Royal Scribe
Royal Scribe
About
- Username
- Royal Scribe
- Joined
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- 4,474
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- Member
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- 1,739
- Birthday
- February 5, 1968
- Location
- San Francisco, California
- Real Name
- Kevin
- Rank
- Mapmaker
- Badges
- 12
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[WIP] The Sewers of Elmsbrook Township
Level 1 primarily collects water from storm drains along with leaves and vegetation that might get swept in. Manure from horses on the street and domesticated animals are often shoveled into these storm drains as well. These drain into chutes that flow into Level 2.
Maintenance workers can enter this level through a staircase near the Great Maw that descends to a maintenance room, where a great seat of stone doors allows them to dump refuse into the giant pit. Luminescent crystals on the pit side of these great doors helps keep the Black Pudding from ascending this far. A spiral staircase in this room ascends to the surface and descends to Level 2.
Each intersection that has a stormwater drain also has a manhole that allows maintenance workers to climb down. These storm drains do not connect to one another, and maintenance workers who want to traverse the system will have to continue down ladders to Level 2.
Still to come: I want to work on the labels more, and I may add some of the rocky texture to outline the storm drains.
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[WIP] The Sewers of Elmsbrook Township
These are the sewers for Elmsbrook, a town in the human kingdom of Powys in my campaign world. They’re intended to be fairly representative on the sewer systems in my kingdom – smaller villages might have a simpler system, but larger cities will have the same basic layout, but with more extensive canals.
I was hoping to get this done the same month that Sinister Sewers was released, and I barely did it. I still have work to do, and advice to collect, but thought I would post where this stands.
By the way, Sue: it worked putting everything for each level on its own layer, making it easy to display or hide different levels as needed.
In addition to using the symbols and fills from Sinister Sewers, this also uses a few things from Marine Dungeons (particularly the stairs and the bell at the bottom of the pit), and a few things from Forest Trails (leaves, the trees along the beach, and maybe some of the fills) and Creepy Crypts. Also: Sue spent a lot of time helping me come up with a technique to show clear water, but it really worked best close-up. At this scale, it made it look like black water. I ended up using a water fill from Creepy Crypts, but on its own water sheet with a 50% transparency effect added.
In my campaign world, fastidious elves have long understood at a high level the correlation between hygiene, sanitation, and the spread of diseases. (Even if they don’t have the tools to study microbiology and virology, they can study commonalities in infected populations to identify vectors of disease.) Dwarves first developed aqueducts and sewer technology. And it is said that orcs pioneered the use of flesh-eating oozes for waste management.
Oozes are amorphous creatures with an intelligence no greater than an ordinary garden slug, flowing through subterranean lairs to devour any creature or object they can dissolve while shunning things that provoke their flight reflex, like bright lights and extreme temperatures. I have made a few tweaks to oozes in my campaign world to make them better suited for deploying in sewers. I added immunity to poison and diseases. I also added a weakness: sunlight hypersensitivity where, like vampires, they can be damaged by exposure to sunlight. (This is why they avoid bright lights: a bright lantern won’t harm them, but it still triggers their flight reflex.) Sunlight can kill an ooze, causing their acids to neutralize and their bodily remains to collapse into a nutrient-rich goo that farmers often use to fertilize their crops.
Some items of note about specific oozes used in sanitation systems. Gelatinous Cubes can dissolve nonmagical soft tissue and vegetation, leaving behind undissolved bones, metal, glass, stone, and magical items of any sort, along with excess water stripped of anything edible. They cannot climb but can move up slopes with a grade of 25 degrees or less. Moving up a slope with a grade of 10 degrees or more requires the Cube to expel any indigestible materials or excess water. Black Puddings are far more dangerous. In addition to dissolving soft tissue and vegetation, they can also dissolve nonmagical bones, metal, but cannot dissolve glass, stone, or magical items. They can also climb any surface, even upside down. Sanitation workers employ bright lights to keep Black Puddings from escaping (and an ample food supply keeps them from seeking to escape). And finally, I created a new ooze called a Voracious Sullage. It’s a slow-moving, weaker version of the Gelatinous Cube, unable to maintain a cubic shape. It tends to stretch itself across small waterways so that anything edible flows to it (and anything it can’t eat gets expelled on the other side).
Here's a quick summary of how the sanitation system works. More specifics for each level of the sewer system will follow in the comments.
Surface (not shown): Storm drains at the intersections of major streets, with a manhole cover at one of the corners than allows maintenance workers to descend using rungs. There is also a large Waste Management Facility where residents can dispose of large objects that cannot be repaired or repurposed (such as items that cannot be chopped up for kindling). Maintenance workers throw these items into a giant pit nicknamed the Great Maw that is about 140 feet in diameter. The surface of this pit is in a building that is covered at night but open to the sky during the day. Bright luminescent crystals are placed near the mouth of the pit to frighten away the Black Pudding at the bottom of the pit.
Level 1: This level is immediately below the surface. Storm drains at major intersections deposit rainwater (along with other debris) here, where they run off to chutes that bring wastewater to Level 2.
