“This place must have some really strong ale. Looks like the whole building is drunk.”
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.
The Black Loch: A Map Full of Maps
I’m giving out the patron versions of this map to everybody. There isn’t as much stuff as there would normally be since this isn’t a battlemap, but I want everybody to have it. You can download it here.
For those of you who haven’t heard of the Black Loch yet, there are only two important things to know:
- The Black Loch is a small sea in the underdark.
- I’m going to draw a map of every dot on the map above, at a 5′ grid scale.
Now that everyone’s caught up, let’s talk about what we’re getting into. There are 23 dots on the map, 3 of which have been drawn already. I’m also going to draw two more things that aren’t marked on the map, which means there are 22 maps to draw before this is finished. Unless I decide to add something else, which I may.
By the way, you might have noticed that most of the place names are pretty generic. They’ll get proper names when I draw them, but, for now, they’ll just be descriptors.
I reserve the right to move things around to accommodate the lore as I come up with it, but the general idea is that the west is sort of the civilized half of the map. Things get a little wilder out in the east and then, in the Deep Reaches, you get the crazy stuff. Let’s talk about the specific locations, as well as the other two things that aren’t on the map:
Already Finished
- The Deep Spire is done.
- Vlyn’darastyl and the Great Breach are done. These two are the only locations that won’t get a 5′-grid battlemap of the whole thing.
to be drawn
- Inn – A solitary inn for visitors who don’t care to stay with the kuo-toa or the drow. How do they survive out here? By paying something really big and scary for security.
- Drow Settlement – This will be a small drow town.
- Secluded Manse – Vlyndarastyl used to send their driders to live on a small island. Someone killed them all and built a house there. I’m not sure who that person is yet.
- Grimlocks – A grimlock settlement of some kind.
- Duergar Outpost – This will probably be half fort, half trade outpost. It’s also a place where the duergar can keep an eye on what’s going on around the loch.
- Kuo-Toa Village and Stronghold – This is the tail end of a kuo-toa kingdom that stretches down the Bluescale River.
- Submerged Temple – A kuo-toa temple. One of three maps that will be completely underwater.
- Submerged Ruins – I’m not sure what I’m doing with this. Maybe a sunken town of some kind?
- Ancient Crypt – I don’t know what I’m doing with this. Maybe it’ll be ancient catacombs from a city that used to exist on the island.
- Travelers’ Ruin – This is a ruined building that passing travelers stay in sometimes.
- Dragon’s Lair – This will be the home of an ancient dragon, high up in the column of rock.
- Fortress Ruins – A charred, burnt-out ruin of a fortress. WELL GOLLY I WONDER WHO DID THAT.
- Deep Gnomes – I’m not sure exactly what this will be, but it’ll have deep gnomes living in it. I think it might be a settlement built around a vertical shaft that goes through the whole place.
- Abyssal Caverns – Several systems of underwater caverns in the walls of a deep crevasse at the bottom of the sea. There may or may not be a kraken lair.
- Surface Entrance – This is the end of a river or stream leading down from the surface. Lots of waterfalls along the way. A good way to get your players into the loch.
- Myconids – Myconids love darkness and dampness, so you’d have to imagine they’re living somewhere in the Black Loch.
- The Blind Colossus – A giant, faceless statue standing in the creepy end of the loch. No one knows who it is or who built it. There will be an interior of some kind.
- Illithid Ruins – An abandoned, crumbling mind flayer city.
- Aboleth Lair – Aboleths are like mind flayers, except they’re better across the board. Mind flayers have psychic powers, aboleths have better psychic powers. Mind flayers are geniuses, aboleths just flat out know everything. Mind flayers look kind of like a cuttlefish, aboleths are actual, giant fish. Anyway, the point is, an aboleth and its flunkies live here.
not on the map
- A Ship – Your players will probably need a ship. There are plenty of ship maps out there, but you need a particular kind of ship for the underdark. Sails won’t do much work, so it’ll have to be a galley. A long time ago, I drew a ship for the underdark called the Grey Huntress, but it’s kind of old and I want to draw you a better one.
