Hopping to the next continent east from my sojourn in Kumarikandam last month, took my sort-of Dungeon24 project (see this earlier topic for details) to the archipelago of Nga-Whenuatoto, and specifically the southernmost island in the chain, Mate Ora, as this was where the third of the Inkwell Dice "Crypts" set of designs had been randomly allocated.

Part of the design the Crypts dice had generated included the interior of a pyramidal structure. Later in the process of rolling-up the full set of base map designs, I discovered that the "Cities" and "Ruins" dice sets had identical patterns, except that the Ruins dice had parts of their designs - as you might expect - in ruins. This created a minor complication, since as mentioned before, I was intending to avoid using duplicates of the same dice design for the full set of base maps. Doing this for the Cities and Ruins sets meant I ended up with just four Ruins designs unused, and as luck had it, each of those had a single major feature on it. Since ruins are a handy feature found on many fantasy maps overall, I opted to add all four of these single-dice drawings to the final set of base maps. One of which was a central ziggurat with the same number of external "steps" as the interior from the Crypts set. So it seemed useful to combine both designs for these Mate Ora maps.

All that remained for the planning stage was to select a suitable ruin on Mate Ora, and I found one in the northeastern part of the island that seemed to fit what I'd begun thinking of:

Mate Ora has a reputation as the Land of the (Living) Dead, so it was obvious the tombs here were going to be a little unquiet, and following a few more random rolls on suitable tables, and a bit of consideration, I decided on the primary denizen being a lich, but one who was trapped at the ruin site. From the map scale, it's clear that the orange rectangle shown above is about 9 by 8 miles in size, so the ruined village shown was going to be just one small feature within that area, and that I'd be looking at creating three maps, for the local area, the ruined village and only then the subterranean tombs. There's an ape-folk village just across the sea inlet from my selected site, and it seemed natural they'd have learnt to avoid this area, and would have named it.

I toyed with the idea of something vaguely Maori for the names, given this applies to the rest of the archipelago, only to decide against it, given how isolated and shunned Mate Ora has become, thanks to its fearsome reputation. However, I still wanted something a little out of the ordinary, so thought the ape-folk language might well consist of elements such as tongue-clicks and throaty sounds. So the village became TlokPik, or Yhangha (as the lich prefers), and the local area map took its name from the former version of the village name. As a translation, I went with TlokPik as meaning something like "Jungle hill(s)/burial mounds where the (living) dead walk", and for the ape-folk to treat it as a kind of taboo term, a place to be avoided.

The area map, while based on the terrain shown on the Mate Ora map, had a number of random additions, and others, applied. For this Mate Ora set of maps too, I drew on a broad selection of random table options, some of my own, some from the Atelier Clandestin "Sandbox Generator" used before, some from the Index Card RPG (Master Edition) by Runehammer Games, but still more this time were sourced from two newly-arrived RPG books from Kickstarters that have delivered in hardcopy during the last few weeks, the main Shadowdark RPG rulebook from the Arcane Library and Monte Cook Games' The Weird (which latter is a massive RPG sourcebook of purely random-idea tables).

Thus finally we arrive at the TlokPik Area Map:

As ever, PDF and text notes will accompany this map, to explain a little more what the names refer to. For the map drawing, I needed some overland style jungle options, and settled upon the Myrklund style from the Cartographer's Annual. The options even so are a little limited, but this set does have varicolor versions of the jungle symbols too, which I needed to better highlight some of the specific features.

However, it might be helpful to see a few more styles better able to handle overland areas of this smaller size (less than 20 miles or so in either dimension), with a greater range of symbol options especially. Just two or three other drawings for jungle (not palm!) trees would have been a great help here, I felt, even though I was able to add a small patch of deciduous woods as well, thanks to one of the random rolls.

As these "ghostly" comments may indicate, I'd had a few ideas of my own as to what else could have been happening in the area, partly also drawing on what I'd established for the Sussara Region earlier. One thing I was pretty sure of is that Marshmalika had been the first place attacked when the invaders arrived, given the Bay of Aqesh is a logical landing area, away from the open sea, where storms are more likely, and the most inland section of that would be as good a place as any to begin. I also thought it would be interesting to explore why their main headquarters wasn't on the coast any more, or indeed at an obvious communications centre with a reliable freshwater supply (it's the orange triangle on the Banjar province map in my first post above). Hence the ghosts, which the rank-and-file are most unhappy about. And there are oddly large numbers of poisonous scorpions and snakes where the ghosts are too, which were never found in such profusion previously, or indeed still at other parts away from the old inhabited locations.

