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The Great Hall of Brazenthrone in Minecraft

Someone made the Great Hall of Brazenthrone in Minecraft and it is incredible. A reader named Fonta sent me these pictures and I wanted to share them with everyone. The first picture is from the northeast corner of the Promontories, which is the upper right corner of this map. The second picture is from the amphitheater. I believe the hole in the center is a ventilation shaft.

These shots show the city from an angle that the maps don’t, but this is how it looks in my imagination. This is it exactly.

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Brazenthrone – The Hall of Iron – Everyone’s Edition

 

The Hall of Iron is a residential district of Brazenthrone. Admittedly, having nothing but residences, it’s not the most exciting part of the city. But a city needs homes and not everyone can live in some kind of dwarven Winchester Mystery House (here, let me save some of you the time).

This is one of a cluster of residential chambers surrounding a fountain plaza, which you can see here (17 and the nearby unlabeled chambers). I’ve decided to do the plaza and the rest of these chambers as one map, which I’ll add this to. That’ll let me consolidate everything into a single annotated version and a single page of DM notes, which is handy because, frankly, there isn’t much notable stuff here. This is Brazenthrone’s version of suburbia.

Next up is last month’s Cartographic Congress winner, The High Temple of Mystra, a massive library and storehouse of arcane objects dedicated to the goddess of magic. After that, more Brazenthrone, of course.

You can download all print and VTT versions of this map from this post on my patreon or from Google Drive.

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Brazenthrone – The Bloody Hall – Everyone’s Edition

 

Here are the DM notes. There is no annotated version, since all the rooms are residences.

The Bloody Hall is a residential district of Brazenthrone, located just south of the Common Quarter. It’s unique on account of all the residences here being in a single, large building formerly known as “Amber Manor.” There are more details in the DM notes if you’re interested.

Next up is the Hall of Iron, another residential district adjacent to the Common Quarter. After that, I’ll be doing last month’s Cartographic Congress winner, the High Temple of Mystra. Then it’ll be back to the mountain for the rest of the Brazenthrone maps I owe you. There’s not too much of the city left to go!

All the print and VTT content for this map is available on my patreon here or on Google Drive.

 

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Brazenthrone – The Old Mines – Everyone’s Edition

Here’s the annotated version and the DM notes. You can download all print and VTT content for this map from my patreon here or from Google Drive.

Last month, I was making all the patron content for my new maps available to everyone (for reasons explained in this post). I’m going to continue doing so until at least May 18th, which is the date for the end of the lockdown in Ireland (where I live). I hope these maps have been helpful to those of you who have had to bring their games online (and everyone else).

Anyway, this map is Brazenthrone‘s old mines, the city’s disused and sealed-off iron mines. What went wrong? They dug too deep and too greedily? Disturbed a sleeping dragon? No, they tunneled into an underground stream and flooded the place. Eventually, various critters tunneled their way in from outside and made it their home, leading to the dwarves sealing the whole thing off.

But maybe somebody left their lunchbox inside and your party has to go in and get it. Or maybe there’s an aboleth in there doing some kind of psychic nonsense and someone needs to put some lemon juice on that sucker and toss it on the grill. There’s some ideas in the DM notes.

Next up is more Brazenthrone. I’m going to do a residential district because there’s quite a few of them left to draw and I don’t want to end up with everything else finished and 8 residential chambers to draw in a row. Well, I’d better get started!

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Brazenthrone – The Gnomestown District – Everyone’s Edition

 

Here’s the annotated Patrons’ Edition and the DM notes. I’m still giving away all my new patron content for free while everyone is stuck inside. You can get it from my patreon here or from Google Drive.

Brazenthrone returns! This is the first of a number of Brazenthrone maps I’ll be drawing in a row. Gnomestown is pretty much what it says on the label: a small corner of the city where a lot of the gnomish residents live. Most of these would be deep gnomes, with whom the dwarves of Brazenthrone have a tight relationship.

The “Tavern in the Sky” at (5) is a good place to hang out if you’re three feet tall and everyone else in the city has a liver like a bank vault and casually drinks an amount of alcohol that would kill your entire family. If the name seems confusing, here’s the explanation from the DM notes:

The name of this tavern makes plenty of sense to deep gnomes, but almost none to anyone else. The gnomes‘ perspective is this: most deep gnome communities are miles below ground. While Brazenthrone is under a mountain, the city and it’s entrance are fairly high up in the mountains and the city is, in fact, at a higher elevation than most surface cities. Thus, it is– according to the deep gnomes– “in the sky.” To be clear, the sky is in no way visible from this location.

Next up is the Old Mines, east of the Noble Quarter. They’re long abandoned and blocked off from the city, which makes them sort of a “wilderness.” But, you know, maybe somebody forgot something in there and maybe your party needs to crawl on in and go get it. It’ll be fine. It can’t be that bad, can it? I mean, of course it can, but… look, just get in the hole.

Before that, I’ll post another batch of tokens I made for my Roll20 game. Those should be up tomorrow. Until then!

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The Library of Gravenhollow – Everyone’s Edition

 

Here’s the annotated version, an alternate version and the DM notes.

