Category: Ships/Airships

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Thanesridge Landing: A Dwarven Port

Thanesridge Landing is a dwarven port settlement. Dwarves aren’t famous for their love of ships, but they’re pretty fond of money and trade is a proven way to make a lot of it.

This map wasn’t intended to be a part of Brazenthrone, but I’ve started thinking of it like it is. In my head, this is the end of the Bitterwash River that runs through town. I’m not going to add it to the giant map of the city or anything, but you can consider it an unofficial part of Brazenthrone if you want.

The drydock on the right is called a “graving dock” and it’s actually below water level. It’s gated off from the sea and the water is pumped out. Then, when you’re ready to launch the ship, you just open the gate and sail it out. I didn’t find out how the water was pumped out, but these things date back to at least 200BC, so apparently it was possible. If you happen to know how they did it, I’d love to hear.

Anyway, I’ve got two more parts of this map to draw. First, I’m going to make a roof level, which may have some more buildings on top of the mountain ridge at the back. And I’m going to draw the rest of the steamship at the docks and make a separate map of it. It’ll be useful if your party shows up and steals the thing. I mean, they steal everything else, right? Maybe that’s just my players.

Well, I’m going to get to work on the rest of this. It shouldn’t take long. Let me know what you think so far!

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Palazzo di Nettuno

I think Venice is the kind of place a fantasy writer would come up with. “It’s this city in a harbor, you know? Trade port, super rich. Really beautiful. And get this: the streets? They’re made of water.” It’d be a really cool concept if it weren’t for the fact that it actually exists.

Of course, not everyone has a fantasy version of Venice in their game world, but I think this could be used as a palace with a moat as well. And I’m going to make a dry land version, which I should have up by tomorrow. Someone suggested turning the boathouse into a stables, which sounds good to me. I’ll draw in a few bushes, a happy little tree, it’ll be great.

By the way, I’m not sure if this map is supposed to be in daytime or a brightly moonlit night. I just started coloring without really thinking about it and this is what happened. Anyway, if you figure it out, let me know.

Okay, I’m gonna go draw some grass on this thing. Be back with that soon!

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Great Bombard: Spelljammer goes brrrrrrrrrrrrrrrt

The Great Bombard isn’t a ship, it’s a gun. A really big gun. This gun does has a ship attached to it, though. This accessory, mounted under the barrel, allows a crew to move the gun through space and blow things up in a variety of interesting and exotic locations.

If you allow your party to acquire a Great Bombard, I don’t think that’s unreasonable. But you do need to keep it in mind when planning adventures from that point on. Ask yourself, “Can my players solve this problem using nothing but their big gun?” If so, you may want to make a few adjustments so the party has to put a little more work in. That said, you’ve got to let them blow something up every once in a while. That’s half the fun of having a ship like this, after all.

Since the new Spelljammer was recently released, I’ll probably draw another spelljammer map sometime in the next two months. I’ll hold a vote to let patrons decide which one you’d like to see.

But first, I’ll be drawing India’s Akshardham Temple. Then, I’ll be drawing the map chosen by last month’s Cartographic Congress: the Indian island fortress of Murud-Janjira. I’ll be drawing it about how it is in this photo: overgrown and in ruins. Personally, I think that’s much more interesting (and it also gets around the problem that the only labeled floor plans I’ve been able to find are in Hindi).

Well, I hope you like the Great Bombard. I’m gonna get started on this Indian double-feature. Let me know what you think!

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Scarhide Yard

Scarhide Yard is a shipyard run by deep gnome engineers and grimlock laborers in the Black Loch. This strange partnership began when a group of gnomes approached a tribe of starving grimlock hunters with 300 pounds of meat. The gnomes needed workers to build ships and the grimlocks needed food,  so they came to an arrangement. The gnomes got their laborers and the grimlocks got as much meat as they could eat, forever.