So to the small town of Marshmalika itself, or more correctly, its abandoned ruins:

While the style's the same Desert Oasis one as before, other than the sea, I've deliberately muted the choice of other colours here to reflect its ruined status, and had quite a bit of fun creating The Pit and the Pentagram (no, not Pendulum 😉). Hopefully, those will be a little clearer on the higher-res version in my Gallery, and of course, clearer still once in the Atlas. I also chose not to have all the nearby features be on, or fully on, the map, to add to that slightly edgy, uncomfortable feeling, while still keeping it usable as a gaming map. I have to say too, I'm impressed by the versatility of this mapping style, so with just this one Annual issue, it's possible to create a vibrant, living settlement (Sussara Village last time) and an abandoned, ruined one here.

When I started rolling the Inkwell dice sets to generate the base maps for this whole project, I made a few decisions in advance. One was that I wouldn't reuse the same dice-face design twice (I just re-rolled any duplicates), and because I wanted to keep the maps fairly small and manageable, that I'd roll randomly between 2 and 4 dice at a time only. I'd then put together the map based on how the dice fell on the table, once slid together into a whole, naturally. For this "Ruins" set map, I just rolled two dice, and the orange rectangle on this image shows what the dice had set-up:

Most of the major features of the settlement, in fact, as that seemed appropriate. The only real change I made here was that the Temple was originally a group of large, partly or wholly ruined buildings, with trees and an open area in the adjoined block to its right. However, the Desert Oasis style comes with its own ruins, including this one, and it seemed a shame not to use it! The expanded areas were a mix of randomly-rolled options, with logical completions and expansions of roads and trails to fit the landscape around the settlement. Other ruined properties further from the centre aren't shown, as already buried by drifting sand, dust and ash, which is explained in the PDF and text files for the final Atlas version, along with what's going on at the various labelled sites. That House of Bones area is an especially unpleasant reminder that the place was invaded by ruthless folk who cared nothing for the local populace, incidentally (so those sensitive to such things should be warned).

I'm not sure if it's been all this thinking about warfare and ghosts, but my next port-of-call is (as randomly decided) to be on Mate Ora, southernmost of the islands in the Nga-Whenuatoto archipelago, a land where the dead walk, apparently. At least it's still in the southern tropics of Nibirum, so decently warm!

EDIT Feb 3: The eagle-eyed among you may have spotted there were missing internal lines in the Pentagram; images have now been corrected!

Completing my trip to the Banjar region of Kumarikandam recently, after the Sussara Region, I've now been visiting part of the coast by the mouth of the Kalabanjar River, the tiny red-square-marked ruined settlement at the head of the Bay of Aqesh on the area map from the Atlas (not the one in the mountains - that's Sussara!):

The map I'd generated in advance from the Inkwell Ideas "Ruins" dice set only covered part of the settlement, and given the large scale of the above map, as with the Sussara Region, I knew I'd have to begin with an area map to fit it into anyway. Having already prepared a 20-mile-square map for Sussara, I simply continued the process here, using the same Scorching Sun style for consistency, having generated a list of ideas for features on this map using the same random tables as for Sussara (albeit re-rolling any duplicates with that map), while taking into account the very different circumstances for this part of Banjar - invaded and devastated by incomers in the relatively recent past. Thus we arrive at the Marshmalika Area map ("Marshmalika" = Queen's Cove, incidentally):

Descriptions of what's where (with how recent some of them are), and the significance of the various items shown will be provided as text and PDF files in the Atlas, as usual, although it's fair to say there are battlefields, and many signs of devastation (not all created by the invaders; war is war, after all). Oh, and there are a LOT of ghosts. They make the invaders feel REALLY uncomfortable, although all they do is stand and stare (mostly). In ever increasing numbers. At any destroyed formerly inhabited place. By day and night, continually. Until the invaders leave.

All of which preparation finally brings us to the dungeon map, entitled "The Tomb of the Prophet and the Sailor Prince", albeit in the Atlas to be known by the somewhat more manageable name of "Tomb of the Prophet", which some may feel is probably no loss (sorry...):

This was drawn using the SS2 Bitmap B style, with a few bits and pieces from its "A" variant, and was selected primarily because I needed a white marble bitmap fill, sarcophagi and coffin variants. The boat was the trickiest feature, as it's intended to be a large river-going vessel, with detached masts (ceiling's not high enough!), whereas the best the "A" style could offer was a rowboat, so that needed a bit of fiddling to look like something closer. The font is "Arabian" from the 2010 Annual.

