M_Natas
Hero
Day 89 - Fishing pond in cave under forge
Not sure yet if color is an improvement for my map style.
D&D General #Dungeon23
- Thread starter darjr
- Start date
Not sure yet if color is an improvement for my map style.
Eyes of Nine
Everything's Fine
I like the colors, especially in the gems, the blood smear, and the water effectsDay 89 - Fishing pond in cave under forge
Not sure yet if color is an improvement for my map style.
Are you doing it by hand with some sort of felt-tip pen? Or are you doing it digitally?
M_Natas
Hero
I use Brush pens/Fineliner Combinations. There was a set with 60 colors:
https://amzn.eu/d/23v5q9N
I draw everything by hand, photograph it with my phone and then I only adjust brightness, contrast, saturation a little.
M_Natas
Hero
Day 90 - The mutant's cave The cave that stretched before me was lined with crystals that glowed in a variety of colours, bathing everything in a strange light. And the light almost distracted me from the figure crouching by the small pond, which was also illuminated by an eerie light. A shadowy figure, a deformed figure whose clothes were made of rags. Growths covered the dirty body and the strong extremities. She turned to us and stared at us from eyes of varying size. "What have they brought us?" it hissed in my head, "are they lost? They smell different, strange." The creature snapped open its mouth, revealing broken, long, sharp teeth. A tortured moan escaped. "You smell different, strange," it now screamed in my skull and the ground began to shake. What was this monster?Day 89 - Fishing pond in cave under forge
Not sure yet if color is an improvement for my map style.
View attachment 280285
M_Natas
Hero
Day 91 - The city wall / a portal to hell
Memoirs of a survivor from Kyrthar Tahlketh, written down by Rotragia van Lattius
"The city walls were high, firm, strong. They meant safety. At least that's what we thought. They became a death trap when the devils opened their gates beneath the city and everyone tried to flee. We pushed our way to the gates, some of which were still locked because it was night. We were trapped and had to flee. We had to ... the mass of our bodies pressed against the gate, we broke it open, gained freedom ... we thought ... but in front of the gate another hellmouth had opened and spat out the devils ... but we couldn't go back, behind us were the masses who wanted to get out of the city and pushed us out, into the clutches of the monsters. I ... I could only escape because I pushed others into the arms of the devils, because I knocked others over to escape. Women, children ... I didn't care. I had to escape ... flee from the devils... and became one myself ... ."
gorice
Hero
Oops! Completely forgot to post this yesterday.
New Area: The lost path
The Air in this section is much better, aside from the Mole Midden. Only real danger is the Bone Eater. Molerats avoid this place unless lured here for some reason.
22: Mole Midden
23: Singing Cavern
24: Lair of the Bone Eater
25: The Secret Garden
27: Sunken Passage
28: Secret Garden Skylight
29: Narrow Caves
Surprise Twist: Back to the Sunken Passages
30: Temple Treasury
31: Secret Sanctuary
And that's the end of the month, thank God. I didn't really have a plan for this one, just a few ideas, and I think it shows. Next month's level is something deeply unpleasant (for the adventurers) but fun to write (for me).
New Area: The lost path
The Air in this section is much better, aside from the Mole Midden. Only real danger is the Bone Eater. Molerats avoid this place unless lured here for some reason.
22: Mole Midden
- A reeking pit, 30’ down, filled with detritus. The walls are sheer and slippery. Fungi cluster in the bottom walls like pale blue balloons. Smells like death.
- (!) Fungi are bluefruit. Explode on collision, making a loud sound and releasing toxic spores.
23: Singing Cavern
- Wind whistles through this craggy cave tunnel.
- (?) humans can squeeze through. Too narrow for the Bone Eater.
24: Lair of the Bone Eater
- Smells like wet dog. Floor is littered with tiny fragments of bone.
- (!) The great shaggy shambler nests here. Only eats dead bones, but not averse to speeding up the process.
25: The Secret Garden
- Dimly lit – natural light shines from sinkhole high above.
- A large cavern filled with pale, purple-leafed foliage. A little spring trickles into a small pond. Alarmingly large frogs luxuriate in the cool air.
- (?) The frogs are peaceable.
- (?) The water is cold, clean, refreshing, and completely safe.
- (?) The pond is deep – a sinkhole that leads to the Sunken Passage.
27: Sunken Passage
- Completely submerged, dark natural cavern. 20’ ascent to the Secret Garden on one end, and Lotus Garden on the other.
- (?) The faintest of lights from the direction of the Secret Garden.
- (??) A skeleton is huddled on the floor, clutching something that glimmers – Headtaker, a demon-possessed two-handed sword of bronze.
28: Secret Garden Skylight
- Forty-five degree climb through a narrow, craggy passage leads to the base of the cliffs in the city’s side, beneath the storm water drain.
29: Narrow Caves
- Winding passages of craggy stone. Crawlspace only.
Surprise Twist: Back to the Sunken Passages
30: Temple Treasury
- A bare cellar of smoothly fitted stones. There is a hole in one wall where the masonry has collapsed, large enough to crawl through (leads to narrow caves). A stone chest sits against the opposite wall, with a cat-sized gargoyle carved from the same stone as its flat lid.
- (!) The gargoyle will animate and bite the hands of anyone who tries to move the lid, naturally.
- (?) Inside the chest: 4d6 silver ingots.
31: Secret Sanctuary
- A circular room with a circle of nine cracked clay vessels within.
- (?) Each vessel holds a fistful of lapis lazuli beads worth 10 coins.
