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 – the dungeon from the classic module “B1 In Search of the Unknown”.

ReQuasqueton (with grid)

So I went with it and stole a few elements from the classic map, and tried to compress the whole In Search of the Unknown experience into a single small dungeon map instead of a massive sprawling complex – complete with one-way secret doors, alcoves along the entry corridor, the kitchen and dining rooms, throne room, garden, storage space, pools, and a lower level of natural caverns.

ReQuasqueton (no grid)

Originally I drew the core of this map for the Exquisite Corpse Dungeon 2 project, and then added the additional material to make it into a fully self-contained map once I scanned the section being used for the Exquisite Corpse.  I’ll post the exquisite corpse slice when the Exquisite Corpse Dungeon 2 is finished and on display.

This map is made available to you under a free license for personal or commercial use thanks to the awesome supporters of my Patreon Campaign. Over 300 awesome patrons have come together to fund the site and these maps, making them free for your use.

Because of the incredible generosity of my patrons, I’m able to make this map free for commercial use also. Each month while funding is over the $300 mark, each map that achieves the $300+ funding level will be released under this free commercial license. You can use, reuse, remix and/or modify the maps that are being published under the commercial license on a royalty-free basis as long as they include attribution (“Cartography by Dyson Logos” or “Maps by Dyson Logos”). For those that want/need a Creative Commons license, it would look something like this:

Cartography by Dyson Logos is licensed
under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

(And of course, I would love to see what you use it in!)

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 underground headquarters, neither of which was really completed before his death.

Sir James’ Decoy Headquarters

This particular structure was not only incomplete, but Sir James never used it as its designer intended, instead using it as a decoy base. Construction was never completed and the front entrance to the structure (at the lower middle of the page) was collapsed to prevent it falling into enemy hands.

To enter the structure now, one has to come in through the ceiling of a chamber that was undermined during construction and subsequently collapsed (drawn as the hole in the upper-right quadrant of the map). The hole is a fairly recent entryway, and little of the underlying structure has been looted or explored.

Sir James’ Decoy Headquarters (no grid)

The structure was evidently meant to be significantly larger when completed, but the vagaries of war and the the role it got pushed into as a decoy kept it from being properly expanded before it was buried.

This map is made available to you under a free license for personal or commercial use thanks to the awesome supporters of my Patreon Campaign. Over 300 awesome patrons have come together to fund the site and these maps, making them free for your use.

Because of the incredible generosity of my patrons, I’m able to make this map free for commercial use also. Each month while funding is over the $300 mark, each map that achieves the $300+ funding level will be released under this free commercial license. You can use, reuse, remix and/or modify the maps that are being published under the commercial license on a royalty-free basis as long as they include attribution (“Cartography by Dyson Logos” or “Maps by Dyson Logos”). For those that want/need a Creative Commons license, it would look something like this:

Cartography by Dyson Logos is licensed
under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

(And of course, I would love to see what you use it in!)

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 beginning of July and sat in the console of the truck for a few months before I finally brought them inside and started messing around with them.

Dungeon Architect at Work

Each card is two sided and each side has a discrete dungeon section (a room or corridor) linked by doors to other sections, and a list of 12 “trappings” for the section. Like any other random dungeon generator, it requires a bit of twisting, bending and personal adjudication (and just removing a number of the exits from many of the sections) to transition from a set of cards to a final dungeon. It does provide a fairly quick system to put together a dungeon on the fly when lacking for inspiration, and the fact that you can customize your deck ahead of time (flipping cards in the deck so specific room shapes are up, removing others completely, etc) means you have some control over the final design…

Anyways, here’s how the first dungeon drawn using these cards came out:

The Architect’s Dungeon

The end result is a very solid, grid-based dungeon full of little loops and interconnections and only a single actual chokepoint where you could cut the dungeon in half by securing a single door.

I’ll be honest, it FEELS like what I expect from a Dungeons & Dragons dungeon.

The Architect’s Dungeon (no grid)

On the other hand, it is a little big for a random dungeon. Generally speaking when I want a big dungeon, I’ll pull out one of my collection of big dungeons (I have a folder full of them… which should come as no surprise to anyone). So my next attempt with the Dungeon Architect Cards will be a smaller structure to see how it turns out with less room for all these interconnections to manifest.

This map is made available to you under a free license for personal or commercial use thanks to the awesome supporters of my Patreon Campaign. Over 300 awesome patrons have come together to fund the site and these maps, making them free for your use.

