The Lost Mines of Odo Ironheart

[Immolate]

Working diligently on my campaign world, Ember, and I wanted a map of extensive dwarven mines that would convey a sense of hopeless complexity. I found a lovely map of actual mines that I used as my model. The idea is that they characters are using an ancient dwarven tunnel system to move from point A to point B (Galton's Ferry to Gammeldine) and they stumble upon an old corpse that has a map. The map is old and discolored but still intact. If one of the characters is a dwarf or speaks the language, they will be able to read the inscriptions just fine. If not, the map will be difficult to make use of.

One of the features of this map is an area called "Mines of Odo Ironheart", which are a legendary (among the dwarves) lost mine. Dwarves are masters at creating secret passages and even they have a difficult time finding them if they don't know where to look. The dwarves of Gammeldine became too soft and civilized, and were eventually chased out of some of the deeper delves. Ironheart's mine was sealed by it's sentinels before they were killed, but the barriers did not prevent a nasty demon from entering the mines. All who were left inside were slain, and the demon took up residence

In Photoshop, if you select multiple text layers (control-click and/or shift-click the layers) you can apply text properties to all layers at once. This allowed me to create a dwarven version of my map with runic labels, and then easily convert it to one with English labels.

The map has a nice aged-paper background, a folded paper template color-burned on top and used as a displacement map.