[WIP] Rise of the Crone-Mother
Royal Scribe
🖼️ 373 images Mapmaker
I have been working on a series of D&D campaign adventures that tie together in a story arc called Rise of the Crone Mother.
In D&D rules, hags are witch-like creatures (like the witch from Hansel & Gretel) whose powers are augmented when they unite in covens of three. In this story arc, there are four different hag covens who have been united by a thirteenth hag to form a Grand Coven. Their goal is to try to resurrect the Crone-Mother, an ancient hag who is said to be the origin and progenitor of all hags.
Each of the four covens will have different lairs:
- The Drowned Sisters’ Grotto: A coven of three hags in an underwater lair
- The Withering Glade: A coven of three hags deep within an overgrown forest
- The Miremothers’ Den: A coven of three hags with a lair in a foul swamp
- The Frostmaidens’ Cradle: A coven of three hags high in snow-covered alpine mountains
- The Womb of Ashes: The arch-hag's volcanic lair where the ritual to resurrect the Crone-Mother will occur
In addition to these five dungeon maps, there is an overland map for GMs who want their adventurers to travel from lair to lair, as well as an optional Web of the Crone-Mother, a sort of between-worlds nexus accessible from teleportation portals within each lair, allowing adventurers to quickly travel between them (if GMs want to skip travel time).
Overland
This is the overland map. Each hex grid is meant to represent one day's travel, but GMs can adjust that however they want if they want travel time to be faster or slower. (I know it doesn't make sense to have snowy mountains so close to a humid swamp, but chalk that up to hag magic.) It uses Sue's beautiful Spectrum Overland.
Web of the Crone-Mother
This optional map allows players to opportunity to choose which lair to go to next without having to travel over land. It is accessed from a teleportation portal in each coven's lair, but GMs could always skip this and have the portals transport the adventurers directly to the next lair. This map primarily uses Creepy Crypts with extensive assistance from Forest Trail, Winter Trail, and Marine Dungeons.
The connecting portals are in each of the four corners, starting with the sea hags' lair in the southwest corner and then continuing clockwise to the forest hags, swamp hags, and alpine hags. Lots of other encounters along the spidewebby route, including carnivorous plants, giant spiders, and a tentacle creature. In the very center, a great subterranean tower provides a gate that will hurtle players through the Astral Plane to the volcanic Womb of Ashes.
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The swamp doesn't have to be humid - plenty of swamps in the tundra regions of earth.
Love the compass
You don't need to invoke hag magic for the warmth. Think Neverwinter in the Forgotten Realms, which is in a not dissimilar northern location - subterranean volcanic heat can help here too. And/Or you could have the seas warmed by the volcanic offshore island on the regional map's edge, with likely more undersea volcanism nearby as well. Warmer seas in a colder climate will give plenty of surface fogs and mists, so all nicely humid, dank and dark (fogs often lift into very low clouds that artificially darken the days, for instance), so also ideal hag territory!
First pass of the outdoor areas of the Forest Hags' lair, the Withering Glade. The premise is that elves once used it as a shrine, but the hags drove them out, poisoning the Great Tree in the center of the glade.
I've been experimenting with using the Forest Trails cliff symbols back to back to make ridges. One other thing I tried, inspired by something I saw Ricko do: instead of using the grass and dirt fills with the grass and dirt patches symbols to make the edges more raggedy, I only used the dirt and grass patches. There are also two sets of all of the tree sheets (including tree parts for stumps and tree shadows), so that some could be beneath cliffs and others above. I thought I would need multiple sheets for the cliffs to show ascending elevation, but I didn't. Had to keep reminding myself that it's all an optical illusion. Amazing how things you can trick the eye, especially when, like the cliffs in Forest Trails, you draw in the shadows instead of relying on sheet effects.
Zooming in, here's one of the three caves used by the coven of hags as bedrooms.
Here's a zoom in on the henge (which operates as a teleportation circle). The gray tree at the cliff base in an Animated Tree. It was a dryad's tree, but the dryad was turned into one of the hags, corrupting her tree. You might notice some vines growing out of the cliff wall near the tree. They are animated, grasping at the hags' captives and serving as organic shackles. This is the only one above ground but there are more within the caves.
Oh, and in the southeast corner, a trio of harpies have set up a nest.
You might want to reduce the darkness of the shadow on the cliffs, as some of the higher areas look a bit "floaty" currently. Making the shadows a bit paler may reduce that effect sufficiently, with luck. Might be a bit too much activity along the river as well, though I don't really know how shallow and rocky it's meant to be.
Looking like a good start regardless though!
I will play with the shadows. By activity along the river, do you mean the ripples? (At first I thought you meant stuff growing alongside the river.)
Here's the inside of ones of the hag's caves. Outside, you'll see her cauldron over a fire pit along with some gruesome trophies: skulls and scalps on pikes. (Also added bed a of fungi outside). Bones dumped in a heap in the opening area. "Bedroom" area off to the left -- the bed is just a pile of dried leaves. Some cells for captives (fresh meat!) with grasping vines to keep captives "shackled" and carnivorous roots barricading the doorways. And in the middle, steps going down...
Oh, and I reduced the opacity of the drawn shadow to 40%, hoping that will make it less "floaty."
Yes, the numerous areas of white water seem a bit distracting, and make it harder to tell which elements among those might be more important. There are what seem to be a couple of larger falls on the left-hand "vertical" section of river, but it's not clear currently if these are more or less significant than some of the numerous other white-water clusters elsewhere, for instance.
