Category: Cartographic Congress

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The Tigers’ Nest Monastery

Some monasteries make wine, while other monasteries make bread. This monastery makes bareknuckle kung-fu killing machines. Or, as they’re known in D&D, monks.

As a DM, having a monk in the party can be a little difficult. Not because there’s anything wrong with the class, but because coming up with useful loot for a monk is tough. They’re like warriors who don’t want magic weapons or armor, but they’re not spellcasters, so they don’t want wizard and cleric stuff either. Bracers of Defense are good and so is a Ring of the Ram, but after that, what do they even want?

One solution that’s worked for me is giving monks abilities instead of items. Have someone teach them the “Iron Palm” and give them +1 on all their unarmed attacks. It’s basically a magic weapon for a character that doesn’t use weapons.

This kind of thing can be good for druids who spend all their time shapeshifted, too, since they’re also pretty hard to find presents for. With druids, I’d present it as the blessing of a nature spirit or something, but the idea is the same. You can do this with other classes as well, but the rest tend to be a lot easier to please.

Next up, I’ll be drawing a map for the Black Loch. This is a new addition that isn’t marked on the map: The Architects of the Awakening. They’re a duergar cult that were the villains of my last campaign and they’ve got a fairly complicated story. The very short version is this:

The duergar race have the psionic essence of the mind flayers within them, but their psionic abilities are nowhere near those of the illithids. A duergar priestess believes she can awaken that essence in her people, granting them the same power the illithids have. She has found a way to do it, but she and her followers must act in secret, as her methods would be considered a heinous abomination by every living thing on earth, the duergar included.

I’ll make a separate post about it in a day or two that explains their story in more detail if you’re interested. Until then, I hope you like the Tigers’ Nest. Let me know what you think!

There’s an annotated version of this map and DM notes available to patrons.

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The Benthic Academy: An Undersea Ruin

Here’s another version of the map with air pockets in some of the rooms.

When I draw a ruin, I like to trash the place. I don’t want it to just be a building with holes in the walls, I want it to look like a hotel room the Rolling Stones spent the night in in 1976.

In this particular map, however, some parts are less trashed than others. That’s because the Benthic Academy is a college of magic– or, at least, it was until whatever disaster swept it under the waves. Unlike most places, the academy has magical wards holding some of it together, particularly the library (on the right), the faculty rooms (bottom center), and the dean’s residence (upper left).

The wards were meant to prevent cracked walls, broken windows and leaks, but they’ve done such a great job that, even after years underwater, a lot of the academy is still in one piece. Depending on which version of the map you use, they may have even caused a few of the upper-level rooms to retain air pockets.

If you might be using this map, I’ve got a few suggestions. First, I’d recommend considering your party’s underwater capabilities when planning encounters. Keep in mind that most melee weapons roll with disadvantage underwater. And, even if your players stop to re-equip themselves at Tridents-R-Us, you may need to consider how dependent they are on any magic weapons they won’t be using. If that Hammer of Hit Point Obliteration is doing a lot of work, you may want to dial the enemies back a little. Also, remember that Lightning Bolt and Fireball aren’t really on the menu anymore.

Second, I’d start the party out on the roof level. Since they’re swimming down into this, that’s the first thing they’ll see.

And finally, if the spellcasting PCs can’t cast Water Breathing enough times to  get the whole party down there, just put a few potions of water breathing into the loot of the adventure before this one. Don’t worry, handing out suspiciously convenient water breathing potions before an underwater quest is an ancient DM tradition.

Next up, I’ll be drawing another map from the Black Loch: the surface entrance. This isn’t a stairway, it’s a series of waterfalls, and it’s probably the quickest way into the Underdark from the surface. Is it the safest way? Probably not, but that’s your party’s problem. Also, since this entrance presumably leads down from a river on the surface, it allows for the possibility of traveling to the Underdark accidentally. And the best part: it’s one-way.

Anyway, I’m gonna start sketching that out. Let me know what you think of the Benthic Academy!

There’s an annotated version of this map and DM notes available to patrons.

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The Cobalt Flotilla: Oscar Mike

Here’s the flotilla on the move. They’re keeping a pretty tight formation, but this is a pretty big map as it is and, if I spread the ships out much more, it would have ended up with a grid size of OMGxWTF.