Because of the incredible generosity of my patrons, I’m able to make this map free for commercial use also. Each month while funding is over the $300 mark, each map that achieves the $300+ funding level will be released under this free commercial license. You can use, reuse, remix and/or modify the maps that are being published under the commercial license on a royalty-free basis as long as they include attribution (“Cartography by Dyson Logos” or “Maps by Dyson Logos”). For those that want/need a Creative Commons license, it would look something like this:

Cartography by Dyson Logos is licensed
under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

This is another map drawn using the Dungeon Architect Cards as the baseline for the design and structure.

But I wanted it smaller than the last map, and since I had a new pad of isometric paper that I haven’t tried yet (from squarehex), I combined the two ideas together into one great tasting dungeon. Less than a dozen rooms make this a perfectly sized dungeon level for an evening of play (or two if you use a system with particularly long combats and decide to sprinkle multiple groups of enemies through the level).

DAC Isometric Dungeon

The isometric design really POPS in this one – a combination of the hand-drawn grid and the lightly drawn and non-overlapping walls. I’m quite proud of the whole thing. It also manages to have a bit more character than the larger Dungeon Architect Card map – a combination of the ability to draw in more character at this scale and the limited size of the structure.

This map is made available to you under a free license for personal or commercial use thanks to the awesome supporters of my Patreon Campaign. Over 300 awesome patrons have come together to fund the site and these maps, making them free for your use.

Because of the incredible generosity of my patrons, I’m able to make this map free for commercial use also. Each month while funding is over the $300 mark, each map that achieves the $300+ funding level will be released under this free commercial license. You can use, reuse, remix and/or modify the maps that are being published under the commercial license on a royalty-free basis as long as they include attribution (“Cartography by Dyson Logos” or “Maps by Dyson Logos”). For those that want/need a Creative Commons license, it would look something like this:

Cartography by Dyson Logos is licensed
under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

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 converted into a set of crypts with a pair of preparatory rooms above and a small shrine in the largest cave, with several more crypts along the walls of the shrine (where the bodies of the high priests are said to be laid).

Crypt of the Child-Kings (with grid)

The crypts have lain quiet and abandoned for years. As Jens Larsen posits:

Were the child kings really… children…? Human children? Of was that just the closest, non-disturbing epithet that their subjects could think of? And why so many tombs? How many were there of these child kings? Was it a long line of rulers that were buried as they passed away? Or do the signs that they all died at the same time speak the truth? Were they in fact an eternal group of rulers that met with a sudden challenge they could not overcome?

Sickness.

A curse.

Invasion.

Retribution.

Maybe the answer lies within.

Maybe it should just stay that way.

Crypt of the Child-Kings (no grid)

An old man still watches over the lower caves from the preparatory chambers near the entrance, but everyone knows he is too frightened to descend any further than those two chambers. According to his tales (all second-hand from people at the tavern) no one ever descends the ancient stairs into the cavern, and yet he hears noises from below on a regular basis.

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 kind of thing that makes little sense from a construction point of view, but produces epic vistas for running battles and exploration.

The Giants’ Halls (map 1)

In all there will be four maps in this set. I just finished the second one a few days ago and it will go live in November, probably along with the third. When all four are done and posted I’ll probably retroactively go in and make them all commercially licensed maps.

Years of playing “old school” means that I think in 10′ squares, making the major halls 30 and 40 feet wide, but they can also still be used with a 5′ grid, still making them quite large for halls and bringing the size of the rooms and side passages down. But that would also conflict with the idea of this being a massive underground structure of giants.

The Giants’ Halls (no grid)

I’m particularly enamoured with the secret passages on this map that go around the edges and underneath various areas.

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 aimed at Gregg Scott, head of Microarmor at the time).

The Coot’s Egg (with grid)

An insanely large egg lies underground here, partially exposed by a small underground river and further excavations by parties unknown.

Some like to think it was a dragon’s egg. But the scale makes that unlikely at best – what dragon could lay a 140 foot long egg? Even guesses about the tarrasque’s reproductive cycle get caught up by the size of this shell.

The Coot’s Egg (no grid)

Of course, the point is pretty much moot now, because unknown forces have cracked the egg and consumed whatever was within.

But there are strange things afoot in the nearest village, and the six-eyed sage of the Amber Hills claims that the egg was the embryo of a god. And whoever ate it might have left enough yolk behind for some of the children to have found it and played with it or even eaten it…

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 was me trying to throw him off his game, but he worked through it and produced a really cool little map.

