February Entry: the Necromancer's Lair

[Gamerprinter]

So bored with making old west maps, I needed something to simulate my imagination, so I thought I'd give this one a try - at least to get an entry made for the "other One Page Map Contest".

This is the Necromancer's Lair - at least the start of it. I decided to begin with a sacraficial altar, the mouth of the skull is a pit to ??? This is just the top of the altar, I plan to do more, just haven't figured out how I want to make it yet. But this is a good start.

I know, no walls and chambers, I haven't decided that either, however I knew I wanted an altar.

Rather than my normal "scribble" drawing, I decided to try to be a bit more refined.

For those who can't tell, I started with a hand-drawing, scanned and imported to Xara Xtreme 4.0, then I created the beveled shapes with the cloudy color and drop shadows placed underneath the drawing.

Now I have think about what I'll do next...

GP

[mearrin69]

Hmmm. Shouldn't there be a sphere of annihilation in that mouth? Nice looking start.
M

[Gamerprinter]

OK, only need to add stairs and the altar will be complete. I thought adding the hand-drawn skeletal dragons surrounding the skull altar was a good fit. I googled me a triceratops skeleton, but could only find a side view. So referencing that, I turned the skeleton into a top view in my mind's eye and hand-drew the figure that way.

Granted Triceratops body doesn't fit - I just needed reference to what the bones looked like, then extended and narrowed the shape to a dragons.

Moving right along!

GP

PS: looks like I need to realign the drawing to the base, I'll do it when I put in the stairs.

[Gamerprinter]

Realigned the base drawing to the base. Added stairs. Done with the main altar.

Good Night!

GP

[ravells]

Great to see you back in the challenge saddle GP!

[Steel General]

Looking good so far.

[Gamerprinter]

Calling this the Skull Chapel. Still no walls, but still more thinking to do regarding that. Threw in a moat of blood surrounding the altar itself.

Regarding the floor - I hate grids, they are distracting to the art of the map. While I understand their mechanical purpose, I always do my best to hide the grid whether through color choice or transparency. For this map, I'm experimenting. Rather than place a 5' grid, I decided to use the floor itself to describe the grid. Each flagstone and the mortar surrounding it, consists of five square feet. Thus the flagstones themselves are the grid.

Threw in some columns and stone sarcophagi - still more to do, but the chapel chamber is just about complete!

I see that everyone else seems to be making their dungeon fit in portrait mode (11" tall), I'm doing this landscape (11" wide), the chapel takes up about half the dungeon area - unless I reduce it to add more, but I think this is scale I'll be working with. Now the map is currently much larger than a page size, but I will reduce it to fit the landscape page, when I am complete.

Enjoy!

GP

### Latest WIP ###

bone-altar.jpg

[Gamerprinter]

OK, not an update, but I was thinking that someone might be able to use my hand-draw and textured skeletal dragon, so I isolated that element from this map (pulled the shadows that I applied), and saved it as a PNG file at 200 ppi.

Enjoy!

GP

[Coyotemax]

Nice map so far! and very generous of you to offer the dragon too! *snags for later*

[Ascension]

In college we had a saying - what's your favorite kind of beer? Free beer. So I'm snaggin as well, thanks, bro.