Category: Cartographic Congress

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The Barre Sinister: A Spelljammer Pirate Tavern

I’ve made some fairly strange maps, but we might have a new champion today. The Barre Sinister is a tavern built on a giant, stone hand… in space. I also made a version with just the hand, which is arguably weirder. I suspect at least one of you has a use for that.

If you don’t play Spelljammer and you’re wondering how this place could possibly exist, allow me to explain the first rule of Spelljammer: Never ask questions about how things work. They just do. That’s a very important rule. No one’s trying to play Spelljammer with Neil DeGrasse Tyson.

Of course, not everyone is running a campaign in which the players can escape the gravitational influence of their planet, so I’m going to make an island version of this map next. That shouldn’t take long, since I mostly just need to change the background and draw a bit of land around the hand. Maybe I’ll throw a palm tree on there, who knows. Wait… would that constitute a pun in this situation? Maybe I’d better not.

Anyway, I’m gonna get to work on that and I’ll be back with it in a day or two. By the way, if you’re the person who actually has a use for the empty space hand, I’d love to hear what you plan to do with it!

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The George and Dragon Inn – A 17th-Century Coaching Inn in Southwark, London

This map is based on a historic inn in Southwark, London. The establishment’s original name was The George and Dragon, although it’s known today as The George Inn. Personally, if it was up to me to abbreviate the name, I’d have kept the Dragon part and sent George packing, but I suppose that’s not the way the owners decided to go with it. They did keep the dragon on the sign, at least.

The George and Dragon was originally a coaching inn, which is an inn designed to accommodate stagecoach travelers, with large stables and space for carriages. Not many coaching inns survived the transition from stagecoaches to train travel, but The George was fortunate enough to be close to London’s railroad, which enabled it to stay in business. Lucky guy, that George.

I’ve gotten quite a few comments and messages with ideas about Tir Thelandira and the second civilization that will be living on the island. Tomorrow, I’ll start working your ideas into 3 or 4 different proposals, which I’ll put up for patrons to vote on.

Each of the proposals will be inspired by things you suggested and will probably contain suggestions put forth by several people. I won’t be able to work everything in, but I do appreciate all of your contributions. Some ideas, like an aquatic civilization, won’t make it onto the ballot, but I do absolutely want to include those in this world eventually.

Anyway, I’ll get those ideas fleshed out and post a vote in the next day or two. After that, I’ll be drawing the Barre Sinister, which is a Spelljammer-themed map that isn’t actually a spelljammer. It’s a tavern floating on a giant, stone hand that floats through space. So that should be a little something different. For those of you whose parties aren’t capable of generating enough Delta-V to reach a place like that, I’ll be making a sea version of the map as well.

All right, hope that sounds good. Let me know what you think of the map!

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Murud-Janjira: An Island Fortress in Maharashtra, India

I made an annotated version of this map, which was only possible with the help of Aditya, who translated the only labeled map of this fort I was able to find, which was in Hindi. I’m very grateful for the help and the least I can do is pay it forward and give the annotated version away to everyone.

Murud-Janjira was built in the 1400s and was only taken by force once. The Maratha Empire assaulted it about a dozen times. They climbed the walls, they tried to dig their way in, they even built a fort nearby called Padmadurg to use as a staging ground for an attack. None of this succeeded. The Virgin Padmadurg was no match for the Chad Murud-Janjira.

So how was it taken? With booze. Let me explain. The fort was built by Ram Patil, the Admiral of the Ahmadnagar Sultanate. Once it was finished, Patil and the Sultan had a little falling out, Patil stopped taking the Sultan’s orders and they unfriended each other on facebook. The Sultan appointed a new admiral named Piram Khan and ordered him to take back the fort.

So Khan dresses up as a merchant and sails to the fort. He says he’d like to leave some crates of silks and wine inside for safekeeping. You know, temporarily. “Sure,” says Ram Patil, “You can leave your booze and loot with us. We’ll be happy to hang onto it for you. You know, temporarily.”

