Mont-Saint-Michel – Work-In-Progress

 

Here’s Mont-Saint-Michel so far. First, I want to talk about what’s finished, then I’m going to talk about some of the unusual things I need to do to get this map done right.

So, this is the town at the base of the abbey. The exterior walls and doors are finished, along with other details around the area, like fences and stairs (which are EVERYWHERE). The only interiors I’ve done are the gatehouse and towers, which are things I’ve been able to find information on in some old French books.

In other words: this is everything (in the town) that I’m able to find concrete information on. Finishing this up shouldn’t take nearly as long for one simple reason: I can start making stuff up now. These buildings aren’t famous and won’t have floor plans publicly available. And besides, they’re not the same as they were in the past. Currently, aside from a number of houses, almost everything else is hotels, restaurants and gift shops, about half of which are called “La Mere Poulard” for some reason.

Okay, now let’s talk about this map’s special needs. This place has two issues that make mapping it complicated:

  1.  Nearly every building has two or three exterior doors on separate floors. This place is built on a very steep rock and a ton of buildings have one door in front on the ground level, a side door on the second floor, then a back door on the third floor.
  2. Elevation is important with this map and the elevation here is insanely complicated. Drawing elevation lines isn’t going to cut it.

So, here’s how I plan to deal with this: First, the ground level of the map will show the lowest level of every structure as well as the outdoors. All ground level doors will be drawn as normal, but doors on upper levels will be indicated by a gap in the wall fill with a number indicating which level the door is on. If someone enters the building through that door, switch to the level of the map shown by the number. Pretty simple.

The solution I’ve come up with for explaining the elevation is the brute-force option: I’m going to make a separate elevation reference map that DMs can refer to when questions come up. I’ll label all the ledges and roofs with their approximate height over the ground below. How high is this to climb? How far do I fall from here? Am I above or below that guy? Check the elevation map. It’s not an ideal solution, but unfortunately explaining the elevation here means writing all over the map, so I’ll make one version with it and one without.

In other news, I’m learning a lot of French while doing the research for this. Not useful French, but I now know words like “pont-levis” (drawbridge), “poterne” (postern) and “bastillon” (bastion). Yay.

Okay, I’m going to get back to work.

Mont-Saint-Michel – The Plan of Attack

So, I’ve gotten some work done on Mont-Saint-Michel. Let’s talk about it.

I always knew drawing this map would be tough, but, after looking into it more seriously, I’ve come to realize that the logistics of drawing this place are insane.

Not that I’d let a thing like that stop me, mind you. I’ve never been the go-to guy for forest clearing battlemaps and I’m not about to back down from this because it’s big or hard to draw. But this is going to take longer than I thought and I want to share some of the reasons why:

  • The island itself is about 900 feet across, meaning the map will be around 200×180 tiles. Per floor.
  • I have about 50 different plans of this place. Some are of the town, some only show the monastery, some are from the past. I’m using about six of these as a reference to draw from, plus Google street view when those don’t give me the information I need. Mont-Saint-Michel is a complicated place.
  • It’s going to have to be drawn on a lot of different sheets of paper. The more you have to split a map across multiple pages, the more planning is required. For this map, I’m not sure how many it’ll take, but… look, some trees are gonna die.
  • The layout of this place is madness. Going into specifics would take way too long. Take a look around in Google street view and you’ll see what I mean. Don’t get me wrong, it’s really cool, but drawing it all in a way that makes sense is gonna be tricky.
  • Everything is really densely packed and almost all of the buildings are some strange shape. Hardly anything is just a rectangle.
  • I care about this map. A lot. I think Mont-Saint-Michel is an absolutely stunning place and I want to do this right. I think it’ll be worth it.

So, here’s my plan to slay this beast:

  1. Sketch the whole thing out. Chop it into pieces. (Done)
  2. Draw outlines of the walls and major structures of the town at full size. Make sure everything fits together. (Done)
  3. Draw in the walls, doors, windows, furnishings and other details. I’m starting on this today.
  4. Ink it.
  5. Scan it, assemble the pieces and color it.
  6. Repeat the process for the upper levels and roofs, the abbey and the back part of the island (which is mostly woods).

