Thanks guys

@PWKerns: It's all digitally hand drawn at this stage, I use an Intuos4 tablet (A3 size) and just lay down some rough sketches in Photoshop with a 1" grid laid down (the finals, which I'll release for sale in the new year when I start selling my maps, will be a 100dpi 1"x1" sq map).

As I do run a game, and have played DM for quite a few years now, a battlemap type design is more than just laying down some rooms and then connecting them with corridors. Anyone can make a battlemap, but it takes a lot of thought to make a fun and exciting map where each room serves a purpose or has some challenge or major feature. That's what, at this stage, has taken the most amount of time to work out... what goes where. Some of the rooms are collapsed in and only accessible from other areas, so the entire place is one big maze on its own, which is fun to explore for would-be adventurers, stumbling on a room you didn't expect to find is always great. Add in trying to combine the needs of my players and trying to meet the Cart Challenge criteria... it's a lot of drawing, cutting and pasting, erasing and head scratching.

Drawing the different levels I had to make sure they connected, give various routes around the tower (I'm not a fan of static maps where there is only one way through the place) and make each room important. If a room is unimportant then don't have it in. I actually originally had the bells (with puzzle) in an upper floor, but realised I didn't want another combat encounter so it made sense to put them on the main starting floors map. Then I move rooms around, work out what has happened in this place (which walls have collapsed in and how that has effected adjacent rooms, lower rooms ie. in the staircase areas where a wall has collapsed it has spilled a mudslide down the stairs and filled the lower room as well, thus blocking access). The whole area, for me, has to tell its own story... I put a LOT of thought into the actual design, not just the drawing

I'm currently working filling in the final ink, starting with the walls (they will take a looooooong time) in the style used from my Monastery of Tyrs map with the partial brickwork around every wall. I've developed my own technique to do this a lot quicker than simply hand drawing every brick would be, so it's a shortcut method that really seems to be working. WIP of that process coming soon At this stage I'm just hoping I can finish the damn thing before the deadline (I'll still carry it on if not as I need it for my group anyway ) time is not necessarily on my side this close to Christmas!