So they start bringing in the crates and Khan decides to throw a little party for Patil and his men for doing him this favor. At this point, you have to imagine that Ram Patil thinks he’s talking to the dumbest man alive. Still, Khan cracks open a few casks of wine and everyone spends the evening getting drunk. Later that night, once Patil and his men are completely hammered, Khan goes back to those crates they brought in earlier and starts opening them up to let out the soldiers hiding inside.

You can probably guess where it goes from here. They attack the drunken garrison and take back the fort. The moral of the story is that sometimes thinking outside the box means literally getting into a box.

Anyway, I’m gonna go to bed. I hope you like the map!

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The Generalife: A Palace of the Alhambra

I visited the Alhambra a few years ago and, before I went, I was considering drawing a map of the place. When I got there, I realized how completely insane a task that would be. Here’s the entire Alhambra complex. This map– the Generalife– is the little thing in the top right. I’ve drawn a four-level map of Mont-St-Michel and I’m pretty sure the Alhambra would take longer than that did.

To give you an idea of how big this place is, there are six other palaces in the Alhambra. And if that sounds crazy, there used to be two more. If you plan to be in Spain, I highly recommend going to see it. There are a lot of castles in the world, but only a few of them will make your head literally, physically explode and this is one of them.

Next up, I’ll be drawing the Great Bombard spelljammer I promised a few months back. It’s basically an enormous cannon with a ship wrapped around it. You could call it the A-10 Warthog of spelljammers. I’ll make a seafaring version as well for those running monoplanetary campaigns.

After that, I’ll be drawing Akshardham Temple, a Hindu temple in New Delhi. When someone builds something that looks this good from the top down, I basically have to make a map of it.

Okay, that’s it for now. I hope you like the map! Let me know what you think.

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The Chronomancer’s Tower

There are a lot of possibilities for this map, but I feel like the most interesting would be for this thing to be a time machine. You turn a few wheels, set some dials and you’re off to the future. Or the past. This could allow the party to get some ancient, lost artifact or talk to that one guy who knew that thing the party wants to know but has been dead for 2000 years.

Alternatively, you could just completely jump the shark and send the players to Stephen Hawking’s dinner party for time travelers. That idea might not be for everyone, but I thought I’d throw it out there. It’d be pretty funny if you’ve got a group that would get the joke.

Next, I’ll be finishing up a few things for the Black Loch. I made a list of everything left to do in this post, but I’m going to start by making the final version of the Black Loch region map, replacing the generic place names with the proper names.

Then, I’ll be tackling everything else on the list, which means I should be posting something here almost every day for the next week or so. After that, I’ll get started on the last Black Loch map. All right, I hope that sounds good. I’m gonna get some sleep and get started in the morning!

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The Sewer’s Terminus

So there are two unusual things about these sewers. First, they run through the ruins of an ancient dwarven settlement, which makes them a little more interesting to explore and gives a little space for things to happen.

And second, the sewers don’t flow out into a lake or a river. They flow down. Maybe into more dwarven ruins. Maybe into the underdark. Or maybe the sewage flows into the groundwater that the people in the city above drink from. That’s the circle of life. For dysentery.

Anyway, I think this would be a good map for an urban adventure or an entrance/exit to the underdark. Just remember: if anyone falls down in the water, make them save to avoid a disease. Roll a three? That’s the worst case of Valderian Bat Herpes the apothecary has ever seen.

Next up, I’ll be drawing one of the last 3 locations in the Black Loch: the Submerged Ruins. I’m not sure what it’s going to be yet, but I think it’ll be something that used to be above the water, but was drowned when the Great Breach opened. Anyway, I’ll figure it out.

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

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Brackenbury Manor (Inspired by Little Moreton Hall in Cheshire, England)

Brackenbury Manor is almost a real place. If it were a real place, the real place that it would be is Little Moreton Hall. Little Moreton is a 16th-century manor house in Cheshire, England, which looks unsettling in a way that I’m not sure really comes through in the map. Here’s a picture to show you what I mean. If that building looks completely fine to you, you’ve had too much to drink.

