The Vault of Sages, Silverymoon

The Vault of Sages

Part of my Waterdeep game involved the PCs taking a jaunt over to Silverymoon to engage in some crazy Emergency Research Action!

Descriptions of the Vault note that it is "horse-shoe" shaped. Though the map of Silverymoon has a spot marked with the Vault on it, it is a very generous thing indeed to say that the shape they use for it there is that of a horse shoe.

So, what the heck - I'd already kind of fallen in love with the mental layout I had of a massive library/sage-mall in that shape, I went ahead and went with the inspiration over the map.

It is notable that in spite of this freaking place being five stories tall, it also has just as many subterranean levels of vaults beneath it, which are, obviously, not shown here.

Blank Continent 2: Electric Boogaloo!

Here's another blank continent map for you folks.

This is the continent I put together to act as home for my Liminal State game, a D&D 4e game.

Wide open plains in the middle of the continent, bookended by big-ass mountain ranges north and south, and a sprinkling of forests around the periphery.

If you're interested in seeing what I did with it for my own home game, check out the Continent of Rinhony here.

Enjoy!

The Tavern of the Flagon Dragon (Waterdeep)

The Tavern of the Flagon Dragon

Just a quick update here.

Part of very nearly any urban D&D game is going to be the ubiquitous drinking establishment, and my Waterdeep game is no different.




This is a map of the Tavern of the Flagon Dragon, located very near Blackstaff Tower, and so features occasionally in my Waterdeep game.

This map makes a great "generic" tavern, with the basic taproom set-up on the ground floor, and the upstairs space devoted to living quarters for the innkeep & his family (and a couple of the staff).

Enjoy!

The Crawling Spider (Waterdeep Tavern)

The Crawling Spider

Alright. This will probably be the last one for the weekend.

Another tavern of interest/note, the Crawling Spider is actually originally from Volo's Guide to Waterdeep. It describes a weird sort of tavern that is a mocked-up subterranean location frequented by dwarves, (half-)orcs, gnomes and priests from all over the city, in an environment that can best be described as a drow cosplay bar, with sexy wait-staff who dress up in masks and black silk bodysuits to bring some Drow Realness to your evening.

The cellars have a central dance-floor (which includes a "private dancer" situation with the faux-drow waitstaff), which then divides off into a variety of small "caverns" where you and your date - or you and the comely private dancer you've hired - can wonder off for a bit of private entertainment.

Cartographer's Guild (Resource)

One of the best resources I've found in my map-making is the Cartographers' Guild, a great website of map-making enthusiasts of all levels of skill.

Their forums are filled with all kinds of great resources and finished maps, but the real prize is the Tutorials forum. You can find all manner of great step-by-step info on how to use various graphics programs (notably Photoshop and GIMP) to make all kinds of different maps.

The one I use for my own landmasses is the Saderan Tutorial, by the user Tear on the forums. It's really spectacular.

Enjoy!

The Castles of Estalia (Resource)

One of the things I very rarely create anymore are layouts of castles. There's one simple reason for that, honest: the Castles of Estalia. A while back, I found this awesome site with like...a million different styles of castle. Altogether tremendously useful, and I have actively mined that site for it's great maps ever since.

Check it out here!

Blank Continent Map!

Here's a blank continent map, ready to have names, cities and nation boundaries added for your gaming use.

I originally created this map for my partner Chillos' D&D game. He had some specific design elements that he wanted included, most notably a near-impassible mountain range that cut the continent in half.

Enjoy!

The Silversley House

First Floor

Second Floor

 This is a map of a manor-house I created for my D&D 4th Edition game, Liminal State. It is set in Liminal, a massive metropolis that has several neighborhoods that are "imbricate" - the local term for a district of the city that is part of both Liminal and another extraplanar city.

The Silversley House is one of many large manor-houses in the city. While most of them are owned by the various nobility of the nations across the continent, the Silversley House is owned by a city-state called Astrapola, which is governed by a magocracy of astrologers. Though Astrapola doesn't have a formal embassy in Liminal, it maintains the Silversley House as a place for its important citizens who visit the city.

The First Floor basically consists of a lot of public areas used for entertaining by its various residents, as well as some servant domiciles.

The Second Floor boasts the massive library (filled with various emphemeris references and other similar tomes used by astrologers, as well as historical texts), and four sets of suites.

Tower, Third & Fourth Floor

The Tower has a variety of studies that are made available to visiting dignitaries, astrologers and other persons of importance to use as offices while they are in Liminal, and a rooftop stellarium, including all the mechanisms one might employ to read the stars.

Finally, the Cellars include the wine cellars and household pantry, as well as a set of vaults made available for the storage of items of value or other importance by notable visitors, as well as the Astrapolan-style bathhouse (Astrapola has a very Turkish feel to it, and many important social interactions tend to happen in one of the many great baths of that city-state).

Cellars

Blackstaff Tower (Waterdeep Wizard Tower)

Blackstaff Tower

I'm currently running a Waterdeep game, using the D&D Next rule-set. It's been an absurd amount of fun to date, ranging from delving about in the muck, filth and monsters of Undermountain, to attending high-falutin' wine-tasting parties among the nobles.

The PCs are playing apprentices and other household folk associated with Khelben "Blackstaff" Arunsun, so I needed to put together a map of his tower. There was one originally in the module FRE3 Waterdeep, for D&D 2nd Edition, so I used that as a basis.

I also added some detail to the grounds and the like.

Inaugural Post

I've been gaming for twenty-seven years now, and I can still remember opening the Big Red Box. I was a poor kid, and it wasn't the sort of thing we could afford. My mom had a job cleaning condos on South Padre Island, though, and after the Spring Break rush, she found the Big Red Box left in a drawer in one of the condos by some college kids. It had a dragon and a dude-with-sword on the cover, so my mom figured I'd be interested in it, whatever it was. :)

Boy, she had no idea.

I was fascinated by everything in that box: the booklets, the dice, character sheets. I read everything in it in exacting detail, and started to figure out what actually playing this game would be like. Then, I found the maps.

After that point, I was hooked. I didn't just want to play this game to create a character and fight monsters. I wanted to be the one with graph paper, who made those cool maps, by God. The first five years of playing D&D, I was the one who DMed it, and I loved the world-building.

Today, I work in the gaming industry, as a freelance writer and game designer. My love of the written word has blossomed into professional work, but I've never abandoned by love of maps. I don't have the artistic eye or training to make maps and the like professionally, but I still make them for my home games to this day. Only instead of a ruler, sharp pencil and pad of graph paper, I tend to use Photoshop. But the craft is the same for me, and I really love working on it.

So that's the purpose of this blog, really. It's a place to post the maps I work on, and might even host some of my thoughts on gaming-related stuff.

Many thanks to the incredible Terry Pratchett, whose quote in the title banner of this blog provided the name for this page, because it's so, so true.