Heading back to Artemisia from Lizard Isle in Alarius, this time I was aiming for somewhere in Statrippe, the southernmost sliver of the continent:

When I started a closer examination of this area for a suitable site for this latest map, there was an immediate complication, because the northern half of this area has been mapped twice in the Atlas, once on the Statrippe map, and once as part of a much larger map to its north covering the Dworaguz Ranges. To avoid the problem that a map can be linked to only one parent map in the Atlas, and as Statrippe was the map already identified here, this did rather restrict the options somewhat to a site in the southernmost sliver of the sliver that is Statrippe!

Luckily, there was an intriguing small island off the south coast, labelled as "Castle Peris (Ruins)", item 13 on the map here:

With no additional information about the isle available, its size, about 14 miles by 8 (22 km by 13), felt like a convenient area to map complete, and then drill-down to add the dungeon layout. Castle Peris was thus already suggesting scope for how to proceed 😉.

My initial thought for the isle's castle ruins was to reuse an ancient map of my own, a castle wrecked in a figure wargame 46 years ago for the specific purpose of creating an RPG setting. Of course, I then couldn't find the original hand-drawn map... Instead, I thought to source an alternative from one of the two - roughly as old - Judges Guild "Castle" books. I have though used quite a few of those layouts previously, and after a few duplicated random rolls, chanced-upon a handily-ruined castle with a neighbouring settlement, also partly ruined, in the second of those volumes.

The map layout for the dungeon was already decided from the Inkwell Dungeonmorph Dice designs, which just left the isle itself, a base image for which was quickly generated from the Statrippe map, with a grid to place random features set over it.

Rather than use random tables to fill-out the various points of interest, this time I'd decided well in advance to go with the latest set of card prompts produced by The Story Engine, their Loremaster's Deck and its Loremastery Expansion, cards designed especially to help create RPG settings. These have only just been published this year. The concept is pretty straightforward, in that you draw random cards from various sub-sets within the main deck, and choose suitable prompts, called "cues", from what's on each one. There are instructions to assist, but of course, you're free to adapt as you see fit, given their purpose is to help spark-off your own creativity - maybe in directions you might not otherwise have gone.

To give an idea of what this all means in practice, this is the spread I generated for the isle's general features:

As you can see, there are cues on all four edges of each card, and each is also double-sided, but with more descriptive concepts on the white-coloured reverse. You simply pick which one (or ones) you prefer, and run from there. I chose the Location card with "Isle" on, because obviously, it's an island I'm designing, but the rest were all randomly drawn.

So now we have a name for it, "Isle of the Full Moon". It's filled with the sounds of songbirds. It has extensive subterranean features, and requires guides to get to, as well as being the hiding place for a chieftain of some kind.

To find out more, I delved into what the songbirds might be:

Here, I've fitted the Songbird Creature card with a Focus Sleeve, to help remind me what it is I'm examining further. The birds are gleaming, they use echolocation or specialised vision, they're not simple physical animals, and there's a notable subspecies at a Watchtower. So now we have a new island feature with this watchtower (which might be part of the ruined castle still at this stage), as well as more details on these magical birds. Intrigued, what of the Watchtower?

That little yellow 3D wooden arrow comes with the card deck, and helps identify what's from where, when creating complex card webs, incidentally. Now we know this is the Watchtower of the Sea. It has a spiralling form, has been overtaken by plants or fungi of some kind, is located in a cave or grotto, and there's a hidden Talisman in it somewhere. On down the rabbit-hole...

Those little wooden arrows come in different colours as well! So we've now an ardent Talisman with navigational powers, that can also bend luck or fate, and which is buried with a mapmaker in - where else? - the tower. And that's where I stopped for this card-chase, because by this point, my own ideas had begun to spiral like the Watchtower. But I still needed to check what the Chieftain was:

I doubt I need to walk you through how to read the card spreads by now, but this character was starting to feel less like a "classic" chieftain, and more like the leader of a group of sages or scholars, who'd made a mistake in the past, and exiled himself to the isle to try to find a solution ("he" was just randomly rolled for).

There was a lot more of this card-design process subsequently, for all the features of the isle, with developments, adaptations and changes in what was already done as things went along, and further ideas were sparked. It was a particularly rich process using the cards, rather more so than can be the case with only random tables sometimes. Without going into too many details, as there will be a full set of notes in the final Atlas version, these are some of the more important elements.

