I remembered this because I used it a long while back (shown in the first post in that link) to make versions of Nibirum for the Community Atlas!

The last of this, as it turned out, quartet of maps from the heart of the Feralwood Forest region in Alarius, is for the Barrow of the Forgotten Wardens. The layout, of course, is more or less identical to the previous "Noble Jewels" Barrow, except this one has no lights inside, and two of the hidden Transdimensional Passageways are in slightly different places:

It was a little curious that there turned out to be three random exits selected for each of the Barrow maps, and that there was some duplication between the trio for where those exits were. I did consider changing them up for more variety, but in the end decided to let randomness have its way.

I reused the glass-panel railing for the pit section of area C from Noble Jewels, although here the railing is just a metre, 3 feet, high, leaving the central area fully open to the lower level. There are also a couple of new features here, both larger techno-magical items. The Undersea Walker is a vehicle adapted from the Hyperborea RPG. In the accompanying text notes, and as originally intended on the drawing, it partly hides the floor trapdoor on the lower level of area C. However, that wasn't practical on the map for clarity. The Amber Fountain, drawn from the Numenera RPG, is a main food source for the external community not represented on the map, on the world outside that isn't Nibirum, and for which the first Transdimensional Passageway provided a useful choice for its location.

Internally, this layout is essentially an ancient museum, so there are display cabinets with all manner of items extracted from both Numenera and Hyperborea in them, most still functional, if anyone can work out how they operate without draining their power (one-shot items) or accidentally killing someone in finding out. To assist, there is a semi-resident Technosage from beyond Nibirum here, and the whole non-Nibirum section of the complex is surrounded by a functional loop of telepathy wire (also listed among the items from Noble Jewels), so the Nibirese may be able to communicate with her. Rho the Mysterion makes its third identical appearance here as well - another telepathic communicator - along with a couple of weirder denizens from outside Nibirum, as the map notes will reveal.

I've not added the PDF notes here this time, and have now also removed the earlier ones, as the final PDFs and textfiles have been submitted for the Atlas, which should hopefully avoid any confusion as to which version to prefer! I have though added higher-res versions for this map to my Gallery, and am now preparing to move on to the last of the four "Explorer" Dungeonmorph Dice designs in this project, which is scheduled for a home somewhere in the Glaciär Kristol region of Ezrute...

A little quicker this time, as the second Barrow map, for the Barrow of the Noble Jewels, had already had much of its layout prepared in advance through last time's "Emerald Guardians" one. This is its "normal" view:

While this is the view with the non-Nibirum passageways revealed:

There was a degree of copying and pasting of items over from "Emerald Guardians" here, including where things had changed since the base map for all three of these designs was laid-out, although I retained the original non-Nibirum wall-line colouring here, as not needing to add the pneumatic tube lines for this map. The Ceiling Lamps are still present in this drawing though. While I did consider moving some about, that really didn't make any sense, as they shed light over a limited area, and with only 20 Lamps to play with, that had already restricted the options in the previous map anyway. I did try to make the exterior sliver on the far left map edge look a little different, and I changed up the look of the railings around the lower level pit in area C, as here, they're meant to be floor-to-ceiling glass or crystal panes, with metal frames, isolating the lower level from the upper walkway completely.

In terms of the contents, most derived from Numenera again, with items and inhabitants both randomly chosen and distributed, although the identical Mysterion makes another appearance, something which, while unstated, gives GMs the opportunity to make things still more weird for visitors from Nibirum who have already met this character previously. There are curious others here as well, including a couple of sort-of, yet not undead, "ghosts", and a superstitious Human Crafter of technology (he's living in a haunted workshop, as he believes it, after all!). Possibly the deadliest creatures are three living-steel spiders, whose web-strands are essentially monomolecular steel threads. They've been set up so opening the door into the chamber they're in will slice off part of the metal door without slowing it, as a warning...

One more of these identical dungeon layouts to come!

[EDIT 19 November 2024: Although I originally added the provisional PDF description for the map to this post, I've removed it now, as the final version has been submitted for the Atlas!]

Well, that was a longer break than I'd anticipated. However, I can now update progress with this project today, having completed the first map, for the Barrow of the Emerald Guardians, and its notes. Typically, if unintentionally, along with other RL issues this month has brought so far, this first map was also the more complicated of the trio to prepare, as it had been randomly assigned both a light generator and lamps, and a pneumatic tube communications system, both of which needed adding to the map. The lamps and generator were straightforward enough, as simple individual fixtures. The pneumatic tubes though needed drawing-in as well, however, given each is meant to be about a foot, 30 cm, in pipe cross-sectional diameter. Lines are, of course, simple enough to draw onto a CC3+ map, but getting the colouring to work well enough in greyscale turned into a bit more of a challenge, and ultimately, I opted for a thin, dark outlining glow effect as well to get the tubes to stand out without making the walls seem like irrelevances. Plus the wall colouring had to be changed as well (several times, in fact, though that doesn't show here, of course...).

