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Royal Scribe

Royal Scribe

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Royal Scribe
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Birthday
February 5, 1968
Location
San Francisco, California
Real Name
Kevin
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Mapmaker
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  • Ideas and Wishes for Monthly Dungeon Symbols

    I am so glad you asked, because you know I've been keeping lists! You can check out some of my ideas in this thread, but here's a recap of some highlights:

    Interior

    • Thrones - Ornate metal and stone; "elven" (wooden with art nouveau flourishes); "evil" (skulls, spikes, etc.)
    • Regalia - Crowns; scepters; orbs
    • Couches - Both "regular" and Roman-style (I think SS4 only has chairs that I make extra wide for couches)
    • Mage/Sage Furnishings - Globes, astrolabes
    • Ornate Staircases - Maybe modular so you can construct your own (left, right, and center for bottom, middle, and top, in stone and wood, with and without varicolor carpeting)
    • Musical Instruments - Upright and on their side (lutes, harps, harpsichords, drums)
    • Ancient Tombs - Think Indiana Jones-style stuff, like idols

    Exterior

    • Gardens - Varicolor flowers, rose bushes, berry bushes, exotic/carnivorous plants
    • Tiltyard - Quintain, pell, horse armor
    • Topiary - Bushes trimmed to form the shape of animals and mythical creatures
    • Statues - Riding and standing free. Royalty plus archetypical character types (sword fighters, archers, mages)

    Building Construction

    • Flagpoles - Upright and on their side, separate from flags for flexibility
    • Flags - Varicolor top-down and on their side
    • Gargoyles and Grotesques
    • Clocktower - Clock hands on side of building; bells for belltower
    • Spires
    • Façade Ornamentation - I don't know the proper term, but here are some pics I took to illustrate


    RickoDon Anderson Jr.roflo1Ryan ThomasKevin
  • An alternate way to draw elevation changes

    Very nice.

    Ralf shows another approach in this Height Transitions video as well


    roflo1Don Anderson Jr.Loopysuezace66Calibre
  • [WIP] Wizard's Tower

    I have been working on a "small" wizard's tower that uses CA186/188 Creepy Crypts as the base (to facilitate doing the below-ground portions later) with heavy use of the fills and symbols from CA149 Beaumaris Castle.

    I put "small" in quotes because it was intended to be the small one, but has been the victim of scope creep. I was working on a much larger wizard's tower that was the center of a much larger fortification, but put it on pause to do this one as a proof of concept. My "small" tower ended up being 80 feet in diameter with at least six stories in the main structure and at least two more stories rising above that. (There are also plans for at least three basement levels, including the sewers.)

    I wanted to do a tower where the stairs wind around the outside, like the Sage Tower from Mike Schley's Overland symbols:

    Given the diameter I picked, the steps ended up going about three-quarters around. It has 146 steps. Since each step has a rise of 7.5 inches, the steps reach a height off the ground of 1,095 inches, or 91.25 feet. And as you can see, the exterior steps don't go all the way to the top of the tower.

    Here is the exterior view and the grounds, which includes a house for servants and/or guests, a barn, an outhouse, an exotic garden, and a fruit orchard. The tower is on a rocky outcrop on a bluff overlooking a river.

    Per the discussion in this Tree Shadows thread, I drew in tree shadows for each tree so that a battlemap could be made hiding the trees but still showing the shadows of where they are, so that players could battle beneath the canopy. Here it is with the trees hidden but their trunks and shadows still shown:

    (Just noticed that the house disappeared. Must have been on the "Vegetation - Trees" layer. Fixed!

    Onwards to the interior!

    RickoLoopysueQuentenMonsenJuanpiLoreleiCalibre
  • [WIP] The Old San Francisco Mint (Dracula Dossier)

    Ahhh, ok. Not sure when I will get to creating the library layout, but if you're interested, I can email you the photographs of the blueprints from a book the librarian allowed me to photograph. They are in the public domain now in part because of their age but mainly because they're government documents (in the U.S., all government documents are public domain, though classified docs can still be restricted).

    Don Anderson Jr.
  • [WIP] The Old San Francisco Mint (Dracula Dossier)

    Okay, I changed it on the Floors 3 and 4 maps, too. While they aren't suitable for the Atlas in their current forms (though I could always tweak them to be a museum or other building), I would still like to offer them up to any Game Masters who would like to use them in whatever campaigns they're in. (I will also post that message to the FB group to reach a different audience than the forums.) For anyone who would like to use them, here are the FCW files with my blessing.


    Don Anderson Jr.Loopysue