When I put the maps up for voting in May for the “Release the Kraken” project, I included an old favourite of mine, the Circle of Doom. But as I was getting it ready to post today, I gave it a good hard look and just didn’t feel comfortable releasing it. I drew the Circle of Doom in 2010 (maybe even late 2009) for a Labyrinth Lord campaign I was running at the time. I drew it in pencil.

Pencil doesn’t scan well. It comes out very light or very jaggy if I enhance the contrast enough to make it dark. Also, I’ve gotten a bit better at the craft since 2009.

So I redrew it.

I’ve USED it three times now in my games, but always stocking it “on the fly” using random stocking from the various rules we were playing with at the time. The dungeon “level” itself is centred around a massive shaft some 70 feet across spanned by four bridges on four different levels. I’ve run it as a rapid delve through four dungeon levels using level-appropriate encounters at each level (appropriate to the dungeon level, not the character level). In other words, it quickly goes from a team of halflings at the beginning to 8 hungry trolls guarding the exit.

However, since the voting was for the original Circle of Doom to be released instead of a full redraw, I also did a bit of cleaning up on the original and am re-releasing it also under the free personal and commercial use license.

So enjoy, and please – give your players the shaft!

This map is made available to you under a free license for personal or commercial use under the “RELEASE THE KRAKEN” initiative thanks to the awesome supporters of my Patreon Campaign. Over 400 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 $400 mark, we choose a map from the blog’s extensive back catalog to retroactively release 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.