Dyson's Inktober & Mapvember

[Dyson Logos]

#Inktober2017 - Map 07 - "Shy"

I caught a mental block on the cue for the first hour that I stared at it, with my various papers and pens laid out about me waiting for that next map to show up.

Then the marmoset savant came calling. The marmoset savant is a recurring low-level NPC wizard from an old campaign. 8 times out of 10, when the party needed to pick up some new information or were heading in exactly the wrong direction, they would come across a jumbled collection of blocks that had been converted into the marmoset savants' latest home.

A shy little bearded marmoset, he would have to be lured out of his blocks with interesting trinkets, new magics, or exotic nuts.

So here's the latest lair of the marmoset savant.

inktober-07-home-of-the-marmoset-savant.jpg

[ThomasR]

Impressive as always !

[Dyson Logos]

#Inktober2017 - Map 08 - "Crooked"

How better to hit the "crooked" prompt than with the basement of a thieves' guild that is in turn connected to a bunch of irregularly shaped ruins under the city that have gradually been partially converted into the sewer system?

A couple of years ago I drew an undercity map for an unpublished city. The maps are at city scale, so roughly 1" = 400 feet or so. For this map I did a closeup on a space about 1" x 3/4" in size on that map.

inktober-08-under-the-thieves-guild.jpg

[Dyson Logos]

#Inktober2017 - Map 09 - "Screech"

Today's prompt made me think of the wail of a banshee, and classic images of the banshee in Irish folklore often includes an old castle or other ruins in the background. So here we have the banshee's tower - a mid-sized adventure site around a small ruined keep.

The banshee's home is in the second floor of the tower in the room open to the sky because of the partial collapse of the third floor. However, this is not where she died - as the red-haired elven daughter of the lord of this tower, when it fell she was imprisoned in the dungeons below where she was later forgotten and died of deprivation pining for her father, her home, and her people.

inktober-09-the-banshees-tower.jpg

[Dyson Logos]

Impressive as always !

Thanks.

When comparing this year's work with last year's there is a distinct improvement in my overall work - from my perspective at least I'm loving that I'm more flexible and much faster with my pens this year, and am producing a large number of much larger maps than last year. By the end of Mapvember last year the quality of my work had visibly improved from the beginning, taking on more daring works and really getting into isometric work by the end - I'm hoping that this extended doubling of Inktober & Mapvember into one big push will do that again, helping me level up my skills to the next level.

This whole geometric progression of XP for leveling up is a lot of work.

[tilt]

Looking great as usual, love your style. But especially love the little non-traditional maps - like the stacked building and the huge sword - keep up the good work

[Dyson Logos]

#Inktober2017 - Map 10 - "Gigantic"

Presenting the... "Headquarters"... of some evil group or another (or maybe just some poor post-apocalyptic bastards just trying to survive the wastelands?)

The shape of the skull is off - cartographer, not an illustrator, but hey I can say it is the skull of some strange missing link between Titans and Titanic Orangutans.

Headquarters-low-res.jpg

[ChickPea]

Oh man, I looove that skull!

[Dyson Logos]

#Inktober2017 - Map 11 - "Run"

After a few too many games of Assassin's Creed, or just lovely flashbacks to the starter adventure scene in the original Warhammer Fantasy RPG, sooner or later you are going to want to run a rooftop chase scene.

Dashing on a 30 degree slope can be difficult, might take a few rolls. And the general rule of thumb for a snowy climate is that roofs slope up six to nine inches for every foot they cover, so assume that the peak of a roof is 1/4 to 1/3 the total width of the building above the level of the edge of the roof. So on a 20 foot wide building, the roof slopes up to 5-7 feet in the centre.

(numbers on the roofs indicate the height of the building in storeys)

inktober-11-third-storey-run.jpg

[Dyson Logos]

#Inktober2017 - Map 12 - "Shattered"

Originally I was planning to make a whole set of these islands instead of just one, but a map of this detail level doesn't lend itself well to being made huge during an event like Inktober.

So for now I'm settling with the one. But there are more of them waiting in my head.

To most seagoing vessels, the Shattered Isles just seem like an unlikely collection of very close islands with unusually straight waterways between them. It doesn't take long to figure out that they were once a single larger island. But it takes a bird's eye view to get a real appreciation for the way the island has been shattered - quite precisely into 2 mile hexagons. Evidently some strange magic was afoot here in the untold past - powerful magic that was able to tear the island apart methodically, as if for some massive wargame.

inktober-12-shattered-isles.jpg