Category: DM Notes – For Patrons

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Brazenthrone – The Eastern Halls

Here are the second and third levels by themselves.

These halls are the “suburbia” of Brazenthrone, which makes them a little hard to say much about. They’re where normal dwarves live. They’re neither the wealthiest commoner district nor the poorest. The wealthiest is the Promontories, of course. The poorest will be the Hollows, to the west of the Anvil Quarter. It hasn’t been drawn yet, but that’s where it’ll be. Ye olde hood.

With these chambers done, a finished Brazenthrone is starting to come into sight. As I promised earlier, I’m going to redo the overview map of the city to include all the unmarked chambers. That won’t take long and it should be up later tonight. I’ve had a few people tell me they’ve been using it as a handout recently and, with six chambers drawn that aren’t marked on there, it’s probably a good time to do it. Anyway, I’ll be back with that in a few hours!

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The High Temple of Mystra

 

This is the main temple of Mystra, the goddess of magic in the Forgotten Realms. In addition to its religious functions, the temple also houses a massive storehouse of magic in the caverns below. I only included the first level in the map, but there’s a stairway on the left side of the caverns to allow you to expand into another map if you want.

The symbols at the bases of the towers are meant to be glyphs that teleport people between levels. But if you’d prefer boring old stairs, I made another version with those.

My game is starting soon, so I’ve gotta wrap up this post. Next up is more Brazenthrone!

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Predjama Castle – A Slovenian castle built into a cave

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The non-annotated version is here. EDIT: Bonus alternate annotated version.

EDIT: Apologies, I was recently made aware that Slovenians do not like being referred to as Eastern European. Sorry about that.

This is Predjama Castle, a real place in the Eastern CENTRAL European nation of Slovenia. That’s right: Eastern Europe– the most brutal and merciless of all the Europes. Leading cause of death in the middle ages? Dracula. Number two? Gypsy curses. Number three? The church.

How do you survive all that? You build this place. Predjama is the castle a paranoid person builds. Start by constructing it in the mouth of a cave. Put a drawbridge on the front door. Then, put another drawbridge on the top level, leading to an inner citadel in the caves behind the castle. Then, dig an escape tunnel leading through those caves to a hidden exit in a nearby well. That just might do it.

This place is one of the most Ravenloft things that has ever happened. Like a vampire reading Edgar Allan Poe on a chair made of lost hope. I love it.

One last thing: this map was proposed to the Cartographic Congress by someone who has since had to delete their patreon account, but I’d still like to give them the patron content for this map if I can. If you are that person, please email me and I’ll send it your way. Also, thank you for suggesting this map.

DM notes and VTT versions of this map are available to patrons.

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Brazenthrone – The Noble Quarter – Fourth Level

 

This was going to be the last level, but a few people mentioned that they could use a version without any interiors, so I’m going to do an overview map with roofs on everything. It’ll only take an hour or two and I’ll have it up later tonight. From now on, I’m going to start making those for the remainder of Brazenthrone, as well as other maps when appropriate.

Oh, and I also promised a 3rd edition of Brazenthrone History and Lore. That’ll be up later tonight or tomorrow. Okay, well, I’m gonna get to it.

Here’s the non-annotated version for those of you who don’t want a 1 and a 2 on your map.

 

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Brazenthrone – The Noble Quarter – Third Level

 

There will be one more floor to the Noble Quarter, which– I’m not going to lie– isn’t going to be super exciting unless your favorite part of these is the roofs. But it’ll only take a day or two and, afterwards, I’m finally going to put all of this together. All of Brazenthrone in one image. It’ll be way too big to serve any practical purpose, but I really want to see what that looks like.

What about after that? Well, I promised that once the core parts of Brazenthrone were done, we’d take on Mont-Saint-Michel. And we will.

Okay, here’s the non-annotated version. There are DM notes and a fully-annotated version of this map with all the rooms marked available to patrons.

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The Silent Vaults – A Prison for the Magically Adept

 

When a person of great magical power breaks the rules, you can’t just throw them in the pokey with the cattle rustlers and meth dealers. Imprisoning someone with the ability to fly, teleport, and otherwise bend the rules of reality takes a place like the Silent Vaults.

Enclosed in an antimagic ward generated by a powerful device (in the dungeon, left side), the Vaults nullify the abilities of those contained within. The facility also has a guard barracks, warden’s residence and a chapel that is definitely not dedicated to Mystra.

Floating above the prison is a tiny island with a heavily-warded containment vault, designed to hold a person or entity of incredible arcane power. If you need to make a demon or an archlich sit and think about what they’ve done, this is the place to do it.

