Category: Work-In-Progress

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St. Peter’s Basilica: Roof Level

Here’s another part of St. Peter’s Basilica finished. We’ve still got the grottoes and the Roman necropolis left to draw. And, of course, the rest of Vatican City. For reasons I explained here, I’ll be drawing in the backgrounds and surrounding buildings later. In the meantime, I hope the lack of surroundings doesn’t impede anyone’s ability to run adventures in the land of Catholicism.

By the way, I’m not planning to draw the roof levels of every building in the Vatican. I decided to draw this one because:

  1. There are numerous stairs to the roof.
  2. It’s a cool roof.
  3. The basilica is kind of the centerpiece of the Vatican.

But, like, I don’t think we need a map for the roof of the Pontifical Academy of Sciences. If there’s another roof that’s worth drawing, I’ll draw it, but I’ll probably skip it for most places.

Next, I’ll be drawing last month’s Cartographic Congress winner, which is a medieval village built in the ruins of an ancient megastructure. I haven’t decided on the megastructure that the village is built on just yet, but it could be an ancient temple, a huge amphitheater or something like that. If you’ve got any ideas, let me know.

Anyway, that’s it for now. Let me know what you think!

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St. Peter’s Basilica Roof (Work-in-Progress)

Here are the lines for the roof of the St. Peter’s Basilica map. It’s probably a little hard to parse what you’re looking at here, especially since this roof– very unusually– has a number of features that are recessed into the roof (as seen here, on the right). Plenty of roofs have things sticking out, but recesses are pretty rare, since they tend to fill up with water. I’m not sure how they avoided that here, but they seem to have worked something out.

Anyway, I’m gonna get to work on coloring this tomorrow. At the moment, I am incredibly sick and I’m going to give my disease-ridden body a day to rest. All right, I’m going to go lie down.

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Floating City (Work-in-Progress)

Here are the drawings for the floating island city. As you can see from the sideview, there’s an underground level as well, which will be in the finished map. It’ll be like a tiny, flying underdark. A sort of “overdark,” if you will.

Anyway, I’m gonna start coloring this thing. Let me know what you think so far!

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Mesa Verde (Work-in-Progress)

Here are the drawings for the next map, which is inspired by the Mesa Verde Cliff Palace. Initially, I was planning to draw a fairly accurate map of the site, but I came to realize there was a problem, which is that it would be a terrible map for RPG purposes. The main issue is that all the rooms are 2×2 tiles or smaller and quite a few would be around 1×1.

So, since most DMs need a little more room for battles and other encounters, I decided to merge some of the rooms together, while mostly keeping the original layout of the place. I hope you don’t mind.

Anyway, I’m gonna get to work on coloring this thing. Let me know what you think!

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St. Peter’s Basilica: Here’s where things are at right now.

There’s still a fair bit of floor left to color, but we’re getting there. I’ve been so engrossed in this that there have been a few times where I’ve started working, then looked up and, oh, hey, it’s five in the morning. Something about this really puts me in the zone.

Anyway, I’m gonna get back to it. Hope you like it so far!

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St. Peter’s Basilica: The floors are finished.

The lines for the basilica are finally done: the walls, the statues, the furnishings, the floors and all the rest. It was an enormous amount of work, but I think it’s been worthwhile. I might even say the map is looking fairly… is Catholicious a word? I hope so.

Anyway, it’s time to color this thing. It’ll probably take a minute, so I’ll post a few pictures along the way. Well, I’m gonna get started on that. Let me know what you think so far!

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Statues are done, on to the floors – St. Peter’s Basilica (Work-in-Progress)

This is the basilica with the statues and altars and most of the furnishings done. I tried to draw everything as accurately as I could and I’m pretty happy with it so far. There’s only one more thing to draw before I start coloring this, which is the floor. That may take a minute, since the floor here looks like this, but I think it’ll be worth the effort.

Well, this thing isn’t going to draw itself (none of the rest of it did, anyway), so I’d better get started. Let me know what you think so far!

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St. Peter’s Basilica (Work-in-Progress)

Here’s where I’m at with the basilica. The structure of the building is done and I’ve started working on the details. I’ve got the pipe organs and altars drawn into two of the chapels and the main altar is done as well, which you can see up close in the second picture. It has statues of four popes holding up a giant chair and looks like this in real life.

This place is pretty enormous and the first image is around 160×100 tiles or so. That, combined with the fact that I’m trying to give this place as much detail as possible, means that it’s going to take a minute. There are a LOT of statues in this place and I want to draw in all the major ones.

So, I hope you like how it’s coming so far and I hope you’ll find this thing worth the time spent on it. Either way, let me know what you think!