Not sure if the wider riverbed area in the top left is part of a lake, or just a wider section of the river either. If it's a lake, the bed should probably be a bit deeper and the water flow quieter, so it would probably be less obviously boulder-covered (which works fine for shallow, fast-flowing water otherwise). What seems to be a lot of waterfalls just before (and into?) that wider area though makes it hard to be sure.
The paler shadow does indeed seem fine on the latest drawing of the cross-section through the hag's lair, although the heavy dark glow around the cave wall lines and the exterior, also helps settle it down into the landscape more.
Thank you! I always struggle with rapids. Never quite sure how to place them. There’s only one waterfall up there. I will calm the waters a bit. Appreciate the insights!
And, because this is the most recent of your topics to be updated here RS, a quick "well done" on having a second Cartographer's Annual showcasing your maps this year, with this month's issue just out!
Thank you, Wyvern! I really loved getting to showcase Sue beautiful Beaumaris Castle assets with it.
This is using Darklands? I like how you made the brownish cave entrance on that one rock.. did you just use some airbrush like coloring to create that appearance?
@Frosty No, I think this is mostly Forest Trail and Creepy Crypts.
The overland map is Spectrum Overland.
Yeah, I should have clarified in my response in your thread that my mountain ridges used Darklands City for the structures but this one is Forest Trails and Creepy Crypts, as Sue said.
Forest Trails has a "cliffs shadow" drawing tool that draws a black polygon onto a sheet with sheet effects designed to turn it into a shadow. The reason is because if you just used the normal Wall Shadow sheet effects, you'd end up with shadows on both sides of the cliff, including the part that's supposed to be the clifftop terrain. This way you can draw the shadow where you need it and skip it where you don't. For the caves, I just left a gap where I placed the cliff symbols and then drew the cliff shadows there, too.
hmmm I understand the words your typing with regards to the cliffs and shadows but not sure I am 100% getting. Let me work on the map a little and poke around and see if I can figure it out. I do recall when I made my city with Darklands one thing I loved was the cliffs, I made an upper city above the cliffs and the lower city.
The shadow is explained on page 2 of the PDF that accompanies Annual 192A (Forest Trail 2) and I know Ralf demonstrated it somewhere in the Live tutorial about it:
Working on the Swamp Hags' lair now.
A year ago for Halloween, I did a series of maps experimenting with creating a swamp witch's lair using three styles: Dungeons of Schley, Marine Dungeons, and Forest Trail. Of the three, Marine Dungeons was my favorite. This time, I decided to experiment with using Darklands City, because I love the green hue of the water effects. I wasn't happy with how it was turning out, so I experimented with using Creepy Crypts, with some of the sheet effects on Darkland City's water brought over.
But I still wasn't happy, so I went back to Marine Dungeons. Last time I used Marine Dungeons for a swamp, I had to play with the sheet effects on the water to give it a swampy vibe. This time, I discovered right away that simply changing the background from the lovely tropical beach sand to a more muddy earth color immediately changes the water, too. This doesn't change any of the sheet effects, it just changes the background from Marine Dungeon's sand to the CA181 Dirt 03 from Forest Trail.
This also makes use of symbols and effects from Creepy Crypts, Forest Trail, and Darklands City (plus tentacles from Sinister Sewers because I wanted the green tentacles). This is a battlemap view with the treetops hidden so you can battle beneath the branches.
This is still a work in progress. Among other things, I need to add tons more trees on the land and in the water, plus more dirt and vegetation patches. And lots more algae.
There are three hags in the swamp hags' coven. Each has her own thatch cottage elevated on pillars, and then the slightly larger thatched cottage in the southeastern side is their ritual room. The hags use ladders to get into their private quarters, but the ritual room also has stone steps descending into the swamp water. You can also see the bone bridge connecting this area to the teleportation portal.
Here's the teleportation portal (from Creepy Crypts). I was going to add the glow symbol from DD3 but the effect wasn't as subtle as I wanted, so I drew a purple polygon on a sheet with an inner edge fade that goes from 0% opacity at the edges to 40% in the center. I may redraw it with a longer radius. (The purplish dots are will-o'-wisps.)
And here are the "prisons" for the hags' captives. Muddy pits contained by low walls (about one foot off the ground) where victims are submerged halfway up their chests. The tentacles keep them restrained and also fight off rescuers, but their suctions also administer a low-dose poison that keeps the captives asleep most of the time.
More progress on the swampy lair. Here with trees shown and the treetops hidden. (With the latter, you can see the ripples around the trunks of the trees in the water -- I do love that ripple drawing tool so much!
Also added more algae throughout. In the southeastern island, I added a pool of blood where the hags conduct their gruesome rituals. And to the northeast of that island, there's a pen where the hags and their lycanthropic were-crocodiles breed crocodiles.
I also drew in shadows beneath the elevated huts so that I could create battlemaps with the houses hidden, for combat underneath the houses. (They're supposed to be about 10 feet off the ground.) I was going to use tree stumps as the poles supporting the houses, but the Marine Dungeons columns were right there and I do love them -- and there are versions that conveniently already have the ripple effect added for the huts that overhang the water..
High level of detail. Congratulations!
Here's the above-ground areas of the Frostmaidens' Cradle, lair of the alpine hags. The underground areas will make use of the Ice Caverns annual.
Started to work on the underground interiors, including experimenting with creating places for the captives, who are encased in ice.
For those prisons, I experimented with putting the frozen water fill on a sheet with a variety of sheet effects, including beveling and a transparency effect. Unfortunately, the lighter frozen water fill has a bit of a transparency acne problem.
But that problem seems to disappear with the darker water, which also has a stronger contrast with the floor, so I'll just go with that.