The isle became formally called Selenos, which is a loose ancient Greek-ish version of "Isle of the Full Moon", in-keeping with the main cultures of Artemisia. Despite being in the tropics (it's at about 16°N), I decided it could be oddly temperate at times, opting for it being where a cold current from the Frigid Ocean to the north sweeps down the east coast of Artemisia, then turns west, meeting a warm current from the Doriant Ocean to the southwest, helping to create frequent mists and fogs, hiding the isle, and making the extensive offshore reefs, shoals and sandbanks severe hazards for navigators. Thus only expert local sailors stand any chance of sighting the isle, let alone landing on it safely, as many wrecks in the waters nearby confirm.

The isle has alternative names, including The Hidden Isle, and The Isle of the Lost and Broken. The latter comes from it being the home and rebirth-place of the goddess Eunike Lysistratedoros, aka Gaiane, or more commonly The Twisted Torchbearer, whose domain is misplaced, broken and imperfect things. She may have created Selenos as her home. Tales hold the isle can be found only on nights when the White Moon is full, with the waxing and waning Moon reflecting the goddess' cyclical nature, periodically dying and being reborn here.

Fairly naturally, the songbirds became Moon Birds, which fill the air with strange, haunting music all across the island and the seas around, and which look like flamboyant, colourful Birds of Paradise. Plus they're magical creatures made from solidified moonlight, able to see equally well by day or night, and see the invisible too. Some say the isle is home to Sirens, because of the birdsong.

Aside from the Greekier personal names being derived randomly from tables in the Hyperborea RPG, everything else came from, or was inspired by, the cards.

And so, finally, to the map! I wanted to try to use a connected style-group again, as with the Snakeden Swamp maps on Lizard Isle, and chose the Jon Roberts Overland style here (and the Dungeon one for the later maps).

Ordinarily for a map of this size and scale, I might have tried to make the coastline more varied. However, as the isle's so little-known and under-explored, I'd already decided to keep it fairly close to the lines of the original from the Statrippe map. Plus as I wanted to use the edge striping coastal effects option available in this style - for the shoals, reefs, etc., offshore - a more complex coastline can sometimes make those look a bit too messy, so the cleaner lines overall looked better to my eye. As you might expect by this point, the names don't always mean quite what you might think!

There is also an alternative version of the map, with an eventual Atlas toggle, because there's a curious magnetic effect centred on the offshore - actually undersea - Pole of Confusion, which deflects lodestones and compass needles within about five miles (8 km), as shown on this view:

More to follow!

As I mentioned last time, this little trio of maps all grew up together, and not altogether in the neat order presented here. Realising early on that the underground complex was set to have a pair of entrances, reminded me that one of the still-to-come dice-design maps also had a couple of cave mouths in a cliff. Although that was from one of the "Ruins" dice, those designs also feature on the "Cities" dice set, die 6R from that (6R* in the Ruins set), without the ruined buildings, fallen trees, and so forth. So rather than use the Shadowdark settlement design rules to create the settlement, I simply reused that Cities dice layout, with a few tweaks, instead, to create Seer's Hall Village:

The mapping style was chosen a while ago for the ten small settlements in the Whispering Wastes of Peredur, which was reused here, with a variant design for the roads and paths, to give them their rough stone-edged, gravelly look, as distinct from the ice and snow elsewhere (one advantage of a B&W style!). I made the chimneys more prominent, given the high-southerly latitude, and adjusted the property sizes a little, as the inhabitants here are primarily Ice Dwarfs, a cold-immune, stocky folk, able to change into small animals and back when they wish (based on the Dverg from the Cursed Scroll #3 zine, writ larger, given the Dvergs are essentially arctic gnomes). In addition, the folk here also have pet Arctic Mastiffs, for a little more colour (cold-immune dogs, basically).

Part of the Village contents were determined from the Shadowdark rules, as before in Peredur, with some tweaks to fit the established setting here, given the whole place is only where it is because of the Hall of the Seer inside the large ice hill to the settlement's north. That cliff-line, with its entrances and stairway, and the two pylons on the hilltop were all from the dice design, like the placement of the buildings and the road layout, again with some adjustments to fit how the road was on the Plain map, as illustrated previously. Indeed, this map was changed partway through to accommodate elements of what the Plain map showed, including the Ley Line.

I tried fitting the existing cliff symbols from this style for the Great Ice Cliff, but ran into the same problem with these as previously in Peredur, where the lines won't fit to a suitable concave form. So I just drew the cliff as a polygon - well, actually two lines, mirror-copied to give a symmetrical four, and then added a shaded polygon by hand-tracing the lines. Dot-shading gravel symbols and fractal lines were then added to give it more of a "cliff" feel. The cave mouth was mirror-copied too, to look more or less identical, while the stairs reused a symbol and railing lines already drawn for the underground map, just copied across from that. The hilltop platform was an addition though, to give some purpose for the pylons and stairs, a place where the locals hold ceremonies at midwinter, midsummer, first sunrise, last sunset, and whenever the aurora is particularly strong overhead. Ceremony Hall has the feasting tables for such events, to be set up at the northern end of Pylon Way.

