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Wyvern
Wyvern
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Community Atlas: Gruvrå's Mine, Serkbergen, Peredur
Sure, Jim. I looked around in the Atlas, worked out where there were area maps smaller than continental-size, drew up a list of those, and then rolled some dice to find places to fit the total of 52 maps I had in mind. Duplicates were re-rolled, so no area would get more than one new map. There were more such areas than I needed, so not every place ended up being selected. I also removed a few areas that were quite heavily mapped already (or had reserved sites on them), and there were a couple that were too small to be viable for what I needed.
When it comes time to finding somewhere for the maps to go on the chosen area map, I then just look at the selected area map and pick somewhere that looks suitably interesting in it, maybe in a sub-area map if there's something suitable, or if not, I'll draw something myself, though not more than about 30-40 miles per side at most. In this case, I felt I'd been really lucky to have found a nicely small area map in the Serkbergen region which had some unused interesting features right in its centre; if I'd been drawing the area map myself, I couldn't have aimed it much better!
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Community Atlas: Gruvrå's Mine, Serkbergen, Peredur
This map was another "two-dice-only" design from the Inkwell Ideas "Delver" set, thus similar in size and proportions to the Oracle Temple one previously on Kraken Island in the Forlorn Archipelago. One novel aspect on this occasion was I found a convenient area map in the Serkbergen region of Peredur into which I could place it, which was unusual in this project so far! This was just as well, since Peredur's quite large anyway, and the Serkbergen map covers a substantial chunk of its southwest.
If you peer closely at the orange outline square near the top right on the Serkbergen map image, you'll see where I was aiming towards. A closer view:
That's the area covered by the Ermite Cave map, and as luck had it, there were some interesting unlabelled mountain spire features near the middle of that map I could simply drop my little dungeon map into:
So I did!
I've mentioned before that ideas for what the contents for each of these maps will be come from various places, typically a combination of what the diced map designs look like, any descriptions available from the accompanying Inkwell Ideas books, a range of random tables from various sources, and where the map will be located on Nibirum. Here, it was the influence of the high southerly location (within Nibirum's Antarctic Circle, roughly 71°S latitude), coupled with the name of Vaettir Tower about eight miles south of the Mine. Having picked-up a copy of Free League's "Vaesen" RPG last year, and a copy of the illustrated book by Johan Egerkrans that inspired it, also called "Vaesen", I knew what "Vaettir" meant from Scandinavian folklore, so I thought that source would be a good place to look for further thoughts. A couple of ideas came from the Inkwell book too - including having undead creatures out for revenge in what's marked as "Cells" on the map, and the dangerous state of some of the caves, although the risky look of the caves on the dice designs had already indicated this latter point as of some significance. I flipped through the Egerkrans book, and settled on the Mine Guardian Spirit, or Gruvrå, as the main actor in this place, although unfortunately, this is one of the creatures in that book which didn't make the cut into the Vaesen RPG (or hasn't so far). So I simply elaborated on what was said about her in the folklore tome instead. A couple of random rolls on tables from Monte Cook Games' "The Weird" - creating a gem-studded, tattooed Golem with a horned cat's head - and everything started to fall into place!
What I came up with, detailed in the map notes for the Atlas, as ever, is an old Dwarf Mine that ended up abandoned, and which was then expanded and altered by a group of inventors and alchemists determined to create a "better" Golem, using body parts from captured humanoids, possibly making them a variant kind of magical undead in the process (hence the need for a secret lair). After the Mine was abandoned, the Gruvrå's attention went elsewhere in her realm (which I decided would encompass all those interestingly spire-like mountains arcing away towards the Myconid Realm on the area map), so it was only sometime later she returned to the old Mine. Horrified at what she found there, she destroyed the Laboratory and Workshop, and drove out or killed the perpetrators. It's really easy to anger a Gruvrå if you fail to show one the proper respect. However, she didn't understand the undead creatures, so just left them, and the last Golem as well. Plus of course, she now keeps a closer watch on this old Mine than she used to.
I also felt I needed a CA3 portrait of the Lady in question, now named as Igrid, thus creating a thumbnail that could be added to the map, as the perceptive among you will have realised already! This is the full portrait, which was heavily influenced by the Egerkrans drawing:
The keys and bats came from the old vector CA, since CA3 doesn't include such features. I might have added a lamp too, but neither version of CA has one of those, sadly. The bats I decided are essentially merely small aspects of the Lady, able to flit about quickly, to help keep her better informed of events in her realm. They're not "real" bats beyond that. If she appears in a black dress, that's a sure warning of impending death for someone; grey like this is her normal attire. I decided against providing that change as an option in the Atlas map though. Seemed a bit too grim.
