Constructing sets of connected maps like this is always an organic process, with ideas for one influencing the other along the way. For these "Crypts" designs, I've been referring to Inkwell's own "Dungeonmorph Delves and Descriptions" book, one of which options has included an order of necromancers that collect strange things from many places, storing them in their own tombs, along with reminders of their greatest leader. Since this chimed with a very long-standing idea of my own from many years ago (it's a useful way of explaining random dungeon layouts sometimes!), I decided to indulge especially heavily from the Inkwell notes for this design, with just a few adaptations and changes, since it all seemed to flow together quite nicely otherwise. Additional elements - notably among the treasures - came from the random tables mentioned in my first posting here, or ideas that occurred along the way. Thus we arrive at The Crypt of the Necromancers map:

The mapping style is Sue's Creepy Crypts 1 & 2, from Annual issues CA 186 and CA 188, partly because I'd only used elements from it last time, and wanted to try out the complete style, partly because - of course - it's ideal for constructing burial layouts, and partly because it has those really invaluable individual step symbols, perfect for creating daises, or when the mapping design needs a non-standard staircase that rises straight before becoming a quarter-spiral at the top (in room 4 here - hopefully a little more visible on the Gallery version of this map). I've also used a couple of Sue's other symbols in this map, one from her City Domes Annual, CA 144A, the other from the CA 175 Marine Dungeon pack.

The outside, cave entry and long cavern to get to the dungeon proper, were simply sketched-in by hand - and those two blind side passages in the Cavern aren't accidental - after the Crypt layout had been drawn-in. The mechanism for drawing caves in this style is somewhat different to normal, and took a little experimentation to get right, particularly in relation to masking the outside of the Crypt's straighter wall-lines, as that's drawn a different way. And that 10-foot grid was actually drawn on three different sheets as a result of this - some of the lines only by hand!

I knew from the original sketched layout that there'd be space around the design to add a places list (expanded considerably by the text and PDF accompanying Atlas notes), and I opted to indulge further by using more of Sue's Creepy Crypt symbols as decoration to fill some of the spaces this left, and to add to the atmosphere. The coloration is deliberately muted and grey, in-keeping with the generally gloomy aura The Scar region encourages, aside from a Necromancers' Crypt not really being a likely place for bright wallpaper with cute puppies and kittens frolicking over it (though that would rather challenge an adventuring party's expectations)!

The next layout is to be from Inkwell's "Delver" dice set, which has a mixture of cavern and dungeon aspects to the designs. That's scheduled for somewhere on Kraken Island in the Forlorn Archipelago...

Returning to Alarius, if not to my usual part of it, in my Dungeon24-ish project (this previous topic has more information on that), saw me hunting for a suitable location on the Southern Scar Environs map of eastern Alarius, for where to place the fourth and final "Crypts" Inkwell dice design map.

That's a big area, and one affected by the unpleasantly weird effects from The Scar, the linear volcanic feature surrounded by swathes of greyness in the top centre of the orange rectangle in the above illustration. The dungeon design is, by contrast, tiny, although the nature of The Scar, as sketched in the map notes, coupled with the fact this was to be another burial tomb site, had already suggested something undead and/or necromantic as a theme for the subterranean layout. So that narrowed things down somewhat, and ultimately, the site very nearly chose itself, given that one of the few labelled main locations on the Southern Scar map was "Witch's Valley", which had a circle of standing stones set in its midst. Right at the northwestern, mountain-enclosed, end was a cave symbol, so that was that!

The orange rectangle around the cave is actually 25 miles by 16 in size, so not wanting to simply drop in a little dungeon map there, as has started to become typical for this project, I also needed to devise a suitable area map into which the dungeon design could be fitted. Having sketched the basic features for this onto graph paper, I then added a random selection of additional items from the sources mentioned in my first post last time on Mate Ora, although here, the selections were tweaked to better reflect the negative feeling of this area, so relatively near The Scar - if sometimes with a few hints that things were not always as they now appear here too. Once these feature locations were emplaced, it was possible to draw in a few river and stream lines to fit, since while no major river is shown in Witch's Valley on the Southern Scar map, valleys rarely happen without something of the sort, and the mountainous terrain, plus the near-tropical location (the cave symbol is at roughly 37° N latitude), showed there would be some water channels at least.

Then it was time for the mapping. Several possible overland styles were identified as having a suitably large number of mountain and hill options, of which the DeRust Overland style from Annual 81 seemed a good fit. Thus the Witch's Valley Head map:

The labelling font is the Mason Serif Alt Bold one that comes with CC3+, as that seemed a comfortably "spiky" fit for this map style. As normal, there'll be PDF and text file notes to provide a few more details on the labelled items in the final Atlas version. While the sites for these were chosen purely randomly, it was pleasing to find they'd clustered more towards the western to northwestern part, given those are the directions of the more imposing, larger, mountain symbols on the Southern Scar map beyond this selected area.