Sixty years later, the gnomes are still overseeing operations, but the shorter-lived grimlocks have passed the torch to the next generation. This is good, but, potentially, also bad. The good part is that this generation of grimlocks wasn’t raised to hunt. They were raised as carpenters and shipwrights and they’re a lot better at it than their parents were.

The bad part is that they eat a lot. And, unlike their parents, they have never known hunger. They’ve never been without the endless supply of meat that the gnomes send for every week or two. And if that meat stops arriving? That’s a scary thought for the gnomes. Best not to let that happen.

If you’re looking for a ship for your party to purchase (or steal) from here, you might have a look at the Grinning Widow. It’s a ship designed for the underdark and it’s exactly the kind of thing Scarhide Yard would build.

This map was partly inspired by Leo’s proposal to the Black Loch Conclave. I was always planning to have a grimlock settlement here, but Leo made me realize that I’d forgotten to put a shipyard in the loch, so I sort of hybridized the two ideas into Scarhide Yard. Anyway, I hope you all like how it turned out!

Next, I’ll be drawing another one of the five remaining locations in the Black Loch. This time, it’ll be the Blind Colossus, a huge, eyeless statue standing in the deep reaches of the loch. I don’t know exactly what I’m doing with the place, but it’ll definitely have some mysterious rooms and passages inside it, built by an ancient civilization for unclear reasons. Ideally, I’d like it to be unsettling, but highly intriguing. The kind of place that your players feel like they shouldn’t go into, but feel compelled to explore anyway. We’ll see how it goes.

All right, I’m gonna start sketching. Let me know what you think!

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Whaleship-Class Spelljammer

The whaleship is a spelljammer for people who want to go to space, but don’t want to leave anything behind. ANYTHING. Not the billiard table, the pool, the tavern, or anyone they know. It’s all coming. Hell, bring the whole village. It’s fine, there’s room for everybody, sheep included.

The whaleship is designed as a passenger liner and cargo ship, but some DMs may want to use it as a player vessel, so I included a few versions of the ship retrofitted with weapons. Here’s the lightly-armed version and here’s the heavily-armed version (aka “the Whalehammer 40K”). Also, here’s a token of the ship.

Next, I’ll be going back to the Black Loch and drawing the drow settlement. After that, I’ll be drawing last month’s Cartographic Congress winner, “a multi-level village built in and around the branches and trunk of a giant tree, with the buildings of the village connected by bridges.” After that, I’ll probably be working on the Black Loch for the rest of the month.

All right, I’m gonna get some sleep. Let me know what you think of the whaleship!

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The Duskfall: A map for DMs whose players stole the airship in the previous map.

You may recognize this map from the last map. It might seem redundant to make a separate map out of it, but your players are probably going to steal it from that map, so this might come in handy. Or maybe you just need a small airship for a party that hasn’t earned a big one yet.

I made a few different versions of this. The one above is the refitted version. The seats are replaced with hammocks and there’s a dinner table in the forward berth. This is for DMs whose parties end up using the Duskfall long-term.

After that, there’s the original version, a version with a Black Loch background, and the refitted version with a Black Loch background.

I did something unusual here and I’m curious what everyone thinks. I added a map of the airship on land to the bottom. It seemed like it might be useful, since a party with an airship will, occasionally, land it. And maybe they land in hostile territory and end up in a fight. Or maybe they leave the ship to go on an adventure and come back to find a bunch of brigands trying to steal it. I felt like there were a lot of situations where it’d be a convenient thing to have, so I thought I’d give it a shot and see what you think.

Next up, I’ll be drawing the map chosen by last month’s Cartographic Congress, the Silver Dragon Inn. This is an inn built over a set of cascading waterfalls, with a dragon’s lair concealed behind the falls. The innkeeper is actually the dragon in human form and the inn has a secret passage to the lair. This allows the innkeeper to turn from Clark Kent into Superman without letting anyone know they’re the same guy. “You get any trouble with bandits around here?” Nope. We sure don’t.