But it wasn’t really a joke, as I was in the middle of my own version of said map and was curious how he would interpret the name compared to my version (because his mapping style is quite similar to mine and I really do like it).

Rhinoceros Containment Caves of the Iron Overlord

The Iron Overlord (a sorcerer of some power who is never seen outside of his full plate armour) maintains this hillside structure where the rhinoceroses are experimented upon with the goal of producing a breed of brutal war rhinos. Most of the time the place is fairly quiet, observing the four rhinos in their two enclosures. But sometimes the rhinos are magically tranquilized and carried up the sloping corridor to the lab. The room adjoining the lab to the east is also twelve feet above the lab, allowing the Iron Overlord and any guests to oversee the work being done to the rhinos without getting their hands bloody.

Rhinoceros Containment Caves of the Iron Overlord (no grid)

The whole facility lies just outside of whatever city the Iron Overlord is based out of. Most of those who work here live on the outskirts of town and walk here to work (cleaning and feeding staff) while the surgeon who does the major work lives in the offices behind the viewing room.

I drew the map of Cinder Crag in 2008, after having used it in a campaign in 2001 and then went on to use it again in two different campaigns in 2009. Then I posted it to the blog in 2011 along with the backstory from it’s use in the 2009 campaigns: Ember Crag – A Recurring Volcanic Dungeon

And I got to break it out again tonight as the party went looking for the token of the god of the Bullywugs in my 5e campaign that is currently running through the classic 1981 module “Dwellers of the Forbidden City” (with a few sidequests and locations).

I gave them a treasure map last game and they went on their way to area G where the token and a great magical weapon were waiting for them. Normally as they cross around the main caldera I have a fire giant lob boulders at parties from the platform D. With 5e, the fire giant was a pretty serious threat to a party of 3 level 5-6 characters, so I kept the range at 100′, so the fire giant’s boulders would be thrown with disadvantage.

First toss? Double 20s. Squished the warlock for 58 damage with a single hit.

After some panicking, heavy spell use (it’s an all caster party – SithLock, Holy Sorcerer, and Bard), they got through, killed the salamander in complex G to get the magic spear, triggered the traps in the room marked G to get the token of the bullywug’s god (a huge pearl 18 inches across), and then found themselves basically trapped because the angry fire giant was blocking the path they had taken to get in. They ended up in F negotiating safe with a Xorn for passage through the Azer domain of B.

Then they got back to the Bullywugs (shadowed by mongrelmen) where King Kroad was all excited that they could present the token to their god itself. He had himself and the party painted up in ritual paints and jewelry and headed to the lagoon where the god showed up just at sunset…

A massive dragon uncoiling from the lagoon.

“Fuckers STOLE my egg?!!”

Cut. Roll initiative next session. :)

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 operations known as Scart’s Hall.

A hundred and fifty feet beneath the meandering tunnels and chambers of the Hall are more warrens that were also converted into storage and barracks… and a descent into even deeper recesses under the earth.

Scart’s Descent (with grid)

Like Scart’s Hall, the tunnels and chambers of the Descent are damp and confusing, but the temperature here is stable – unchanging from summer to winter. A stream of warm air constantly flows up from the lowest parts of the Descent, and while the door to the final section of the descent is always guarded against encroachment from below, it is made of a stout iron grating instead of being a solid door in order to keep the air flowing.

Scart’s Descent (no grid)

Beneath the Descent there are unknown caverns and extended passages that the goblins who were here before would not enter. Scart and his companions explored the first few miles of these over the years as the hall was completed, but their experience only indicates that the depths continue on for untold miles and contain strange creatures and unexplained magical phenomenon.

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 – the dungeon from the classic module “B1 In Search of the Unknown”.

ReQuasqueton (with grid)

So I went with it and stole a few elements from the classic map, and tried to compress the whole In Search of the Unknown experience into a single small dungeon map instead of a massive sprawling complex – complete with one-way secret doors, alcoves along the entry corridor, the kitchen and dining rooms, throne room, garden, storage space, pools, and a lower level of natural caverns.

ReQuasqueton (no grid)

Originally I drew the core of this map for the Exquisite Corpse Dungeon 2 project, and then added the additional material to make it into a fully self-contained map once I scanned the section being used for the Exquisite Corpse.  I’ll post the exquisite corpse slice when the Exquisite Corpse Dungeon 2 is finished and on display.

