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My irregular DCC game has arrived at the Castellan’s Keep, north of the settled lands… in an area that can only be described as “the borderlands”.

The Castellan's Keep

The Castellan’s Keep

Yes, this is a redraw of a map from another source, but one that I needed to do because I required more residences in the keep (and thus more citizens to mess with the PCs and for the PCs to mess with), and I wanted to upgrade the shrine (area 17) to a full-fledged temple. A temple of Law. One with a prison hole in the middle of the floor that I can use for “the Screams from Jedder’s Hole“. I also moved (and fortified) the bank, because… well… players.

Also, this redraw was a great chance to practice cliff-edges (well, I got a lot of that working on maps for Ron Edwards, actually, but I wanted to use them in one of my own maps too) as well as crenelated battlements. The crenelations in particular were inspiring to work on, they remind me of my childhood drawing massive castle maps over multiple pages of graph paper, and inspired the map I’ll be posting this Friday.

I also rebuilt some of the walls and the northern structures of the keep. I started numbering the southern locations, but left the northern ones un-numbered (because I forgot to finish the job, to be honest – I numbered the southern locations before I even drew the north half of the keep). I’ve also found some absolute awesome stuff to add twists to the Keep on the Borderlands.

Seriously, go check that link out. It’s full of great stuff that you can use to add twists to your game in one of the most classic modules of all time. The party has already run into a leper colony just outside the keep (which has a 1-in-6 chance of offering services and items the keep doesn’t… which the party immediately twisted to their own ends. “Does the keep offer half-elven prostitutes?… no? Let’s check the leper colony!” “Ooooh, does the keep have an elephant graveyard?” and so on. I’ve also grabbed another dozen items from that thread and sprinkled them around the keep, which totally changes the setting for the adventure.

There are also another two threads over on RPG.net for changing up the Keep on the Borderlands that I haven’t adopted into my version of the module, yet.

This also reminds me that when I made the effort to redraw the Caves of Chaos back in 2011, I never finished the job… Part 4 of the series would have the minotaur’s lair and the slimes… both desperately needed to finish off the collection.