Tags
Call of Cthulhu, Crypts, Dungeons & Dragons, Fantasy, Labyrinth Lord, Maps, Numenera, OSR, RPG, The Strange, Weird
The Lost Ossuary (with grid)
This complicated little map started with a simple request from Christian Klauser over on Patreon.
The Lost Ossuary is a small dimensional rift beneath the Lobachevsky Church. Cut out of the stone beneath the church as a set of crypts and ossuaries, the Lost Ossuary displays bizarre geometries to those who would try to map it out. Routings through the Ossuary make little sense, with paths connecting with far less than 360 degrees of angle between them, and some secret passages connecting areas that should be hundreds of feet apart.
To confuse matters more, the ossuary has two types of construction – rough hewn crypts and the carefully built ossuaries and tombs. Both areas are completely contiguous, and yet seem to cut each other up at times. In all, the structure is a nightmare for any who would try to map it out.
This is of course because the planar topology of the Ossuary is a cube – however this is never apparent to those within it – the faces do not involve any changes in angles – the floors remain consistent and flat instead of switching by 90 degrees as one walks over the “angle” in the cube.
Exploring the cube will probably result in some weird maps… here’s a very simple map of just part of the crypts themselves that ends in the same room in two different locations, reached through two different doors.
In time, any attempt to map the Ossuary from the inside will result in a map that crosses over itself and comes back from point A to point A with those two locations at wildly different parts of the map.
The Lost Ossuary works not only for classic fantasy gaming, but would be a perfect spot for a bit of adventure in a Call of Cthulhu campaign (non-Euclidean geometry), or for other games that deal in strange places and possible hyper-tech (Numenera, The Strange, or something happening just inside a rift in Rifts).
Once the adventure is over, however, it might be fun to show the party exactly what was causing all the chaos.
Here I’ve taken the map and made it into an actual cube to show how the halls and chambers connect.
I printed it on some fairly heavy paper stock (it would be significantly easier to assemble using cardstock, mind you) and trimmed it so that there were tabs that I could use to assemble it. A bit of glue or tape and it goes from 2 dimensional to 3.
And for those who prefer their maps without a grid – here is the Lost Ossuary again
As with all the maps on the Dodecahedron, this map is made possible by the amazing people who support the continued production of this fanciful cartography through my Patreon Campaign. Check it out to see how you can help keep the flow of cool maps coming for as little as 5 cents a map.
A tesseract!
Well, part of one: It’s lacking the ‘inside’, (accessed by going down from these levels), and ‘outside’, (accessed by going up from these levels), spaces.
Absolutely correct. It would be fun to add in some trapdoors in floors and ceilings to really confuse things. Maybe that’s too complex, I’d hate to be lynched by my own players.
That’s horrible. Now I want to make a bunch of regular polyhedra with dungeons on them. Maybe even a set of all five, call them the Tombs of Plathagoras, and build an adventure surrounding them and some sort of associate cult that worships math.
Love it!
This is the most awesome thing I’ve seen in a while, Dyson. You’ve again set a bar for mapmaking that few, if any, could equal.
I am thinking that there is a secret trapdoor in the octagonal room below your logo with a spiral staircase that leads to the back of one of the crypts at the top of the map.
That is beautiful . . . but it makes my head hurting trying to figure out how to explain mapping it to the players.
You don’t ever mention the “bends” from one face to another. You just keep explaining how it goes, and after a while the players will realize the map doesn’t work.
Even if you map it for them, do the same thing. Just keep drawing it as it happens, and after a while the map will make no sense and you will have achieved exactly what the map is meant to.
Pure awesome.
Thumbs up for the map, and another thumb for the Bloody Basic:Mother Goose Edition!
This is just pure awesome. Just the kind of thing a Lich or Vampire-mage would use as a lair.
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Great Dyson !
Why not another version with a library’s rooms for a enigma variation of the well famous book ” The name of the rose” ?
An OSR tribute in memoriam of Mister Umberto Eco.
With a complete monastery map, it will a a great piece of adventure to find a Lost Tome.
Please… 🙂
This is pure awesome, thanks! I stumbled over this beautiful blog a few days and have been digesting maps ever since, but this one takes the price. Simple, funny, and mind-bending in the best way possible.
