[WIP] - Sakherma Ruins
Royal Scribe
🖼️ 251 images Mapmaker
Working on the Sakherma Ruins, a ruined desert temple in the Mike Schley style. For reference, the ruins are at the edge of a mountain range (middle right) in the Eknapata Desert below.
The temple was built with a covered temple partially constructed into the hills, with a courtyard surrounded by walls but open to the sky. The bronze plates that made up the roof were stolen long ago by scavengers, so now what was the interior of the temple is also open to the sky (except for the portion beneath the hill).
Here's the above-ground portion. The other things in the desert are an obelisk, and the head of a once-gargantuan statue, both appearing on the parent map. The river is a small stream that feeds into the Eknapata River on the parent map.
I tried different approaches with the sand dunes. Some are a lighter shade of the sand, some are a partially-transparent darker shade. Let me know what you think.
I fabricated ruined walls by constructing them in three layers and then using the color key cutout to carve out bits of them. They're supposed to have a brown stone core with a lighter gray stone surface. (The Corinthian pillars come from CA49.)
Now for the inside. I tried to show elevation changes using the techniques that Ralf recently demonstrated in the Height Transitions demo. Most of it shows more gradual changes, using Edge Fade effects rather than the Glow effects that Ralf used. The passageway that spirals down to a level below (not yet mapped) used the Glow effect to show sharper transitions. And there are a few areas with higher elevation. One is a small "chamber" off of a narrow passageway -- there are even stairs in that passageway. The other is the wider passageway leading to the underwater lake. It slopes up and then back down to the water.
That blue line? That's supposed to be a wall of glass. I added a bevel and a transparency to it. Not sure it works, and I am very much open to suggestions for how to improve it.
Here's the FCW file if anyone wants to suggest different effects to improve the wall of glass, sand dunes, or anything else.
Comments
Whichever fill you use for the dunes, I recommend making the bevel wide enough that the dunes have a ridge at the top instead of a bump. If you add an Edge Fade, Inner to the dunes as well, the bottom of the slope doesn't hit the ground so sharply. Adding an EFI also blends the fill of the dunes with the background a lot better.
These are the sheet effects settings for the above example:
You may or may not want the shadow. That's up to you. But if you do want it I recommend using an ordinary "Wall Shadow" and not the usual directional one. It plays better with the other effects.
Those dunes look fantastic! I will try it.
Here's what it looks like with those new sheet effects. I can add more dunes as well -- either a few big ones, or more smaller ones? Also, I may have attached the wrong FCW file before.
Oops! It looks like you have some transparency acne going on there. They shouldn't look so bubbled.
You might need to change the fills so they aren't so similar, or try using Solid 10 instead of a regular bitmap fill. The effects might need to be adjusted.
Oh! Hahaha, I just assumed that was the intended effect, not acne. Here is is switching all of the dunes to a Solid 10 fill. (Might need to redraw some that connect in weird ways.)
That looks better.
You might also need to reduce the Lightness Base value. The Solid 10 is much lighter than most sandy bitmap textures.
Reduced the Lightness Base from 75 to 58 for the HILL sheet and 62 for the HILL 2 sheet (but I'm not sure that a 4 point difference is visibly apparent to the human eye), and added some more dunes.
That's better again because the lit side of the dunes aren't bleaching out now. Depending on time you could play with all the settings till you get it looking how you want it to look.
I've designed the lower level, but first: an explanation.
What was once an important temple was abandoned several hundreds of years ago, beset by the encroaching desert sands...and worse. Many of those who sought to plunder the ruined temple never returned, and rumors about that it is haunted, or guarded by fearsome creatures.
The temple grounds are indeed protected by an ancient mummy with a retinue of skeletons -- the remains of an ancient king and his loyal knights who were cursed. The real "big bad" keeps them around as useful sentinels who make enough of a ruckus to warn the BBEG when intruders are about. And just who is that BBEG? An adult blue dragon just trying to hatch her eggs and raise her wyrmlings in peace.
This is the lower level of her lair. This level is primarily accessed through the massive tunnel in the lower right that winds up to the level adjacent to the temple, but there are other ways to access her lair as well.
The one part of her lair that was properly excavated and built out is the portion beneath the old temple's ruins. The two circular stairwells come from just inside the once-enclosed part of the temple above. The northern stairwell is mostly filled with sand and is unpassable. The southern stairwell is still accessible for humanoid-sized intruders but not reachable as someone as massive as the dragon. The dragon (back when she was younger and smaller, and could still pass through the 10-foot-wide doorway) built up a wall of sand and used her electricity breath weapon to turn it into a solid wall of glass, keeping more sand from coming through the northern stairwell and overrunning that part of her lair.
The part of the human-constructed portion that she can still access has been turned into a museum of her favorite treasures: six statues; four tapestries; the sword, shield, and dagger of an ancient king; four suits of armor; and a valuable spellbook on a bookstand.
Her personal quarters include three chambers. She primarily sleeps in the outermost, on a pile of coins. Another chamber is for brooding on her eggs. These, too, are on a pile of coins, primarily copper. (I think dragons horde treasures, especially coins, because they can infuse precious metals and gemstones with their energy, which, among other things, can warm up enough to keep the eggs heated even when the mother dragon is away.) The third chamber is her personal treasure chamber. The 10-pointed star on the floor is constructed of blue sapphires.
Her wyrmling has its own chamber on this level as well. Older young dragons used to live in the chambers above, but they have grown old enough to seek their own homes. There aren't enough vulnerable caravans nearby to sustain a growing draconic family.
In the northern section of the lair, there are two other areas protected by ten-foot thick walls of glass. One is a room completely filled with sand. It is, in fact, directly below the sandy cave-like semicircular area in the northeastern side of the rocky outcrop above. Here, the dragon can use her draconic magic (a "lair action" in DND 5e terms) to pass through the glass barrier, where she naps beneath the sand until intruders camp out above. This is her primary entryway/exit from her lair to the outside. The other glass is a dam for the lake above, making it into a gigantic fishbowl or aquarium. She can pass through this glass as well to swim in the lake or as a backdoor escape route.
Not entirely thrilled with how the glass turned out. It's serviceable, but I will continue to fiddle with the bevel settings. Open to recommendations for sheet effect settings or other approaches if anyone has any. (I just used a solid light blue color. Do any of the annuals have a glass fill that would work, or some other fill (like water?) that might work with the right effects?
P.S. I know that Remy will think these dragons are woefully tiny! I just used Mike Schley's default size, which appear to be about the DND 5e's 20x20 size. Most of the lair's passageways are about 30-feet wide to accommodate her.