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Fort Bourtange – Roof Level and Dutch Version

Here’s the roof level, which is the last part of Fort Bourtange. I also made something else: an annotated version in Dutch, which I’m giving out to everyone.

I’m aware that everyone in the Netherlands under the age of 105 speaks perfect English along with 50 other languages, so I know you probably don’t need this, but I still thought it’d be nice to do. Plus, the English version comes from a Dutch tour map I translated, so I figured I could just not translate it and make a Dutch version that way. There are a couple things I had to use Google for, so I can’t promise it’s perfect, but let me know if anything is wrong or just super weird and I’ll fix it.

Anyway, the next map will be a demonologist’s lair, Remember A Dark Place? I’m gonna try to make someplace freakier than that. It’s not Hell, but it’s the home of… well, a big fan of Hell. A Hell stan, if you will. Hopefully I can come up with something uniquely terrible.

I’ve also got the next historical map picked out, which I’ll be doing sometime in the next few 2-3 months. This time, I’ll be drawing a place in Britain– or, more specifically, Scotland. There are some incredible places in Scotland, like Stirling Castle, the Wallace Monument, and about half the buildings in Edinburgh. Instead of drawing any of that stuff, I’m going to draw Coxton Tower. It’s a towerhouse in Moray and I think it’d make a great map. It’s not huge, complicated or flashy, but it’s interesting. It’s got some unique character, both inside and outside, and it’s the kind of place everyone can find a use for.

I don’t know exactly when I’ll start on it, but I definitely want to put some work in on the Black Loch first. That’s Scottish, too. Well, a little. I mean, it’s not the Black Lake. Anyway, I’m gonna go sketch out some freaky demon stuff. If you’ve got any thoughts on any of this, let me know!

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Fort Bourtange

In the 1500s, the Netherlands were ruled by the Habsburgs. The Habsburgs were an astoundingly inbred German noble family with faces that were about 85% chin. For some reason, they were the rulers of the Spanish Empire.

The people of the the Low Countries didn’t want to be ruled by German people, Spanish people or inbred people, let alone a combination of the three. They wanted self-determination, a republic and the right to worship the protestant version of God. So, in the mid-1500s, the Dutch Revolt began.

The Spanish Empire ruled Spain, part of Italy, Austria, and– you know the countries that speak Spanish today? All of those. It was a daunting enemy, but the Low Countries had one thing going for them: stupefying amounts of money. And they planned to leverage that to win.

One of the things the Dutch spent that money on was Fort Bourtange. Since the Spanish were allied with the Holy Roman Empire, they’d need a way to protect the Dutch land from the Deutschland. One of the main roads to Germany passed through a marsh, so the leader of the revolt, Willem van Oranje, ordered the construction of a fort across it.

Building a star fort with forty buildings, a crownwork, four ravelins and two moats is an expensive operation. But not only did they build it, they built it on a sandbar in the middle of a marsh.

Fort Bourtange was such an obvious deathtrap that not many people were inclined to order their armies to assault it. But, about 100 years after its construction, Bernhard von Galen, the Prince-Bishop of Münster, came along to give it the old college try. During a parley before the attack, he told the fort’s commander, Captain Protts, he had 200,000 guilders for him if he’d surrender Bourtange. Protts famously responded by telling von Galen he had 200,000 bullets for him and his men. Von Galen decided to send his soldiers to go receive them, which resulted in a crushing defeat for his army. He then went on to besiege the nearby city of Groningen, which he also failed at.

In later years, the fort began to transition into a village, where the soldiers of the garrison lived with their families. Then, in the 1800s, the fort was turned into a village for local farmers.

Well, this map was a ton of work, but I hope you like it! I’m going to make a roof-level version of the fort next, which should only take a couple days, then I’ll be moving on to the next map. I plan to make a big push on getting some Black Loch maps done over the next few months as well.

Anyway, let me know what you think of Fort Bourtange!

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

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Finbarr’s Marsh in Minecraft

A Youtuber named Andyisyoda is building all of Finbarr’s Marsh in Minecraft at the moment and it’s incredibly impressive. If you’re interested in seeing it come together, here’s a playlist of his build videos so far.

Also, I’ve got good news and bad news about Fort Bourtange. The good news is– and I say this in the most humble way possible– it looks really good. The bad news is I’m going to need another week to finish coloring it. The full size version is pretty massive and I underestimated the amount of time it’d take to color and shade everything. Anyway, I’m gonna get back to work on it and I’ll be back to you when it’s finished!

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Fort Bourtange – Second Update

This is the linework for Fort Bourtange finished and ready for coloring. I’m planning to crop this map to a few different sizes, since I don’t think most people will need this much space around the fort. This will be the largest size, however, and is intended for people who want to do something crazy with it, like have a full-on battle between two armies. I’m not gonna lie, the grid size on it is absurd.

I also wanted to mention that I’m not going to draw the upper levels of the buildings here. The best way to explain the reason is that I think including them makes the map worse. They’re all small– mostly attics and lofts– and there’s nothing interesting going on up there. If I include them, that means doubling the size of an already huge map, which means more to load on a VTT or more to print for the table. Mont-St-Michel had interesting stuff on the upper levels, but this place doesn’t and I think it’s better to just leave it at one floor. Hopefully, everybody’s cool with that.