As I mentioned before, on the 4th, I’m taking a trip to Mont-Saint-Michel, the Chateau de Chenonceau and the Chateau de Breze and I’ll be gone for a little over a week. I don’t think I’ll be able to get the Silver Dragon Inn finished by then, but I’ll see how far I can get. I’ll make a post when I’m leaving.

Well, that’s it for now. If you’ve got any thoughts on how I did the airship, let me know!

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The Roost

This is the map chosen by patrons in the Black Loch Conclave: a drow outpost in the roof of the Black Loch. This map is complicated to say the least, so let me break it down for everyone.

The Black Loch is a small sea in the underdark. There’s a large hole in the roof of the loch’s cavern, leading up to a sea on the surface. The hole, known as the Great Breach, is about 100 meters wide, with water constantly pouring down the sides.

The falling water does not fill the breach completely, however. There is enough space for an airship pilot– a talented airship pilot– to maneuver a vessel down the center. Not many places in the underdark are accessible by airship, but the Black Loch, very unusually, is.

So, this map is a surveillance outpost located at the bottom edge of the Great Breach. It’s used by the drow to track the comings and goings of airships. The drow also have a hangar here, in which they keep their own airship, known as the Duskfall.

TL;DR: It’s a spy outpost at the bottom of a giant waterfall in the underdark, where the drow keep their airship. I hope that doesn’t sound as insane to you as it does to me.

Anyway, you may have noticed that this map has a map of an airship inside it. I’m going to take a day or two to make a separate map of the airship next. You may need it if you bring your players here, because, let’s be honest: they’re going to steal it. Seriously, no matter who your players are or what kind of game you’re running, your party has a one hundred percent chance of stealing that airship, or at least trying to. I honestly can’t imagine a party that wouldn’t. Still, if that’s a problem for you, it can always be a broken airship.

Well, that’s about it. Out of twenty ideas for a new location in the Black Loch, this is the one you chose. I hope you all like what I did with it. Anyway, let me know what you think!

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Black Loch Naval Battlemaps and Tokens

You can download the ship tokens and maps here.

I spent yesterday and today making a bunch of stuff to help you run naval battles in the Black Loch. Most of it is in the picture above. There are nine ship tokens, plus two tokens of the loch’s resident sea creature, the Whisperer. One of the tokens shows the Whisperer clearly and the other is just a dark shadow under the water to freak your players out with.

There are also four maps that are mostly water. Since I want to get started on the next Black Loch map, I decided to keep this fairly simple, so all the water maps are basically just the map above, cropped in different ways. They’re nothing fancy, but they’ll let you run naval battles in the loch without having to use a sea map that looks like a sunny day in the Caribbean.

Anyway, with that done, I’m going to get started on the Submerged Temple, a kuo-toa holy place in the Black Loch. I’m thinking it’ll be partly above water, but mostly below. Maybe like a pyramid with the tip above water? I’m not sure, I’ll figure it out after a few sketches.

There’s one other thing: I’m unable to continue updating the EncounterPlus module with new maps. I’m sorry to those of you who use EncounterPlus, but the program I use to export the module hasn’t been working properly, possibly due to a conflict with a recent release of Foundry. If things change and I can start updating the module again, I promise that I will. Until then, I’m really sorry.

Also, I mentioned in an earlier post that I’m planning to hold a vote of all patrons for a new Black Loch location. I’ll post about that in a day or two and send out a call for proposals for locations to add to the loch.

Okay, I’m gonna start sketching that temple. I hope you like the naval battlemaps! Are they the most boring maps I’ve ever made? I think they might be, haha.

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Man-O’-War-Class Spelljammer

Here’s a version of the map with extra crew quarters. And here are some tokens of the ship and the weapons.

There’s a time in every Spelljammer campaign when the party has finally committed enough crimes and looted enough corpses to afford a new ship. Maybe not the Doomlord-Class Planetary Sterilizer they’ve always wanted, but something better. They’ve been cruising around in a stylish, but poorly-armed bugboat for about eight levels now. They used to love it, but now… well, the decks are stained with blood, they’ve got three NPCs sleeping on the floor, and there isn’t a square inch of the ship that the wizard’s familiar hasn’t peed on. So they head down to the shipyard to buy themselves a big boy spelljammer.