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

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Saint’s Rock – A fortified cathedral inspired by Ireland’s Rock of Cashel


 

, the inspiration for Saint’s Rock. Before it was a cathedral, it was the castle of Brian Boru, High King of Ireland. Fun fact: Brian Boru is the reason there’s a harp on your Guinness can. He’s also the reason that there are pictures of harps all over everything in Ireland despite the fact that no one plays it or has any interest whatsoever in harps or harp music.

Anyway, Brian Boru’s great-grandson gave the castle to the church, who rebuilt it into a cathedral. While the castle was dismantled, the gates and curtain wall were left in place, which, combined with the Rock’s location on a steep hilltop, made it a very well-protected church.

There are a few differences between Saint’s Rock and the Rock of Cashel, the biggest of which was the removal of a secondary chapel building and the addition of the cloisters. The passages through the walls are actually real. This photo shows what the second floor passages look like from the ground (you can see them at the bottom of the windows).

So, with this done, Brazenthrone‘s Noble Quarter is next. It’s the second-largest chamber of Brazenthrone and it’s going to take a minute. I’ll get you some work-in-progress photos along the way. Sound good? All right.

There’s an annotated version of this map and DM notes available to patrons.
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Brazenthrone – The Anvil Quarter- Second Level

 

With the second level done, the Anvil Quarter is now finished and Brazenthrone looks a lot less like The Dwarven City of 10,000 Desk Jobs. As I mentioned in the last post, the next Brazenthrone map is the Noble Quarter, which completes the core of the city (although there’s still a lot more to do). After that, I’m going to do something I’ve been waiting to do for a while: I’m connecting all the chambers of Brazenthrone and putting everything into a single image. Of course, I’ll have to shrink it way down to keep the file size from being absurdly huge, but I think it’ll be cool to step back and get a look at the whole thing.

So, I went to Spain earlier this month. And I learned a few things:

1)”España” is not Spanish for “Hot France.” I have it on very good authority.

2)Spain doesn’t know anything about October. Seriously, it was like 35°C (95°F). I don’t think October has even been invented there yet.

3)The Torre Del Oro is definitely going to be a map. Not soon, since there’s plenty of Great Vote maps to take care of first, but one day.

4)The Alhambra is unbelievable. It’s a giant castle with several palaces, a church, homes, workshops, gardens and about a billion fountains. These guys were really into fountains. Like, there are literally fountains surrounded by other, smaller fountains. Will this ever become a map? I don’t know. This place is absolutely enormous and it would easily be the biggest thing I’ve ever done aside from Brazenthrone. For now, let’s file it under “we’ll talk.”

5)Seville is kind of unreal. I’ve been to Spain before (I live in Ireland and Ryanair will fly you there for some loose change and a stale slice of leftover pizza). But before, I was in Barcelona. Barcelona is a great city with some impressive stuff, but… how do I put this? You can go to Barcelona and not realize that Spain was once the center of a massive empire that was swimming in gold. That is not the case with Seville. Seville slaps you in the face with that fact over and over again. In fact, I’m pretty sure the Plaza de España was built for that specific purpose.

Okay, here’s the non-annotated version. And, of course, there’s patron stuff for patrons. You know the drill.

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The Kothoa – The Dual Harbor of Carthage

 

The Carthaginian harbor is one of those things that has to have been imagined by a fantasy artist, except it wasn’t. It was real and this is, from what we know, what it looked like. On the left is the merchants’ harbor, built for trade, with a chain boom at the entrance that can be raised or lowered to block access. On the right, the war harbor, housing the mighty Carthaginian fleet. And in the center of the war harbor is the Admiralty Isle, a man-made island with more docking space, a naval shipyard and an observation room from which the fleet’s command can oversee everything.

The main departure from reality is the scale– the war harbor shown here has space for 34 ships, but the real harbor held around 220. Still, I think this gets the point across without the need for a map the size of a mattress.

Thanks to Anders, who proposed this idea to the Cartographic Congress. Some of my favorite CC maps are the ones where I started out thinking, “How the hell am I supposed to draw this?!” I definitely felt that way with this, but I’m really happy with how it turned out. Hopefully you like it too.

Next up is the second (and last) floor of Brazenthrone’s Anvil quarter. Then I’m going to do last month’s Cartographic Congress map, which will be inspired by the . Then I’m going to go straight into Brazenthrone’s Noble Quarter. I was thinking about trying to get one of the Great Vote maps done in between, but my thinking on that is this (and correct me if I’m mistaken): the Great Vote maps people are really champing at the bit for are the bigger ones, but I need to get the core of Brazenthrone (the Noble and Anvil Quarters) finished. Once I’ve got those two huge maps taken care of, I’ll be freed up to take on Mont-Saint-Michel, which, I suspect, is the map a lot of you are looking forward to the most. So, that’s the plan at the moment. We’re just gonna run past all the minions and rush down the big guys. Can I get a Leeroy Jenkins?

If you need it, here’s a version without the ships. There’s also an annotated version of this map and DM notes available to patrons.