I didn’t originally plan on including the gardens in the map, but after my last post, someone suggested that I should. And they were absolutely right. See, here’s the thing: these are the hedges. They’re cut into tunnels. You can walk through the hedges! I don’t know about you, but the DM part of my brain couldn’t stop thinking about how awesome it would be to have a monster hiding in there, waiting to jump on someone the second they come around the corner. In any case, I think the extra effort was well-spent.

Next up, I’ll be drawing the grimlock settlement from the Black Loch. It has a shipyard, where most of the ships in the loch are built. The basic story is this: a team of deep gnome engineers builds ships using grimlock laborers. The grimlocks, who don’t care about money, are paid in meat. This situation has been working out for years, with rich gnomes and fat grimlocks. And there’s no reason to think it won’t. Unless they run out of meat. That would be a problem, especially for the gnomes. This is a bad place to be the last thing made of meat.

The grimlock shipyard is one of only 6 maps left to draw for the Black Loch. Aside from that, there are some tokens to draw, as well as a few generic backdrop maps (caves, tunnels, etc), but it’s getting pretty close to being finished!

Anyway, that’s it for now. Hope you like the map! Let me know what you think!

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Elderseed Sanctuary

Elderseed Sanctuary is a small treehouse settlement in a giant baobab. I designed it with a druid community in mind, but it could easily be a village of wild elves as well. Or aarakocra. Or avariel. Or weresquirrels.

Here’s a question to think about: is it a treant? If so, that makes this place mobile, which allows for some interesting possibilities. For example, your party could make camp in the woods and wake up next to this thing. That could be a handy approach if your party isn’t great at following a trail of breadcrumbs to the next adventure. Just park the next adventure on top of all their stuff and see if they can work out what to do.

Next up, I’ll be drawing another map from the Black Loch. This time, it’ll be the ancient crypt on Cairnhollow Isle. I’m not sure exactly what I’m doing with it, but I think it’ll be a fairly decrepit series of winding tunnels and catacombs, leading to a huge, elaborate burial chamber at the end. I’ve got a bunch of maps of the Paris Catacombs, so hopefully I can give the map a fairly authentic feel.

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

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The Corruption: A Journey Deep into the Heart of Crazy Town

Let’s talk about what this map is intended to be and what I think you should use it for instead. This is a fortified dwarven steelmaking facility that has been infected by the Far Realm. The hellish, alien dimension is slowly pervading reality from below, where the barrier between the realms has weakened the most.

That’s cool and all, but hear me out: hallucinogenic drugs. The party is sent to an abandoned steelworks to recover an advanced dwarven steelmaking crucible. The party will expect that there must be orcs or something living there, but there aren’t. There’s nothing, they can just walk in and get it.

But here’s the thing: on the way, they accidentally ingest some kind of powerful, mind-altering substance. Maybe they fill their waterskins in a creek the locals call the “Stream of Visions.” Maybe the local mushrooms just put out a lot of spores this time of year. In any case, the party consumes a Hunter S. Thompson quantity of hallucinogens without realizing it and strolls into the empty steelworks.

As they begin to explore, the psychotropic substance kicks in and things turn into Fear and Loathing in the Forgotten Realms. There’s stuff coming out of the walls, monsters everywhere, it’s just insanity. At the bottom, they fight some sort of heinous, demonic beast that just flat out wipes the party. Everyone dies. And then they wake up on the floor. Pounding headache, but no monsters. Everyone’s alive. When they make it back to the nearby village, someone’s like, “Oh, no one told you not to drink from the stream? Oopsie.”

The end. That’s what I’d do with this map, anyway. I like playing mind games with the players and this is one I don’t think they’d see coming. I can’t promise they’ll like it, but I’d say they’ll remember it.

Next up, I’ll be drawing the Travelers’ Ruin from the Black Loch. It’s an abandoned building occasionally used by passing sailors to meet up and have a few drinks before getting on their way. After that, I’ll be drawing whichever map wins the Black Loch Conclave, which should be finished fairly soon.

Anyway, that’s it. Let me know what you think of the map! And if you’ve got any other ideas for it, I’d love to hear them.

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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!