Category: Cartographic Congress

Posted on

Scaligero Castle – Sirmione, Italy

So, there are eight buildings called Scaligero Castle in Italy. They were built by the Scaliger family, who ruled over Verona and were not very creative at naming castles. I mean, being fond of your own last name is fine, but maybe mix it up a little.

This is the Scaligero Castle in Sirmione, which has a very unusual feature: a fortified port. The port once held a fleet which the Scaligers used to control Lake Garda and its waterways. It’s mostly a fortification rather than a noble residence, so it’s fairly utilitarian in design, with most of the castle being defensive structures. The only two buildings inside are a barracks and a tower.

If you’re looking for a way to use this map in your game, allow me to suggest pirates. That’s what I’d use it for and something tells me I’m not alone there.

Next, I’ll be drawing a map I’ve been looking forward to making for a while now: the Château de Brézé. This is a French castle that looks like it was made for RPGs. There isn’t one photo that can explain this place, so let me walk you through it:

  • This is the Château from above. Note the dry moat surrounding it.
  • At the bottom of the dry moat, the walls of the moat are lined with tunnels and caverns. Here’s a photo of these. Here’s another.
  • Some of these lead to very long tunnels. A lot of them are interconnected. And a lot of them predate the castle, having been dug as an underground settlement in the 1100s.
  • So, to recap: people dug tunnels, creating an underground settlement. 400 years later, someone built a castle over that settlement. Then, they dug more tunnels. This place is unbelievably fascinating.

So, that’s the place I’m going to draw for you. I’ve been wanting to draw the Château de Brézé for years and it is time. Wish me luck.

Posted on

The Digging Machines

This map is an underground mining complex run by mechanical constructs. It has equipment for stamping and smelting ore, as well as a factory for making more constructs. I imagine this place being built by deep gnomes or duergar, since they are:

A) Good at engineering, and

B) Crazy enough to think building self-replicating machines is a good idea.

For patrons, I’ve got a version without the machines in case you just want a regular mine. And there’s the unfurnished version as well for anyone who just wants some caves.

There’s some good stuff coming up, so let’s talk about it. Do you like castles? I hope the answer is yes, because castles are happening. Bullet list mode, engage.

  • Next up is Scaligero Castle, a very unique Italian fortress with its own walled harbor.
  • After that, I’ll be drawing the Chateau de Breze, a French castle with a complex network of tunnels running underneath it. I visited this place a while back and took hundreds of photos of these tunnels so I could make a map of them one day. That day is soon.
  • A few months back, the Castel Sant’Angelo came in second to the Chateau de Breze in a vote for the next big historical map. But Shawn proposed the Castel Sant’Angelo to the Cartographic Congress last month and won, so I’ll be drawing that too. In case you’re unfamiliar with the place, it was originally built as the tomb of the Roman Emperor Hadrian, but was later turned into a fortress by the pope. It’s another very unique place.

So, that’s our future: a France sandwich with two slices of Italy. How’s that sound?

Posted on

The Monastery of Varlaam in Meteora, Greece

Whew, this thing was a ton of work, but it’s finally done! This is a place I’ve wanted to draw for a long time and I was really glad to see someone propose it to the Cartographic Congress and win.

There’s something I didn’t realize about this place until I started working on it, though. I knew there was a mountaintop monastery in Meteora, Greece, but when I started looking for floor plans of the place, it turned out there are six. And there used to be twenty-four.

Imagine something for a moment. It’s the middle ages and you’re Greek. But the big city lifestyle was never for you, so you and a couple other fellas go out to the middle of nowhere, climb to the top of a giant rock formation and start building a monastery. Here, you can devote your life to God, get away from the rest of the world and live in quiet peace. And then some other people show up and start covering every rock in sight with twenty-three other monasteries. I mean, the first few are probably fine, but once they start hitting double digits, you’re probably ready to throw your hands up and move back to Athens.

So, here’s what I’ve got planned: I’m going to make a small map next. It’ll be something to do while I’m waiting for the last Tir Thelandira map to be decided on. If you’re a patron, the runoff vote is now open. After that, I’m going to finish Tir Thelandira and get started on that giant city-ship map I was talking about in this post. That’ll probably take a month or so to finish. It’s absolutely a megaproject and it’ll be bigger than any ship map I’ve ever seen by an order of magnitude or more.

