Nov 2016 Challenge: Abu's Abandoned Mesa Outpost
Haven't been mapping a lot lately, so my fingers were really itchy, when i saw the next random map challenge announced by our beloved MapMaster DiamondDrooling over the lovely little scifi maps by Miska Fredman once again, i decided to make a futuristic outpost/base "dungeon" for this challenge, inspired by his wonderful work.
I had some problems with the instructions too, as i went on rolling the dice for my life and sketching the rooms down. Half way through the process, i realized i added the number of exits of the respective room on top of the entry to it, so every room has in fact one more "door" than the dice roll showed. So, only the rooms with a trap have a single access.
Since i notoriously fail to finish my challenge entries in time lately, i wanted to finish it before uploading this time. After i finished the drawing with pen on paper, i scanned and then colored and labeled it in gimp.
The retrospective WIP:
After an even messier first version of the dungeon, i came up with this rough layout, starting at a landing platform/hangar and having two exit points of the whole dungeon on the other side of a mesa (platforms/hangars too), where the outpost is build in.
FirstSketch.jpg
With 3 "Chasm Traps" rolled on roughly the same "level" (on a vertical axis), i decided to represent them with an actual chasm leading directly through the banse. The rooms are traps in so far, as the ground is unstable here and with a 33% chance you can crush into the chasm.
With this idea in mind the "Acid/Poison Traps", who are in rooms roughly next to the chasm traps, are also depicted as half destroyed rooms this time with a more stable ground, but with nice toxic gas leaks instead.
The "Water Traps" gave me some headache, since i felt in a scifi setting a trap might look a bit different. So i wondered in wich places in the outpost could be water and on top of that in form of a trap? The only place i could think of were washing facilities...
For illusions, i thought some distracting holograms projected in the room might be a good fit. The statue, etc. coming to life would be a sort of combat drone waiting for some explorers to eliminate
This is the scan of the final "pen&paper" BW version:
BWVersion.jpg
I'll post the colored version in the next post, since the thumbnail scraper always has problems with the "latest WIP tag" and multiple images in one post.
Even though i think it's pretty much finished, i'm (as always) open to any sort of comments/crititque and suggestions. I think i won't change the drawing anymore, but would love to hear if you think the coloring / labelling could be improved.
Cheers,
AL