The Man-O’-War is an elven-designed light warship with lots of cargo space, seven officers’ cabins, and enough firepower to hold its own against most of what the old ship had to run away from. The four ballistas are fairly standard, but the catapult is a little more interesting. Instead of using rope and wood to launch a projectile, this catapult uses a high-pressure boiler that builds up steam, which can be released to fire the weapon.

But the best thing about the Man-O’-War is, arguably, the rear cargo doors. They can be used to load or unload cargo or passengers, either on land, or *ahem* mid-flight. An excellent way to prevent overcrowding in the brig.

Earlier, I said I was planning to draw another spelljammer later this year, but I think I’m going to make it at least two, with the next one coming in three months or so. It’ll be a bigger ship than the Man-O’-War, something beefy to use as a late-game vessel. I’ll probably hold a vote on which ship to draw when I’m ready to get started on it. I know there aren’t a lot of maps out there for Spelljammer and I want to draw a few more for those of you running games in the setting. With the Dragonfly, the Man-O’-War and the next one, that’ll give you an early-game, mid-game and a late-game ship, which at least covers the fundamentals. After that, I’ll see where you want me to go from there.

Next, I’ll be making some things for the Black Loch. Since a campaign in the loch would probably be a naval campaign, a water map and some ship tokens would be helpful for a lot of people. Someone pointed this out to me recently and I’m going to go ahead and make them now. It’ll take a day or two at most and, afterwards, I’ll probably get started on another Black Loch map.

Okay, that’s it. Let me know what you think!

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The Grinning Widow: A Ship for the Seas of the Underdark

The Grinning Widow is a ship designed for the Black Loch. In an underground sea, sails aren’t going to accomplish much, so the Widow doesn’t have any. She’s a galley, powered exclusively by rowing, with a crew of 20 oarsmen who all look like they walked out of a “skipped leg day” meme.

For defense, the Widow is armed with a ram on the bow, as well as two ballistas, one of which is a little scarier than the other. You see, I’ve been drawing the “big crossbow” ballista in my maps for a while now, but I wanted to change things up a bit, so I started searching for different ballista designs. I found a few I liked, but then– out of nowhere– this thing struts into the room. Yes please.

I don’t know if it’s real and I don’t care. It’s awesome and I decided it was definitely going in the map. I made a token of it, too, by the way, as well as the other one. You can get them both here. Personally, I’d give it around double the range and damage of a regular ballista in the DM’s Guide, but require a 2-person crew to fire it every round. And give it +1 to damage if the party names it.

So, here’s a funny story from my game. A few years ago, my players spent some time on a ship like this one, down in the underdark. The orog crew ended up teaching them Orcish, which my wife’s elven wizard got quite good at.

Several months later, she’s with a different party, being confronted by orc bandits, and she uses her knowledge of Orcish to speak with them.  The bandits look at each other and burst out laughing, which leaves the party confused. Finally, the orc leader stops laughing and tells her he’s never heard an elf in a fancy dress speaking Orcish. And he never imagined that, if he did, she’d be speaking the filthiest Orcish he’s ever heard.

They end up eating with the orcs, who tell her that everything she says is heavily laced with curse words. She hadn’t realized it, but the orog sailors taught her to speak like they do, which is very crudely, even by Orcish standards. So she knows the language, but she can’t speak it without cursing. Fortunately, orcs don’t tend to be prudish about that kind of thing, but no one expects it from someone like her.

Anyway, next up, I’ll be drawing a mountainous island settlement. And after that, I’ll be coming back to draw something else from the Black Loch. Maybe the illithid ruins? We’ll see.

Well, I’m gonna grab some coffee and start sketching some islands. Let me know what you think of the Widow!

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