Tags
Catacombs, Commercial Maps, Crypt, Crypts, Dungeons & Dragons, Fantasy, Labyrinth Lord, Maps, OSR, RPG, Tomb
There are times when I don’t know quite what I want to draw and I just start to doodle a map – letting the pens and the back of my mind wander around the page creating stuff. Of late it seems that my pens and that quiet part of my brain have a thing for crypts and tombs.
Here we have a set of crypts associated with two different churches. In total there are three entrances to these catacombs from the surface – the upper two both linking directly to churches which use the catacombs to bury their dead, and the upper-right stairwell leading into the rectory of the closer church.
While the left hand set of catacombs is rougher and is used exclusively for the burial of the deceased, the structures in the right-side catacombs are much better maintained and involve a lot of heavy masonry work – implying that the church above uses it for more than just a burial site (in fact, assuming that most of the doors are locked, it would appear that they bury very few people down here, having only a few crypts directly attached to their chambers and passages).
The southeastern structure may well be an underground place of worship for the gods under Lankhmar or similar creatures / deities / fell beings. This is further supported by the access point between the rectory understructures and the local sewers on the right edge of the map (an access point that is secured by a portcullis that is in turn controlled from a secret room).
The western structures are much older and decayed, showing a lot of wear to the areas that are worked. These crypts have been here for ages – since the city was young and the old masters of the lands would be buried here. These crypts and tombs often have multiple bodies within them, usually separated onto their individual stone shelves, but sometimes laid one upon the other, until their clothes have disintegrated with age and their bones mixed together by gravity and whatever else may dwell down here.
This map is made available to you under a free license for personal or commercial use thanks to the awesome supporters of my Patreon Campaign. Over 300 awesome patrons have come together to fund the site and these maps, making them free for your use.
Because of the incredible generosity of my patrons, I’m able to make this map free for commercial use also. Each month while funding is over the $300 mark, each map that achieves the $300+ funding level will be released under this free commercial license. You can use, reuse, remix and/or modify the maps that are being published under the commercial license on a royalty-free basis as long as they include attribution (“Cartography by Dyson Logos” or “Maps by Dyson Logos”). For those that want/need a Creative Commons license, it would look something like this:
Cartography by Dyson Logos is licensed
under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
Because of the recent increase in funding from the many patrons of the blog, this is the fourth map to be released under this license this month! With another bit of a push for more funding we’ll soon be at the point of releasing five new maps every month under this license, plus the “Release the Kraken” achievement where we release a map from the back catalog each month. At the end of this month we’ll announce which map is being released from the back catalog to be added to the four commercial releases this month.
More maps! More awesome!
This map looks amazing. What is the room on the left edge of the map that is separate with no door?
There are two if you look closely.
The one furthest to the lower left appears to be someone’s basement that may have once been connected to the catacombs but is not currently.
There is also a tomb that has been completely sealed of from the catacombs a bit to the north of the basement.
Nice touch. I wonder what can be buried in this tomb, which had to be completely sealed off…
Reblogged this on DDOCentral.
So Dyson, do you use graph paper or are you free-handing it on standard white paper? If you’re using graph paper, how do you get rid of the graph in your scans?
As you can see in the photos above, this was drawn on graph paper. A quick tweak of brightness and contrast in photoshop clears the grid away (as long as you work with higher-quality graph paper with pale lines).
I think that’s my problem. I’m using a Moleskine book and the paper has a yellowish shade to it. I need to do a little more tweeking it seems. Thanks for the info
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