Advice on Drawing Mines
JulianDracos
Mapmaker
I am trying to draw a set of abandoned silver mines. I am mostly happy with what I drew by hand. However, every time I make it in CC3, I dislike how it looks. Using sheets, flooring, etc. I am sure can help.
Part of my problem is that since I know it is mines, having straight corridors or rooms doesn't look right. On the other hand, having it all cave like doesn't sit well with me either. I have added fractal to the corridors and that helps sometimes. As for the flooring, I would like there to be some diferentiation. Yet, if I put anything down that isn't just ground it seems weird for a mine.
Before I try for a 6th time, I thought I would see if people have any ideas about how to approach a mine.
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I don't know anything about silver mining, but can we see a couple of your attempts? That might help to spark a bit of inspiration here.
Does it involve unconscionable treatment of orc slaves?
It will involve necromancers and undead. No orc.
My issue relates to the wall styles and flooring. None of them seem to look right. I even bought the 2020 annual, but am disappointment in it. The floor style won't actually match up to give an appropriate grid look when using Inked Dungeons. I do not think it is offering me anything that that other styles can't do. Wished I would have spent the money on something else now.
It is probably all just in my head in terms of it not looking right. I will see about cleaning up one of the maps and posting it for more detailed feedback.
I am sorry to hear about your disappointment.
If you are really regretting your purchase it is always worth asking Profantasy for a refund or an exchange for something else, but it is best to do this sooner rather than later.
We might be able to resolve the issue you are having with it right here once we see what it is, but if you are seriously dissatisfied it would be better to contact Tech Support without delay and mention that you wish you hadn't made the purchase. You can do this through your account page.
I would still like to see what the problem is, though, because I am naturally curious and would like to know if there are weaknesses in any given style that might need to be worked on.
Without seeing any images, this is an appallingly difficult thing to try to provide advice upon, because it's impossible to guess why you're not happy with what you've managed so far.
Subterranean silver mines in ancient to medieval settings (presumably what you'd be aiming towards for a fantasy setting, and assuming you're not opting for some form of surface/open cast mining, which would be an alternative) essentially looked a lot like mostly narrow, often straight, low caves. The nature of these will be heavily dependent on what state the silver is in. If it's in the rarer metallic veins, the narrow, tunnel-like caves would be appropriate. If it's in the commoner form found on Earth, an ore combined with lead or copper, which needs further processing to extract the silver, larger areas of higher-grade ore might be opened up as a cavern. In addition, processing facilities would almost certainly be constructed on the surface nearby for the latter ore-type mines particularly (or perhaps underground where undead workers are being used, as here), which would make for a larger, more varied complex overall.
The mine needn't require vertical access, as many early silver deposits were extracted simply by starting to dig a tunnel into a hillside more or less horizontally. That would be an option for a more 3D map, however.
My issue with the style is I am not seeing any real advantage over the OSR dungeon I already have. I prefer the symbols from OSR or other map packs. The only thing I like is that caves, but I think I can use a cave style from a non-OSR dungeon to get the walls. The style is just not enough of a difference.
It seems I forgot to save it other than autosave and a different map was saved on top. I remade the map mostly as it was before. I have done this in 4 different styles. Here is the one for the inked dungeon with and without grids. It is probably unrealistic for a mine map and there are going to be lower levels beyond this one.
So orcs aren't even good enough for slaves? The Slaves' Union will be informed by Stirge post
Orcs need food. Skeletons do not.
Just a typical necromantic capitalist. Down with Skellies.
I start to see what you mean about it not looking very mine-like. It really looks much more like a typical OSR dungeon, with a mix of built-wall rooms and natural-wall caves next to one another. OSR dungeons were always very simplified and stylised, compared with the more pictorial styles that have come into vogue since, which has both advantages and disadvantages, of course.
For a typical silver mine, I'd use only the cave drawing tool for the areas and passages. The ruler-straight passages and rooms look completely out of place, unless these have been added later, and for a very different purpose. The two places where a single, thin wall is all that separates a room from a cave (west side) or room and passage (lower central area) need adjusting to give more space between the two. Such thin walls in real underground settings would simply collapse, and to my eye at least, just look wrong here.