Anyway. that’s what’s in the works. Hope it sounds good! Let me know what you think!

Wait, one last thing: if you’re a patron and you use Foundry, I just started a new Foundry module. Because Patrons’ Module 2 got so big that Foundry couldn’t export it without crashing. Not a joke. Anyway, you can find the link to install Patrons’ Module 3 on this page.

Posted on

Ethermont House

Ethermont House is the guildhall of the Imperial Society of Extraordinary Adventurers, who have done pretty well for themselves over the years. As it turns out, breaking into the homes of evil wizards, killing them and selling all their stuff is a fairly profitable line of work.

When the job is done and you’ve finally cleaned all the little chunks of Saruman off your battleaxe, Ethermont is a great place to go and relax with some friends. Then, after a night in the beer hall and the billard room, you can go up to the guildmaster’s office, pick up another contract and head out to smoke Voldemort.

So, I started my patreon 5 years ago this month and it feels like I should do something special. So I’m going to hold a vote for all patrons on which historical map I should draw. The options will be:

  1. Château de Brézé – A French castle with an elaborate network of caves and tunnels dug around and underneath it.

  2. Stack Rock Fort – A British sea fort off the coast of Wales.

  3. Church of St. George, Lalibela – A very unique church carved into the bedrock in Ethiopia.

  4. Castel Sant’Angelo – Hadrian’s Tomb, which later became the pope’s castle.

These are places that have been on my to-do list for a while now and I think they will all make amazing maps. One of the monasteries of Meteora, Greece would have been on the list as well, but it just won last month’s Cartographic Congress vote, so I’m drawing it next. Between that, the giant ship and whatever wins the vote, there’ll be some cool stuff coming up.

I want to say thank you to everyone who’s supported my art over the last five years. Being able to wake up and draw maps for you every day is the best way I can imagine to make a living and I appreciate it more than you will ever know. Thank you all.

Posted on

Driftport 40K: In the grim darkness of the open sea, there is only fog.

The other version of Driftport is a pretty nice place. This is the version for DMs who imagine it as a place where the residents might drink turpentine, engage in cannibalism and sacrifice outsiders to an ancient abomination lurking deep beneath the waves. Or it can just be the night version, I suppose. Your call.

Drawing this gave me an idea for a map of another large, seafaring settlement and I wanted to get your opinions. Imagine a ship, like a galleon or a ship of the line, but much bigger. Bigger than any sailing ship ever built. 400′ (130m) long and 140′ (45m) across the beam. Eight masts, thirty sails. But this isn’t just a ship, it’s a town with hundreds of residents. Across the ship’s 5-6 full decks, there are shops, craftsmen, a marketplace, a tavern, an inn, a temple, gardens, a library, a mill and a lot more. There are cabins for the middle class, luxury apartments for the rich and hammocks for the poor. This is a ship you could get lost in. It could be a community of traders, explorers, pirates or wanderers.

I don’t know what the biggest ship map ever drawn is, but I’m fairly sure this would be larger by an order of magnitude. It would probably take around a month to draw and color. Anyway, is that something you’d be interested in?

Posted on

The Floating Town of Driftport

I’m going to say something wildly controversial. I probably shouldn’t, but I’m going to anyway and I hope it doesn’t offend anyone. I liked Waterworld. I haven’t seen it in years, but I watched it a few times as a teenager and I thought it was a pretty good movie. Feels good to get that off my chest.

Driftport was sort of inspired by the town in that movie. It’s the kind of town people might build if there was no land. A collection of salvaged ships and scrap wood Frankensteined together into a floating community.

There are a few things that might need an explanation here. The first is the building at the bottom right. This is a trywork. It’s a stove used to harvest oil from blubber. Since wood, coal and peat are hard to come by in the sea, I’d imagine whale oil would be the common fuel used for cooking and heating.

