Last week I introduced to Sezaran’s Dwarfhold in Dweredell, courtesy of Fictive Fantasies. This week I get to point you in the direction of even more cool stuff from that campaign: The PCs have apparently dug their way into a gang war and now they’re trying to find a home base for the gang they’ve allied with. Enter the Dwarven Temple of Khorus:

Dwarven Temple of Khorus

Once again, you should head over to Fictive Fantasies to get the full story and all the cool details.

(And if you’re looking for other cool Dyson Logos maps turned into abandoned temples, check out my own Ruined Temple of Illhan.)

The map for Dweredell was originally created with large key entries. It looked like this:

It’s a beautiful map, but I always wished that I had a version that had no map key numbers on it.

Then a fellow by the name of Andrew Shields contacted me: He’d done an absurdly awesome amount of Photoshop work and managed to rebuild the map sans numbers. Instead of posting it here, I’m going to point you over to Andrew’s website: Here.

It’s well worth checking out, particularly if you’re the proud owner of a copy of City Supplement 1: Dweredell. (And if you’re not a proud owner of that book, you should check it out. Hint, hint.).

I’m pleased to announce that we’ve finished the conversion process necessary to make the 3.5 adventures and supplements from Dream Machine Productions available in print from DrivethruRPG:

The City Supplements — Dweredell, Aerie, and Anyoc — all feature a complete fantasy city: A full-page map. Gazetteer. Organizations. Characters. Adventure Seeds. They developed out of a campaign that featured a lot of overland travel: I could see my players eyes light up whenever they reached a new city and I could whip out a full map for it. I figure that other GMs might like some city supplements that could be easily slotted into their campaigns.

Rule Supplement 1: Mounted Combat was originally meant to be the first of several supplements that would have provided advanced sub-systems that could be plugged into your game. Then the 4E/PF shift happened and that plan got short-circuited. In this case, though, you’ve still got a great book featuring rules for flying mounts, mounts of unusual size, intelligent mounts, multiple riders, riding platforms, cavalry maneuvers, warpacks, contest jousting, and a lot more.

Spells of Light and Darkness is a hyper-specialized supplement featuring 50+ spells themed around magical light and darkness. There’s some really cool stuff in here and this book has seen a ton of use at my own gaming table.

Mini-Adventure 1: The Complex of Zombies is a mini-dungeon: You can slot it into a larger complex or run it solo. One of the primary goals of this adventure was to create a zombie variant that would actually strike fear into the hearts of your players. And, according to all reports (including those from my own gaming table), it’s been a huge success. I’d recommend grabbing it just for the bloodwights, even if you ignore everything else about it. (Here’s a tale from the table featuring the events of this mini-adventure.)

Mini-Adventure 2: The Black Mist is a completely different type of adventure scenario. This is more of a “mega-event” which can either become the focus of an urban campaign or serve as a horrific backdrop for the other adventures that are happening at the same time. The short version is that a magical plague has visited the city: How does the city react? How do the PCs react? If you’re looking for something plug-and-play, this isn’t it. If you’re looking for something enigmatic and strange and terrible and epic… this’ll be right up your alley.

When I finished putting everything together, this was the map I had created. I’m fairly proud of it. (Which would explain why I’ve written a four part series on its creation.) It’s not the best map of a fantasy city ever published, but for a city supplement that can be purchased for as little as $7.99, I think it’s fairly impressive.

Of course, I’m biased. (And shilling.)

(What is the best map of a fantasy city every published? For my money, Ed Bourelle’s map of Ptolus wins that distinction hands-down. It’s a beautiful work of art, featuring layered geography; individual buildings; crystal-clear information clarity; and an enormous amount of utility. Quantity isn’t the same thing as quality, but it’s notable that I have a version of the Ptolus map hanging on my wall which is more than six and a half feet long. And, even at that immense size, it remains an astonishingly beautiful piece. The map of Anyoc, by contrast, is designed to be viewed at just 21″ x 16″ — which is big, but not huge.)

One of the things I love about mapping is the ability it has to provide a conduit for inspiration. Some of the best ideas I’ve ever had have been the result of my brain churning something out because there was a blank piece of graph paper that needed to be filled.

Designing the map for Anyoc was no exception.

Let me back up for a second and talk about the history behind City Supplement 3: Anyoc.

