A fresh visit to Artemisia randomly took me off to the Lampoteuo Region in the central-southern part of that island continent:

Like much of Artemisia, this area has been mapped at a regional, and often smaller, level already, so checking the existing Lampoteuo area maps narrowed down the options for where this latest small dungeon design could go. After much deliberation, heavily influenced by what I'd determined the contents of said dungeon were to be, I finally selected a cave symbol labelled as "Hopes Lost" here:

Having finally remembered there was a book of scenario suggestions that accompanied the Trailblazer set of Dungeonmorph Dice from Inkwell Ideas, the "Dungeonmorph Book of Modular Encounters: Delver, Trailblazer, & Voyager Edition", when preparing the previous map (Ruins of Shadow Keep), I'd already made use of that here prior to settling on a location. The essentials so-determined were that the place was run by Gnomes, and that it contained a planar nexus, with attendant higher-level magic-users. I reused and amended many of the details from the Inkwell book, as it provided some interesting architectural and decorative options, besides these aspects.

One complication was that one of the three randomly-chosen dice provided an elaborate tomb. Ultimately, that was converted into quarters for the Archmage and the four leading elemental mages at the complex, while retaining much of the design's layout.

A few other amendments were made, as usual, although handily, the Trailblazer set comes with one die of entrances, making an imposing way into the complex. Along the way, I'd decided this was also going to be both a teaching place for elemental mages, and a location people could come to and pay for scrying and access to other planes.

While there are no descriptive notes for the Lampoteuo map, there are general notes for Artemisia touching on who and what is around in this region, which beyond Lampoteuo city-state (central to the second map above), comprises a number of semi-nomadic tribes. Thus a new backstory developed. The complex originally had been a cave system in some rocky hills, in which was an oracular shrine where the local tribes would gather for an annual celebration. Generations ago, a disaster occurred during one festival, killing most involved, with the few survivors left to tell only conflicting tales. All were clear the site could never again be used, as the oracle had been either destroyed, or buried too deeply.

More recently, some Rock Gnome prospectors turned-up, and found there was something magically unusual here. The Rock Gnomes were chosen as having magical and physical expertise in handling rocks, precious stones and general stonework. Gnomes aren't mentioned as major inhabitants of Artemisia, and came just from the Inkwell book's ideas, as well as making a change from the more prevalent Dwarves.

The Gnomes set-to, called-up more of their folk, and reworked/rebuilt the lost caves into the current subterranean complex, reopening the planar gate in the process. So to the map:

Much in the dice design was strongly rectilinear, so that became a distinctive feature, with straightened rock cliffs faced with granite brickwork, the spilled-over granite-brick fill around the complex hinting at how the former cave area had been reopened and restructured. The area outside then became levelled-off granite, with a great white marble stepped platform leading up to the way in.

I picked the DD3 Dungeon Digital style for the map, only to discover this was quite tricky to use, as rather than presenting the older-style vector symbols (I think from the "Filled" set of DD3 options; that's what I used, anyway), it tended to default to the normal DD3 raster ones instead. It does encourage use of the SS2 set as well, and that was heavily pressed into service. Being vector sets, there are plenty of options for all manner of objects. Dungeon Digital does use the DD3 bitmap fills too, partly why I'd picked it, because I knew there were going to be several square-tiled areas.

For the black-and-white marble in area 1 though, I drew out a series of small squares using the two marble textures, gradually combining them into larger strips to duplicate over the whole floor using the snap grid. I did try the standard chequerboard fill (in areas 2, 3, 4 and 8) with an RGB Matrix Process set to greyscale, but this looked a bit too washed-out compared to the white marble platform, black marble pool base and wall tiling of area 1. Then for the red and white check carpet in area 7, I selected a suitable red rug, enlarged it, and added a series of white, square cushions across it, as they gave a slightly textured look to the whole, more soft-carpet-like than the tile textures. A row of small rectangular white panels were added at the carpet's long ends, because the cushions didn't fit perfectly to both length and width, after a couple of quick trials.

Area 9, the Statue Room, is the planar gate. It has five 10-foot-tall statues in it, each of a different, loosely humanoid, creature from a different plane. When four of the five's "hands" are linked (their arms, only, can be moved and repositioned), this opens the gateway within the centre of their ring. The floor is decorated with a mosaic of an unknown world, as stated in the original notes, so I found a nice vector planet among the Cosmographer 3 designs that didn't have the spherical shading that so many do, and added that. The blue is intended to be lapis lazuli, the browns sardonyx. The Inkwell book provided various options for the planes involved, and I picked five that are a little unusual: Ash (a mix of Fire and Negative Energy), Dust (Earth + Negative Energy), Lightning (Air + Positive Energy), Minerals (Earth + Positive Energy), and Radiance (Fire + Positive Energy). It's also suggested in my notes for the Atlas that these may change, along with the statues, over long periods. I wanted to suggest that whatever had happened in the past to wreck the ancient oracle, was still having an unusual effect here.

The white marble southern part of the subterranean area was a design choice from the Inkwell descriptions for the original tomb there, including the wall-tiling, and it seemed to me the luminous look this gives the whole was delightfully striking. As is obvious, there are two staircases down from it, and they're weirdly located, because they're off the standard geomorphic connection points by 10 feet each. They should be where the two shallow indentations are in the adjacent walls of rooms 12 and 16. This is most unusual among the Inkwell designs, and initially caught me by surprise, as I thought I could simply rotate the design, and have this white marble area be at a lower level than the rest - except of course, the stairs don't fit to the entrances from areas 5 and 10! So that meant I needed to design a Lower Level as well. We'll come to that next time.

Yeah, it can be a real challenge to work on large, complex layouts like this, and I suspect it's easier if you're doing it for yourself, rather than someone else (even if they are paying you for it). Closest I've come using CC3+ is the Dendorlig Hall map for the Atlas, and that took me ten months to finish, so I don't think you've done too badly here!

Prior to that, I'd only done a couple of twelve-level random dungeons by hand, the more recent of which was about thirty years ago, using the original D&D DM's Guide random dungeon design mechanic. Neither of those took anything like so long (the more recent took about five months), but being younger and with fewer commitments/health issues back then, things flowed more smoothly, of course...

Hope your client's as impressed as we are!

Having established that I wanted to draw an overground map for Shadow Keep's ruins based on the underground one, I copied and pasted over into a new map the sub-surface wall lines for the Keep's Grand Entrance octagon, and those areas of the Kennels where the hanging moss skeins were shown, together with sketch-lines for where the heaviest collapsed rubble lay, blocking the stairs down into the Grand Entrance chamber, and the first part of the stairs too. That Grand Entrance became the surface ruins' Inner Keep, with a larger octagonal sketch-line for the outside wall of the Outer Keep, together with a couple of similarly sketchy gatehouses for access to both. I also added the line of the Old Road from Elkan Village, leading off the southeast map edge, based on the trail-line illustrated on the Atlas map for the Loksa Environs area (the B&W hex-map from last time).

This looked a complete mess, as sketch-maps often do at first, especially after I started cutting-up the wall-lines, showing which had completely collapsed, and which were still partly intact. I wanted the final walls to look as if they had some surviving dressed stones covering their lower parts in places, with those missing from the higher surviving stones, which I decided would be chiefly packed-rubble wall-cores. These walls were thus initially drawn as stone-fill polygons, so as to have flat sides yet ragged ends where the rest of the wall had fallen away, something simple lines can't do. A couple of higher sheets were added to the stack for numerous hand-placed rock symbols from the Mike Schley SS4 Caves options, sometimes rescaled, with more fallen rock rubble strewn liberally across the ground surface. As so often with elements like this, a degree of trial and error was involved, getting the shadow effects especially to look right, without being too overwhelming or invisible (hopefully!).

The fissures and crevices took still more trials to get right, with various attempts to use bevel options failing to achieve a suitable look, whereas a simple Edge Fade, Inner was all that was really needed, on several dark grey, angular, hand-drawn polygons! In the end, there was so much fallen rubble everywhere, I started to wonder if any of these painstaking efforts would ever be seen at all! At least I'd know they were there though 😁.

Indeed, I scaled-back the amount of rubble, especially over the stairs, since while it's all fine for the map to be accurate, it also needs to be usable for GMs, so things can't always be drawn exactly as they might genuinely appear. In a century since the event, there'd be likely a lot more vegetation covering the rubble than appears here, for instance. Thus, the final map:

As the mapping was underway, I also designed a couple of surface aspects, beyond the heavy vegetation of the Shadow Woods jungle (which was already placed as present on the earlier Atlas map). This was done again using The Tome of Adventure Design, which came up with the Flying Foxes (terrier-sized canines with prehensile forepaws, bat-like wings and sharp teeth, whose bite carries disease - they like to live in the largest jungle trees with big branches they can easily walk along) and the odd-sounding Slap Grass. Slap Grass grows in patches up to adult-human-tall, and crawls along slowly through rubbly soils using its roots. It has sword-length, wing-shaped, flattened flower heads that it uses to slap at passing creatures (attracted by sensing heat and motion from them, if large enough). This forces its seeds into the creature's skin, and if not removed quickly, once in living tissue the seeds grow rapidly through their host's body, killing the creature in a very short time. And, as the yellow-green patches on the map suggests, there's a lot of it about here!

I decided to keep the map overall fairly simple in its labelled features, and not too threatening in its contents, although GMs could always have a few Forager Elemental Wasps pass through as an additional problem for parties trying to clear enough rubble away to access the underground complex.

Looking ahead for next time, it's a return visit to Artemisia, around the south-centre of that island continent, somewhere in the Lampoteuo Region...

As mentioned last time, the next map in this sequence was heading for somewhere in the NW Doriant map, a huge part of that largest continent:

However, when I investigated further, it turned out the Malhavania peninsula there had already been mapped previously. While itself no small region, that did start to look a little more hopeful:

Checking the smallest pre-mapped part of the Malhavania one, around Loksa, clinched things, with its convenient selection of interesting potential sites available to slip-in a small, new, dungeon map:

As this final map indicates, I chose the Ruins of Shadow Keep for this site. It's probably not too obvious at this resolution, but the black-and-white area is covered by a hex-map (drawn for the Atlas by Kathorus), with six-mile hexes. I did consider mapping the whole hex, but decided against it finally, mostly because the previous map-group I'd prepared had already been so long delayed in being completed.

The dungeon design was derived this time from randomly-rolled layouts using the Inkwell Ideas Trailblazer Set of Dungeonmorph Dice, the first of the four designs prepared from this set, though I did make a few minor changes to fit better with how things developed for what the contents and purpose of this structure might be/have been ("Ruins", after all). Much of those contents were determined using random tables from the revised edition of "The Tome of Adventure Design" published by Mythmere Games. I only realised after doing so that the Trailblazer dice set actually does have accompanying notes in a separate Inkwell Ideas book! Still, there are three more designs from that set after this one, though I did take a few ideas from that book as well, notably that the original inhabitants of Shadow Keep had been Dwarves, that part of the complex had been a temple, and that another part had been kennels.

One thing the "Tome" came up with were some very weird creatures, which rapidly became the focus for why the Keep had been abandoned and ruined, the Elemental Wasps. From the notes prepared to go into the Atlas: Elemental Wasps. Horse-sized, hairy, spider-form, colonial, egg-laying outer horrors, with three spherical body parts - a small head, medium body and larger abdomen - the body segment with 8 or 10 pincer-tipped legs. Normally invisible, except during and after feeding on blood, when their forms appear pink and sharply-ridged. Attracted to small, shiny objects that they collect as nests. May become ghostly and intangible at will. They have three forms, Queen, Forager and Warrior, of which the Forager and Warrior may cocoon to transform into any other type, as the Queen requires. Cocoons and eggs are always visible.

I also provided the creatures with relevant game stats based on the "Shadowdark RPG", published by The Arcane Library, for GM's guidance. To give an idea of what these (all non-flying) Wasps get up to, these are the notes for the Queen: Elemental Wasp Queen. An almost immobile form, with a huge, egg-laying abdomen and eight tiny legs. AC 12, HP 42, ATK 1 mental burst and 1 lightning cloud or 1 blood suck (near) +3 (1d10 + blood drain), MV close, S +3, D -4, C +2, I +0, W +1, Ch -4, AL C, LV 9. Blood Drain. Extensible head proboscis can hit one target in near. Once attached, may auto-hit each round as the Queen's only attack. Queen regains 1d6 HP per successful attack round. Target may DC 12 STR to break attachment on their turn. Lightning Cloud. Fills a double-near-sized cube extending from the Queen. DC 15 DEX or all within the area take 4d8 damage (DISADV on check if wearing metal armour). Mental Burst. Fills a near-sized cube around the Queen. DC 15 CON or paralyzed 1d4 rounds. Impervious. Electricity immune. Incorporeal. In place of attacks, become corporeal or incorporeal. Invisible. Naturally invisible. After using Blood Suck attack successfully, becomes partly visible. All who can see this, DC 12 CHA or paralyzed 1d4 rounds.

The other forms all have variant powers based on these, with physical pincer attacks as well, and they're a lot more mobile, able to climb vertical surfaces and so forth. There are grubs too, but they're unable to defend themselves, and need looking after by the other mobile types till they become adults.

All of which preamble brings us to the new map:

This also has a gridded version, although the angled areas work somewhat less well with that, of course:

The mapping style here started out as the CA94 Dwarven Dungeons one, given the initial inhabitants were, after all, Dwarves. However, it soon became clear that I needed other elements as well. SS4 Dungeons of Schley and the free monthly "Schley" symbols are already intended to work with Dwarven Dungeons, so that was fine. However, I also ended-up adding items from CA209 Stairs & Steps, Sue's Creepy Crypts (CA186 + CA188) and DD3! So using the Worn Manuscript font from Perspectives 3 wasn't much of a step further...

Of course, when you start a new map with Dwarven Dungeons, the first symbol catalogue that shows up has the cave bugs in it, so while they're not very close to how I envisioned the Elemental Wasps (except maybe the maggot-grubs), I thought they'd do to hint at Things To Come for explorers here 😉.

There is much other weirdness as well. The "Tome" provides opportunities to go to town when designing features such as statues, and having had it come up with a Statue Hall (4), all the statues in it now have individual descriptions in the Atlas map notes, based on those random options, as do the individual pillars in those seven Pillar Rooms (because you can also randomly design pillars using it!). Even the glowing hanging moss across the Kennels area (13 to 25) originated in tables there. The ceiling crevices from which it has grown down from the overlying jungle (the site is at about 25°N latitude on Nibirum) were though my own thought to explain how it got to be here at all, at least. Oh, and there are poisonous little spiders in it that keep away other predators...

One more weird item discovered late in the process concerns the Dwarven Dungeons scalebar. If you peer closely at the gridded version of the map, you may be able to tell the 10-foot grid squares do not match perfectly with the 20-foot marks on the scalebar. Ordinarily, when adding a scalebar symbol, I always check it against the grid, to make sure the size is what it's supposed to be and that I haven't messed it up. Commonly, I also place the centre of the scalebar using the snap grid, as a further test. Doing that showed this scalebar didn't fit to the grid, even after testing with adjusted symbol scaling, including trying the varicolor and metric scalebar versions, in case one worked. All proved identical, however. So then I measured the separation of the marks on the bar at scale-size "1", and found the separation between individual marks came out variably between about 15 and 17 feet, with no consistency, which of course explained things. I did think of swapping-in an alternative bar, but I wanted to try to stick as much as possible with the Dwarven Dungeons style here, so have just left it, given it'll still be sufficiently correct for most uses. Something to be aware of when mapping with this style though, perhaps.

Meanwhile back at the broader-scale map, features such as those ceiling crevices in the Kennels, started me considering it probably needed a surface map as well. We'll come to that next time...

OK, maybe try this.

1) Set up a suitably-sized snap grid that'll let you draw squares of the exact size you need, and keep the snap grid turned on.

2) Draw an outline square of the size you require, with the line thickness you need it to be, using the snap grid.

3) Copy that square, and paste it immediately below the first one. Again, the snap grid is your friend.

4) Then paste another line of two squares to the right of the first two, with the half-square offset required. You may need to adjust your snap grid to allow this correctly.

5) This gives you a base of four squares in the correct pattern that you can then copy, making a larger area of squares with the necessary offset. Depending on how large an area of squares you need, once you have a larger part of the pattern available, you can simply copy said larger number of squares to speed things up. If you group the batches of squares too, that will make copying the groups easier.

6) Once you've filled the area you need with the offset squares pattern, save this as your base file that you can then open and re-save each time you want to draw a map using this offset grid.

By using the snap grid and basic commands like grouping the areas of squares, the whole process should be pretty quick to do, and hopefully fairly problem-free.

[Edited this where boldfaced, as I realised after posting that the pattern actually needs a four-square group, not a five as I originally suggested! (Otherwise you end up repeatedly overlapping the column with three squares in it.)]