Before I get to coloring this, I want to share a few things I’ve learned while doing research for this map:

  1. William the Silent, who ordered the construction of Fort Bourtange, looked like this. I have never seen a 500-year-old portrait of someone who looks anywhere near as badass as that. Everyone else is a ponce in a wig. But that dude? That dude is serious.
  2. Fort Bourtange has three drawbridges. One of them has a bathroom on it and it’s still in use. Don’t swim in the moat.
  3. This is unrelated to the fort, but super interesting: Grutte Pier was an early Renaissance Dutch man the size of Andre the Giant. A mercenary group called the Black Band raided his village and killed his wife, after which Pier started a peasant rebellion. Later, he became a pirate. This guy was the D&D character you created when you were 15, except he was real. This was his sword.
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Fort Bourtange – An Update

Here’s where things are at with Fort Bourtange. This is all of the fort’s structures, including about 40 buildings, 6 bridges, a few wells, some watch posts and a windmill. The next step is to scan all this, arrange everything and draw in the rest.

While I normally draw almost everything on paper, I’m going to be drawing the rest of this map on my pen tablet. That means the landscape, moats, trees, plants and so on. I don’t think you’ll notice any difference, I just want to let everyone know what the plan is.

Finally, after the lines are done, I’ll be coloring it, which will probably take a week or so. I’ve been hoping to get this done by the end of the month and I’d say things are on track for that so far.

On a side note, here’s something interesting I learned. There are about 50 residents of Fort Bourtange today. That seems like a pretty unusual place to live, right? Like, if you told someone you lived in a star fort surrounded by a moat in the Netherlands, you’d imagine that would narrow down the location quite a bit. That’d have to be here, right?

No. There are five places in the Netherlands that fit that description. Five. Fort Bourtange, Naarden, Heusden, Brielle and Willemstad. Apparently, there are thousands of Dutch people just casually living in star forts in the year 2021.

Man, I really have to go there one of these days.

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The Flying Rook

Here’s the annotated version and here’s the unfurnished version.

The Flying Rook is the sort of place wizards build to show off. Anyone with the power to keep this architectural Frankenstein standing is no joke, but– just in case anyone wasn’t fully convinced– they made it fly as well.

I didn’t have any particular purpose in mind when I added the windmill, but, the more I think about it, the more I’m wondering– and hear me out here– what if it was a propeller? Like, what if this whole thing was kind of an airship? That’s not for everybody’s game, of course, but it’s an idea you could roll around in your head if you want to do something a little different.

So, now that we’ve got that 13-story building taken care of, I’ll be moving on to something considerably bigger. Naturally.

As I mentioned before, I’ll be drawing Fort Bourtange, a magnificent 16th century grapeshot dispensary star fort in the Netherlands. It’s a big place, but I believe it’s all one level, so it shouldn’t take an unreasonable amount of time. I think I might get it done by the end of the month, but I don’t want to make any promises.

I’ll be making an unfurnished version of the map as well so you can use it as a village instead of a fort if you prefer. And it actually was a village for a few centuries, so that’s not a stretch.

Well, I’ve been champing at the bit to get started on this map for a couple months now, so I think I’m gonna go do that. Let me know what you think of the Rook!

There are DM notes for this map available to patrons.

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The Floating Tower (Work-In-Progress)

Here’s a sketch of the 13-story tower I’ve been working on. I wasn’t originally planning to draw something completely insane here, but then I came up with this design and now I am. Anyway, what do you think?

Also, just a heads-up: this map and the next map are both going to have windmills. Things are going to get pretty Dutch around here for a little while, I hope everyone’s prepared for that.

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Delaro’s Manse

Here’s the unfurnished version.

Hey look, I drew a reasonable-sized map! 34×55! I knew I could do it! Don’t get used to it, though, the next two maps I’m drawing are a 13-floor tower and this.

Delaro’s Manse is a part of the Black Loch, marked on the map as “Secluded Manse.” Delaro Montalos is one of the few humans living in the underdark sea. He’s a wizard who came to the loch to conduct research into an extradimensional gateway he created.

Normally, in a D&D setting, the term “extradimensional” refers to planar travel, but that’s not the case here. Delaro isn’t going to the inner planes, the outer planes, or anywhere else described in Planescape. He’s going outside of that, to another multiverse altogether.

I imagine this place as a completely different reality with laws of physics that bear no resemblance to our own, but I think there are a few other ways to play it. The most interesting, to me, is having Delaro’s gateway lead to our world, at some interesting point in time. You could drop your party into the middle of the Second World War, or the French Revolution, or the Wild West. You could have your party appear in a city under siege by the Mongol horde, or in the capital of the Incan Empire as the conquistadores are about to arrive. Hell, you could drop your party into the middle of modern day Tokyo. There are tons of possibilities if you want to go that route.

I feel like a lot of people are going to want to use this map for things other than the Black Loch, so I’m going to make an alternate version, which I think I can get done tonight. I’m just going to get rid of the stalactites and put some grass in there, so the place isn’t explicitly in a cavern. It won’t take long and it’ll keep some DMs from having to say, “I told you it was on a grassy hill, stop asking questions.”

Anyway, I’m gonna get on that. Let me know what you think!

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