I am an unashamed fan of the machinations of Jez Gordon who works as a layout and graphics god for a few small press releases every year. Among last year’s masterpieces of his work we had Zak Smith’s Red and Pleasant Land (winner of a fistfull of ENnie awards) which he laid out and added a few maps to.

Combining the inspiration from reading the book with my love of the black, white and red isometric map that Jez drew for it (if you don’t yet own a copy of this awe-inspiring book, you can see Jez’ final map that inspired me on this blog post about awesomeness from earlier this summer), I decided to finally draw the isometric map that I wanted to since forever.

The last time I drew a crazed isometric “cityscape” map, I spent a lot of effort keeping the geometry in line so it made sense. This time around I spent a little less effort on the geometry, but this time it was specifically to make sure it didn’t make sense in certain areas. There are places where a path that remains level will link to areas above it, below it, and even pass over itself.

This map was drawn on a ledger-sized sheet of isometric graph paper. A page size that it turns out doesn’t fit on my scanner… not even when cut in half. I had to scan three different segments of the finished map and then splice them together.

Items/encounters on the map include a flail snail, the Giant Chicken of Bristol, some sort of Jabberwocky, slimes, a tortoise and of course the Ace of Spades.

I hope you find some use for this – it took me over a week to put together when I should have been working on other things, but the whole thing makes me very, very happy.