Next time, into Seer's Hill.

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...

Map four of my ten small settlements is Toresk Village:

I've updated my WIP topic with this map today too, and there's a higher-res version in my Gallery as well. The FCW and PDF notes follow:

Map two in my group of small settlements is for Bruga's Hold in Hex 403:

I've updated the notes in my WIP topic about this set as well, and there's a larger version of the map in my Gallery too. Meanwhile, the FCW file and PDF notes are here:

So at last, everything's ready, and has now been submitted to the Atlas. This is the final version of the Evth Pass map (higher res version in my Gallery):

Quite a journey from those three rolled dice that began it all!

Next time, the deities of randomness seem to be dictating a return to Peredur, in its northeastern part, somewhere in the Godtagel area, apparently...

The basis behind the Inkwell Ideas setting that I wanted to reuse here was as a sort-of druidic experimental station, a series of caves magically enhanced to allow the growing of normal surface food crops underground, protected from conditions outside, and defended by a group of willingly-summoned elementals. This seemed very suitable for this area, with its short summers and long winters, and although not illustrated specifically on the map, the notes for the area indicate there are a lot of other small caves across the Petroc Hills, which might also be used in future, if the experiment here works. It's all being done in secret for now though, in case something goes wrong, hence the defences. I tweaked a few items, added one or two more, and decided, partly based on the general layout, that it had originally been one of the old Hill Dwarf mines of the district. It's often amazing how much just seems to come together from a couple of initial thoughts in this way. I even contemplated having it be set-up just for growing grain crops for a different flavour of whisky at one point, but decided against that eventually. If they can grow the food underground, that'll leave more field space for cereal crops to make whisky outdoors, after all!

As indicated earlier, I'd be opting for the Jon Roberts Dungeon style from Annual 54 for the mapping of the Caverns, and although I had to make use of a couple of DD3 symbols to round-out what was needed, most of what was required could be found, or repurposed, from that style alone. So to the map:

The earthy colouring worked to reinforce the whole "druidic growth" concept, and it's a style that works well in showing what's outside and inside, as having greenery, bushes and trees available. To keep the interior clear enough for GM use though, I decided against adding specific plants there, just some fungi (which are one key aspect of the Growing Cavern area), and also went with a quite strong scaling grid, as distances here can be important. I continued the grid over the water, because half of Lowest Cavern is underwater, and characters could well end up stuck there (the underwater areas including the annexe chamber beneath Upper Cavern - the dashed white lines show bits of the lower caves under Upper Cavern). Those circled "T's" in Upper Cavern are indeed rotating Dwarf-made round trapdoors, dropping down to the barred-cell cave off Middle Cavern, and into the plunge-pool off Lowest Cavern. In Growing Cavern, the four labelled statue-like features are the magical items that keep the place functioning, as explained in the map notes, and which again have vaguely elemental aspects to them.

Probably the biggest mapping challenge was constructing the steps, which did start to feel a little as if they were having to be carved from the native stone by hand for a while! Each has to be on a separate sheet to enable the effects on them to be adjusted to create the illusion of showing which are higher and lower, with the added pain of trying to hide the dark glow at the "back" edge of the top step. They're not perfect, but to my eye at least, they seem perfectly functional to show what they are on the map.

One further troublesome aspect was the abysmally slow redraw times when using the "Trace" command here, because the caves are all drawn as fractal polygons. For reasons I won't pretend to understand, the command insisted on repeatedly following the entire Caverns outline every time it was used, regardless of which way I'd told it to go, or how small an area I was trying to trace. There wasn't any choice though, as aside from needing different floor textures in places, I had to create masks to Color Key cut-out the unneeded segments of the grid, due to the way caves are drawn in this style. Worked in the end, but quick it ain't!

A useful feature of the Inkwell Delver dice set is that one of the six dice is designed to show entrances to the subterranean systems. So for the first time in this mapping project, rather than simply devising a suitable way in to the dungeon or caves separately, the first segment of this map - from the exterior through to that first long, straighter, northeast-southwest passageway in Growing Cavern - came directly from the dice design. We'll get the chance to see another of these entrances in action next time.

As for next time, a new continent beckons, the largest on Nibirum, Doriant, and a location somewhere in the Duin Elisyr region...

