Dyson, over at Dyson's Dodecahedron is running a
small contest to finish a map he began and fill in the empty areas. Now Dyson's technique has become something of the standard for hand drawn dungeon maps in the past few years, but what makes his maps great is the way they are constructed with a great deal of verticality, looping and extra entrances - so they're not just well drawn, they're well designed.
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| Lost Copper Isle |
Anyhow, I figured I'd draw up a Dyson style map for his contest. I have tried to make the vertical element important and use it as a way of splitting up nearby areas while offering hints of thier existence. I've also tried to use a fair amount of water both as obstacles and to maintain the maps nautical flavor.
The map turned into some sort of fantasy version of
El Fraile Island, a sea fort carved out of a rock outcropping. Now the way I figure it the fort is relatively new and recently occupied by pirates who made a few improvements before being driven off. Prior to that the whole island (let's call it "lost copper island" was some of temple complex or ritual site for a sea deity and its best if it's some kind of icky Cthulhu style sea deity I think. The abandoned pirate fort fills only a third of the space with set of sea caves, a flooded shrine and perhaps some crypts filling out the island. There's even a little cave for a creepy old hermit in a battered coracle who might be able to impress upon characters the danger or potential glory of the island.
The Livid Fens are several thousand square miles of bogland
South of Denethix along the River Effulent, between the Southern Certopsian
Plains and the Sea. They are a strange place, shrouded in mists and lashed by
scorching sun, seemingly without season. Teaming with life, the vegetation of
the fens is unlike anywhere else, universally shades of red and purple, the Fen’s
flora tastes of burning iron and grows in shapes that look profoundly alien
even to the jaundiced eyes of the Fallen Age.
Fecundity brings wealth, and the fens have made many fortunes animal
products (especially the bones, blubber and meat of the enormous Froghemoth),
herbs, drugs, medicines and gems. The
Fens also contain thousands of tiny channels, innumerable islands and countless
wrecks and ruins which draw adventurers, fugitives and hermits. ... (Table Follows)
My Anomalous Subsurface Environment game continues on G+, and the adventurers have finally figured out some of the basic mysteries of the first level beneath Mt. Rendon. It's been a few months of game time though and the little mold farming hamlet of Chemfoldshire is growing into a boom town a rowdy boom town from the fortune hunters flocking to Mt. Rendon's various entrances. Below is a table of traveling merchants, some of whom have flocked to Chemfoldshire (though I've changed the details in my own game). This isn't perhaps the most useful of tables - but with all the OSR competitions going on right now I'm trying to work on some things for Dyson, Tenkar and the One Page Dungeon contest.
Palace of the Silver Princess, B3, was first published in 1981 and written by Jean Wells and later revised by Tom Moldvay. Apparently when first published the module had less of a story and was more of a ruined castle to plunder with more fill in the blank style encounters. There was also something about replacing some naughty art work, but I doubt anyone really knows or should care about the whole story. Palace of the Silver Princess was designed as an introductory module, rather like Keep on the Borderlands, but rather than Gygax’s three pages of advice, the author chose to make the first three or four rooms into a 'choose your own adventure' of sorts that takes up a solid chunk of the module that doesn't give especially useful advice. Palace of the Silver Princess does not seem to be a well-loved module, and it is fraught with problems, but it's not completely lacking merit.