I've been toying with the idea of creating a subterranean dwarven city, and to test some approaches, I decided to revisit my village of Arbor Hollow to map our floorplans of some of the dwarven homes. When it's ready, I will submit it for the Atlas in a separate thread.

This set up maps will be limited to DD3 plus two annuals: Volume 15 from 2021 (primarily Darklands City and Marine Dungeons) and Volume 16 from 2022 (Creepy Crypts and Forest Trail). It's built on a Creepy Crypts foundation with extra fills and symbols from the others.

Open to naming suggestions instead of "Dwarven Townhouses."

Arbor Hollow was designed for the village maps as part of the 1,000 Map Contest. I did Summer, Autumn, Winter, and Spring versions of the map -- all are in the Atlas but only summer was submitted for the contest. It's a village at the outskirts of a dwarven kingdom. I thought the village would have a mix of dwarves and humans living there. You'll notice in the map below that there are towers embedded in the rocky hillside. My thought was that these are the entrances to dwarven homes carved inside the mountain.

This will be six towers marked in the section in yellow of this map:

I thought these would be like townhouses, where each home has a private entrance, and each home has interior stairs to get to the upper levels of the home, but it's like a condominium complex with common areas behind the homes.

Here's a first pass at the ground floor level. I have not put in doors or furniture yet, so this is just the general layout of ground floor rooms.

Of the six towers in this map, five lead to private homes but the sixth -- third from the left -- opens to a passageway leading to the communal areas in the back (allowing for other villagers to use those facilities). On this floor, those facilities include two wells, a chamber with three geothermally-heated pools, a room that will have a cold-plunge pool, and dry and steam saunas. The common area also has a great staircase heading up, which will lead to other community features like a botanical fungi garden.

Each private home uses slightly different tilework to make it easier to visually see them separately. The ground floors will have rooms like dining rooms and kitchens. Each home also has an internal staircase that will lead to bedrooms on upper floors. And of course, each home has a back door leading to the common areas of the complex.

Revisiting this old Greco-Roman temple, one of my early maps.

A friend of mine is GMing a campaign that I am not in (he and I are also players in another campaign). My friend's campaign is Greco-Roman flavored, so when I mentioned this map, he was interested in using it for his campaign. I'm dusting it off, fixing the gardens, and adding crypts that he really wanted.

Above

At the time I designed this, I only had a handful of annuals. I used Marine Dungeons for this with a little bit of Forest Trail and Darklands City. My botanical gardens were a weird mix of styles, including some of Mike Schley's stuff that's really beautiful but doesn't mesh with the more magic realism style of the rest of this map.

Now, though, I have all of the annuals. I ripped out the flower beds and replanted using trees and bushes from the Japanese Temple annual.

The temple always had stairs going down, but I never actually designed what they lead to. Now I have.

Underground

This is the "show everything" version of the underground map, including removing the lids from the sarcophagi and showing the secret areas that are on the GM's map.

This has a sacristy where the priests can change into their vestments, and a common area where they can assemble, practice their sermons, and get into formation before the religious ceremonies.

This map shows where municipal pipes bring water in for the fountain and the aquagarden (the gardens have a pool with coral and sea anemones). It has a "Purification Chamber" -- I imagine that's used for acolytes to do some sort of ritual purification before they are ordained. There are three libraries: the Muniment Room, where records like births, baptisms, and marriages are stored; the Scriptorum, where scribes transcribe and make copies of books and other records; and the Archives.

Much of this underground area is dedicated to the dead. The Putridarium is the chamber where bodies are cleaned up before burial. The Shrouding Chamber (a term I invented because I couldn't find a better one) is where the deceased are dressed in the attire they will be buried in. And the Chapel of Rest is where they lie in state before being entombed.

Then there are the crypts. There are a few gated tombs but the rest are open niches, with some vacancies in the northwestern area. On the eastern side, there are three circular columbaria, where urns with the ashes of the cremated are maintained.

This version of the map shows that there are secret doors connecting the Water Garden Maintenance Room with the Archives. Could be used for all sorts of things: a crime lord's hideaway, perhaps, or a ritual chamber for an illegal cult. A passageway heading south is caved in. It's just there to give the GM options. It could be easily cleared away to provide access to another underground area, or an escape route out of town. Or it could be permanently closed off if the GM doesn't have a need for it.

Half of my co-workers (scattered around the U.S. and the world) are either snowed-in or have temporarily left their homes for safer weather conditions. Meanwhile, here in San Francisco, it's a not unpleasant 58 degrees Fahrenheit (14.4 C).

But cold weather is on my mind, and it inspired me to create ruins with the Ice Cave annual. This is the ruins of a dwarven temple that has been overcome by the weather, perhaps magically conjured. (Elsa, are you there?) All of the entrance staircases have been snowed-in. Although the rest of the temple remains snow-free, the walls have turned to ice, and icy frost creeps along the floor from the edges of the walls. Even the geothermal baths in the southeast corner have turned to ice.

(I originally had the entrance to those baths coming from the east, but the cutout ended up looking distractingly like a copyright symbol.)

The ten sarcophagi in the crypts have their lids pushed aside, and their contents are empty. Not so coincidentally, there are also ten skeletons in the antechamber of the Great Tomb -- perhaps rising to defend the remains of whomever lies in rest there?

On the northern side, a break in a wall leads to icy caverns and a cluster of large crystals, swirling with magic. Perhaps the source of this icy disturbance?

Procrastinating on something else, so decided to do a little mapping instead. A quiet, peaceful stroll around the lake in winter.

Act I

Act II

Careful out there, looks like the ice may not be so solid...

Act III

Uh oh.....

Welcome, Jeff!

I was in a similar boat with a more truncated timeline. Bought everything except the annuals in 2017, but tried and failed to teach myself through the PDF manuals. Finally around 2023, I decided to peek at some of the video tutorials, and that’s what worked for me.

You can check them out here: