Dwimmermount is the mighty megadungeon penned by James Maliszewski and published (after a trail of long-ago events) by Autarch. It has a total of 13 levels (and several sublevels) that were mapped for the finished product by master cartographer Tim Hartin of Paratime Design.
I love enjoy Tim’s maps, but there are times where I just want to take up a piece of digital work and see how it turns out under my pens instead. So… last month I sat down and redrew level 1 of Dwimmermount 1:1 from the original design (with a couple of tiny modification) in my style and it came out looking like this:
Dwimmermount – Level 1
I like it… but it is a redraw instead of a remake. So what happens when I try to “Dysonize” it? I sat down for a day with pencils and remapped the dungeon level how I would have drawn it – with more z-axis changes, some odder-shaped rooms (I’m big on weird shapes as you’ve probably noticed) and bigger rooms where I could wrangle them into the map, all while avoiding the temptation to actually change any real layout. Every room is still accessed via the same routings and rooms it was accessed in the original map, but some have switched sides of the corridor, and there’s a lot more going on with the z-axis.
Dyson’s Dwimmermount – Level 1
And there’s the remake. The structure remains mostly identifiable, with the circular chambers increasing in size and the rooms around them now “molding” to fit them. Also, a lot more stairs. Because I love the z-axis. It does get a little too crowded for my taste in the portion just below and to the left of the central chamber, but I think that has its own benefits, keeping the level from feeling the same throughout.
This is definitely more of an “extreme” dungeon makeover, and I really like it. I think I’ll go on and redraw the two different level 2 sublevels next.