Gravenhollow is an unmapped location in the 5E D&D module Out of the Abyss. It’s a place where space and time work differently and a person can travel from one place to another just by thinking about where they want to be.

Since there are quite a few peculiarities of Gravenhollow that make this map a lot less useful than it could be to DMs wanting to use it for something else, I made an alternate version as well with a few changes. It’s not exactly standard fare either, but, should you need a map of a strange, mystical place full of crystals, obelisks and other weird crap, it might get the job done. Worth a thought if your party might be headed to Limbo anytime soon.

Thanks to Fraz-Urb’luu who proposed this map to the Cartographic Congress! Next up is Brazenthrone. A whole lot of it. Let’s kick it off with Gnomestown and see where the mood takes us from there, shall we?

As I’ve been doing all month, I’m giving away all the patron content for this map for free. You can download it from the patreon here or from Google Drive.

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My first VTT session went great! Also, here’s the tokens I made for my next session.

 

First, here are the tokens.

All in all, it felt a lot like DMing offline. Previously, my impression was that Roll20 was much more automated than it is. But it mostly just rolls dice and adds modifiers. You’ve got to determine if the rolls succeed or fail, add or subtract hp and do pretty much everything else yourself, which I like. Thanks again for everyone’s advice! I’m sure it wouldn’t have gone nearly as smoothly without your tips.

So, I made these tokens for my next session. They’re kind of a weird selection, I know, but they’re what I need. The goblin is a character you might remember if you’ve ever run LMoP: Droop. My players made friends with him and now he’s, like, their mascot or something. I made some goblin tokens before, but I needed an unarmed goblin. Droop is a lover, not a fighter.

The bear is actually for the druid. She took the shapeshifting path and she’s able to turn into a brown bear early, which means… well, she gets some work done. After she slaughtered her way through Cragmaw Castle, I described her as looking like the back seat of the car in Pulp Fiction. So the bloody one is her: nature’s brutal killing machine.

Originally, I just drew one stirge, but they’re tiny and I decided that only letting one fight in a 5-foot area seemed crazy, so I made a flock. I’m putting three of those things on one tile and if the D&D police want to lock me up for it, they can come and get me.

I’m working on the next map, which is based on the library of Gravenhollow from Out of the Abyss. It’s supposedly so complex and changing that it’d be impossible to make a map of it. Challenge accepted. After that, Brazenthrone.

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BOATS!

So, I don’t know if ship tokens are actually a thing anyone uses or wants, but I hope they are because I made a bunch of them. If they’re not, well, they were only an hour’s work, so no big deal.

Originally, I’d planned to make tokens out of the ships from the Vlyn’darastyl map, but they were too small, so I used boats I drew for other maps instead. The only one I drew specifically for this was the Century Pelican, which I figured might be useful too.

Anyway, I’m about to start my first session on Roll20 later today. Thanks to everyone for the advice about how to get started! I’ve got everything set up: the maps, the tokens, the macros, the discord and all the rest. Let’s hope it goes smoothly. And good luck to any other first-timers out there as well! We will screw this up together.

The tokens are free, as is everything else this month. You can get them from this post on the patreon or from Google Drive.

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The Drow City of Vlyn’darastyl – Everyone’s Edition

 

First, the annotated version, the DM notes and this other version.

This was a slightly unusual map for me. When I say I’m drawing a “city map,” it usually means something like Brazenthrone or Finbarr’s Marsh. Drawing an exterior-only city had me a little worried, since the last one I did was this piece of white-hot garbage. God, that’s embarrassing. But I think Vlyn’darastyl is big step up from that.

So, Vlyn’darastyl is a drow city that’s accessible by airship, which isn’t a characteristic shared by many other cities two miles underground. But the Great Breach– a 300′ (100m) hole in the roof of the cavern leading to the surface sea above– makes this possible. There are more details in the DM notes above, but if you’ve got any other questions I didn’t cover, feel free to ask.

Thanks to Senator Matt for proposing this map to the Cartographic Congress! He and I were talking about an idea I had for the future which I’d like to let you in on.

At some point, I want to make a map of a small Underdark sea. That sea is the Black Loch, which the map above shows only a small corner of. I want to make a larger, region-sized map of the whole loch with 10-12 locations marked: maybe a kuo-toa village, a duergar outpost, a few islands with some ruins, a series of caves, maybe something underwater, stuff like that. Then I’d draw maps of each of those locations at a 5′ scale, so you’d have this map of a whole region and, wherever you wanted to take your players in that region, you’ve got a map of it ready to go.

When Matt proposed a city next to an Underdark sea, I thought that seemed like a good addition, especially since the Great Breach makes the area more accessible for DMs whose parties aren’t currently below ground. But– to be clear– this is the only part of it I’ll be making for a while. This is a big project and I’m not going to be starting on it until Brazenthrone is finished, which will be a while still. But I thought I’d share that with you and see if anyone had any thoughts.

As I said when I posted the last map, all patron content is free to everyone this month. You can download it from this post or from Google Drive.