Into the Underdark with HellHound

[HellHound]

Nope, never did a stalagtite lair. Although I considered it for a scene once, my underdark campaign ended before we got that far along.

[pyrandon]

Awesome, Hound! Keep 'em coming! Thank you x 10!

[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!