Into the Underdark with HellHound

[ravells]

Besides the beauty of the compositions and the way they are so pleasing to the eye, I love your trade-mark hatching, the line thickness variation and jitter. Am I right in thinking you draw your maps by hand, scan them and then ink them and mount them on parchment in a paint program? I'd love to hear more about your working process.

Ravs

[HellHound]

100% hand drawn with pencil (usually a 0.5mm mechanical pencil with a fairly soft lead - as soft as I can get - sometimes a 0.7mm but I don't like those as much). They are never inked, all pencil work.

Then scanned and the unnecessary gridlines are brushed over in white, and finally overlaid on a parchment design that I made in photoshop. I've got a limited number of parchment designs for these because I just haven't found the time to make more, and don't have the energy to invest in them at this time.

The parchments are a mixed bag. Some were made entirely digitally - I wrote a short tutorial on doing that on ENWorld somewhere. However the better ones are pieces of white paper that have been seriously teabagged and then scanned when they dried.

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This is a temple to some water deity or another. It has changed hands repeatedly over its existence, and is difficult to maintain because it actually has no other access to the underdark except the one access to the dark sea itself. A small underground river used to enter the dark sea from this point, and the temple was built around it, and the centrepiece of the temple is a waterfall chamber leading to a large pool. The river pours down from the centre of the ceiling of the chamber, and pours down past the observation deck on the top level, the blessing platform on the second level, and into the pool proper below, where the water is channeled into the dark sea itself.

(Hand drawn in pencil, overlaid on a digitally created parchment and digitally created wax seal)

[torstan]

Talk about timing. I'm currently gearing up for an underdark adventure based around an underground sea, so these are perfect. Thanks for posting these excellent maps.

[HellHound]

Glad they can be of use to someone.

Here's number 5 in the set - the Duhr-Ilvahn Trading & Salvage outpost is an old trading community that lies on the one main access between a drow city and the dark sea. The top of the map is the access route to the drow city, and the south is the port facility. This community has grown over centuries of trade, and the current ownership also runs a salvaging operation, keeping tabs on lost barges on the sea - their own and others.

This is another one that took a full sheet of graph paper, and has more rooms than I like in a 'dungeon' environment. Fortunately, it isn't meant to be used as a dungeon so much as a set piece for a running battle or an investigative scenario. Drawn in pencil and overlaid on digitally created parchment.

[landorl]

Nice job. Those maps provide a lot of inspiration!

[HellHound]

Number 6 in the sea-shore underdark set.

This is a quick one, but a big one on paper (full sheet map). It's a bridge over a river that feeds into the sea, the bridge top is about 50 feet above the river, so the bottom is probably about 40 feet above. There is a little guard tower on the upper ledge, 20 feet above the ledge and bridge (60 feet above the water level).

The location is nice for use in game as a way-point because it is memorable (bridge, river, guard post, long old worn down stairs to the seashore), and it acts as an intersection, with three egresses into the underdark proper from here, as well as access to the sea and to a minor shipping waterway.

I didn't like this one much when it was about 2/3 done, but now when I look at it, it's one of my faves in the set. Definitely got the feel across a lot better than the dwarven stair.

Drawn in pencil on graph paper (full letter sheet), and scanned and overlaid onto a digitally-made parchment.

[HellHound]

This one was done as a request for a friend's game -

A wizard's private sanctum in the underdark, built in water-carved tunnels near a massive underground lake. The lair itself starts with a narrow tunnel that opens into a flooded room with only stalactites and stalagmites, which can only be easily navigated with flight magic, spiderclimb, swimming, or (if you're drow) levitating and pushing yourself from stone pillar to stone pillar.

The interior of the lair has a bit of a spiral upward, with a trap door in the wizard's personal chamber that actually opens into the ceiling of the flooded entry chamber. The wizard has a trophy room for all the monsters she's killed, a sculpture room to practice stoneshaping, and a false escape in her personal chamber that will hopefully distract attention away from the trap door in the floor. The false escape leads to some sort of death trap.

I came pretty close to the description I think, and I really like this one, especially since it is only a few rooms and takes up 1/3 of a sheet of graph paper.

Drawn with pencil on graph paper, scanned and overlaid on scanned home-made parchment