This is pretty different from my usual process and I don’t really have an ETA for you, but I’d like to think I can get it done in a month. I hope you’re cool with that. It’s a big project, but I think it’ll be pretty epic when it’s done. I’ll post some work-in-progress pictures along the way so you can see how it’s coming.

Dear Patrons: This is the map you’ve been crowdfunding for the last year.

 

As it stands, the dwarven city of Brazenthrone has 497 buildings with 2,247 rooms across 6 different levels of elevation and has taken around 1,300 hours to draw and color. I hope you like it so far. I don’t know if it’s the largest hand-drawn fantasy map ever made, but I’d say it might be when it’s finished.

There’s still plenty more to do, like the Old Quarter, the mines and a number of residential areas, but this is the core of the map finished and none of the rest will take as long. I mean, I don’t know exactly what the mushroom farms will be like yet, but they’re definitely not going to be six floors high.

 

These are the original hand-drawn copies of all this, which are currently falling off my wall. Yep, there goes another one. Each page is 11″x15″ (A3) in size and there are… I don’t feel like counting them. There’s a lot.

Anyway, next up is Mont-Saint-Michel, a fortified island monastery straight out of fantasy art, except it’s somehow a real place. For those of you unfamiliar with it, it looks like this. Man… everyone, let’s give France a round of applause. Well done, France. That is just… magnifique as hell.

If you’re not a patron and you’re interested in helping me make the rest of this monstrosity of a map, you can check out my patreon here.

Brazenthrone: History and Lore, 3rd Edition

 

As promised, here’s the 3rd edition of the lore. I added a summary of each of the different districts of the city and some of the more notable buildings, like the Freehammer Forge and the Amethyst Arcade. It’s stuff that I felt like I should explain for people who don’t have access to the DM notes. While I tremendously appreciate the 187 people who are funding the creation of Brazenthrone, I also want it to be usable by people who can’t afford to be patrons and people who won’t discover it until 10 years from now.

If you are a patron and you’ve read through the DM notes, there’s still a few new things here. There’s some advice on using the city under “Notes from the Artist,” there’s an explanation of how the city is lit under “General Information” and the last entries under “Foreign Relations” and “Society” are new as well.

And with that done, I’m going to begin the task of stitching every chamber of every floor of Brazenthrone into a single image. I’d guess that’ll take one day, maybe two, depending on how many times I crash Photoshop in the process. I’ll take a photo of the originals, too, to show you how many trees had to die for all this.

 

I mentioned in the last post that I’m going to be in Spain for a few days and I wanted to get this done before I left. Well, after a few days of doing literally nothing but drawing, this is as far as I got. There will be second floors for a few buildings and, of course, I’m going to color it, but that’ll have to wait until I get back. Still, I thought you might like to see what it looks like so far.
Okay, I’ve been awake since… a really long time ago. I’m going to sleep.

Brazenthrone – The Anvil Quarter – Work-in-Progress

 

Here’s the Anvil Quarter, ready for the scanner. This actually took quite a bit of research to draw. I read about metalworking in the middle ages, glassmaking, foundries, ceramics and enamels, stonecutting, coin minting, hammermills… all kinds of stuff. I wanted it to look right and I think it does. Hopefully you’ll agree when it’s done.

All right, I’m gonna go put some color on this thing.

Merchants’ Trade Port Island – Work in Progress

First of all: yes, that is seriously my phone. Now you know. I’m the last person on earth with a phone that folds in half. I’ll give you a minute to finish laughing.

All good? Okay, so these are the pencils for most of the merchants’ trade port island. There are a number of smaller outlying islands, plus upper and lower floors for a few buildings, but my camera is dying and I had to fight with it just to get this picture, so the rest will have to wait.

The island has around 50 buildings, including three taverns, a brothel, a lighthouse, a distillery and a number of traders’ warehouses. I was reading about Port Royal, a town in Jamaica that used to be a pirate hangout. In its heyday, it was flooded with money and prostitutes and had around one bar for every ten residents. This will be that kind of place.