Some of you might end up using the flotilla and you may want to run a naval battle. I say “may,” but, I mean, let’s be real: it’ll happen. Anyway, I’ve got you covered: here’s the Cobalt Flotilla Showdown Map. Good guys on the top, bad guys on the bottom. Unless the flotilla are the bad guys, in which case… look, I’ll let you figure it out.

Anyway, the last thing to do is make individual maps of the ships. That shouldn’t take me long, so I’d say it’ll be done in a day or two.

One last thing: you might be wondering why it’s called the Cobalt Flotilla. This map was chosen by the Cartographic Congress. Jon, who proposed it, explained to me that he was planning to populate it with kobolds, who come from German folklore, and that the word “cobalt” derives from “kobolds.” Thus, the “Cobalt Flotilla.”

I don’t know about you, but I didn’t even know kobolds were a thing outside of D&D. Now that I do, I can promise you one thing: from here on, all kobolds in my game will have German accents. I wouldn’t want to be historically inaccurate.

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The Cobalt Flotilla

Whew, okay! So, this is the thing I’ve been drawing over the last few weeks. When I started this, “an island made of ships” seemed like a simple enough idea. But, as it turns out, you need a lot of ships to make an island and ships kind of take a while to draw, so it turned into a bit of an accidental megaproject. Still, I don’t know about you, but I think it was worth the effort.

I suspect a lot of people will have questions about where the sleeping quarters are, so let me talk about that. Historically, most crew aboard ships usually slept in hammocks. Space is limited on a ship and beds are big. Hammocks, on the other hand, are small and can be stowed overhead during the day, allowing the room to be used for other things.

This many ships would require a ton of crew and a ton of hammocks. But hammocks aren’t interesting and I didn’t want to fill the map with them, so I mostly depicted the rooms as they would look during the day, when the hammocks are stowed in the rafters.

Since I’ve drawn all these ships, I figure I might as well use them for more than just this one map, so I’m going to spend the next few days making individual maps of each of the larger ships. I’m also going to make a map of the flotilla on the move. This shouldn’t take long, since everything’s drawn and colored and I just need to move stuff around. For patrons. I’ll be making annotated versions of the individual ships as well.

When I went into this, I didn’t think I’d be drawing something you could base an entire campaign around, but it’s starting to look like I did. There are a lot of things you could do with this, really. Let me know if you’ve got any thoughts about that.

Well, I’m gonna get to work on wrapping this stuff up! I should have more for you tomorrow, if not later today.

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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.

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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:

  1. It feels authentic, because it is. I think that counts for a lot.
  2. 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.
  3. 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.

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A Dark Place

 

This is the most grim, surreal place I could come up with. While it’s meant to be an estate on the Plane of Shadow, I think it could be good for a nightmare or someplace in hell.

People always depict hell with fire and lava and, you know what? That’s just not scary. When I send my players to hell, I want them to be soaking their pants. Will a statue of an eyeless, obese man vomiting blackish liquid into a basin accomplish that? I don’t know, but I’d say it’ll make them more uncomfortable than molten rock.

I don’t have much of an explanation for the strange things in this map and I don’t think there needs to be one. This stuff doesn’t necessarily need to be interactable, it can just be decor. Personally, I wouldn’t give my players an explanation of anything here. This is a place you send your players when you want them to be scared and people are more scared when they don’t understand what’s going on. Whose head is this? You don’t know. What’s this dark liquid? You don’t know. What do these symbols represent? You don’t know.

And then there’s the top floor. I meant for it to look like reality was falling apart, but there are plenty of other things that might be going on there. I think having the party fight a giant, writhing mass of eyes and teeth would be a nice way to cap things off.

Anyway, next up is the Deepspire, a fortress city in the seas of the Underdark, carved into the sides of a massive column of rock stretching from the sea floor to the roof of the cavern. I’m not sure how big this will be, but it’ll probably be close to what I’d call a megaproject. I’ll be posting it level by level, so you’ll get it one piece at a time until it’s finished. Once I’ve got it planned out a little more, I’ll have more details for you.

One last thing: before I got started on this map, I said that if it didn’t make Warhammer 40K look like My Little Pony, it would be a failure. That might’ve been setting the bar a bit high, but, well, how’d I do?