In case anyone's unsure, the Mine map was drawn using the SS4 Mike Schley Dungeons set. I've used this before, though not for a long while, and thought it would work nicely for the somewhat dangerous, partly collapsed layout here, as it has such a fine collection of rubble and rockfall markers, aside from other features. Thanks to the Gruvrå's colouring being very greyscale overall, I did want a more washed-out, aged and worn look to the map as well, so this all just seemed to work ideally for that impression. I also wanted it to be a little off-kilter, so you'll notice the squared areas don't quite fit to the grid lines. That's quite deliberate, and isn't simply a means to annoy those using the map in VTTs - that's just an added bonus 😉!
For the next map in this sort-of Dungeon24 set, I'm being randomly guided back to Alarius, and this time quite close to my "usual" territory there, as it's to go on the adjoining North Central Alarius map...
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Community Atlas: The Haunted Cloud Mesa Area of Kraken Island, Forlorn Archipelago
With the area map done, and near-central Site 12 selected as the location for the Oracle Temple map created from the dice throws, I thought it might be interesting to try to tie the mapping style up with what the Fantasy Realms one was based on originally, which was that used in the 3rd Edition "Forgotten Realms" D&D published products. I'd hoped to provide an illustration here to show what I mean by this for the dungeon-scale maps, but I've struggled to find anything suitable online, and while I have a couple of PDF books from that era (when I was too deep in my long-standing interest in many other RPG systems than D&D to collect D&D books!), I'm dubious about reusing something from those here on copyright grounds. Plus, a lot of the subterranean maps in this style seem uncomfortably dark and hard to read to me (in the PDFs at least). They do though have a couple of interesting quirks. Walls have a consistently "hand-drawn-wobbly" look, and are highlighted further by use of closely-ruled lower left to upper right hand-drawn hatching strokes, while the scaling grid is a double one, with heavier 10-foot squares subdivided internally into 5-foot ones.
Having randomly opted for just two dice designs for this map, I felt I could probably cope with this for a small area, and set about pulling together a sort-of new style, using elements from both the Fantasy Realms Annual (as the textures in the 3rd Ed dungeon maps have a similar look to the overland maps) and the Old School Dungeon style from Annual 12, the latter mostly for the symbols, though in the end, I only used two of those, and one of them was a repurposed door! The map:
The only further addition was the Alyssa Faden style's compass rose, which is a closer approximation to the 3rd ED one than any others I could find. Most of the map is simply hand-drawn, including all those ruled hatching lines (hey, the Mesa map was mostly hand-drawn too, so I was in practice!).
For a more formal style, the hatching could doubtless be done with a suitable bitmap fill of tile-able ruled lines with transparent gaps between, the polygon tool set up to be drawn fractally, and the colouring of the texture bitmap fill adjusted to fit this reddish-brown theme (which is very characteristic - the original was notably darker than this; I've deliberately aimed for lighter tones). To achieve this colouring here, I've used two different fills, one atop the other, one reddened with an RGB Matrix effect, the other made partly transparent, and then punched holes through both with a Color Key effect to show floors and grid (which latter is on two different sheets to help thicken up the 10-foot squares a little more). There would need to be one more darker blue water fill as well in a fuller style version, as some of the original maps showed up to three deepening water contour levels.
Although the doors in the "real" style were always shown as they are here, elements such as the altar were drawn in a similar brown colour to the background fill, which again I find hard to read (is it a room feature or just a rectangular rock pillar?). However, I was happy with this final result as being close enough to the original to work - to my eye anyway! It's much the same sort-of look to how the Fantasy Realms style is to the published Forgotten Realms overland maps, at least.
Next time, I'm slipping sideways to the left in Nibirum to find somewhere to drop in a little dungeon to somewhere in Serkbergen, Peredur!
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Community Atlas: The Haunted Cloud Mesa Area of Kraken Island, Forlorn Archipelago
Switching from the northern tropics of Nibirum's Alarius last time to almost the Antarctic Circle there this (about 60°S), in my ongoing sort-of Dungeon24 project, took me to Kraken Island. Although I have the base sketch ready for the feature map I'm intending in each fresh area, developing ideas to expand that into an actual, if imaginary, place draws on input from that map, possibly some details the accompanying Inkwell Ideas book may have for those of their dice sets that have such, and whatever information the Atlas maps have available already (both maps and text notes). Kraken Island though has very little written about it, and even the maps so far are somewhat vague regarding it.