- Vlyn’darastyl Streets and Buildings – This will be a battlemap for Vlyn’darastyl with a small bit of the city depicted. Someplace you can use as a backdrop if your players get into a fight, which they probably will, because drow are not nice people.
Anyway, there’s the plan. While I’m working on the Black Loch, I’m going to draw some other maps as well, but I’ll keep things progressing. Some of the maps above will be bigger than others, so it’s hard to calculate how long it’ll take, but I’d say a year or so sounds about right. So, now that you’ve got a better idea of what this project is going to look like, what do you think?
The Great Pyramid of Khufu, depicted before it was looted.
Here’s the non-annotated version and here’s another non-annotated version without the treasure.
I didn’t draw this because it’s the most famous pyramid in the world, I drew it because I genuinely think it’s fascinating. But exactly what is fascinating about it is hard to convey in a map alone, which is why I made the version above to explain it. There’s a mysterious tunnel that leads nowhere. There’s a set of three granite slabs that were dropped down to seal the burial chamber. There’s a narrow, vertical passage with a hidden entrance. And it runs through a cave.
I think this would be a great place for an adventure. It doesn’t have to be anything fancy, just have somebody tell the party it’s there and it’s full of treasure, then have them figure out how to get inside. Personally, I think it’d be fun to let the players think it’s just a fantasy map. Then, after the session is over, tell them they just looted the Great Pyramid. Yeah, in Giza, the big one. Yep, that’s what that was.
Well, I’m not drawing another pyramid next. Instead, I’m going to draw the regional map of the Black Loch. I expect this to change over time as I come up with new ideas and develop the lore of the place, so think of it as the Black Loch v1.0. It’ll have a bunch of locations marked on it, which should give you an idea of what it’s going to look like as it comes together. Any changes I end up making will probably add things rather than subtract them, so I’d say you can probably expect to see maps of whatever is there.
Anyway, I hope you like the map! This concludes our Egyptian tetrahedral mausoleum double feature.
There are DM notes for this map available to patrons.
The Pyramid of Sobek
If you’re looking for a slightly more classic pyramid, here’s the alternate “cool but can you dial that back just a bit” version.
Sobek is the Egyptian god of the Nile and is depicted here a few times. Fun fact: Sobek was history’s first dragonborn. A lot of people thought Wizards of the Coast came up with them in 4th ed. D&D, but the truth is, the Egyptians came up with them around 2500BC. True story, look it up.
The bottom level of the pyramid was inspired by Tutankhamun’s tomb, the red stone sarcophagus being a good example of that. Some of the upper levels, on the other hand, get a little less historical and a little more this guy. That may not be quite what everybody’s looking for, but that’s why I made the alternate version.
I spent some time looking at the insides of actual pyramids while drawing this. Not because I was trying to make it historically accurate, but because I wanted it to have a similar sort of feel. One of the pyramids I looked at quite a bit was the Great Pyramid of Khufu, the largest of the pyramids of Giza. I briefly considered designing this map around that, but that wasn’t going to work. I do still want to draw it, though, and I’ve decided I’m going to do that next.
Let me explain why. It’s not a perfect place for an RPG map, but it has some things going for it:
- It feels authentic, because it is. I think that counts for a lot.
- I want to draw it as it was before it was looted. This lets you give your players the experience of being the first people to break into the Great Pyramid and I think that would be pretty awesome.
- Breaking in without boring a hole through the side (which is what happened) would involve this: smashing a stone seal over the entrance, heading into a tunnel that leads deep underground, finding the entrance to a narrow passage concealed behind a wall, then climbing 150′ (50m) up that nearly vertical passage, which runs through a small, natural cave. There’s more, but are you intrigued yet?
I don’t know if this sounds as interesting to anyone else as it does to me, but I really think this could be an amazing experience and I’ve got a powerful urge to draw the place. In any case, it shouldn’t take that long.
