This is a different sort of map in that it has a sense of directionality to it. It starts with a larger trunk, and then breaks down to smaller passages as it moves away from that base. Or maybe it’s like the dispersal in the delta region of a river. In any case, there is a difference between sides.
As usual, feel free to use for any non-commercial purpose, or contact me if you’d like to use this on a commercial project, or if you would like to commission a custom piece.
More experimentation with borders and poche fill in this. The corridor with piers running down the middle is a bit goofy, perhaps, but maybe it was once a mine or some kind of created structure.
As usual, feel free to use for any non-commercial purpose, or contact me if you’d like to use this on a commercial project, or if you would like to commission a custom piece.
Sometimes an earlier piece suggests doing the opposite in the next one. This was inspired by the idea of having passages that branched, which is true for most of the connections between the rooms in this.
As usual, feel free to use for any non-commercial purpose, or contact me if you’d like to use this on a commercial project, or if you would like to commission a custom piece.
Shape rooms and lots of connections; this is a very Jaquayed dungeon bit, but all of the corridors are simple end-to-end or room-to-room connections; there are no forks or decisions between the rooms.
As usual, feel free to use for any non-commercial purpose, or contact me if you’d like to use this on a commercial project, or if you would like to commission a custom piece.
It has been quite a while since I did one of these with a stone block style wall, and that was suddenly very appealing to do for a change. This is also a “boulevarded” dungeon, since there are several places where there are two passages running side-by-side, at least for a bit of the way. It was somewhat inadvertent, but it was interesting, so a couple more got worked in.
As usual, feel free to use for any non-commercial purpose, or contact me if you’d like to use this on a commercial project, or if you would like to commission a custom piece.
This map started with the central round chamber, and then extended from there. Unlike a lot of the Fragments, this one is rather interconnected, and has at least two ways to get to any area from any other area. The central area is definitely a point of focus of some kind, which makes this different from a lot of the rest of the series.
As usual, feel free to use for any non-commercial purpose, or contact me if you’d like to use this on a commercial project, or if you would like to commission a custom piece.
After doing many very rough-walled dungeons, it seemed like an appealing change of pace would be an alternative that was somewhat squared-off. But, not being drawn on a graph grid, this still has coarse walls and lots of irregularity. It certainly suggests more of a hewn mine, rather than a natural cave of any sort.
As usual, feel free to use for any non-commercial purpose, or contact me if you’d like to use this on a commercial project, or if you would like to commission a custom piece.
These are a pair of maps which are linkable to each other. Usually, the maps posted here are singular pieces, without interconnection to each other. But this one and its counterpart were created to be able to be connected to one another on any edge. So there are four configurations possible with the combination of the two.
As usual, feel free to use for any non-commercial purpose, or contact me if you’d like to use this on a commercial project, or if you would like to commission a custom piece.
This is a fairly simple 6-room dungeon using a more geological bordering for the walls and pattern for the background, just to do something different. It also has more limited access, with only one passage extending off each edge.
As usual, feel free to use for any non-commercial purpose, or contact me if you’d like to use this on a commercial project, or if you would like to commission a custom piece.
This was an interesting one to work on. This is for a project that Thor is working on, and needed an alien ship to be explored.Not only did I want the layout of the ship itself to be odd, I thought that it would also help give it another level of strangeness to use a non-standard, non-regular hex grid for it. They are still hexagons, just not with 60-degree corners at every vertex.
As usual, feel free to use for any non-commercial purpose, or contact me if you’d like to use this on a commercial project (which might be a little more complicated in this case, since it is already planned for use in another project), or if you would like to commission a custom piece.
Came across this older map (from 2017) while doing some sorting; I’m not sure I ever posted it before, so I’m posting it now.
As usual, feel free to use for any non-commercial purpose, or contact me if you’d like to use this on a commercial project, or if you would like to commission a custom piece.
Getting back to the fragment maps after a few weeks. The idea that came along with this one was having space that wasn’t necessarily a collection of distinct rooms. There are a couple of comparatively distinct rooms in this, but also some space that is only partially differentiated and separated.
As usual, feel free to use for any non-commercial purpose, or contact me if you’d like to use this on a commercial project, or if you would like to commission a custom piece.
I’ve recently completed a couple more commissions for Through the Void. This is one of them, as a preview for what will be coming out when the whole game is published.
These are in a similar style to the Lunar X1 base from earlier this year. They want to have a consistent style, so working with the same artist for all the maps helps with that. The greebling that helps define the walls also gives it a characteristic that I haven’t seen in other maps, and I think it works well for this series.
As just the map maker, I know only a little bit about these places when I draw them. I’m given some information about the spaces, but I don’t have a complete adventure text, so the collaboration is somewhat at arm’s length, though they seem to work out pretty well.
The airlock and landing bay is at the left. Other labs and containment areas throughout the complex. This one also has a set of vents which provide an alternate way of getting around and bypassing certain rooms or spaces. The one additional note I was given about this complex is that it is an orbiting space station over a planet of storms (a la Solaris), so that was what led to the swirled background surrounding the map.
The rough draft, now called The Shipping Forecast, has been updated in itch.io with a section about Wealth and Ships. This is all still very preliminary, and thinking aloud (on the page) to work out a system for handling ship exploration and trade in a fantasy/medieval kind of setting.
I’ve been stuck with thinking about how it might work, and realized that, instead of trying to think it into place, I need to come up with a rough draft for it, and see how it works and where it breaks, and then revise as appropriate. But I’m not going to come up with the perfect system on the first pass. So this is an initial, rough, almost certainly broken system. But let’s see where it breaks, and what might make it better.
