Sept / Oct Lite Challenge: Dracula's Castle

[7Sided]

Hey guys,
I've decided to do something Halloween-related for this challenge so my entry is...Dracula's Castle! Well, one of his castles at least. My map is inspired by Poenari Castle in Romania which is reported to be the real-world location where Vlad the Impaler made his last stand against the Turks.

Here is the map of Poenari Castle that I started with.


Here is my lastest WIP. I've been working on this every morning for a little over a week. I grabbed my color scheme from the Curse of Strahd adventure. I'm hoping this will be useful for a Halloween one-shot adventure or Strahd side-quest.
### Latest WIP ###


I'd love to hear feedback and ways to improve this! Currently, I'm planning to rework the "forest" and add a border and title. After that I'll spend whatever remaining time I have adding interesting objects and architectural details.

P.S. Sorry I've been out of the forums for a month or so but I promise it was for a cartography related project! I actually was working on getting my map from the August Lite Challenge ready to sell on DriveThruRPG. It has only sold 5 copies since I posted it two weeks ago but it is still really exciting! Thanks for the great community and support here!

[Bogie]

Nice map 7Sided! This looks very interesting, Welcome to the Challenge!

[Greg]

Welcome to the challenge 7Sided! A nice atmospheric start you've got going there.

Haha, if you're up for it, you can do TWO dracula maps, so you can enter one in the main challenge as well!

[ChickPea]

Ha, yeah, you should have joined in the regular challenge!

[Robulous]

Intriguing - the front (bottom) makes sense, I assume most of the back of the castle has collapsed? Just looks a bit strange the rock area blurring into forest below, a more jaggedy edge would make more sense visually I think.

What are you using to make this?

[7Sided]

Thanks for the feedback.

Yes, robulous, the way that the "cliff" interacts with the forests below has been one of my biggest problems with figuring out how to make the geometric make sense. I feel like anytime you introduce dramatic differences between levels it's going to be tough.

I'm using Illustrator to create the architectural shapes and Photoshop to work with the textures.

I've used two or three textures from this free texture site: texturelib.com. Also, you might notice a few objects from Bogie's epic resource post (such as the three grates and a stack of barrels). Thanks for those Bogie!!!

And...that's hilarious that the second sentence in the main challenge is "something like Dracula's Castle." I obviously did not check that thread. However, I'm not sure if I technically would have qualified since I got the idea for this map when the Lite Challenge dropped several weeks ago and I've been working on the map well before the start of the month. My understanding is we aren't supposed to use pre-existing maps.

But I will DEFINITELY consider making a second map before the end of the month. (Once you get the textures and objects, you already done a lot of the hard work so it seems almost silly not too.)

Thanks again for the feedback!

[7Sided]

Here's my final map for the challenge! I think the cliff edges turned out okay, not perfect but definitely better than my first attempt. Thanks for the feedback and encouragement!

### Latest WIP ###

[Mouse]

Woooo! Veeery spooky

Love the lighting effects. Very impressive

[Bogie]

Very nice work, especially the cliffs on the north side. Would love to see a higher res version, 70 or 100 dpi, without the labels. (not for the challenge, just to download and use in my games )

[J.Edward]

Yeah, that is splendid 7
Love the destroyed floors