This map is made available to you under a free license for personal or commercial use thanks to the awesome supporters of my Patreon Campaign. Over 300 awesome patrons have come together to fund the site and these maps, making them free for your use.

Because of the incredible generosity of my patrons, I’m able to make this map free for commercial use also. Each month while funding is over the $300 mark, each map that achieves the $300+ funding level will be released under this free commercial license. You can use, reuse, remix and/or modify the maps that are being published under the commercial license on a royalty-free basis as long as they include attribution (“Cartography by Dyson Logos” or “Maps by Dyson Logos”). For those that want/need a Creative Commons license, it would look something like this:

Cartography by Dyson Logos is licensed
under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

(And of course, I would love to see what you use it in!)

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 underground headquarters, neither of which was really completed before his death.

Sir James’ Decoy Headquarters

This particular structure was not only incomplete, but Sir James never used it as its designer intended, instead using it as a decoy base. Construction was never completed and the front entrance to the structure (at the lower middle of the page) was collapsed to prevent it falling into enemy hands.

To enter the structure now, one has to come in through the ceiling of a chamber that was undermined during construction and subsequently collapsed (drawn as the hole in the upper-right quadrant of the map). The hole is a fairly recent entryway, and little of the underlying structure has been looted or explored.

Sir James’ Decoy Headquarters (no grid)

The structure was evidently meant to be significantly larger when completed, but the vagaries of war and the the role it got pushed into as a decoy kept it from being properly expanded before it was buried.

This map is made available to you under a free license for personal or commercial use thanks to the awesome supporters of my Patreon Campaign. Over 300 awesome patrons have come together to fund the site and these maps, making them free for your use.

Because of the incredible generosity of my patrons, I’m able to make this map free for commercial use also. Each month while funding is over the $300 mark, each map that achieves the $300+ funding level will be released under this free commercial license. You can use, reuse, remix and/or modify the maps that are being published under the commercial license on a royalty-free basis as long as they include attribution (“Cartography by Dyson Logos” or “Maps by Dyson Logos”). For those that want/need a Creative Commons license, it would look something like this:

Cartography by Dyson Logos is licensed
under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

(And of course, I would love to see what you use it in!)

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 beginning of July and sat in the console of the truck for a few months before I finally brought them inside and started messing around with them.

Dungeon Architect at Work

Each card is two sided and each side has a discrete dungeon section (a room or corridor) linked by doors to other sections, and a list of 12 “trappings” for the section. Like any other random dungeon generator, it requires a bit of twisting, bending and personal adjudication (and just removing a number of the exits from many of the sections) to transition from a set of cards to a final dungeon. It does provide a fairly quick system to put together a dungeon on the fly when lacking for inspiration, and the fact that you can customize your deck ahead of time (flipping cards in the deck so specific room shapes are up, removing others completely, etc) means you have some control over the final design…

Anyways, here’s how the first dungeon drawn using these cards came out:

The Architect’s Dungeon

The end result is a very solid, grid-based dungeon full of little loops and interconnections and only a single actual chokepoint where you could cut the dungeon in half by securing a single door.

I’ll be honest, it FEELS like what I expect from a Dungeons & Dragons dungeon.

The Architect’s Dungeon (no grid)

On the other hand, it is a little big for a random dungeon. Generally speaking when I want a big dungeon, I’ll pull out one of my collection of big dungeons (I have a folder full of them… which should come as no surprise to anyone). So my next attempt with the Dungeon Architect Cards will be a smaller structure to see how it turns out with less room for all these interconnections to manifest.

This map is made available to you under a free license for personal or commercial use thanks to the awesome supporters of my Patreon Campaign. Over 300 awesome patrons have come together to fund the site and these maps, making them free for your use.

Because of the incredible generosity of my patrons, I’m able to make this map free for commercial use also. Each month while funding is over the $300 mark, each map that achieves the $300+ funding level will be released under this free commercial license. You can use, reuse, remix and/or modify the maps that are being published under the commercial license on a royalty-free basis as long as they include attribution (“Cartography by Dyson Logos” or “Maps by Dyson Logos”). For those that want/need a Creative Commons license, it would look something like this:

Cartography by Dyson Logos is licensed
under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

This is another map drawn using the Dungeon Architect Cards as the baseline for the design and structure.