The reason I opted for a monochrome style for the overland map was that I'd already chosen the Annual 48 Dungeon Black & White style for the underground map. Even if technically, it's not truly underground at all, as it's set into the gigantic dolerite mesa-like rock pillar which is what's actually called "Melgore", with its entrances at surface level on the north side of the pillar, by the rocky beach leading down to the nearby River Wisper, and which extends up into the pillar a short way (a total of less than 40 feet, 12 metres, given the pillar is roughly 500 ft tall, 150 m). Thus the Necropolis map:

There are, of course, PDF and text descriptions for both maps to go into the Atlas, to provide more flavour and notes on what's where, and what's going on in both. Some of these ideas came from various random design lists, published and personal, although I also drew on inspiration from the book description available from Inkwell Ideas for the "Crypts" dice set used to create the Necropolis map, adapted and amended somewhat here.

Plus the original dice-map was amended, to remove unnecessary blind passages that didn't link together, and to stop the whole from having too much of a "geomorphic dice edge" look in places. In other sections a few new features were added - corridors or rooms extended, shortened or linked, with new doors or secret doors added as well, as my thoughts about what was here developed during the whole mapping process, much as normal.

I wasn't sure at first about leaving the wall shadows visible into the surrounding rock, although this is what the style was designed to show. However, I became quite attached to this look during the mapping, which, with the crispness of the style, gave me the impression of looking at a map set into a sheet of crystal-clear glass. I did a brief experiment with a wall mask to hide the shadows in fact, as part of the process in concealing the bits of the grid that weren't needed, but found that hid too much of the wall lines, and made the whole thing look rather flat overall.

Higher-res copies of both maps are in my Gallery as well, for those wishing them.

My intention is to keep trying out different mapping styles during this project, albeit I am inclined to attempt to retain a stylistic theme where two (or more) maps need to be nested into one, as in this case.

If all goes to plan, I'm next heading off to a continent that's eluded me till now - the tropical heat of Kumarikandam!

As mentioned, the four Palace Wings were based on a different option than the "Carapace" booklet's system, hence none of these maps have schematic drawings beside them. Each was instead based on images posted by various people on the Dwarven Forge Discord, and from layouts shown in several official company videos available on the Dwarven Forge YouTube and Twitch channels. All used items from the cast modular terrain "Burrows" pieces made by the same company.

The nature of such modular terrain items does make for more rectilinear layout patterns than those generated by "Carapace", although this would make it possible to set-up layouts on the tabletop, for those owning such Burrows pieces, that are similar to what appears in the Palace Wing layouts overall. However, alterations were made to the sizes, shapes and orientations of the tunnels and chambers at times as shown in the final maps here and in the following posts, so exact matches would not be possible.

Despite this change, the nature of each chamber in the Wings was again randomly decided using the Appendix 2 tables in "Carapace", with occasional amendments, since these offer the potential for a number of interesting variations and features.

The selected layouts were combined and chosen to loosely match the look of the outlying parts of the Palace on the Illusory Level 1 map, meaning the layouts delving deeper were placed in the western and northern Wings, representing the parts of the surface sketch where the taller buildings and towers were.

First then, the West Wing, comprising three main vertical levels:

All the Wings have just a single connection to the outside, in each case by a link back to either Level 2 or 3 of the main Palace. In this Wing, that's on Level 1 of this trio, where Tunnel W1.1 leads back down to Chamber 2.4 on the Palace's second Level. This layout was based on the extensive, multi-level "Demonic Depths" Build of the Month video from May 2020 by Dwarven Forge.

The idea is that the Wings are generally less-used than the main Palace, so few of the areas in them have suggested-use labels on the maps (albeit some additional comments are provided in the accompanying separate notes files).

Although I've already posted about this in the contest topic, to round-off this WIP topic too, here are the final versions of Cloven House, without and with its secret Cellar cave, now with added cupboard under the Cellar stairs:

For those who might be interested, and again something that's in the contest entry topic too, I've attached here the PDF notes for the map, which will be in the Atlas version in the fullness of time, for those wanting an early preview of this little haunted house:

Do be aware that there's a hint of "adults only" about a couple of the potential apparitions and other ghoulish elements in these notes. Nothing too salacious, just something to be aware of.

Incidentally, anyone thinking I might have abandoned my preference for random design mechanics in devising my Atlas maps in this instance, might be reassured that there were hints of that in selecting what ghostly items to pick from in constructing this description (I have a long list drawn from numerous past sources and ideas!). Such a mechanism was used less here than in other features I've designed previously, however.

And good luck to all the other contest entrants, especially those struggling to get things finished by the deadline!