly ever take center stage.

Well, the kuo-toa of the Black Loch aspire to a little more than jumping out of the water and getting decapitated by your half-orc barbarian. They’ve got plans to take over the loch and subjugate the other races. Including your precious drow.

The plan is crabs. Siege crabs. Crabs the size of your house with carapaces a foot thick. Walls don’t save you from that. Soldiers don’t save you from that. Running for your life? That might do it.

The kuo-toa have been breeding siege crabs in the caverns below the Eel’s Maw Stronghold for decades and, as soon as the next brood reaches maturity, they’ll be ready to kick things off. The kuo-toa intend to move up in the world, or at least wreak enough havoc to take everyone else down a peg or two.

Next up, I’ll be drawing another map from the Black Loch. This will be a battlemap for the drow city of Vlyn’darastyl. It’ll be a few streets with some houses and shops. Nothing too fancy, just something that’ll make a good backdrop for encounters in the city. I don’t expect it to take too long.

By the way, I thought I’d give away the DM notes for this map, so you can download those here. Also, here are some siege crab tokens and a trebuchet token I made.

Well, that’s it for now. Let me know what you think!

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Two Things

First, if you’re a patron, I need you to break a tie in the Cartographic Congress. The vote has been 10-10 for several days now, so I’m opening it up to all patrons. It’s time to finish this.

Second, there are a few streamers who have been using my maps lately and I wanted to mention them in case anyone was interested. I get a huge thrill out of seeing videos of people using my stuff. I don’t know, it’s like my map is on TV.

Anyway, DM Filly is running a Spelljammer campaign on Twitch called “Dragonfly” and he’s using my Dragonfly map. I was actually watching his campaign before he started using it and, the first time he did, I swear to god, I did exactly what Leo is doing in the picture above. Here’s links:

Also, Andyisyoda is a Minecraft streamer who’s been building some of my maps on his stream. He recently built Five Arches and, before that, Finbarr’s Marsh.

If anyone else out there is streaming their game and wants to use my maps, you are welcome to do so pretty much unconditionally. If you already are, feel free to post a link to your stream/youtube/podcast/etc in the comments.

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The Citadel of Ash

A lot of people will look at this map and see a place inhabited by one of two things:

  1. Bad guys
  2. Dwarves

Why? It’s the lava, of course. Lava in FRPGs is practically code for dwarves and scumbags. It’s almost like decent, respectable humans can’t recognize the defensive utility of molten rock.

Hopefully, this isn’t how it works in real life, because I recognize the defensive utility of molten rock. And I’m a little too tall to be a dwarf.

Anyway, the first vote of the Black Loch Conclave started yesterday and, if you’re a patron, you should go cast a vote. There are some amazing ideas people have proposed for this and I really want to see what everyone decides on. Honestly, there are a few proposals that have inspired me so much that I’m thinking of incorporating some of their ideas into other maps if they don’t win. I am so glad I did this.

Next up, I’ll be drawing the Kuo-Toa Stronghold from the Black Loch. Like the Mother’s Eye, it’s going to be partially underwater. I don’t think I’ve seen a map of a semi-submerged castle before, so this should be fairly unique, or at least not something there are a million of out there. And, once it’s done, I should have time to knock out another one or two Black Loch maps this month.

Anyway, I’m gonna get to work. Let me know what you think of the Citadel!

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El Ojo de la Madre – Aztec Version

Okay, here’s the alternate version of the underwater temple I promised. Could be useful if your party ever ends up in Chult, Maztica or any other place that’s basically Mexico with lizardmen.

I’ll be drawing a tower fortress next, in the style of Barad-Dûr from Lord of the Rings. I have to admit, that was a nice-looking evil tower. But if you engineer a fortress in such a way that it falls apart when someone destroys a piece of jewelry, that seems like a serious design flaw to me. Something to consider.

Anyway, I’m gonna finish this coffee and start sketching. Let me know what you think!

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The Mother’s Eye

The Mother’s Eye is a kuo-toan temple partially submerged in the waters of the Black Loch. The part of the temple above water is meant, perhaps surprisingly, to accommodate land-dwelling races.

Do land-dwelling races worship naked lobster lady? No, but they make great sacrifices. And kuo-toa do human sacrifices like Brazilians play soccer.  They love it, they’re great at it, it’s kind of their thing. It’s not their only thing, of course. But, you know, it’s a big one and they work hard at it. You’ve gotta respect that.

