Since the Bundle of
Holding is offering a great deal for the Ptolus setting for the
next few days, this seems like a good time to post something I’ve been
working on, but am not going to do much more with: a revision/hack of
one of the dungeons within that setting.
For reasons explained in more detail in the documents below, I was a bit unsatisfied with this location. I was also intrigued by Justin Alexander’s article on using design ideas from the dungeons designed by Jennell Jaquays to make dungeons more interesting. I was also keen on messing with isometric maps in Adobe Illustrator.
As with all DivNull Seeds, this is work isn’t entirely finished, but is in a decent enough state to be used. Feel free to pick up where I left off, but please share the results with everyone. With most seeds, I’ve posted things I’ve learned along the way, but this one, I kept a log of progress on the Cartographer’s Guild which contains most of the stuff I want to remember. That forum thread also lists the goals of this project.
I targeted legal-sized paper for most of these maps, as it is the largest paper most home printers in the US can easily use. I also tried to set up the battlemaps to use as little paper as possible, with locations rendered separately. In play, I would tend to only put the parts of the map the characters could see on the table at any given time.
I also decided to try to make a couple of poster sized maps (the large centerpiece location, for example, is a 24″×36″ poster), and used on-line print services (Vivyx printing in this case) to make hard copies. This worked pretty well, though uploading could be a challenge (had to resort to downsampled PNG files in one case).
The upshot of these last two points is that you might need to
experiment to print these things.
The files for this are pretty large, so please download and read the
first one before deciding if you want to download the rest. It is a
guide that tells you about the location and what I’ve done with the
place. If you’d like the Adobe Illustrator and InDesign sources for
these documents, drop me a line here and I can get them to you.
- goth-gulgamel-hack.pdf (<1MB): A guide to the location
- goth-gulgamel-hack-iso.pdf (89MB): An isometric overview of the whole location
- goth-gulgamel-hack-outer.pdf (16MB): Battlemaps of the outermost rooms, distributed on legal sized pages.
- goth-gulgamel-hack-core.pdf (296MB): Battlemap poster of central location.
- goth-gulgamel-hack-inner.pdf (48MB): Battlemaps of the outermost rooms, distributed on legal sized pages (not quite as developed as the outer rooms)
- goth-gulgamel-hack-pngs.zip (158MB): PNG versions of these maps, with some poster sized locations not shown in the PDFs.
Thanks to Monte Cook for allowing me to make use of his intellectual property, yet again.