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The Shattered Tower - Upper Levels

This… is a mighty tall tower.

Here are the 8 levels of the Shattered Tower that are above the break at level 5 of the structure. These levels float in the air above the base of the tower, slow...

The Shattered Tower - Lower Levels

One of the quickest and easiest ways to indicate weirdness to players is to have something quietly and simply defying gravity. In the case of the Shattered Tower it may not even be immediately apparen...

Rhinoceros Containment Caves of the Iron Overlord

In late September, Billy Longino asked for some mapping ideas over on google+, so I threw him a title I was working on at the time – Rhinoceros Containment Caves of the Iron Overlord. He thought it ...

The Coot's Egg

Obviously the name of this is a bit of a joke referencing the “Egg of Coot” from Arneson’s “The First Fantasy Campaign” (which some people take to be an attack on Mr Gygax, but was in fact a...

The Giants Halls (map 1)

I don’t normally spread a big map release over several months, but this one I seem to be taking my damned sweet time at. The goal is to draw up a dungeon based upon unreasonably large hallways. The ...

Crypt of the Child Kings

This is the real meat and potatoes of my fantasy games – small underground maps of caves that have been modified for human or subhuman occupation or use.

In this case, the cave has been conver...

The Architect’s Isometric Delve

This map was drawn using the Dungeon Architect Cards as the baseline for the design and structure, like the map posted on Tuesday this week.

After seeing how my Tuesday map turned out, I wanted ...

The Architect’s Dungeon

In March of this year I backed a Kickstarter for “Dungeon Architect Cards” because I was in the consideration phase for the Dyson’s Deck of Delves project. The cards arrived in the mail in the b...

Sir James' Lost Base

Sir James sought out an underground military headquarters from which he could command troops and maintain an eye on logistics but also be out of sight when needed. In the end he commissioned a pair of...

Backstage Pass - Season 2 - #9

And here we go!  Here's the maps going up on the blog for the month of October (which I have filed under Spocktober on my hard drive).

Also this month I'm working on trying to exercise my d...

More Ruins of the Forbidden City

As my D&D5e campaign continues in the titular city at the heart of of the classic 1981 module “Dwellers of the Forbidden City”, I find myself drawing out maps of more and more structures from ...

A Green and Pleasant Map

A companion piece to the Red and Pleasant Map I posted on Tuesday, this map was inspired by the gardens of Voivodja. A city block-sized chunk of city, surrounded by streams with a few bridges connecti...

A Red and Pleasant Map

I am an unashamed fan of the machinations of Jez Gordon who works as a layout and graphics god for a few small press releases every year. Among last year's masterpieces of his work we had Zak Smith's ...

Upwards into the Portal Nexus!

On Tuesday I posted the Portal Nexus – the ground floor and side view of a set of towers with no obvious ground-level entry that I picture as housing a set of portals from one place to another – a...

The Portal Nexus

Once again it is not much of a secret that I have a love for towers (and a recent love for drawing lots of circles on a piece of paper and calling it a map). For this one I wanted a set of towers with...

The Ruined Ha'Tak Temple

There’s a structure in the Forbidden City with five small pyramids poking out of the roof. It was once either a museum or a temple – definitely a place where people came to contemplate (their hist...

Dreaming Feather's Tomb

While I have many a tower map on the blog, I seem to be lacking in ziggurats and stepped pyramids – wonderful constructions that evoke ancient civilizations, mysteries, and probably hidden treasures...

The Temple of Marid Scurn

Temples, churches and religious structures tend to both be large (because they are built with the help of a whole community instead of a single person or family) and central to a lot of games (because...

ReQuasqueton

Sometimes you find inspiration in another map. Initially I started drawing this map based only on three corridors, and somewhere along the way I realized that it was starting to feel like Quasqueton -...

Backstage Pass Season 2, #8

Here they come patrons! Thanks again for supporting me in this endeavour to produce more and better maps. This month I really feel I went all-out for most of these maps - some of them took most of a w...

Scart's Descent

Introduced earlier this week, Lord Scart of the Hemron Coalition was a name-level fighter who took over a series of insanely meandering and twisting goblin warrens and converted them into his base of ...

Scart's Hall

In a departure from the norms of dungeon development (where foul goblinoids and monsters invade the subterranean works of other races), Lord Scart of the Hemron Coalition took over a series of crudely...

Redstone Shrine (with time lapse video!)

One thing with running the classic “Dwellers of the Forbidden City” module – there’s a lot of opportunity to draw up ruined and partially ruined temples and other buildings to scatter througho...

The Floridungeon

A while back someone commented on how many of my recent dungeon maps were distinctly bound by the limits of the page (that is to say, they were quite square or rectangular in overall design). So I fig...

Small and simple maps can often produce about one evening of play when you incorporate travel times, investigation and research and a few good twists and encounters once at the location in question. T...

The Ledge Tower

When it was built, it probably bore some fancy elven name that translated into “Spire that reaches from the soil to the stars” or similar nonsense, today this tower on a hard stone escarpment is m...

Backstage Pass, Season 2 #7

Oops! This was supposed to be posted before I posted Nesbitt-Hill on Tuesday!

Here is the backstage pass for August, 2015!

Nesbitt-Hill

When noted on a map, most would expect the tiny village of Nesbitt-Hill to… well… be on a hill. In fact, the land around village is uniformly flat and hill-free. The small town was built up around...

Pregello Fortress

Along the wide banks of the Onur River are a number of small fortifications dating back to various Kale city states that were once the backbone of trade and travel along the river and the badlands to ...

Tavistock Manor

Again with the compass-derived maps this month, I bring you Tavistock Manor. A three-story manor house that seems perpetually for rent on the north side of the city.

Tavistock Manor is se...