- (!) The beads are cursed – the New God of the deep will know the thieves.
- (??) A secret door connects to the Leaky Valve room – just push on the wall.
And that's the end of the month, thank God. I didn't really have a plan for this one, just a few ideas, and I think it shows. Next month's level is something deeply unpleasant (for the adventurers) but fun to write (for me).
Mad_Jack
Legend
Still Dungeon-ing, although it's been slow...
About 93 days into it? Hrmm.
I may still be caught up with where I'm supposed to be. I've actually started (finally.) mapping out parts of the dungeon complex(es)...
The Great Black Swamp transitions into a salt marsh to the west, and then a small bit of beach between it and the sea. About a mile offshore are three islands called The Blades (Longknife, Dagger, and Smallpoint), large rocky outcroppings jutting up out of the ocean like knives, the sole remains of the western side of what used to be the small mountain the Dwarven settlement was in.*
Each of the blades is about half the size of the previous one, with the largest being about a mile wide, one-and-a-half long and about something like seventy-eighty feet high. The largest two have beaches with small docks on their shore-ward sides, and the Swamptown clan of the Firstfolk use the few remaining rooms, corridors and stairs carved into the rock as the staging point for their smuggling operation - the pirates they work with drop off the goods, and the Swamptown Firstfolk take them through the swamp to the town of End-Of-The-Line where the local thieves' guild contact uses the wagon clans of the Firstfolk to move them on to the larger towns and cities.
At the moment, I've got around 2/3 of the Longknife Island "dungeon" mapped out, nine or ten rooms so far. It's split into the beach level, a lower level I haven't drawn yet that's going to have a few partially-flooded rooms below it, and a couple of long winding staircases that lead up past a couple rooms on the middle level to the lookout posts on the top of the island.
Once I get Longknife finished, Dagger should go by quicker, since I anticipate only having about six or seven rooms in it, and one staircase to a lookout point.
At some point, I really need to photograph all of my maps and get them cleaned up in Paint, and start doing the write-ups of the locations and NPCs.
* (The southernmost spur of the Mistside Mountains range that run north-south parallel to the coast is a ridge of rock about a hundred miles long, around ten miles wide and around 100-150ft. tall at the end. The end of it, just south of the now-petrified forest known as the Stonelands, was called Mistside Reach by the Dwarves. When the ancient magical cataclysm turned Mistside Forest into the Stonelands it dropped a huge chunk of the coast into the sea (leaving Mistside Reach less than a mile from the shore), and a later earthquake shattered the Reach and caused everything between the Reach and End-Of-The-Line to sink wholesale into the Underdark cavern below it, allowing the Great Black Swamp to form over it. The Dwarven buildings exposed when the recent quake lowered the water level of the swamp were originally the few surface structures built on top of the Reach.)
About 93 days into it? Hrmm.
I may still be caught up with where I'm supposed to be. I've actually started (finally.) mapping out parts of the dungeon complex(es)...
The Great Black Swamp transitions into a salt marsh to the west, and then a small bit of beach between it and the sea. About a mile offshore are three islands called The Blades (Longknife, Dagger, and Smallpoint), large rocky outcroppings jutting up out of the ocean like knives, the sole remains of the western side of what used to be the small mountain the Dwarven settlement was in.*
Each of the blades is about half the size of the previous one, with the largest being about a mile wide, one-and-a-half long and about something like seventy-eighty feet high. The largest two have beaches with small docks on their shore-ward sides, and the Swamptown clan of the Firstfolk use the few remaining rooms, corridors and stairs carved into the rock as the staging point for their smuggling operation - the pirates they work with drop off the goods, and the Swamptown Firstfolk take them through the swamp to the town of End-Of-The-Line where the local thieves' guild contact uses the wagon clans of the Firstfolk to move them on to the larger towns and cities.
At the moment, I've got around 2/3 of the Longknife Island "dungeon" mapped out, nine or ten rooms so far. It's split into the beach level, a lower level I haven't drawn yet that's going to have a few partially-flooded rooms below it, and a couple of long winding staircases that lead up past a couple rooms on the middle level to the lookout posts on the top of the island.
Once I get Longknife finished, Dagger should go by quicker, since I anticipate only having about six or seven rooms in it, and one staircase to a lookout point.
At some point, I really need to photograph all of my maps and get them cleaned up in Paint, and start doing the write-ups of the locations and NPCs.
* (The southernmost spur of the Mistside Mountains range that run north-south parallel to the coast is a ridge of rock about a hundred miles long, around ten miles wide and around 100-150ft. tall at the end. The end of it, just south of the now-petrified forest known as the Stonelands, was called Mistside Reach by the Dwarves. When the ancient magical cataclysm turned Mistside Forest into the Stonelands it dropped a huge chunk of the coast into the sea (leaving Mistside Reach less than a mile from the shore), and a later earthquake shattered the Reach and caused everything between the Reach and End-Of-The-Line to sink wholesale into the Underdark cavern below it, allowing the Great Black Swamp to form over it. The Dwarven buildings exposed when the recent quake lowered the water level of the swamp were originally the few surface structures built on top of the Reach.)
Eyes of Nine
Everything's Fine
M_Natas
Hero
Thanks
I really tried to go for something realistic here. And yes, the story of Kyrthar Tahlketh is a dark one. If you go deeper it will only go darker, you will get your hands and your soul dirty. Once our adventurers entered the city, they were doomed. They just don't know it yet ...
