Friday, June 7, 2013

Old Blue - Dungeon Maps Are Always Good

I haven't posted much about maps in a while, because I haven't had much time to do any drawing. May is crazy with family obligations, but now that we're into June, I have some spare cycles to devote to cartography. I've been working on some classic blue maps lately. Here are a few samples.




 The first map is a bunch of corridors with a central temple/shrine chamber. There are two altars, a bunch of statues in the halls and one in the main chamber, plus a secret passage to the west. I'm still working out how I want to show secret doors. Since the eventual goal is to make these useful to Roll20 / Maptool users, having a secret door indicator that's tucked away in the wall seems like a good idea. The GM can use a single map and use Fog of War to hide the marker. I'm still debating how to do this though.


Next up is a hallway with a chasm cutting across it. As you can see the chasm extends beneath the walls and into the adjacent room. I'm fairly happy with how this looks.


Last up, a corner room with a bunch of niches in the wall, a circular pool, and an altar. I'm not 100% happy with the water. I like the general look, but I think the colors are a little off when viewed against the classic blue background. I've also been toying with using color variation to pop the doors from the background a bit, but haven't really liked the results yet.

All these maps are done on a five-foot grid and the water treatment isn't exactly classic, but overall, I think they're a fairly close match to the traditional style. What do you think?

2 comments:

  1. I love that style. The chasm looks especially cool.

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  2. Thanks! I kind of like blue maps, but I'm always torn on how much detail to put in. When I was doing mega-dungeon construction I always worked at 10' per square scale, which limits the detail you can actually draw. With digital format and 5' per square scale it's easier to add detail, but then you're stuck with what's drawn.

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