Posts

Posted on

My players are terrible at tanking, so I made this landing page to help them with a little educational mockery.

Tanking– you know, the thing where the person with the full plate and the battleaxe stands in front of the person with the walking stick and the bathrobe. My players are not completely on board with this concept.

Where do I start? How about the wizard? She LOVES opening doors. And if you suggest that front line combat may not be her strongest position, she’ll be happy to tell you all about her AC and her mage armor. It’s 18, you see. She can’t be touched. Do the dice even go that high?

Then there’s the ranger. This ranger does not and will not lead the way ever. He’s focused on archery, which puts him in the back line, but he’s convinced he’s a glass cannon and, should any harm come to him at all, it is OVER. When someone opens the door, he won’t just be in the back, he’ll be another entire room away. Maybe two. That’s not me being funny, either– he is terrified of damage. And this is a character with a d10 hit die, 16 CON and the highest HP in the party.

The rogue will open doors, but only when the rest of the party is engaged in another fight and he thinks he might be able to sneak off to score some loot he doesn’t have to split. This is, of course, the D&D version of Russian Roulette: this room has nothing, this room has nothing, this room has some gold, this room has OH GOD GUYS HELP OH GOD PLEASE IT HAS SO MANY TEETH

Anyway, they thought this was pretty funny, so I thought I’d share it with you. If you’re wondering about the sword (or whatever you want to call it), it’s just a picture I found on the internet. It’s so over-the-top badass that I had to throw it in there.

By the way, Brazenthrone‘s Old Quarter is coming along nicely. The pencils are almost done and I should be getting some of the ink done tonight. Speaking of which, I’m gonna get to work on that! I do love drawing destroyed stuff.

Posted on

Brazenthrone – Updated Overview Map

Sorry this is a little late, I had something come up last night before I could get it done. Anyway, here it is! I reserve the right to change 19 and 27 if I come up with a better idea for them, but I’ll update the map again if I do.

Here’s the non-annotated version. You can download the print and VTT versions for free from my patreon here. The VTT versions aren’t marked with dimensions, they’re just a smaller file size you can use as handouts.

All right, time to get started on the Old Quarter!

Posted on

Brazenthrone – The Eastern Halls

Here are the second and third levels by themselves.

These halls are the “suburbia” of Brazenthrone, which makes them a little hard to say much about. They’re where normal dwarves live. They’re neither the wealthiest commoner district nor the poorest. The wealthiest is the Promontories, of course. The poorest will be the Hollows, to the west of the Anvil Quarter. It hasn’t been drawn yet, but that’s where it’ll be. Ye olde hood.

With these chambers done, a finished Brazenthrone is starting to come into sight. As I promised earlier, I’m going to redo the overview map of the city to include all the unmarked chambers. That won’t take long and it should be up later tonight. I’ve had a few people tell me they’ve been using it as a handout recently and, with six chambers drawn that aren’t marked on there, it’s probably a good time to do it. Anyway, I’ll be back with that in a few hours!

Posted on

Brazenthrone – The Eastern Halls – Ground Level

Here’s the annotated version.

These are the residential chambers on the lower-right side of this map surrounding 17, which is the fountain in the center. I’ve got all three levels of this drawn already, so the rest should be up in a day or two. I just need to color them. I’m also going to update the map in the link to include all the residential chambers. I’ve been meaning to post my Roll20 landing page too. It’s… a little different. There are going to be a lot of posts this week.

Once those are up, I’m going to start on something a little more interesting: the Old Quarter (7&8 on the map above). Originally the center of Brazenthrone, it was abandoned and sealed off following a disaster that left the entire chamber in ruins. What that disaster was, exactly, I’m not sure. But I’ll know by the time I’m done and it’ll all be explained in the DM notes.

All right, I’m gonna go knock out the rest of this thing!

Posted on

The High Temple of Mystra

 

This is the main temple of Mystra, the goddess of magic in the Forgotten Realms. In addition to its religious functions, the temple also houses a massive storehouse of magic in the caverns below. I only included the first level in the map, but there’s a stairway on the left side of the caverns to allow you to expand into another map if you want.

The symbols at the bases of the towers are meant to be glyphs that teleport people between levels. But if you’d prefer boring old stairs, I made another version with those.

My game is starting soon, so I’ve gotta wrap up this post. Next up is more Brazenthrone!

Posted on

More tokens from my game. The party is in Chult, which means we are go for dinosaur cavalry.

These tokens are huge spoilers for my game, but I’ve banned my players from my site and my patreon so I can give them to you. Download them from my patreon here or from my Google Drive.

The party is deep in the jungles of Chult, having just found their way to the Hidden Shrine of Tamoachan. If you’re running that, this is nearly all the tokens you need, by the way. The dinosaur cavalry is something I made for an encounter along the way. The party’s paladin is a jungle dwarf who worships Thard Harr and he just got Find Steed, so I decided to give him a deinonychus, which is the smaller of the dinosaurs up there. It’s powerful, sure, but it’s one of those things that’s going to be much less of a big deal in a few levels. Plus, I’m a very stingy DM when it comes to magic items, so there’s room to do stuff like this.

My philosophy with magical stuff is, when I give the party an item, I want it to be meaningful and I want them to feel special for having it. I don’t want a player to check if this magic sword is better than their current magic sword. I want them to go, “Holy crap, I have a magic sword!”

While I don’t give the PCs magic items often, when I do, they are the hotness and I don’t think it underpowers the party much. One side effect is that everyone can get through their turns quicker in combat because they know what their options are. It takes forever when players have to look over a thousand different options every turn because their gloves can cast three different spells, their axe can cast two, their ring can cast four and their other ring lets them do some other crap.  When a player only gets a new item every 6-8 sessions at most, they have time to learn what it does and they can keep track of their options more easily. The barbarian isn’t the only one who can get through their turn in under a minute (“Groknar frenzy. Groknar smash monster with axe forty-seven times. Groknar finished”).

Anyway, that’s how I handle it. I’m interested to hear your thoughts about it if you have any or if you do things differently and it works out for you.

The High Temple of Mystra is coming along. It’s about halfway inked and it should be done by the weekend. It’s a big one. All right, I’m gonna get back on it!

Posted on

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.

Posted on

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.

Posted on

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.

 

Posted on

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!