I know some folks here are keen Cthulhu-esque fans, and some may already know that Chaosium has just released a new "Arkham" supplement for their Call of Cthulhu RPG. When checking the webpage for more details on the book today, I spotted that as quite often, they've made some elements available for free online viewing and downloading (as PDFs), including four new maps, two of Arkham, one of the city's surrounds, and - still more interestingly to me at least - a new map of Massachusetts for 1922 which has on all the main Lovecraftian additional settlements! All these are beautifully done in period style, and you can find the download links here, by scrolling down to almost the end of the page.

There's also a four-page PDF copy of the Arkham Advertiser newspaper available there too, again prepared in period style by the two leading lights of the H P Lovecraft Historical Society, Andrew Leman and Sean Branney, long noted for the excellence of their facsimile period physical products!

All of which brings us to the subterranean version of the "Crypts" dice set design that started this journey on Mate Ora:

This was constructed using a range of assets from Dungeon Designer 3, Sue's two Creepy Crypts Annual issues, CA 186 and CA 188 and Character Artist 3. The latter wasn't merely for the portrait of the Lich Queen, as the harp and lute on the altar in the Bardic Mirror Tomb (if you can spot them!) also derived from there (though I had to use the vector lute, as the newer bitmap drawing style of CA3 doesn't have one). This time, while some features originated from the group of random tables mentioned in my first post here, many of the more detailed elements derived, sometimes in modified forms, from the Inkwell Ideas "Dungeonmorph Delves and Descriptions" book for the Crypts dice designs being used in this case. One of the larger changes was to swap the Tomb of the Wyvern King for the Tomb of the Thunder Lizard King; obviously, a heart-rending decision 😉, but an essential one, given I've already provided more than enough details on Wyvern Lords and their riders, for Kentoria elsewhere in the Atlas! Plus the Thunder Lizard concept fitted better for Mate Ora, due to the large numbers of prehistoric creatures, including all manner of dinosaurs - some of them undead - that roam the island. More information will be found in the PDF and text files that go with this map.

Naturally, that Lich Queen's portrait didn't just draw itself here, as it's extracted from a fourth Atlas contribution from this set, a complete illustration of the lady in question:

Next time, in the fourth and final instalment of the Crypts dice maps, I seem to be heading off to Alarius, in the region of the southern Scar there, according to the dice roll!

While the next map in the zooming-in sequence is for the Village, it was actually prepared only after the subterranean tombs one, because various overground features had to be fitted to that map design. While the Village map did draw on the Inkwell Dice "Ruins" design too, because that provided simply a base street layout around the pyramidal ziggurat structure, surrounded otherwise only by debris and a few ruined wall-lines, I elaborated on that somewhat, as while I wanted to use that layout as the Village's centre, I also wanted to show the above-ground area within which the lich, now the Lich Queen of Yhangha, was trapped. Random rolls on the suite of tables noted earlier provided further points of interest, and a selection of creatures and things a group of adventurers might encounter in this area if they visited it (which list is in the map's accompanying PDF and text files), some living, some undead. The map:

The fact there's both a ziggurat and a barrow mound here is partly why the translation for "TlokPik" referred to "hill(s)" in plural, of course.

I chose the City Designer 3 Bitmap B style for this map, primarily because it allows the City Ruins Annual to be used fairly seamlessly with it, which provided the distinction between different kinds of partly-roofed ruins I wanted to help loosely define the area the Lich Queen cannot leave (it's the region with the yellow straw-roofed structures around the Temple Tomb ziggurat). That loose definition is quite deliberate. Oh, and one other feature of this inner zone, that I termed "The Glade" in the descriptive notes, is that the night sky seen from it isn't that of Nibirum, but somewhere else entirely. Should it ever change back to Nibirum's, the spell will be broken and the Lich Queen will be able to leave the area. Just waiting for the stars to be right...

Since the Village is half overgrown by the jungle, it became something of a challenge as to how much could be hidden and how much left still visible. I wanted the old grassed-over trails to disappear into the trees towards the map's edges, though closer to the centre, this became more of a juggling act. If you think the Barrow Temple looks a little strange, and maybe a bit "thin", you'd be right, as it's a semi-transparent ghost building set over its own low-wall ruins. Turn off the "Ghost Temple" toggle in the Atlas FCW file, and it vanishes: