When the Wilderness of Ordurak adventure and gazetteer were in development, I was looking for a real world cognate that would be a comparison that would help with understanding the size and scale of the area. Today, somewhat randomly, I took a map of Switzerland and dropped it under a 5-mile hex grid, and it fits pretty well into the 12×18 size map (one-quarter Alusia, if you will).
Wilderness of Ordurak and Switzerland at the same scale in the image below. The hex mapped area is about 190 miles by 125 miles in each.
This is, I suppose, all in conjunction with thinking about new DragonQuest adventures and material. I’m using the break over the next few days to work on some ideas for the Water Works sequel adventure I’ve been calling GasWorks (but that won’t be the final title for it, I promise). And some things are starting to come together with that. So stay tuned for more about that in 2024.
Things got bogged down over the last couple months. Real Life intrudes in many ways. But, this past week, I finished out the series of all 12 zines for the #dungeon23 pamphlet series.
These are available from DriveThru and on itch.io. And, for a limited time, the complete set of all 12 zines is available in a discounted bundle from DriveThru:
If you want hardcopies, these are available from Exalted Funeral (for zines #1 through #5, for now; their site looks like #6 is sold out, and they don’t yet have the second half of the series).
Hardcopies of all 12 are also available directly from us, in bundles of three (for each quarter of the year) via the itch links.
The twelve issues are: #1 Intersections #2 Halls & tunnels #3 Stone masonry #4 Doors #5 Water #6 Stairs & shafts #7 Air & gasses #8 Network #9 Mechanisms #10 Geology #11 Secrets #12 Plants & vegetation
In addition to the maps, there are some further dungeon-inspired illustrations from artists including Jake Mix, Jan Krycinski, and HodagRPG
I’ve been posting about the Planetary Display for the past few weeks for people interested in the #planet23 #dungeon23 challenge for 2023. Now here’s a filled-out example of it to demonstrate how a planet can be mapped out.
The Planetary Display TITAN project is an example completed Planetary Display using 6 images of Saturn’s moon Titan as imaged by the Cassini mission, and fitting that information into the faces of the Planetary Display. (Since the images are all from an equatorial orbit, the poles are mostly incomprehensible. But 30 faces is a pretty good map.)
Here’s a first section using the Planetary Display, to show how it might be used for #dungeon23 #space23
This pass is just sketching in the major hydrographics (bodies of water and rivers), a couple of major cities, and some mountains. One option could be to do a couple more passes at the sections, and fill in more of the detail, once I’ve got the preliminary layout done. Or maybe this will be enough, and the next month I’ll do another planet.
It seems like a good idea to play around with things a bit before the beginning of the year, so that it goes more smoothly once things get underway.
There’s lots more to be worked out with this, potentially. Three cities/settlements could be a later source for development, or wait until there’s something specific to do with the planet to add more of those details.
Back to a simple hatching style for this one, but with a small set of chambers that have a decent amount of interconnection and choices in the pathways from one side to another.
I look at this as a set of rooms with connecting passages, but I also can see it as a couple of larger chamber with some blocky obstructions in the middle. Wonder if there are other reads folks have for 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.
A rough, jagged map seemed to be called for. Hatched poche seemed that it would be too much, so instead, you see the simple stipple for this. I wasn’t thinking about the last, swoopy map posted last week, but this is pretty much in contrast to that one.
I took a couple of pictures of the page as I was working on it, so I have a sequence of the various states of progress to get to this point. The whole thing isn’t all that involved, so it’s not all that dramatic or exciting, but I’m thinking about posting that as a way of showing the process and progression with 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.
Maybe the last map made me long for doing some brick greebling. Maybe I just needed something that wasn’t a plan for a change of pace. In any case, the idea for this struck, and I wanted to knock out a quick and dirty version of it.
The flues are big and open, so you can see all the pathways. I was experimenting with a fill in the flues to make it dark, rather than white. But it was reading a little oddly, so this is a clean and readable version.
(And, as discussed on Mastodon, this is very fictional (and functionally unsafe)*. A real mason would have an aneurysm looking at this. (*See also every crawl through ducts in any movie)
It seemed to me that this could be used as the map for some kind of a caper or heist game, where the plan layout of the space matters less than the arrangement of the fireplaces and flues for a crew to scamper around a building going between rooms and levels. If you make this work for something like that, I would love to hear about how that goes.
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, the final version of the map goes in a different direction than what was expected with the initial concept. In this case, the first idea for the drawing was to have hooks and switchbacks; that the connectors would have sharp turns rather than being more direct A-to-B kinds of connections. But the version that came out of that, with these swoopy, Art Nouveau lines, was not necessarily what I was after. It’s not a bad thing at all; just different from the initial thought.
It also clearly didn’t call for a Dyson-hatch or for a block wall style to outline the edges. The denser stipple at the edges along with the overall poche also seems pretty successful with this one.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
RThorm - Antherwyck Blog 