This then is the (probably, subject to later checking) final map in its "ordinary Nibirran" view:

And this is the view with the hidden passages those not from Nibirum can ordinarily see, displayed:

In terms of map contents and denizens/potential denizens, these were drawn, and then adapted, from, primarily, the Numenera RPG for this map. In the notes, I've identified the original source object or creature type, in case anyone should want to use the "standard" versions instead of my amended ones, for which I've also provided Shadowdark stats and comments. We have a couple of Human inhabitants, both tech-savvy mage-like inventors of sorts, and a host of curious magic-like gadgets they may have constructed or be working on (or indeed, even be using). There are also oddities from the non-Nibirum world outside (since I've assumed there is a settlement of some sort beyond one or other of the "exit" passageways), creatures that have wandered, or may wander, in, including a particularly vicious group of vaguely humanoid, communal, raiders that communicate purely by telepathy, and which have a thick, long tentacle each instead of a head. There's also a wandering envoy, a loosely insect-like humanoid, jerky of motion, actually a technological construct, liable to be off-putting to folks, despite only wanting to establish peaceful contact with other humanoids. That one can summon a group of warriors of similar type should the need arise, since there seems the possibility for some curious alliances to form among the folks here when added-to by a group of Nibirran adventurers. And then there's also the Mysterion (as I've called it), essentially a Vorlon from the old Babylon 5 TV series, should you recall that. That one's going to be in all three of the Barrows, being extremely cryptical and enigmatic. I did promise weird!

Hopefully, not quite so long a gap till the next map's ready from this trio.

[EDIT 19 November 2024: Although I originally added the provisional PDF description for the map to this post, I've removed it now, as the final version has been submitted for the Atlas!]

Having decided to prepare three identical layouts for the interior Barrow "dungeons", the obvious first step was to get a version of the hand-drawn map traced in to CC3+ which would then act as a template to be refilled and adjusted for each separate interior, given their contents were not going to be identical. As the general mapping style was already well-established, drawing this was pretty quick and straightforward:

The walls are paler than those in the two previous dungeons in this group, so as to indicate their different character to the typical stonework. The semi-tech setting was going to have plastic-coated metal panelled walls (or something similar), hence this choice of wall texture. While it looks quite straightforward initially, the layout here is actually on three different levels - the rectangular pit in the lower-right quadrant has a raised pathway/passage around it, and a trapdoor access from below into it, as well as two side passageways opening directly into it, for instance, and the elongated side-passages/rooms flanking the long, straight entrance passage (with wall slits into that long corridor) have a bridge accessway over the passage, connecting them to each other and, by secret door, the rest of the complex, though not directly into the entrance route. Took me a while to get to grips with this as well!

While that was all fine, as I was drawing this out, I started wondering about how the semi-tech-world's inhabitants were going to get in and out of here. I'd already drawn-up lists of items and potential denizens from the sources noted back in my first post in this topic, especially the Numenera RPG, and had realized the three layouts would work best with these as workshops, laboratories or a museum. Ultimately, we'll be going with one of each of those. Naturally, some kind of teleportation/transporter beam option was a possibility, for all that felt a little contrived.

Ordinarily, as explained previously, any segments of the geomorphic dice designs that don't link to the main part of the layout, including the connections off the dice edges, are simply skimmed away in preparing the Atlas version. However, now, I started thinking of adding some or all of those external links to this map too, as passages/doors only the semi-tech inhabitants could see and use. This is a shot of the two Inkwell Ideas Explorer dice designs I was using here to indicate what those possibilities were (from dice "V" and "K", in case anyone might wonder about those letter labels):

And this is how they were drawn into the CC3+ plan:

Each new passageway has a wavy line ending it, to show the route goes elsewhere beyond this map, without indicating where that might be, in the semi-tech land that isn't Nibirum. In addition, they've all been set up on the GAME MASTER ONLY Layer, and a series of new Sheets (for the walls, floors, grid lines, and dot-shading symbols), so they can be shown, or not, for each individual layout, something that's intended to be possible via a toggle in the final Atlas version. Each separate layout will have a variable number of these accessways only; the rest will be removed in those final maps. It made sense to draw the set together though, because there is quite an art to doing so, so as not to forget some key element.

While doing this, I next realised the long entrance passage and the rooms/corridors flanking it probably would be in the original Barrow stonework, not the semi-tech walls. This was mostly to avoid the complications of why the semi-tech folks hadn't wandered off into Nibirum at some stage, and more importantly, why they'd have set up a passage with viewing slits to watch for nobody ever coming in down that long passageway! Instead, if this was all the original stonework by the Barrow builders, simple anti-tomb-robber floor pressure-plate traps to shoot darts from magazines that had to be emplaced before the Barrow was sealed, began to crystallize, and were ultimately adopted, as a concept. Thus the wall texture there was changed:

Plus, it no longer made sense to have any linking passageways attached to the semi-tech world from this segment of the layout, so they were removed:

The perceptive among you will doubtless have realised that one other change has been made here, to the semi-tech wall texture. This happened because when I adjusted the new darker wall texture's bitmap scaling, I discovered that, as sometimes happens with the older Annual styles, I had to force the system to use the very high res bitmaps. I hadn't realised sooner that this wasn't happening automatically, partly because the walls lines are quite thin, I suspect. When I did that though, the selected semi-tech texture - the only one that gave a suitably pale appearance - started to vanish into the dot-shading exterior texture in places. This image shows a comparison test, where just the top left room's texture remains as it had been earlier:

Thus I ended up with simple, solid, pale grey wall lines for the semi-tech areas, rather than bitmap-textured ones.

Clearly, this is all still WIP, given that the entrance passageway doesn't go anywhere right now, nor have a blocking doorway to the outside, and the wall around the pit is likely to change too, so it doesn't look like the same solid walls as everywhere else, albeit that may be different for each of the three final layouts anyway. Plus everything needs fitting-out and labelling, something which is still rather in-flux currently, as the lists of items and denizens are allocated and consolidated to their respective layouts. Some progress though, at least!