Adding a mask to half-hide the walls was a late addition, as the shadows "inside" the solid rock surrounds beyond the walls seemed too distracting. This had a serious disadvantage, as the floors and walls had been drawn rather piecemeal, largely thanks to a few quite complex shapes (areas K and L were drawn square to the grid and then rotated, for instance. Areas A and B proved devilishly complicated to get right, particularly as for some reason, during the rotated copy operations for two of those small square peripheral tombs, the room size had slightly shrunk in one direction (well, one, but then that was mirror-copied to the opposite wall), something I didn't realise until I started connecting area H to the chamber between tombs I and J. Thus I couldn't do a simple series of "Trace" commands for a Color Key inner mask, and indeed ran into so many problems with it tracing the wrong bit repeatedly, I gave up trying to do that, and did a couple of external polygons instead, albeit that wasn't much easier...

In terms of the contents and area descriptions (in the map's PDF and text files), I found some of the options for the dice designs I'd used in the accompanying Inkwell Ideas "Dungeonmorph Delves and Descriptions" book for the Crypts, Lairs and Sewers sets very appealing. Most of the occupants and mechanics originated there, with a fair bit of subsequent tweaking in places, and the assorted treasure items scattered liberally throughout - together with the caveats on removing some - also derived from the same book, many as determined from the random tables towards the back.

Once the key and scale notes had been added, there was enough space left for portraits of a couple of the people buried here, created using Character Artist 3, naturally. The Sailor Prince is as he appeared in the later prime of his life, while the more ghostly appearance of The Prophet is because that is how he may appear in the Tomb, if the right ceremony is performed, for all he is not an undead creature. His holy symbol features repeatedly in the Tomb, so it was important one version of that should be added too. All those available have an attached cord in CA3, and while I thought of using a mask to disguise this, it proved possible to "attach" this version of it to the caption, to look as if it's hanging there.

Of course, it only really needs a few extra clicks in CA3 to generate full-body character portraits, and as I wasn't sure if I might need necks and shoulders for the versions to be used in the dungeon map, simply went ahead and drew the lot. It seemed a shame to not provide an Atlas version as well, so here they are:

Now, it's off to the ruins by the mouth of the Kalabanjar!

Continuing the process of zooming-in brings us to Sussara Village, at the heart of the Sussara area map:

This time, I chose the Desert Oasis Annual mapping style and its accompanying ArabDances font, although I also needed some trees from the Mike Schley Cities (SS5) set, as I wanted to add some cedar-ish trees, while Desert Oasis only offers palms and shrubs. To generate the base map, I combined three old village maps from the venerable Judges Guild "Village" Books 1 and 2, again adapted accordingly, as I wanted quite a scattered community. The population of Banjar overall is tiny, so there seemed little reason not to give most folks plenty of space to build on.

Some features were decided in advance, as the nature of what I'd opted for in the dungeon meant a distinct spiritual element was going to be important here, and I thought it would be fun to add to the mix a small community of monks from the vast, rather distant, but still loosely neighbouring region of Tiantang in Kumarikandam, far to the north of Banjar. Since the folk here are accepting of nomadic wanderers, it seemed natural they wouldn't balk at still more distant people wanting to settle here too. Other items were chosen from random lists in "Village Book 1" and the settlement options in "Sandbox Generator", including the fact there are naturally-occurring flower-like crystal formations "growing" out of the soil in places, especially over and around Flowerfield Peak. Hence names such as "Billawr" (one Arabic-ish variant for "Crystal") and the Village's own name (Sussara = Glass Flower). The irrigated fields were quite fun to set-up, although at this scale, most of the smaller elements (shadufs, water gates, etc.) couldn't be added, even had symbols been available, without making the map seem very cluttered. Similarly, fences, livestock pens and sheds, and small gardens near most houses weren't included. I did though add a couple of carts to the Market, and three small well-fountains, to hint at what such tiny structures might have looked like. Notes on what is visible will be in the Atlas, as ever.

Of course, we also need a means to access the dungeon map that started all these above-ground explorations, so activating the "Village Secret" toggle in the final Atlas FCW version, will reveal a couple of hidden stairwells in the cellars of two separate, and otherwise unremarkable, properties (zoomed-in here for clarity at the usual Forum-acceptable size):

Very few folks here even know they might exist (which doesn't include the current occupiers of either dwelling!), and fewer still know what potential significance the Tomb of the Prophet may hold...