Well, I’m gonna get started. I hope I didn’t talk up the next pyramid so much that people lost interest in this one. In any case, let me know what you think!
There’s an annotated version of this map and DM notes available to patrons.
The Deep Spire: All Levels
Here are the non-annotated version and the unfurnished version. Also, here are the DM notes in case you missed the last post.
Sorry, this took a bit longer than I expected, mostly due to the Photoshop-crashingly large size of the image file. As soon as the stores open back up, I’m buying a new computer. I bought my current one when my previous machine died and it’s still kicking, but it’s time for an upgrade. I haven’t bought anything other than food in almost a year, so as soon as the stores open back up, I’m going to the local indie computer place with the name that probably sounded super hi-tech in 1989 and I’m gonna tell them I need a machine that will literally melt a hole through my desk the second the video card starts running. I’m “supporting local businesses,” or at least that’s my excuse.
Anyway, there are a couple more things I still need to make for this, including some multi-floor maps. You can use this one with all the floors, of course, but I’m going to make some maps with three levels each as well. I think I can get all that posted later today.
Well, I hope you like the Deep Spire! It was a month’s work, but I think it’s a pretty good start to the Black Loch. Let me know what you think!
The free Foundry and EncounterPlus modules have been updated!
So, I sent my module to Foundry recently to put on their site and they asked me to tidy up the walls and doors a bit, which I’ve been doing over the past week or two.
Foundry’s elite module beautification consultant, Cobalt, was nice enough to help out and give me some tips on walls and lighting and so forth, which has improved the module considerably. There are no new maps in there, but a few of them are higher-resolution than they were before and the walls and doors are much nicer. I even redid a few from scratch.
All these changes have carried over to the EncounterPlus module as well, since it is, after all, the Foundry module’s offspring.
As always, I need to give credit to the other people who helped in creating the free module:
- Luke B. did the original walls and doors for almost all of the maps.
- Cobalt gave me a tremendous amount of very helpful feedback and did some tinkering with the database files that would have resulted in the module’s complete incineration if I had attempted it myself.
- And Matt C. gave me tons of feedback on the E+ module, which was crucial in working the bugs out, since EncounterPlus only runs on MacOS and I am not legally cool enough to own an Apple product.
THE GOODS:
You can install the Foundry Module with this manifest URL and you can download the EncounterPlus module here.
NOTE: If you already have the free Foundry module, you should know that the name has changed and, if you update it, it will install a new module called “Milby’s Maps Free.” You can delete the previous one, called “Milby’s Maps Free Module” if you want. Or keep it for sentimental value, whatever.
The Deep Spire: 6th Level and the Citadel
Here are the annotated version and the unfurnished version. And here are the DM notes.
The last part of the Deep Spire is done and so are the DM notes, which… well, they started off as “notes” but, by the end, they were somewhere between a “lengthy screed” and a “borderline manifesto.” Anyway, they go pretty deep into the history of the spire and the people who live there.
For those disinclined to read them, the TL;DR is this: a clan of orog raiders called the Tideborne settled the place, a drow noble house rescued the orogs from disaster and moved in, then they opened the place up to settlers and traders to make money.
If you’re not familiar with orogs, they’re The Other Underdark Race. I like them for when I want an NPC who isn’t a duergar, drow or deep gnome, but I also don’t want them to be some weird crap like a cloaker or whatever. Orogs are basically orcs, except better. They’re Orcs 2.0. They’re bigger, as smart as humans and have sophisticated, well-organized societies.
Of course, they’re not any less into the raiding scene than orcs are, but, to be fair, that’s a very practical trade in a society where everyone is the size of Andre the Giant.
Anyway, the DM notes will give you plenty to read, so I’ll leave the post at that. There’s a few more things to make for the spire, including some tokens I mentioned previously and an assembled map with all of the spire in it. I’m going to make an annotated version of that as well, which will have a little more flavor to it, now that I’ve got more of the lore figured out. It shouldn’t take more than two days, so I’ll be back with that soon. Hopefully a few people will have made it through the DM notes by then, haha.
All right, back to work!
The Deep Spire: 5th Level
Here’s the annotated version and the unfurnished version.
This part of the Deep Spire looks a little different from the rest. I’ll talk about why in the DM notes, which will be coming with the next map, but I’ll explain it a bit here.
So, this part of the spire is occupied entirely by a drow noble house: House Vaerixas. They were once the ruling house of the city of Vlyn’darastyl, but they now live here in exile.
As with most drow cities, the dominant deity of Vlyn’darastyl was Lolth. But, unusually, the deity revered by their ruling family was not. For ages, House Vaerixas worshipped Eilistraee, the drow goddess of freedom and beauty, instead. While the other nobles may have preferred a ruling house that was more in line with the others, they had grown accustomed to it and, for their part, House Vaerixas made no attempt to impose their goddess or her rules on the rest.
Then the Matron Mother died and her daughter Ysri took her place. While the old matron was devoted to her goddess, Ysri Vaerixas was a zealot. Under her rule, the will of Eilistraee would never be denied or compromised. After abolishing slavery– an institution abhorrent to Eilistraee– the other houses rose up against Ysri, forcing her to flee with the surviving members of House Vaerixas.
They came to the Deep Spire, occupied at the time by a gang of raiders in need of protection from a coming assault. Ysri made their leader an offer: she would establish a home in the spire and an arrangement of co-rulership would be created between her house and the bandits. In exchange, the renowned and feared Darksong Knights of House Vaerixas– paladins of Eilistraee– would stand in their defense. The bandit leader reluctantly agreed and their agreement has stood ever since.
Many things have changed in the spire since then, but Ysri’s burning need for retribution has not. She resides in the spire for now, but she doesn’t plan to forever.
So, the story of the spire is coming together. You are, of course, free to tell your own, but I feel like a map this big needs to have some lore in order to make it easier to use for those DMs who don’t have the time to worldbuild it all from scratch.
The next map will be the last part of the spire and will include the floor above this, as well as the citadel, which you can see here. After that, I’ll put the whole thing into one big image. I didn’t think that’d be a usable size for VTTs, but I just found out that Foundry can handle maps up to 50MB. Like, 50 megs. Fifty. Holy crap. So, I’ll make a VTT version of that as well.
Also, I’m in the process of fixing up the public Foundry module. There’s nothing new in there, but I’ve been tidying it up, so you may want to update it if you’re using it soon. There’s more tidying to do and I’ll let you know when it’s finished.
Man, I can’t wait for the other VTTs to catch up to Foundry’s file size limit. I’ve got 50MB ideas and, if you give me a 50MB canvas, I am just going to take my foot completely off the brakes. We will be on the autobahn to Crazy Town.
The Deep Spire: 4th Level
Also, here’s the annotated version and here’s the unfurnished version.
Higher and higher we go! I usually crop my maps closer to the edges, but I want to leave in all of the background so you can see the lower levels spiraling below. It should be fine, since this is only 44×43 anyway, which is fairly small as my maps go.
This level of the Deep Spire is predominantly inhabited by deep gnomes and has a gemcutter’s workshop, a tinkerer and the spire’s second tavern, where the locals drink. The tavern is hidden away from the main walkway in order to keep the visiting sailors from finding the place.
There’s also has a big, open plaza, which is a good spot for an encounter that requires a little more space than you’d find in most of the spire. And it’s still located conveniently close to the edge, meaning your players can chuck the enemies over the side. Or, if your players are being all “Phoenix Wright, Rules Attorney,” you can have the enemies chuck them over the side. Plenty of exciting possibilities.
The next level will be the drow neighborhood, which will have, among other things, the estate of a drow noble house living in exile. The last level will begin with a gatehouse, which guards the barracks on the other side and the citadel beyond that. I’ll probably just make the 6th level and the citadel one single map, so there will be two more to go.
Well, despite my repeated requests, this map refuses to draw itself, so I’d better get back to it!