As the second map suggests though, I quickly settled on an intriguing-looking spot, Haunted Cloud Mesa. Krakens' Plain and the somewhat straggly, "undersea" look to the Mesa's symbol set me off down a "watery" route in this case, especially because the small dungeon map I was working with had a stream through it, and the Inkwell book for the dice designs in question (from their "Delver" set, the book being "Dungeonmorph Book of Modular Encounters: Delver, Trailblazer & Voyager Edition") had already suggested some amphibious humanoids could be in residence there.
Ideas clustered in profusion from that, influenced in part by some 15 mm-scale underwater-ish fantasy miniatures from many years previously (almost 25 now...), especially the squidfolk and landsharks, part of a range by the wonderfully-titled Evil Gong Miniatures based in Australia. Not all are imaged there, but the Lost Minis Wiki has more information on the range than most places now, as sadly, I'm not sure Evil Gong are still a going concern. The minis were available in the UK for years from East Riding Miniatures, who started trading in 1999 (Evil Gong started-up around 2000). Unhappily, ERM ceased trading on their owner's retirement in 2021, and Evil Gong seem to have been only on FaceBook since 2019, although the page has been dormant since 2020 apparently (according to the Lost Minis Wiki, as I'm not on FB). They were - maybe still are - based in NSW.
So Haunted Cloud Mesa was going to have spindly (ish), "underwatery" mesa spires, with clouds and mists rising from their tops and valleys, and amphibious/underwater creatures living happily in the air and on the land surface around it. These rapidly came to include (of course!) the squidfolk, called "Plains Krakenfolk" here, and their landshark steeds on Krakens' Plain, along with the gigantic Land Krakens (helping to explain the lack of information on the island, and the few settlements mapped there all apparently being ruined, perhaps), and amphibious Mountain Krakenfolk in the mesa plateau itself. Adding in some transparent deep-sea creatures - Ghost Sharks, Ghost Jellyfish shoals, Ghost Squid and Ghost Giant Octopodes, all flying in air as if swimming in the sea - with some genuine undead ghosts, and suddenly the place was starting to get crowded! After which I decided it needed something a bit more scary still, so added in some Lovecraftian Giant Flying Polyps, which of course are also more or less transparently invisible, as well as hugely inimical to other living things.
When it came to mapping the Mesa, that orange square is about 30 miles per side, and I knew I needed a top-down mapping style so as not to lose too much information on what was supposed to be where. Sketching out some early thoughts, based almost entirely on that single symbol at first, and adding in a series of random features and creatures (using the various sources I've mentioned in previous of these mapping topics), pointed me towards styles that would have hatched contour line markers of some kind. Ultimately, I went with a style I've used before, the Fantasy Realms pack from Annual 26. I did consider the very recently-updated version, but needed the original's hatching options for giving the appearance of flat-topped and stepped hills better. Which brings us to:
As the right-hand side key panel mentions, the number-labelled sites are detailed in the accompanying PDF and TXT map notes, alongside notes on what the creatures are (the Krakenfolk Goblins are simply the local Goblin-folk; the locals know what they mean by the names, and there aren't many tourists passing through here!).
And if anyone objects to the missing apostrophe in the "Krakens Plain" label here, I have to tell you, it looked far worse when there was an apostrophe out in the middle of nowhere all on its own! "Text along a curve" is great, but unforgiving sometimes...
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Character Artist_Orc warlord
You can use any assets you have in Character Artist just as you can in any CC3+ drawing, although none of the background symbols used here come with CA3. Not everything will work well necessarily, as some symbols won't enlarge sufficiently without pixelating too much, although it never hurts to experiment.
I did something like this with one of my Community Atlas portraits some time back - Gallery image link for Queen Mica. There, the Queen figure is CA3, the "giant" ants are old vector CA symbols, and the hilltop castle is from Mike Schley overland. Add in some colour "washes" and fading glow effects around the figure as required, and maybe some shadows to help separate the back arm from the body, and the front arm from the body as well, etc. (although I didn't use shadows with Queen Mica; it got a little complicated because she can also appear with a human head instead in the drawing!).