Wealth (as a ship stat) is influenced by the Wealth characteristic in d20 Modern SRD, and similar kinds of abstracted models in place of pure total tracking. But in this system, Wealth applies to the whole ship and crew, not just to a single individual. There are also several measures of Wealth and Treasure that all pertain to different facets of the assets and profitability and condition of the ship and its crew.
I’m also thinking about information as an economy. Getting intelligence about an unknown place that you’re planning to travel to can be very valuable. And trading information gathered from previously unknown places you have been to can also be as valuable as the goods you’ve brought back.
There’s not enough there yet to call it complete, or even testable, as yet, but there are some additional notes I’ve collected in the past couple weeks, and I’m working on pushing this to a testable framework.
These notes were originally posted in a thread on Mastodon. And then on Twitter. Sharing here to expand the audience and solicit further feedback.
What I’m trying to hack together is a system for sailing ship operation and activities while going from port to port. Sorta Traveller-esque (in the operating a free trader sense), but in a fantasy setting. The encounters and events in port are the more interesting bits, but what do you do in-between?
Events at sea could include weather (becalming, storms, etc), ship issues (damage and repair, crew matters, fire, etc), passenger and cargo issues, and so forth.
I am envisioning this for use in a game setting where some of the area has been charted, but possible discoveries of new islands may occur. Encounters with fauna or with other vessels (friendly or hostile) could be possible, as well.
For in port activity, I’d like to have a a few systems or sets of tables: a trade and cargo bit for brokering; an encounters bit for potential passengers or possible adventure hooks; administrative and tariff matters; some maintenance and upkeep requirements to keep things in check and have tasks the PCs and crew need to keep up with (or not, if they’re feeling risky).
This was the general shape for the F2F game I was trying to get started at the end of 2021 to start up a new DragonQuest game, but it never quite gelled. So I’m still thinking about it as a PBEM. I’ll probably use DQ for the characters and activities, but it’s not going to be a tactical game at all.
It seems to me that this could be done as a system-agnostic set of tables and rules. It’s hexcrawl-ish, but with elements of castle maintenance for the ship operation and so forth.
My setting concept is for a somewhat known region, but it could be adaptable to a more Edge of the World/There Be Dragons kind of setting, as well.
Is there already something like that out there, so I don’t have to reinvent existing wheels (to pick a particularly un-related metaphor)?
Is this something anyone else would want to play? If someone else was running a game like this, I am pretty sure this would definitely be my jam. Hopefully it’s interesting enough that others might want to playtest this with me.
Some things other people have posted about that’s been a nudge or an inspiration to do more with this idea:
Mastodon discussion
ara – [email protected]
Twitter/blog
emmy – @emmyverte
Also, I think the concept of Paul Czege’s Traverser is an influence, even if his actual game is nothing like what I’ve imagined for it.
Taking a bit of a break with this, to experiment with a different kind of structure. An earlier draft sketch was posted on Mastodon (in particular, my account at dice.camp). And a cleaned up, high contrast final first-state version is also here (below).
This should be usable as a dungeon, if the edifice suggests something in your imagination. Since it was created on a grid, it would be easy enough to add numbers along one axis and letters along the other, and then use those coordinates to identify each of the doors and windows (and if there is call for a keyed version, I might do that, as well). There are 15 doors and seven windows, each of which imply the presence of a room, so that allows a fair amount of space for different things to be going on. And the vertical configuration makes it easier to have separation between different inhabitants.
Let me know if you are interested in seeing more of this kind of thing. I enjoy the current series of Dungeon Fragments, and I’m going to keep making those. But I also want to include more alternative and experimental varieties of maps and drawings, as well.
As usual, feel free to use for any non-commercial purpose, or contact me if you’d like to use this on a commercial project, or if you would like to commission a custom piece.
Collected from a thread of a few posts on Mastodon, with some additional clarification and revision.
This is a game like “Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon” where you try to make connections between a random starting point and a specific end. But, instead of connecting actors, it follows the links in Wikipedia articles to thread from one article to another to try to reach a particular point.
Wikipedia is good for this because there is lots of range to dive into. The rules of the game are simple enough. Choose the target article you want to reach (your “Kevin Bacon”) and then try to get to that article from a given starting point through the fewest number of links.
To play, start with the featured article of the day on the main Wikipedia page. For the first jump, choose any link in the opening section of the article, which is usually a couple of paragraphs. It’s enough to provide some variety of paths, and makes it a little more constrained out of the gate. This doesn’t need to be a hard-and-fast rule; it’s just something that I’ve evolved in the way I play this game, and the little added constraint just helps a bit, I think. But, after the first jump, the entirety of subsequent articles are open.
The target article I’ve been using is Submarines (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Submarine) – hence the name Wiki Dive. It’s a good, wide topic, not too obscure or niche, but also not something that seems readily connected with most of the starting topics. But there’s no reason not to use another topic of your own choosing.
Wiki Dive example (from a few days ago):
(And, as I started checking, I found a variant game with both start and end points every few minutes. There’s a whole website for The Wiki Game, but it seems that it emphasizes speed more than exploration.) To my mind, a more explorative game is more interesting. To me, it’s more meditative and exploratory than competitive.
Rougher walls with crevasses and fewer chambers in this piece. It started with a couple crossing lines, but then, as often happens, turned into a thing of its own character. I was thinking about revisiting some of the old geologic strata I’ve used before to do the poche on this, but, once I had the outlines done, it seemed really best to keep with the same style I’ve been using recently.
As usual, feel free to use for any non-commercial purpose, or contact me if you’d like to use this on a commercial project, or if you would like to commission a custom piece.
This map has turned out pretty well, in my opinion. It has the edge definition I tried a couple weeks ago, along with the more elaborate poche I’ve sometimes used in the past. Everything comes together really well in this.
As usual, feel free to use for any non-commercial purpose, or contact me if you’d like to use this on a commercial project, or if you would like to commission a custom piece.
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