But I wanted it smaller than the last map, and since I had a new pad of isometric paper that I haven’t tried yet (from squarehex), I combined the two ideas together into one great tasting dungeon. Less than a dozen rooms make this a perfectly sized dungeon level for an evening of play (or two if you use a system with particularly long combats and decide to sprinkle multiple groups of enemies through the level).

DAC Isometric Dungeon

The isometric design really POPS in this one – a combination of the hand-drawn grid and the lightly drawn and non-overlapping walls. I’m quite proud of the whole thing. It also manages to have a bit more character than the larger Dungeon Architect Card map – a combination of the ability to draw in more character at this scale and the limited size of the structure.

This map is made available to you under a free license for personal or commercial use thanks to the awesome supporters of my Patreon Campaign. Over 300 awesome patrons have come together to fund the site and these maps, making them free for your use.

Because of the incredible generosity of my patrons, I’m able to make this map free for commercial use also. Each month while funding is over the $300 mark, each map that achieves the $300+ funding level will be released under this free commercial license. You can use, reuse, remix and/or modify the maps that are being published under the commercial license on a royalty-free basis as long as they include attribution (“Cartography by Dyson Logos” or “Maps by Dyson Logos”). For those that want/need a Creative Commons license, it would look something like this:

Cartography by Dyson Logos is licensed
under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

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 converted into a set of crypts with a pair of preparatory rooms above and a small shrine in the largest cave, with several more crypts along the walls of the shrine (where the bodies of the high priests are said to be laid).

Crypt of the Child-Kings (with grid)

The crypts have lain quiet and abandoned for years. As Jens Larsen posits:

Were the child kings really… children…? Human children? Of was that just the closest, non-disturbing epithet that their subjects could think of? And why so many tombs? How many were there of these child kings? Was it a long line of rulers that were buried as they passed away? Or do the signs that they all died at the same time speak the truth? Were they in fact an eternal group of rulers that met with a sudden challenge they could not overcome?

Sickness.

A curse.

Invasion.

Retribution.

Maybe the answer lies within.

Maybe it should just stay that way.

Crypt of the Child-Kings (no grid)

An old man still watches over the lower caves from the preparatory chambers near the entrance, but everyone knows he is too frightened to descend any further than those two chambers. According to his tales (all second-hand from people at the tavern) no one ever descends the ancient stairs into the cavern, and yet he hears noises from below on a regular basis.

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 kind of thing that makes little sense from a construction point of view, but produces epic vistas for running battles and exploration.

The Giants’ Halls (map 1)

In all there will be four maps in this set. I just finished the second one a few days ago and it will go live in November, probably along with the third. When all four are done and posted I’ll probably retroactively go in and make them all commercially licensed maps.

Years of playing “old school” means that I think in 10′ squares, making the major halls 30 and 40 feet wide, but they can also still be used with a 5′ grid, still making them quite large for halls and bringing the size of the rooms and side passages down. But that would also conflict with the idea of this being a massive underground structure of giants.

The Giants’ Halls (no grid)

I’m particularly enamoured with the secret passages on this map that go around the edges and underneath various areas.

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 aimed at Gregg Scott, head of Microarmor at the time).

The Coot’s Egg (with grid)

An insanely large egg lies underground here, partially exposed by a small underground river and further excavations by parties unknown.

Some like to think it was a dragon’s egg. But the scale makes that unlikely at best – what dragon could lay a 140 foot long egg? Even guesses about the tarrasque’s reproductive cycle get caught up by the size of this shell.

The Coot’s Egg (no grid)

Of course, the point is pretty much moot now, because unknown forces have cracked the egg and consumed whatever was within.

But there are strange things afoot in the nearest village, and the six-eyed sage of the Amber Hills claims that the egg was the embryo of a god. And whoever ate it might have left enough yolk behind for some of the children to have found it and played with it or even eaten it…

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 was me trying to throw him off his game, but he worked through it and produced a really cool little map.

But it wasn’t really a joke, as I was in the middle of my own version of said map and was curious how he would interpret the name compared to my version (because his mapping style is quite similar to mine and I really do like it).

Rhinoceros Containment Caves of the Iron Overlord

The Iron Overlord (a sorcerer of some power who is never seen outside of his full plate armour) maintains this hillside structure where the rhinoceroses are experimented upon with the goal of producing a breed of brutal war rhinos. Most of the time the place is fairly quiet, observing the four rhinos in their two enclosures. But sometimes the rhinos are magically tranquilized and carried up the sloping corridor to the lab. The room adjoining the lab to the east is also twelve feet above the lab, allowing the Iron Overlord and any guests to oversee the work being done to the rhinos without getting their hands bloody.