I immediately printed and glued the cube, now I’m waiting for the perfect opportunity to wreak havoc on my players (or at least the poor sod who’s mapping…).
Beacues of this, I am going to make dungeon maps using all of the platonic solids as the topography of the dungeon, but I will make it impossible to walk down the same set of stairs forever without going back up any stairs like I can see in this picture.
Which set of stairs allows you to go down endlessly. Sounds like a feature!
Sorry, that should have been, “Which set of stairs allows you to go down endlessly?”
There are some stairs to the left of marker “D”. If you travel through “D” to “A”, then using the secret door to the side of the coffin, you can then travel back to “D” without walking up and stairs. This means that you can travel down or up infinitely.
I think it’d be simpler to assume that there are some steep stairs under the “S”
Thanks. I see it now. Given the nature of the map, maybe the secret door involves some sort of additional spatial jump.
When I drew it I figured the secret door was a very small space (about 30″ tall) that went from the floor of the tomb with the two coffins to the very top of the wall of the tomb with one coffin. The secret door doesn’t angle, it is just very awkward.
I’m very late to this party, not sure how I missed this before.
Any thoughts on how this might be implemented in a VTT like Roll20? You couldn’t implement the whole thing at once, because you need players to not notice the edges and corners, or at least obfuscate them.
I think you would need to have multiple maps that represented the two faces across each “edge” of the cube, so that you could obscure the fact that it is folded on itself as you transitioned in the game. That would be 12 total maps and a lot of duplication,but would keep the mystery alive for a long time.
Another way to do it would be to have each square as four different maps, one in each of its four orientations depending on the way the players entered it. That way players would enter the map as if it were still north/south orientation, but would eventually realize they were actually in a map they had seen before but in a totally different orientation.
Thought about it a bit more and I realized you have to have 24 maps regardless of how you do it. You either have each of the 6 faces in 4 orientations or each of the 12 2 square edge maps in two orientations. But if you do that, the players can keep going in any cardinal direction and feel like they just keep going in that direction with no clue that are “transitioning”.
You would definitely need Fog of War turned on so that it wouldn’t be immediately obvious that you had entered a rotated version of something you had seen before.
I was prepping to run this on Roll20, and was considering the same issue. It is not as bad as it seems.
Something to consider is that while the map is done as faces of a cube, the characters/players have no way of directly experiencing it as a cube, so I found it helpful to not think of the map in terms of 6 discrete “faces”.
What I did to start with is to print it out and tape together joined passages, then basically unwind the map, cutting apart where there is no connecting hallway, cutting at the secret doors, and finally cutting all doors between the caves and the building except for the two on that central face (with “DL 16”).
That leaves you with a nearly flat map. The three weird places remaining are two cave tunnels adjacent to the central face, and the hallway that joins at “B”.
My plan for Roll20 is to use four copies of this flattened map, one for each rotation. At each of the “weird” areas, some of that section of map is duplicated, reoriented to match. (This is to make it clear it isn’t some kind of subtle magic portal in a specific location, and reduce the chances of players being on different maps while still in sight of each other.) Dynamic lighting keeps them from seeing the duplication, but probably lazy dynamic lighting lines, just blocking off sections rather than tight to each wall enforcing literal line of sight.
So players enter into that main chamber, and everything works normally. Because they aren’t doing the mapping, and because my players aren’t especially attentive, I want it to be clear early on that there is something weird going on with the layout. So there will be something that draws them to go first to the door on the left. When they get to the door at B, from either side, we switch to a new map – the same map, rotated 90 degrees one way or the other, based on what door they went through. During the inevitable, “Hold on, let me get the next map” delay, I can copy over any tokens for dead critters. Each door has, on the GM layer, a note saying which map & door this connects to. Secret doors are the same.
By the time they get back to the main chamber, they should have some understanding that this is the same place they just “left”, and start paying more attention to the map.
The caves sections are a little trickier, just because there is no door, no natural point to switch to the next map. I think I see some good points to start the duplication so they would have to get pretty far away from each other anyone can wander off the edge. (And then, of course, anyone straying so far away will get eaten.)
Super excited to run this…
I’m having a hard time picturing what you are describing, Joshua, I’m not quite seeing how it can be flattened out with only three “weird” bits. I’d love to see your version!