Anyoc was originally created back in 2001 as the setting for an adventure module. A playtest draft was completed and playtested (which is reflected in the playtest credits to be found in the published book), but the project was cancelled before a final draft was completed — partly because the publisher was already moving away from D20 modules and partly so that I could focus on a supplement called Gods & Goddesses^TM (which was also cancelled before it was completed).

In 2002, Campaign Magazine started publishing my new column: Cities of Fantasy. Each issue of the magazine featured a complete fantasy city designed by me. I wrote two original columns, recycled and expanded the unpublished Anyoc material for the third, and started work on three more columns.

Unfortunately, after publishing a single column (featuring the city of Dweredell), Campaign Magazine went out of business. So the material was shelved again.

And shortly thereafter I got tired of my projects being cancelled by other people for reasons that had nothing to do with the work itself, so I took a hiatus from the roleplaying industry and when I came back I founded Dream Machine Productions.

All of which is to say that City Supplement 3: Anyoc was originally going to look a lot like City Supplement 1: Dweredell — a shorter, cheaper book detailing roughly a dozen locations.

But as I was working on the map, a couple of things happened: First, I kept getting struck by inspiration as I considered the various stories behind the buildings and streets I was drawing. Second, I realized that there was a serious mismatch between the detail of the map and the detail of the gazetteer. It just didn’t make a whole lot of sense to have a poster-size map serving up only a handful of detailed locations.

So, despite the fact that the entire book had already been laid out and proofread, I decided to scrap the existing gazetteer and rewrite it basically from scratch. At the time, I was appearing as Inspector Colquhoun in The Hollow by Agatha Christie. As the requisite detective in the story, I spent most of the second act onstage, but during the first act I was just sitting backstage waiting for the murder to happen.

So I would sit in the dressing room with my laptop, busily working away with fresh inspiration on an expanded gazetteer for the city. The final result more than tripled the number of locations detailed.

And that’s how the map of Anyoc was both my creation and my muse.

Merely aping real world geography will give you a functional map, but won’t create a living city. For that to happen, you have to understand the soul of the city: What does it look like? How do people move through it? What’s it like to live there? These types of questions have a very real impact on how the streets are laid out; how the buildings are built; the whole nine yards.

In the case of Anyoc, I had already written up two evocative pieces of detail. The first was the literal look of the city:

As you pass through the inner gates of the wall, you are struck by a sudden cascade of color: In a single glance you capture fully half the city as it sweeps up and away from you along the side of a gently sloping hill. Pale purples mix with soft blues and faded greens; pinkish reds stand in contrast to burnished gold. And atop the hill, where it crests at a distance of what must be half a mile, are three buildings of white stone which seem to dwarf all else within the city’s walls. Anyoc bears the marks of age, as if every curved wall bears an infinity of memories. People sweep past you – a constant flow of traffic in and out of the gate through which you havepassed.

Anyoc is built from fairy stone, which comes in seven types — taylos, which is the faded green of a wood beneath the sun; vaylos, which is the faint violet of an evening cloud; saelos, which is the pale red of a friendship rose; kadlos, which is the golden color of burnished copper; anlos, which is the blue of a noontime sky; bahslos, the black midnight stone; and essabas, the star stone, which is of purest white.

This meant that I had a very specific color palette to work with, and it was important for me to get those colors right. I spent a non-trivial amount of time finding the right colors to help evoke the look I wanted for the city.

Second, I made a point in the city supplement of detailing what the common architecture of the city looks like:

The buildings of Anyoc are seldom higher than they are long. But in many cases this is not a significant restriction – entire sections of town are dominated by buildings which run the entire length of blocks, and which easily reach a height of four or five stories. Often these taller buildings will be terraced – with each subsequent level smaller than the ones below, and the remaining space rendered as an outdoor porch or salon. In some cases these terraces will create the impression of a pyramid, but generally the terraces are aligned along one side of the building to complement the angle of the hill. In contrast to the terraces, other sections of Anyoc see buildings which have been slowly expanded – until they cross over the tops of streets, meet, and join one another. And extended eaves are common throughout the city.

I decided to forego the visual representation of buildings meeting each other across the top of the street (due to the loss of visual clarity when it came to the roads themselves). But the idea of these long, low buildings terracing their way up the side of the hill had a significant impact on how the buildings of the city were laid down on the map. Here’s a representative sample:

Here you can see the distinctive colors of the fairy stone; the long, curving architecture of the buildings; and the impact the hill has had on both the buildings and the streets.

Continued…