My first battlemap, a post-apocalyptic office building

[Pmumble]

Hi all,

This is my first set of maps. I’m creating them for a home-brew campaign I am running in Monte Cook Game’s "The Strange” RPG using Roll20.

If anyone has any feedback, tips, or things of that nature feel free to comment. I’m a beginner with photoshop and I don’t know how to draw (yet). I am rushing to get these maps done by Saturday before our game, but I might have more time to tidy them up after. Also, I haven’t really tacked objects yet. I don’t really have the time before the game, but I’m interested in revisiting it afterwards. There’s also the debate about that for VTT.

It’s an odd and wonderful setting. My players are in a post-apocalyptic horror recursion (virtual dimension, mcWoD specifically). There is a very bad supernatural man at the top of an old twin towered bank building and he has a whole host of thugs guarding the way. The PCs need to find him.

Basically, it’s a modern themed dungeon. The building itself has a total of 36 floors, but I figured I really only needed a few that I can reuse. I’m sweating, as I have bitten off a lot to chew. It’s really just a house game, but I’m a perfectionist and it’s really hard not to get tangental with details. I also decided not to sweat the odd shape of the buildings and just make them rectangular as it's my first map.

The building itself is modeled after a real building in downtown Minneapolis. Here is the Apple Maps 3D view that I used to present the building to the players during our game. An important note: The tall dark building is ruined, and the structures around are in some form of ruin or worse shape than they appear here. I just used it as a general guide.


The building has a ground floor and a second floor which has skyway access to nearby buildings. This is for some kind of downtown mall-like environment, probably because it’s cold out there. The two towers I will label A and B. B is the taller tower, and A has a parking garage behind it.

Both the towers extend up off of the 2nd floor. I described the towers as skeletal, especially tower B, which is technically taller, but the top levels are ruined. This of course is so I can bring the Z-axis into play for the boss fight and make it more interesting. There is also a wily mage amongst the enemy forces, and his powers call for me to make some kind of transparent overlay for an illusory pit. I hope I can manage to squeeze that in.

The PCs ended last session by grappling up to the 6th floor from a parking garage next to tower A. So they start here, in A6. They were planning on attempting to grapple over to tower B from tower A.


A6 is a shape that can be reused for any other floor if I need on the A side, and I know the PCs are aware the bad guy is in B, so I moved on.

I’ve also designed A2 and B2, which connect to each other and provide a main passage. I figured maybe it was a cafeteria or something. I forgot some bathrooms, oops. :/ I’m sure there are more things I forgot. I am struggling with not piling on details as they always lead to more like a domino effect and I have work to do.


The rest of the floors are in the B tower, which is still in heavy development. I'll post more pictures soon as I complete their first pass. Floors 17, 18, 19, and 20 are all one map, with the boss being on 20 and the PCs entering on 18.

I’m a month new to Photoshop, but I am an obsessive crash course learner with a lot of spare time on my hands right now. I took an online course, read a book, and have been blessed by having access to all the wonderful tutorials on this site. Thank you!

All the textures used were from CGTextures with the exception of the elevator shafts, which I plan on replacing when I have time to make my own with vectors or something. I just found it on google images.

If anyone finds these maps helpful please use them. I’ll update them as I work on them. The next area I plan on designing is a wizard’s tower out on a crag suspended in “The Strange”. Think space. Can’t wait to start that one.