Tags
City, Doodles, Dungeons & Dragons, Fantasy, Isometric, Labyrinth Lord, Maps, Maze, OSR, RPG, Urban, Weird
I spent yesterday mapping with my isometric graphing paper that my lovely girlfriend bought me for Christmas (you’ll see why I had the pad out on Tuesday when I post the map I was working on yesterday). But in the process I drank a lot of caffeine.
Which is rough, because I pretty much cut caffeine out of my diet recently. So as night arrived, I still had the pad in front of me, and a pencil… and too much energy.
So this started to happen. Just a random collection of lines and buildings in a strictly isometric perspective, without thought as to gameability or whether it would turn into a functional map or just… something else.
And it started to grow… Sometime around 1:30 this morning I realized I had filled the page with pencil scribblings (and spent a fair chunk of time erasing and redrawing sections to prevent accidental M.C. Escher twists) and it really was time for bed.
A full letter-sized page of madness. Some strange city where law and chaos have collided into an explosion of straight lines, sharp angles, and bizarre byways.
This morning I started to ink the final piece from last night (using a Sakura Micron 03 pen) and it rapidly grew more… solid. Less sketchy… Like a solid heavy thing slowly emerging from the potential of the grid and penciled lines.
A quick hit with the eraser later, scan the mofo into Photoshop and a bit of digital editing to make it a little more apparent as to what is what and we finally get The House of Seven Larks.
The House of Seven Larks
If you manage to use this in a game, I would LOVE to hear about it!
I’m all for torturing players with complex maps, but I think my eyes are bleeding ……
I’d put it up as a piece of art, but I’m not sure I could run something with it.
Lovely though, very lovely.
I think you may have actually mapped/drawn R’lyeh! Somehow it makes me think of both Anasazi cliff dwellings and some far future buildings at the same time. Very cool!
How cool is that! >saved<
As someone mentioned before, R’lyeh, with its non-Euclidean geometry, seems to fit this map. But also it makes me think of one of the 666 layers of the Abyss – either Baphomet or Lolth might turn this into a corner of their demesnes.
This actually looks a lot like something the gnomes/dwarves in my setting would make. Saved and put into the swiftly growing reference pile.
Haha, that’s the most wonky map I’ve seen in a while! I’m impressed that you managed to turn it into something Euclidean! Not sure if I’ll be able to use it, but I’m definitely inspired!
I think this map would be great for one of those urban/rooftop chase scenes, like in James Bond, The Bourne Legacy, or Fast Five.
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That is some Erol Otus-looking craziness right there. I applaud your fortitude!