There’s an annotated version of this map, DM notes and other stuff available to patrons.

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Mind Flayer Dreadnought Spelljammer

You’ve gotta love Spelljammer. Want to travel into space? Just duct tape a spelljamming helm to the deck of a stolen fishing boat and you’re off to explore the stars.

Mind flayers, however– former masters of the universe that they are– tend to be a bit more sophisticated about interstellar travel. Dreadnoughts are the capital ship of the illithid fleet and they weren’t built for catching seabass. In addition to carrying a variety of weapons on board, the dreadnought also holds a fleet of boreworms, small attack ships with a single crewman. Boreworms aren’t fighters, they’re actually boarding ships, designed to crash into the side of a ship, punch through the hull, then eject the illithid pilot into the enemy vessel.

If you find some things about this ship unusual, remember that mind flayers are a little different than the rest of us. As a brain-eating species, they don’t need a dining table or a kitchen. And illithids love pools. That might be their main motivation to rule the universe: more time in the bath.

As I promised, I’m going to spend the day doing the dynamic lighting for Brazenthrone. I think I can get the rest of it finished by tomorrow. I honestly thought this would take longer and I’ve never been happier to be wrong.

Next up is the aarakocra village, the second-to-last of the Great Vote maps. The last will be the Deepspire, a fortress city in the seas of the Underdark, carved into the sides of a massive column of rock stretching from the sea floor to the roof of the cavern. This is going to be a part of the Black Loch and will be pretty huge, so I’m going to do the next Cartographic Congress map before I get started.

That map will be a dark, surreal estate on the plane of shadow. I hope you like weird, because that is going to be WEIRD. I’m going for “Salvador Dali plus MC Escher plus your worst childhood nightmare.” We’ll see how that goes.

There’s an annotated version of this map, DM notes and other stuff available to patrons.

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Drowning Hill – Roofs

Sorry, this took me a bit longer than expected because holiday stuff. Anyway, VTT versions of Drowning Hill with walls and doors are in the patrons’ Foundry module and the patrons’ EncounterPlus module.

If you downloaded the free module for Foundry or EncounterPlus more than 3-4 days ago, you should grab the new one (you can update the Foundry module). They’ve both been fixed up and all the maps and walls should be in good shape.

This is especially true with the EncounterPlus module, which required a little more attention. If you use EncounterPlus, you have Matt C. to thank for that, by the way. Since I don’t have a Mac and can’t run E+ myself, I was flying blind while trying to fix the errors and I wouldn’t have known what worked without his feedback over the last month or so. I’ve already said this quite a few times, but here’s one more: Thank you!

As I mentioned before, I’m going to spend one day between maps doing the VTT walls and lighting for Brazenthrone. After that, I’ll be starting on the floating market map. Until then, have a good holidays!

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Drowning Hill

Here’s the non-annotated version and the DM notes. This is pretty far from your run-of-the-mill village and I think I owe everyone an explanation of some of the things that are going on here.

Drowning Hill is a village meant for an amphibious race. The name is a fairly literal description of the place, since most of the village is submerged by high tides. With the place being underwater on a fairly regular basis, it’s not an ideal location for people who are particularly picky about whether they’re breathing a gas or a liquid.

I could talk more about the various races that might live here, but all my thoughts on that are in the DM notes. Also, it just recently occurred to me what a perfect aboleth lair this would be and now that’s the only thing I can see. A big, clairvoyant fish hiding under his cult of drooling lackeys.

You might be wondering about Nina’s Inn. Why Nina? Well, the idea for this map came from the Cartographic Congress, and the person who proposed it, James, asked if I’d name the inn after his wife, so I did. Although, in the DM notes, I may have… sort of implied that she’s a fish cultist. Let’s hope James married a woman with a good sense of humor.

I tried some new things with the color here and I’m pretty sure this is the best I’ve ever colored anything in my life. So I might keep doing that. If you’ve got any thoughts about it, let me know.

The next map won’t take long. I’m going to make another version of this with roofs on it. Everything’s already drawn and I might have it done by tonight. After that, I’ll be drawing a floating market, one of the last three maps from the Great Vote. Anyway, let me know what you think!