Hand-drawn (+ GIMP) Dungeon: The Lost Tombs

[Wirelizard]

Decided to spend a few minutes before bed the last couple of evenings drawing instead of reading, and actually came up with a dungeon map that could be useful for RPG dungeon crawling.

Drawn in 0.5 black rollerball pen on plain white office paper, photographed, then fiddled various ways in GIMP to correct some of the distortion from the photo, clean up the line art and add the parchment effect.

dungeon30Oct2012.png

I figure on it being the lost chapel & tombs off to one side of a larger complex; the wide tunnel on the right that's caved in at both ends was once the grand underground processional leading to grander places. These days it's isolated, except for the cracked-open tunnel at the top (if I were to redo this map, I'd make that cave narrower...) that leads into a side chamber beside the main chapel. The tombs are the warren of chambers and passages at the lower third of the map, although some of the larger chambers off the passageway into the chapel might be guardrooms.

There's also a network of secret passages, mostly off to the left of the chapel, probably originally for the convenience of whatever priests ran this place.

Now? Perhaps the whole thing is taken over by goblins or something. Or maybe the dead are restless, and stalk the narrow passages...

Parchment effect done with RobA's excellent GIMP tutorial elsewhere on CG; photo of the drawing cleaned up in GIMP thanks to a tutorial posted over on Google Plus earlier today.

I can post a plain white background version if anyone's interested; it would be easier to edit than the parchment version.

[amberroberts09]

Wow, Yes I am interested to see plain white background version!!!

[jtougas]

Looks Great.

[arsheesh]

A nice hand-drawn dungeon. Lovely work.

Cheers,
-Arsheesh

[Larb]

This has a very rough architectural feel about it.

[Wirelizard]

Glad people are enjoying it, it was a nice diversion to get back to pen & paper for a bit - and then to discover the useful GIMP tutorials that let me take pen & paper into digital. I didn't have a particular plan, beyond thinking it was going to be a mix of natural cave and hewn/constructed spaces. No pencil sketch first, either, so not only was I making it up as I went, I was committed as soon as the pen started moving.

Here's the white background version, obviously cleaned up from the photo but with the parchment effect layers turned off.
dungeon30Oct2012_white.png

Same size as the parchment version, so it should print fine if that's what you're planing. Also obviously easier to edit.

I've just learned that I'm off for a two-week field assignment with my company, starting this Sunday! I don't own a laptop or netbook, so I'll take my notebook (as in actual paper book...) and should have lots of downtime in my hotel room to sketch and draw maps...

[RobA]

Nice map! I'm always a big fan of handdrawn maps.

Also glad you found my little tutorial on cleaning up uneven backgrounds to be of use.

-RobA>