Rhinoceros Containment Caves of the Iron Overlord (no grid)

The whole facility lies just outside of whatever city the Iron Overlord is based out of. Most of those who work here live on the outskirts of town and walk here to work (cleaning and feeding staff) while the surgeon who does the major work lives in the offices behind the viewing room.

I drew the map of Cinder Crag in 2008, after having used it in a campaign in 2001 and then went on to use it again in two different campaigns in 2009. Then I posted it to the blog in 2011 along with the backstory from it’s use in the 2009 campaigns: Ember Crag – A Recurring Volcanic Dungeon

And I got to break it out again tonight as the party went looking for the token of the god of the Bullywugs in my 5e campaign that is currently running through the classic 1981 module “Dwellers of the Forbidden City” (with a few sidequests and locations).

I gave them a treasure map last game and they went on their way to area G where the token and a great magical weapon were waiting for them. Normally as they cross around the main caldera I have a fire giant lob boulders at parties from the platform D. With 5e, the fire giant was a pretty serious threat to a party of 3 level 5-6 characters, so I kept the range at 100′, so the fire giant’s boulders would be thrown with disadvantage.

First toss? Double 20s. Squished the warlock for 58 damage with a single hit.

After some panicking, heavy spell use (it’s an all caster party – SithLock, Holy Sorcerer, and Bard), they got through, killed the salamander in complex G to get the magic spear, triggered the traps in the room marked G to get the token of the bullywug’s god (a huge pearl 18 inches across), and then found themselves basically trapped because the angry fire giant was blocking the path they had taken to get in. They ended up in F negotiating safe with a Xorn for passage through the Azer domain of B.

Then they got back to the Bullywugs (shadowed by mongrelmen) where King Kroad was all excited that they could present the token to their god itself. He had himself and the party painted up in ritual paints and jewelry and headed to the lagoon where the god showed up just at sunset…

A massive dragon uncoiling from the lagoon.

“Fuckers STOLE my egg?!!”

Cut. Roll initiative next session. :)

The first of the dwarven earthships to come to this world failed to breach the surface and its engines failed somewhere beneath the Plains of Harr – now the Harr Badlands after centuries of war between the Kale and the armies of men.

After the fighting was over, dwarven engineers sealed off the ancient ship, but only after bringing the ship’s mind up from the depths and building a small temple or memorial for it. The ship’s mind still resides in the great hall of the First Breach, offering advice to those who would seek it out.

Unfortunately, it is most definitely insane.

The First Breach

Now the door to the Breach is locked and the dwarven caretakers have departed with their kin in the working Earthships deep underground to travel between the worlds and hopefully find their way home.

The Breach in turn has been breached again by others – subhuman creatures who listen to the mad whispers of the ship’s mind and have dug down along the old paths the dwarves sealed… perhaps as deep as the ruined earthship itself?

The great stairs down to the hall where the mind holds court curls around a massive statue of the dwarven captain who lead the ship here and who died in the wars thereafter. The smaller statue down the hall is a representation of his daughter, the engineer of the lost earthship, who rescued the ship’s mind from the crushed remains.

The First Breach (no grid)

I drew this map after a discussion with one of my players who had recently picked up a Canson brand pad to draw maps on based on my own promotions of said graph paper as some of the best I’ve ever drawn on. I realized that I hadn’t drawn on either of my Canson pads in almost a year and broke out the 4 square per inch pad to draw ANYTHING on it again and revel in the soft quality bond paper that doesn’t bleed at all from my microns.

This map is made available to you under a free license for personal or commercial use thanks to the awesome supporters of my Patreon Campaign. Over 300 awesome patrons have come together to fund the site and these maps, making them free for your use.

Because of the incredible generosity of my patrons, I’m able to make this map free for commercial use also. Each month while funding is over the $300 mark, each map that achieves the $300+ funding level will be released under this free commercial license. You can use, reuse, remix and/or modify the maps that are being published under the commercial license on a royalty-free basis as long as they include attribution (“Cartography by Dyson Logos” or “Maps by Dyson Logos”). For those that want/need a Creative Commons license, it would look something like this:

Cartography by Dyson Logos is licensed
under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.