The kuo-toa of the Black Loch have big plans and I’ll talk more about what those are when I draw the kuo-toa stronghold, which I’m probably going to do within the month.

But first, there are two things to do. The first is to make an alternate version of this map with the temple on land. I figure that, if I’m going to draw an Aztec/Mayan style pyramid and put it underwater, I should probably make a version that isn’t underwater while I’m at it. It should only take a day to get done.

After that, I’ll be drawing the map chosen by last month’s Cartographic Congress: a tower fortress, similar to a smaller version of Barad-Dûr (from Lord of the Rings).

Anyway, that’s it for now. If you’re a patron and you’ve got an idea for a new location for the Black Loch that you’d like to add to the upcoming vote, you’ve got another week to let me know. Speaking of which, the ideas people have submitted so far are really good. Like, REALLY good. I can’t wait to see which one you go for.

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Submerged Temple (Work-in-Progress)

Here’s the top level of the submerged kuo-toan temple in the Black Loch. There are three floors below this and I should have them all done in a day or two.

By the way, I mentioned earlier that I was taking proposals for a new location in the loch and that all patrons were welcome to submit proposals. I originally estimated that there might be 40+ proposals in all, but I may have overestimated, because I currently have 11. So, if you’re a patron who was thinking about submitting an idea for the vote, your chances may be better than previously expected. Anyway, you’ve still got another week to shoot me a message if you want to propose a location.

Okay, back to work!

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The Black Loch Conclave (AKA “The Unholyrood”)

I mentioned in an earlier post that I wanted to hold a vote to give more people a voice in the creation of the Black Loch. Here are the details on that:

First, I’m going to send out a message to all patrons asking for proposals for new locations for the loch. If you have an idea for a place you think would make an interesting addition, please reply to the message with a brief description of your idea (or a long one, if necessary). In any case, I’ll get more details from you if your proposal is chosen.

The call for proposals will be sent through patreon’s messaging system, so if you don’t check that very often, please do. I’ll be sending it out tonight.

I’ll start the voting in a week or two, depending on the number of proposals. The first round of voting will consist of multiple votes, with around 10 proposals each.

After that, the two proposals with the most votes from each ballot will be pitted against each other in a second round of voting. Runoff votes will be held until one location wins. That location will be added to the loch and, of .

There are a few rules:

  1. One proposal per person.
  2. No megaprojects. If you think your proposal might be a megaproject, send it to me anyway and I’ll let you know. Keep in mind that the Flying Rook and Five Arches are not megaprojects, so you can still think pretty big.
  3. With the above exception, you can propose any kind of location you like. It can be tied in with the existing lore of the Black Loch or it can be entirely new.
  4. If you have a proposal, there’s no time limit to tell me, as long as you let me know before the final first-round vote is posted. This could be as long as a month from now, but I’ll make sure you have at least two weeks.
  5. All patrons can participate in all votes. All votes count equally.

And that’s it. If you have any questions, leave a comment or shoot me a message!

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Black Loch Naval Battlemaps and Tokens

You can download the ship tokens and maps here.

I spent yesterday and today making a bunch of stuff to help you run naval battles in the Black Loch. Most of it is in the picture above. There are nine ship tokens, plus two tokens of the loch’s resident sea creature, the Whisperer. One of the tokens shows the Whisperer clearly and the other is just a dark shadow under the water to freak your players out with.

There are also four maps that are mostly water. Since I want to get started on the next Black Loch map, I decided to keep this fairly simple, so all the water maps are basically just the map above, cropped in different ways. They’re nothing fancy, but they’ll let you run naval battles in the loch without having to use a sea map that looks like a sunny day in the Caribbean.

Anyway, with that done, I’m going to get started on the Submerged Temple, a kuo-toa holy place in the Black Loch. I’m thinking it’ll be partly above water, but mostly below. Maybe like a pyramid with the tip above water? I’m not sure, I’ll figure it out after a few sketches.

There’s one other thing: I’m unable to continue updating the EncounterPlus module with new maps. I’m sorry to those of you who use EncounterPlus, but the program I use to export the module hasn’t been working properly, possibly due to a conflict with a recent release of Foundry. If things change and I can start updating the module again, I promise that I will. Until then, I’m really sorry.

Also, I mentioned in an earlier post that I’m planning to hold a vote of all patrons for a new Black Loch location. I’ll post about that in a day or two and send out a call for proposals for locations to add to the loch.

Okay, I’m gonna start sketching that temple. I hope you like the naval battlemaps! Are they the most boring maps I’ve ever made? I think they might be, haha.