Freelance adventure writing requires map-drawing, even when a real cartographer is going to come along and draw a much better map for the final release. (Thank God for real gaming cartographers.) Anyway, I drew this map for practice, to help me make cooler crappy first draft maps.
I’ve always loved side-view maps for dungeons, not least of which is because I love Metroidvanias like Hollow Knight, Salt & Sanctuary, and Ori and the Blind Forest. I’ll probably try my hand at a few top-down maps soon, but I had to get this drawn so that my brain would agree to do literally any other creative thing.
Let me know what you think, but kindly keep my very novice status in mind. I don’t expect to fully develop this dungeon – it’s more of a “maybe someday if I don’t get work for a long time.”
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Very cool. I share your novice status with mapmaking but have never actually attempted a cross-section map before. I’m going to have to try this sometime soon, it’s such a great tool for visualization and spatial relationships. Also, the names of the rooms here are quite evocative, any chance we can get the name of the product this will eventually end up in?
I’m glad you like it!
This isn’t currently for any product. I’m considering researching Creative Commons licensing and just throwing it out into the world, but if not that, I might make it a DM’s Guild adventure? The idea is that the ruby talon is an actual fragment of Sardior that made it to [world of your choice]. The core problem is that I’m a long way out from having time to pour into as big of a dungeon-crawl adventure as this would be.
Ahhh. That first sentence made me think you were drawing this for a professional cartographer to reference. That is a really cool adventure idea. The new lore about Sardior is one of the more interesting bits I’ve taken from FToD so far. My own setting is heavily influenced by 4th edition’s Living Gate and I am considering shifting my own deep lore to combine Sardior and the Gate into a single entity. I really like how that story would connect gem dragonborn and shardminds in my setting.
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