Level 2: Wastewater from Level 1 is deposited here, where it helps push through human waste from outhouses and latrines that are connected to the sewer system. This sewage flows through chutes down to Level 3.
Level 3: Waste brought in from Levels 1 and 2 are treated here in two great chambers called Auditoriums. Numerous Gelatinous Cubes gobble up the waste, leaving behind items they cannot digest, and now-clean water stripped of contaminants. This purified water drops through chutes to Level 4.
Level 4: Primarily a passthrough level, and the lowest level that maintenance workers normally go.
Level 5: A Black Pudding lives at the base on the Great Maw, devouring any waste thrown into the pit. It can eat nonmagical flesh, vegetation, and metal, but cannot digest stone, glass, or magical objects of any sort. Water purified in Level 3 descends to this level, where some passes directly to the sea and the rest is used to flush out anything the Black Pudding cannot digest.
More details for each level in the comments.
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Egg Hunt!
Years ago, when I was first developing the pantheon for the halflings of my world, I accidentally recreated the Easter Bunny.
I had in mind that idea that the head of the pantheon was a grandmotherly figure. I pictured her baking pies and sitting in a rocking chair on her front porch dispensing common-sense wisdom. I had a mental image of her as an anthropomorphized rabbit, like Peter Cottontail's grandmother or a Richard Scarry illustration. But when I had the thought that maybe the living creatures of the world came from eggs that she laid, I realized that I had recreated the Easter Bunny. I decided to lean into that.
Here's my description for Mother Ailish:
The de facto head of the Halfling pantheon is a four-foot tall anthropomorphized rabbit named Mother Ailish. She is depicted as a grandmotherly figure dressed in an apron, bifocal spectacles, and a bonnet or straw hat. When she isn’t shown knitting on her front stoop while dispensing common-sense wisdom, she’s generally shown baking in the kitchen. In her ovens she bakes any manner of delightful confections, particularly savory and sweet pies, and for this reason halflings celebrate natal days (and pretty much every occasion) with pies in her honor. It is said that she baked, piece by piece, all the non-living things of the world in her ovens and then fashioned them together. Every living this in the world is said to be descended from an original that she gave birth to – not in a live birth but laid in bright, multi-colored eggs that her many children and grandchildren (all also depicted as anthropomorphized rabbits) then hid about the world until they were ready to hatch and populate the world with life. For this reason, the halflings have a spring celebration in which they paint eggs made of paper, baked clay, wood, leather, or the like, inside which is hidden toys and candy, which are then exchanged with friends and family and sometimes hidden for strangers to find. The holiday always falls on the first Estaradÿn that falls on or after the first full Caerudraal moon after (but not on) the Spring Equinox.
(Caerudraal is the smallest of my world's three moons. It takes 77 days to orbit the world, and weeks are 10 days, so the holiday is celebrated anywhere from the day after the vernal equinox to 87 days after.)
Anyway, when I created some rainbow images for St. Patrick's Day, I thought maybe I should do an
EasterMother Ailish Egg Hunt for Easter.I used the Mike Schley Dungeon City style to create a halfling's home and garden. At first I tried to create varicolor decorations for eggs, but they're so small here that you couldn't see the decorations anyway. I tried to just create solid-colored eggs using the three-point circle drawing tool, but wasn't thrilled with the shape -- and the beveling effects didn't show up once the eggs were shrunk. I ended up just using Mike Schley's varicolor dragon eggs.
Anyway, here's my little halfling home and egg hunt:
Garden without Eggs
The home faces a rural lane, with the garden accessed through the home's back door. The garden has a gate that provides access to a side street. Everything comes from Mike Schley's city or dungeon assets except the hedges, which are Sue's connecting hedges -- and then I used her end/corner pieces instead of Mike's for the stand-alone hedges. And I think the flowers are miniaturized shrubs from DD3.
Garden with Hidden Eggs
Under the Trees and Gazebo Canopy
Mappy Easter -- er, Mappy Mother Ailish Day!
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Mars Ultor
The red X's on the outside "offerings" pits (basically, barbecue pits) are different meat cooking on skewers symbols from the Bogies Redthorn Tavern assets. You can get them here, though it's a bit involved to install them. You could also safely delete those symbols and have the burn pits with nothing cooking on them.
The symbols inside the temple are custom-made symbols. The walls are supposed to have mosaics made with luminescent crystals, and the X'd assets are reflections on the floor from those mosaics. You could delete them, particularly since the reflections won't really match up with your lore, or you can download them here:
To keep the file path consistent, place them in this path, creating folders as needed:
CC3Plus - Symbols - Users - Kevin - Dungeon - Statues, Temples and Idols
Here's how it's supposed to look:
I'm sure everything will look good if you delete the missing symbols without trying to replace them with anything else.
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On leprechauns and rainbows and pots of gold
Ricko gave me some great tips -- fixing the waterfall in the first image (it needed to be more in the foreground), rotating some of the elven buildings to face the road, and adding trees to conceal where terrain/symbols connect. I hope I found all of the spots that needed trees! Here are my adjustments: