I have been reading (and re-reading) a lot of pulp fantasy of late. Not just Lovecraft and Howard, but Clark Ashton Smith and Lord Dunsany. The reading has inspired me to run a ‘dungeon crawl’ fantasy campaign based on the works of HPL, Lord Dunsany, Clark Ashton Smith and others. The world the campaign would take place in would be a version of Lovecraft’s Dreamlands with a heavy dose of Smith’s Hyperborea and Zothique, as well as Dunsany’s “worlds” (I named the world after Dunsany’s Pegana). Where appropriate I’ve added my own elements and place names. I’m certainly not the first one to do this. Chaosium’s version of HPL’s Dreamlands has some Clark Ashton Smith while the artist Jason Thompson created a Dreamlands map with elements and place names from both Smith and Dunsany. However, I found Chaosium’s version of the Dreamlands too sparse and the map created by Jason Thompsan – while excellent – was too abstract for gaming. I wanted to map a world that I thought my players would want to game in, a world both different and familiar.

The map below is what I’ve come up with. The map is done is Photoshop and I used a number of different graphic elements:

  1. The forests and certain symbols are from brushes created by StarRaven, which can be found at this link: (Sketchy Cartography Brushes by StarRaven on deviantART)
  2. Banners and other images are stock art by Outland Arts. Some artwork copyright William McAusland, used with permission.
  3. Certain images are clip art in the public domain.
  4. Other images were drawn by yours truly and scanned in.


Please let me know what you think of the map. Are their items I should add? Are there graphic elements you would change?

Thanks,

-Steve
(visit my blog, The Lonely DM, for more discussion on Pegana)

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