Dungeons under Hettach

[Striogi]

So this is a dungeon that my players are going to be going through for... stuff.

Short version: There is an artifact at the bottom of the dungeon, a flask of material that can fix any thing... which they need, because the have to fix an artifact in their possession. Rumor has it, the flask may be near the remains of a dead god. The dungeon has history that goes back into myth - once a military installation, then a laboratory, then ruins, then the dungeons under a palace, then storage, then ruins under a ruined palace.
As such, it is the home of a colony of kobolds and mites, it is haunted by ghosts of old, and even demons and golems that are searching for this mythological flask.

These maps are all drawn, pencil on paper, then inked with a .1 and a .3 Micron. Paper is a light green engineering computation pad. It doesn't give me paper weight, but it is thin.

I'm notoriously bad at making random-feeling maps, so I used the random map generators found on http://donjon.bin.sh/ for the general layout of levels 2 and 3. I printed it out, then penciled it in on the paper, modified it to suit my needs, rewrote every encounter and nearly every chamber and here we are today.

Scanned with the general windows 7 fax/scan tool, digitally edited with GIMP.
Fun fact: when I started this dungeon, (November? October?) I was just going to be using it for me, so I did all my room and corridor labels on the map directly. Now that we're ready to play them, two of my players are moving away and I'm now using them on Roll20. which means I needed to do some significant editing. It's also why the map for levels 1 and 4 show no gridlines, I drew them on the side opposite the printed gridlines - which means that I could faintly see them fine on the paper, but not when it was scanned.

So, here they are:
Encounter map for the ruined city. This is a section of the city, ruined buildings and to the right is the town square.


Encounter map for the ruined palace.


Encounter map for levels 1 and 4 (top and bottom of the dungeon, respectively. Level 1 is a wine cellar that leads into the wine fermenting "caves" below the palace. A winch was used to bring the heavy barrels up. Level 4 is an ancient depot/kennel for biological war beasts. Only one survives to this day.


Encounter map for level 2. The secret tunnel from the wine cellar leads in on the west side of the map. The square room on the east side of the map is a 150' shaft straight down to the next level


Encounter map for level 3. Again shaft down to level 4 on the east side of the map.


(did I provide the images at too high of a resolution? I can reduce it if I ought to)

[arsheesh]

Nice! Gotta love that old-school pen and graph-paper approach to the dungeon. There's just something so satisfying about these sorts of maps. Nice hatch-work.

Cheers,
-Arsheesh

[Striogi]

Thanks Yeah.
Looking back, I think I might make standardized icons for things like doors and such that I can just paste in; I like the hand-drawn aspect, it feels good.

Still, It feels a little rough, especially since the hand-drawn maps are about 5 squares per inch, and when it gets scanned and up on the Roll20 screen, it's quite a bit bigger, so every wiggle, squiggle and waver of the pen is magnified. For example, I'm fairly annoyed with door icons that are all over the place in size and shape.

I was also thinking about making a set of pixel art mapping tiles and using that to construct my maps, but I worry that it will come out too blocky.

So I might try out that... erm... fractal mapper? Something.

I think my big problem is that I'm not satisfied with any of the options I see before me. Maybe it's because I'm not sure what I want my gaming maps to look like.

/goes back to work and beats head against wall some more

[Rautatilhi]

Nice! I really like your style on the first map as a picture and a battlemap too. Complex enough to be an exciting encounter: use different terrain types, has a lot of cover for sneaking or sniping, and it is big enough to use retreat and other tactical cherries. Well done!