My March 2013 Mapping Challenge Submission: Monastery of Tyr

[Cunning Cartographer]

Monastery-of-Tyrs---Final-GM-Map.jpg

(Formally the Temple of Saint Patrick of Swayze )

Spent a good 30hours on this map I reckon over the last month, from concept to layout to inking, colouring and labeling. The biggest time leech was the one step forward and two steps back, as I was working to the months deadline I wanted to make sure I had SOMETHING finished, so I'd start building with parts of the adventure map unfinished then think of an idea, or change an idea, or decide the players would have to go to another area first... and so on. The result was constantly changing room around and resizing them and giving them new purposes, however ultimately I am extremely happy with the final outcome.

This is a GM map so it lacks the detail I'd put on a player map (also hadn't noticed until a lot of linework later I'd designed it at 72dpi (dammit!) so this is as big as it goes, though my computer was pretty much on its arse as the layers built up So great for screen, printable at a decent quality and probably even usable for VTT. Given the amount of time I've put on this map I'm going to work on a full .pdf and make it as my first publishable/to buy adventure map with full details of the rooms, etc.

Very much inspired by the classic D&D TSR dungeons and the works of Mike Schley, a style that over the last year I have simply fallen in love with. The extensive write up of the various puzzles can be found in the original thread (link in siggy). Hope you enjoy checking it out (and maybe even playing on it one day) as much as I enjoyed making it.

[Beoner]

Wonderful job, great colouring - and a huge map o.o for a dungeon. A special mention to the stone walls, very good job on those. Now you make me want try a dungeon map myself

Have some rep

[Cunning Cartographer]

Gracias

I'm particularly happy with the walls, I made a pretty huge tileable pattern that I can lay over the entire map then systematically mask out the none wall areas, draw an outline on another layer over the top of them were the brick breaks, etc. Had to make it big enough so that it didn't look too obviously a pattern.... that took a while

This is the biggest dungeon map I've made so I'm really happy with it, for the final adventure module I plan on adding more at the beginning, so maybe a separate map leading into the initial area of [Area 01]. My biggest issue with this one was knowing where to stop as I just kept coming up with more and more ideas, puzzles, encounters and rooms.

[Larb]

It's a great looking map and I especially like the way you have taken the layout, as it started as lots of rooms and corridors in your original thing.

[Cunning Cartographer]

Yeh, I used donjon; AD&D Random Dungeon Generator to randomly generate a dungeon initially to just give me some rooms to start working on as I had no idea what it was going to be. As I developed the lore and decided it was going to be a monastery then the layout completely changed, the corridors pretty much got removed, but the initial map still left me with a nice shape to base everything off. Sometimes just getting shapes onto the page is enough to get you going, especially when you have no clue the direction you're going to head in

[Jeudi]

Wonderful map !
What program did u used to make it?