Category: Ships/Airships

Posted on

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!

Posted on

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.

Posted on

The Cobalt Flotilla: The Ships

Turtle Ship
Barge
Drua

And the rest:

I don’t often post 11 maps in one day. It feels like a lot, even if I did make those 11 maps for the purpose of making one big map. Anyway, I hope everyone’s good on ships for a while, because after drawing all these, it might be a minute before I do another one.

In any case, I’d say everyone’s collection of ship maps just got a lot more diverse. You’ve got three Japanese ships, a Korean ship, a Filipino ship, a Portuguese ship, a Fijian ship, a few kinda-sorta Chinese boats and a Polynesian raft. Hopefully they make your seafaring campaigns a bit more interesting.

All right, next up is the Château de Chenonceau, a magnificent French castle built across a river. Imagine the Twins from Game of Thrones, except they were an only child. And a lot classier. I’ve been looking forward to drawing it since I found the floor plans and I’m going to get to work the second I stop typing.

Well, I hope everyone likes the flotilla! It took a lot longer than I expected, but I think it turned out really well and there are a lot of possibilities for how to use it. Overall, I’d say it was worth it and, hopefully, most of you agree.

One last thing: I’d like to apologize for mentioning Game of Thrones. It’s been two years since season 8, but for some of you it may still be too soon. Stay strong, we’ll get through this together.

Posted on

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.

Posted on

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.

Posted on

The Cobalt Flotilla (Work-In-Progress)

As it turns out, drawing an island made of boats requires a lot of boats. I’ve got two and a half more pages of boats drawn on top of this. Two more and we should be good.

I think this is gonna be pretty cool. All right, I’m gonna go draw more boats.

Posted on

Dragonfly-Class Spelljammer – “The Mid-Priced Toyota of Fantasy Spacecraft”

I’ve never run a Spelljammer campaign, per se, but I have run campaigns where some mild-to-moderate spelljamming did take place (including my current one). If you don’t understand the appeal of the setting, let me try to explain it.

First, picture the show Firefly. Now, imagine that Kaylee is an elf. Imagine Wash is a wizard. And Shepherd Book is a priest of Tempus who always tries to solve people’s issues by asking, “When was the last time you purified yourself in the holy flames of battle?” That’s basically Spelljammer. Oh, and the Firefly would probably look like an actual firefly.

There’s some freaky stuff out in space, too.  For example: a giant skull full of mind flayers that are torturing beholders. Or how about a clump of pirate-infested asteroids held together by a giant plant? Or, my personal favorite, a big old cloud of wild magic shaped like a boat. For the record, that last one gives you, the DM, license to do literally anything. “Siderion, you are now neon yellow. And your arm turns into a sheep.” What? Are you serious? “You fall down. The sheep is heavy.”

I’m not sure what I’m drawing next, but I’ve got a few things I want to announce about some stuff I’m planning over the next year and I’ll let you know in a day or two when I post about that. I don’t want to hype this up like it’s some huge thing, but I think most of you will be into it.

Anyway, I hope those of you running Spelljammer games approve of my choice of ship! I don’t think I’ll be doing another spelljammer soon, but I may draw another one later in the year. I’m thinking it’d be something a bit bigger than this. Like, the kind of ship your party graduates to after this one. Maybe an elven Man O’ War? If you’ve got any suggestions, let me know and I’ll keep them in mind. In any case, tell me what you think of the map!

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

Posted on

The Deep Spire, 1st Level: The Harbor

First, as usual, the accessories: a version without the ships and ship tokens. There are two versions of the tokens: one that will look good on this map but will look terrible on almost any other map, and an alternate version that will look terrible on this map, but good on most others.

This is the first of six levels of the Deep Spire. The next few will be much bigger, since the harbor doesn’t go all the way around the column and the other floors do. I’m not sure how long this will take overall, but I’ve got a lot of it planned out already and this has taken much less time than I expected it to, so I think it could be done in about a month.

I’ll have DM notes when everything’s finished, but, for now, let’s talk about what we’re looking at. The harbor is a big, open chamber underneath the spire. The ceiling isn’t that high– call it 25 feet (8m)– but this is in the Underdark, so no wind means no sails, which means no masts.

At the entrance to the harbor is a chain boom, like the one in Brazenthrone’s Underdark trading outpost. In the upper left is the gate leading into the spire. On the right are livestock pens. The residents don’t want pigs in the spire, but they do want bacon, so this is where they keep and butcher the animals. In the center, just inside the big support column, is a cargo elevator leading to the second floor. It’s raised and lowered by turning the two big wheels on the sides and is useful for hauling up crates of trade goods or players who failed their persuasion rolls at the gate.

You may have noticed that I changed the colors from what they were in the last post. I decided that using awful, crappy colors might not be the way to go and I decided to use good colors instead. I think that was the right call.

Also, I’m going to make unfurnished versions of all the levels of the Deep Spire. Since I draw everything by hand on paper, that isn’t as simple as turning the chairs off, but it won’t take that long either. I should have the unfurnished version of the harbor up within a day.

Anyway, if you’ve got any thoughts on the map so far, let me know!

Posted on

So, I forgot to post this. It’s the floating market, except with nothing floating and no market.

Also, there’s boat tokens, in case you liked the boats, but you didn’t like where I put the boats and you want them to be somewhere else. Or on another map.

I made this a couple weeks ago and I thought I’d posted it, but I just realized I hadn’t. Sorry about that, but here it is now. I thought this map might be more useful to some people with an empty river and it only took a few hours to make, so I did. And then I completely forgot about it. Oops.

Anyway, I’m working on the map of an estate on the plane of shadow and it is easily the most unsettling map I’ve ever made. There’s a fountain of black liquid pouring from the eyes of a stone head. There’s a bed covered in teeth. And there’s a room where reality is falling apart.

The Shadowfell is a strange and alien place and I want this map to reflect that. It’s not the flaming abyss of damnation, exactly, but it’s definitely not just some place where it’s hard to see. It’s kind of a Diet Hell. I want this map to be a place your players don’t want to be and, unless they are really into H.R. Giger, I don’t think they will.

Well, just thought I’d give you an update on how that’s coming. I’m gonna start inking it tonight and I should have it done and posted in a few more days.

Posted on

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.