Some Maps

Here's a few maps I've been drawing. No keys are included at the moment. The Sunken Temple is almost fully keyed, but I am unsure about when I will get to play it, so I am sitting on it for now. The rest is just me experimenting and trying my hand at drawing some maps. I hope to be able to put together my own sweet-ass megadungeon one of these days.

I've also not done anything to modify the images. They would probably have scanned better if I'd inked them, but I want to be able to make changes to them, so I'm not inking them. Someone probably knows some good ways to modify them in GIMP or something to make them look nicer, but that is not my area of expertise. That being said, if you know of any good tutorials for taking pencil maps and editing them to make them look a bit more awesome, please share the link!

Sunken Temple - Levels 1, 2, & 3

The first one here is levels 1 through 3 of The Sunken Temple - an ancient pyramid half submerged in the middle of a swamp. The first two levels are ripped directly from B4 The Lost City, while the third level is a nearly exact copy of a map from Paratime Design's awesome collection of maps.

Sunken Temple - Level 4

This is the bottom level of The Sunken Temple. It is another from Paratime that I basically just redrew to get a feel for drawing these things.

The Sentient Dungeon

Now we finally get to the stuff that I didn't just copy. This is an idea I got from reading Fritz Leiber's The Jewels in the Forest (an amazing read by the way). None of it is populated, but I had a basic idea that room 20 had a pool of tar upon which were floating several very large jewels, which basically compose the brain of this dungeon complex. If disturbed, that room would sort of come to life and burst out of the ground with the adventurers inside, and start bashing itself around against the ground. I think it's a neat idea, but I haven't figured out how the party might be able to escape such a thing before being crushed to death.

First stab at a "megadungeon level"

Next is my first try at drawing what I thought a megadungeon level might look like. Not sure I'll ever use it. As Jeff pointed out yesterday, this sort of thing just might be unnecessarily complex and a bitch to map. The LBBs encourage making your dungeons a bitch to map, but I'm not so sure about how that works out in practice. I think I'd just be happy if a player agreed to map, and so I'd make it easier on him/her.

A mini-mega-dungeon level

And here's the last one I whipped up. It has a cell block, an entrance to some caves which are no doubt really bad for the health of the adventurers, and an annoyance dead-end trap up at the top. I was thinking a portcullis plus a gelatinous cube might work well up there. Also, not sure what goes in the south, but those statues will definitely come to life, and the secret room will hold some amazing treasures.

Let me know what you think. If you see any rookie mistakes I made, I'd be happy to be made aware of them.