Category: Temples

There she is. A whole lot of trees died to get us to this point. Seriously, I’m gonna post a picture of all the originals at some point. I think this may have taken more paper than Brazenthrone, which is a little nuts.

That reminds me, I need to buy more. Unfortunately, I have to order the paper I use from overseas, which is a bit of a pain, but only the finest French graph paper will do. *adjusts monocle*

All right, I’m gonna grab some more coffee and get started on coloring this thing. My next post will the the finished first level!

So, this is the whole island. In the back, there’s the Chapel of St. Aubert on the left, then toward the center is a fountain. It’s kind of a strange fountain. I guess you get the water out of the hole? I don’t know.

The leftmost tower has the windmill I mentioned before. I can’t show you a photo because it’s not there anymore, but some old French books assure me it used to be there. Well, Google Translate assures me that some old French books say it was, anyway.

I really wanted to get this done tonight and I did but now it’s like 8 am and I want to write some stuff here but I just… I can’t. I’ll post something tomorrow. Good night.

The second level of the town is almost done! Once I knock out the rest, it’s on to the third floor, which shouldn’t take long at all. Then I’ll do whatever roofs are left, which is going to feel like a vacation compared to drawing the rest of this place, haha. Then I’ll draw in the trees and rocks, fill out the back of the island (including the two small buildings back there) and it’ll be ready for color!

Also, here’s the entire first level of the town and the abbey. I think this is pretty awesome. Thank you so much for letting me make stuff like this.

The second level of the town is coming along faster than I’d expected and I’m feeling like we’re on the homestretch now.

If you noticed that building at the bottom extending over the street, you should have a look at the real thing. You know what that place is called? The Inn of the Unicorn. No kidding. How is this place real? Everything about it is straight out of a fantasy novel. There’s a place called the Inn of the Mermaid down the street, too. And both of those date back hundreds of years.

God I love it.

And that’s it for the abbey. You may have noticed the steeple here and thought, “Is there really a statue of a sword-wielding angel on top of this thing?” In fact, there is a GOLDEN statue of a sword-wielding angel on top of it. I mean, sure, you can hardly see it from the ground, but people know it’s there and that’s the important thing.

All right, back to work.

The third and final floor of the abbey is finished. In the center is the cathedral, of course. Above it on the left is the cloister, with the refectory and kitchen on the right. For those of you not familiar with the term, a refectory is a dining room in an abbey. It strikes me as one of the least-necessary words in the English language, but there you go.

The area on the left side of the map is a huge, open-air terrace. The area outlined inside it is the foundation of a structure that was meant to be built there, but never was. Elsewhere on this level are an infirmary, a disused dormitory, a used dormitory and a small archives.

Now I just need to slap a roof on this baby and then I’ll be finishing up the town. My original plan for that was to draw three full floors of the town as they are in real life. There are a few buildings with fourth floors, but in the interest of keeping the map to a manageable size, I decided to just lop those off.

That’s still the plan, but I’m also going to partially abridge the third level. I can’t claim that I’m doing it to keep this thing from being too ludicrously huge because, well, I think we passed that point a long way back. Mainly I just don’t think drawing the third floor of every building adds that much to the map. A lot of what’s up there isn’t that interesting and, if this weren’t a map of a real place, I’d feel like a lot of the town’s 3rd level was filler. So I’ll pick and choose which buildings get a third floor and which ones don’t and hopefully it won’t be any less useful or interesting to anyone.

The second level of the abbey is done and there’s some interesting stuff here. The room near the bottom-left with the four pillars is an ossuary. The big thing in the middle is called a “treadwheel” and it’s meant for hauling stuff up a ramp into the abbey. It’s turned by people walking inside it like big, hairless hamsters. Yeah, I know. Fun.

The big chamber near the center that looks like a hand giving the middle finger is the “Crypt of the Great Pillars.” The two small rooms with no doors above and below it are cisterns. This place actually has four. Religion is thirsty work.

The room the middle finger is pointing to is an ecclesiastical court. Then above that, past the gardens, is the Hall of Guests (“Salle des Hôtes”), a big chamber meant for hosting nobility and other distinguished guests. The other big chamber on the left is the scriptorium, where the monks worked to copy books.

I was thinking about drawing these last two rooms furnished, but I decided against it. My reasoning for it was that this map is for D&D purposes and, as a DM, if I’m having some kind of big encounter or battle, that’s probably where it’s going down. And because of that, I felt like I should leave the rooms flexible. No one wants to be tripping over a bunch of desks while they’re trying to stop the High Priest of Whatever from summoning the lord of darkness.

I’ll be back with the third and final floor of the abbey. Unfortunately, the winding-underground-tunnels portion of the adventure is over, but there’s still some interesting stuff left to explore.