The other two unusual buildings are a ropemaker and a distillery. Rope and rum seem fairly mission critical for a place like this. You need rope for fishing nets, boats and to hold this place together. And you need rum because… well, in the Age of Sail, every ship brought loads of it on every voyage. They considered it a necessity and I’m going to assume they knew what they were doing.

I’m going to make an alternate version of the map next. It’ll be a grimmer, darker sort of place. I’m just going to adjust the colors, add some fog, stuff like that. Anyway, I’ll have it done by tomorrow. Hopefully, I’ll still have patrons at that point after what I said about Waterworld.

Posted on

Saltiron Prison – Reduced-Moisture Version

Here’s a drier version of the naughty box for those of you who need to send your party to the hoosegow but aren’t near a coastline. Hopefully everyone enjoys their stay and learns some respect for the authorities. Unlikely, but possible.

The next map is going to be a submarine, but I’m going to make a spelljammer version of it as well. Why a submarine? I’m curious about that too. I’ve been getting asked about doing a fantasy submarine quite a bit over the last few months and I don’t know if it’s a coincidence or if there’s a new module out there that involves one. If you can think of a reason submarines might be in demand lately, I’d love to hear it. But, in any case, I’m going to draw one.

Anyway, that’s it for now. Hope you like the map!

Posted on

Saltiron Prison

I really like how this map turned out, so I’m giving away all the patron stuff to everyone. You can download it here.

Prisons have never been a great place to be, but they seem to have been particularly godawful in the days before the concept of “human rights” became a thing. The prison this map is partially based on– the Chateau D’If— held 3500 prisoners at one point. Now, there are differences between that place and this map, but the prison building itself is about the same size. So imagine 3500 people in that space. A guy named Céphas Carrière, who was held there in 1708, wrote about the experience. To summarize, he said it was hell and people were constantly dying, which is about what you’d expect.

Of course, he and everyone else there at the time were horrible criminals who were guilty of… *checks notes* being the wrong religion. I mean, yes, technically they were worshipping the exact same god, but they were doing it wrong and– look, it’s a problem, okay? It had to be done. Maybe. It’s hard to say.

Anyway, next I’m going to make an alternate version of this map that isn’t on an island. I’ll probably have that done later today or tomorrow at the latest. Okay, I’ll be back with that soon!

Posted on

Auld Mithrilsides: A Dwarven Sternwheeled Steamship

This was intended to be the ship from Thanesridge Landing. But that ship was crap, so I redrew it. I like this much better. I will always redraw and rework a map rather than knowingly put out something that sucks, even if it takes a bit longer. Also, I’m going to replace the ship in Thanesridge with this one, but give me till tomorrow to get that done.

So, the map. Dwarves aren’t known for their love of ships, but I felt like this is the kind of ship a dwarf would build. With a coal-fired steam boiler for propulsion, they don’t have to worry about “learning to sail” or whatever. Just fuel it up and point it where you want to go. Which way is the wind blowing? Who cares. Plus, the burning coal makes it smell a bit like home.

I’d like to remind any DMs considering using this map that the ship’s speed is entirely dependent on how hot the boiler can get. So if the party starts summoning fire elementals in the fuelbox, things could get pretty interesting. Of course, the ship is made mostly of wood, so hopefully they don’t get too interesting. Anyway, something to think about.

Next up, I’ll be drawing the next map for Tir Thelandira. This will be the map proposed by Shawn and voted for by patrons. It’s called the Tower of the Moon and I’m imagining it like this: a round, wooden tower that snakes upward, curving and branching off in a few places. It’ll be kind of like a large, hollow tree. I haven’t drawn it yet, but it looks really good in my head.

Anyway, I think that’s it. Let me know what you think of the ship!

 

Posted on

Thanesridge Landing: Upper Level

The upper level of Thanesridge Landing is done and there’s only one more part of the map left to draw: the rest of the ship.

By the way, I got an answer about how they pumped the water out of the drydocks back in ancient times: an Archimedes screw. Speaking of Archimedes, did you know he also invented an ancient Greek death laser? Not bad for 200 BC.

Anyway, I’m gonna get to work on the ship. I’ll have DM notes for patrons once it’s done.