Greyhawk Underdark Updated

It's been quite a while since I posted my updates to, at that time FtF campaign, delve into the Underdark. My online Roll20 campaign is now half way through the Giants series, and so it was time to re-visit those maps.
I had originally re-done Denis' Encyclopedia Subterranica maps at that time, but I'm still not completely 100% happy with it. Since the original module is already in the old-school blue, and the other scans I have of the Underdark maps from the various Into the Depths modules aren't quite high enough resolution for the online game, I did the next best thing. Now any normal/sane person would have just fired up their scanner and used any of the many modules he owns of this product to get a better, higher resolution image, but noooo, not this guy. Fired up the imaging software instead and went in and redid the map in a closer adaptation of the original maps found in the published works. Don't get me wrong, I liked the others maps out there, just had to make one I was satisfied with.

Here are the results from that little side trip into OCD-land. While it's doubtful the time spent resulted in any great contribution to this already overdone [and some cases better done] map, it nevertheless made me happy about the results achieved. Now to get on with the all the battlemaps for all those many encounters listed on the map. [heavy sigh]

Edit; Since things can always be tweaked now that there is a template to work from, changed out the b&w for colored passages on the map.













Since I already had the hand drawn maps from the Trading Grounds done went ahead and did that first. These are only for my personal online game on Roll20 and meant as an example of my hack job at putting together maps.

This from the original below

Caverns of Thracia

Its seems like forever since the last post. Which is kinda true. Haven't had the inclination to post anything for a while now. The FtF game has switched over to Swords & Wizardry and we're currently going through B2 Keep on the Borderlands and have just started The Caverns of Thracia. The Keep has been covered previously in this blog, so we'll look at the Caverns of Thracia instead. Since the group is still in the midst of this adventure I won't post too much but thought to cover some of the basics.
The Caverns of Thracia is considered by many to be a classic old school adventure from none other than Paul/Jennell Jaquays. While this might be true the actual maps in the adventure are somewhat confusing. This has been documented in various places and is not something new that is being pointed out. A good clarification of some of the interconnections of the maps can be found here.

I have the original module from back in the days of the Compleat Strategist in Montclair. While going over the adventure in preparation of running this I found the need to revise/update the maps to have a better grasp of the various interconnected levels/rooms/passages. While I do this as a matter of routine when starting any new adventure this proved to be more than just my passing need to re-do the maps in old school blue in this case. You can see some of the areas explored thus far by the group on the map in blue.

Compare this to the original;

Not that radical of a difference but the DM version has some more detail/info than what's shown in the published version. At least the old/original that I have. From what I'm given to understand the maps have been re-done and are much clearer these days in the newer version for sale. The first level map has been posted in more than a few places, so I'm not really giving anything away here. 

A good level 1 treatment of the map/adventure can be found here if anyone's interested.

City of Greyhawk [available again]

Granted its 2e, but still  good to be back. 

From the description:

Available now in print on demand formats:
The City of Greyhawk (2e)

From the high towers of its grand universities to the rancid alleys of its darkest slums, the City of Greyhawk awaits you. Center of magic and learning in the Flanaess, Greyhawk is also the home of powerful thieves, mighty warriors, traitorous ambassadors, and honest craftsmen.
They all await you within the pages of this information-packed boxed set.

You get four full-size, full-color maps, each depicting a different aspect of the Greyhawk campaign. Two 96-page books give you a detailed overview of the city and a closer look at its more influential citizens - and its more notorious criminals.

& Magazine #14 - Animal Companions

Download Magazine

This issue features:
Included in this issue include feature articles:
Animal Amalgamations
Animal Companions …
Dogs of the Lakelands

Bonus articles:
Political Treasures in D&D
Ability Checks: Are You Doing It Wrong?
Making the ‘God Call’

and Regular Columns:
Town Maps: Library and Records Hall
Gilderlo Hippogriffs
Who Let The Dogs Out?
A Plethora of Ideas
New Weapons VIII – Siege Weaponry
Brewmaster: Extraordinary Holy Symbols

AD&D Core Books Megabundle Sale

For those who might not have heard about it in their newsfeeds yet, there is a 8 book megabundle sale on the AD&D Core Book PDF's. Currently only $14.95 vs the usual $75.

Here are the books that you get in the bundle:





Dungeon Master's Guide [Premium Edition]











Dungeoneer's Survival Guide












Fiend Folio












Monster Manual [Premium Edition]











Monster Manual II











Oriental Adventures











Player's Handbook [Premium Edition]












Wilderness Survival Guide






FYI if you've already bought some of these titles previously, you'll get a discount for that title.