One option if built-wall rooms have been added to the mine might be to set them up within a cave - so a room or rooms inside a cave, maybe with little separation between the room and cave walls in places. Give the built walls a suitable degree of thickness even so.
Although you mentioned different levels, a silver mine might not have recognisable "levels" in the D&D dungeon sense at all, simply sloping passages or caves with dropping floors, so the way ahead ends up lower to a lot lower than where it started, but in a sort-of linear fashion - that is, with essentially just one way in and out, no matter how branching some of the inner areas may become. The one reason to map the layout using different mapped levels would be where the lower areas underlie too much of the ones above them to be properly seen, so the "level changes" should be quite organic, I think.
I do like this OSR drawing style, and I think it'll work quite well for what you wanted with a little more tweaking.
I thought I'd just drop a mine I made here, to show you what is theoretically possible. I designed it using symbols from Munson's Mines and the template is from the Isometric Dungeon Annual (Wielink). It was designed with reference to an actual medieval mine, I believe in England, where there was one shaft with tunnels going off from it. I think you can see that there are good mining symbols here, which can be added to any of the dungeon styles, or even to the base program if you don't have DD3.
The way I did it did result in some blockiness, but that can be easily rectified by just drawing shapes through the front of the perspective, much as I did for the water, in the same colour as the background. I was in a hurry to finish it as I had a game coming up.
Anyway, not sure if its helpful, but here it is.
The style I used is not the OSR style. It is the Inked Drawing for 2020. However, it is almost exactly the same as the OSR style, which I why I regret that purchase.
I am not sure about if it would be all drawn with caves. I think then it would like like a series of caverns. Maybe that wouldn't be so bad. One issue I am having is how to show slopes up and down. Arrows I suppose work.
Of course going isometric may solve that. I have not tried making a map using that yet. There is a grayscale isometric map style so maybe if I used that then it would address my issues.
Ah, I'd assumed the examples you'd shown were from an alternative version of the map drawn using the T J Vandel OSR style. I'd not realised some of the fills were so nearly identical with those in the Inked Dungeons style (mostly because I've used the OSR style recently, but not yet the Inked Dungeons one).
Early silver mines generally do look like small-scale caves and cavern passages, but of course what appeals to you needn't be what the real-world examples suggest. Fantasy worlds have magical options not available to this reality after all ?
Arrows are perhaps the simplest graphic option for this style of map to indicate where passages are sloping up or down. You could try placing them alongside the relevant areas instead of actually on them if the area begins to look too cluttered.
The snag I find with the isometric options is that the cave symbols offer somewhat limited options, and the drawing styles aren't so easy to use successfully as the top-down plan view mapping styles (for me, anyway). Worth experimenting though.
I took the suggestions and made another map using just the OSR style. I am happier with this one. Still not 100% satisfied, but I am not sure what else to add to make it look better.
I am not sure about having the floor graphics. I might prefer it to just be white. There was not an arrow symbol in the catalog and I wasn't sure about how to just draw one on the map to indicate the direction of the slope.
It looks good to me :)
You can draw any shape you please, including an arrow, using the primitive tools on the right hand side. Polygon is probably the one you want in this case. Depending on what you want the snap grid would be useful here. And don't forget that you can scale the arrow once you have drawn it.
I would add a new sheet for your arrow first, so you can control the sheet effects for your arrow without disturbing the rest of it.
Good suggestion on making the arrow on a different sheet. I am trying to sort out an appropriate look/size to add.
There is also an automated arrow drawing tool option, but the arrows tend to look clumsy, because the line pushes through the arrow's tip, so Sue's suggestion, of simply drawing the arrow yourself, is the better option.
The floor fills look good on your revised map, I think, as indeed does the map overall. I've sometimes used the fills just to indicate areas of different rock type, or where there's something interesting happening on similar B&W maps, as the options to show such features otherwise are quite limited in some of these styles.