Now, for me, the Survival Guides are not Core Rules but that's just personal preference. Also the Deities and Demigods is missing from this which I do consider core rules. YMMV.
Still a great bargain if you don't have some or all of these yet. Plus there's the BECMI Known World bundle as well if that's your cup of tea. Plus a whole bunch of other things worth checking out.

Shopping for Groceries in 1836

View larger

Looking over the page from Roswell C. Smith’s 1836 Practical and Mental Arithmetic on a New Plan, you can get a rough idea of what prices were like in the early 1800's. Coffee, 35 cents per pound. A self-sharpening plough, $3.50. A whip, a buck fourteen. And a gallon of gin, 60 cents, which was “about two-thirds of a day’s wages for the average non-farm white male worker.” (View the prices in a larger format here.)

There's also some items that could’ve warmed you on those long, cold frontier nights… Some gin, perhaps…or wine? Rum? Brandy?

Smith’s shopkeeper would’ve been well provisioned, laying the stuff in by the barrel, hogshead, and pipe-full.

As for that “bladder” of snuff, a post on the Snuffhouse forum suggests that it wasn’t a euphemism, but the actual bladder of a hog, paced with 4 pounds of snortin’ tobacco.

Of course, Smith’s shopkeeper would’ve also carried a healthy assortment of wholesome goods- hymnals, children’s shoes, calico, satin, silk, whips…

Evolution of the Military Kit

Battle kits of British soldiers over the years.

Collection from the Battle of Hastings in 1066.

1244 mounted knight, Siege of Jerusalem.

Battle of Agincourt in 1415

Battle of Bosworth 1485

See the full article here.

B2 Keep on the Borderlands - # 24 Fortress

I've been done with the B2 - Keep on the Borderlands Module for a little while now when I got a comment and then some followup floorplans for B2. Drew Williams sent me some very detailed plans for the fortress interior, #24 in the module. They were actually very thorough, so I switched them over to the blue format that I have all of the other maps in. These maps are designed to fit the description of the Keep Fortress (#24) on page 11 of the module. So without further ado I present to you maps originally made by Drew Williams.

Keep Fortress Cellar [1 square=5 feet]

Lower level legend:

1. Guard Room
2. Torture Chamber
3. Prison Cells
4. Cistern
5. Record Chamber
6. Scribe
7. Jailer
8. Storeroom
9. Servant's Chamber
10. Servant's Chamber
11. Servant's Cahmber

Keep Fortress level 1 [1 square=5 feet]

Fortress Level 1 Legend:

1. Foyer
2. Great Hall
3. West Hall
4. Kitchen
5. Buttery
6. Pantry
7. Guard Room
8. Stairs up
9. Couriers
10. East Hall
11. War Room
12. Armory
13. Stairs down

Note, side ports have been added for kitchen supply service and direct access to the stables for the cavalry. These ports are reinforced and highly defensible.

Keep Fortress level 2 [1 square=5 feet]

Keep Fortress Level 2 Legend:

1. Guard Room
2. West Parapet
3. East Parapet
4. Solar
5. Wardrobe
6. Chamber
7. Chamber
8. Chamber
9. Privy
10. Guest
11. Balcony
12. Open to area 2 below (Fortress level 1 map)
13. Armory
14. Barracks
15. Barracks
16. Bath

From an email from Drew;

So this layout is based on determining factors from the module: This is a military HQ. It houses A Castellan (a military position), his staff, servants, and cavalry (Men at Arms) barracked in upper area. It must be useful as a greeting hall and as a space to adjudicate legal and diplomatic matters. And it must include all the specifics listed on page 11. The Great Hall is given the full heights of 30' vaulting, to go with the 30' X 45' length & breadth. The East and West sides are divided by the Great Hall, and are purposed for the Castellan's staff and guests on the West, and the Cavalry on the East end, along with the Armory, and ready access to the Stables. It's also absurd to include only one door. Defensible "Sally Port" doors on each side for logical uses; The kitchen supply access, and the Cavalry access to the stables. I also depicted Seats, tables, and a chest in the Great Hall, as that is how a Castellan and his staff would be arranged when providing audience for all legal matters, and keeping written records of all legal concerns, to later report to the crown as required.

Why Making Accurate World Maps Is Mathematically Impossible

Jorge Luis Borges once wrote of an empire wherein “the Art of Cartography attained such Perfection that the map of a single Province occupied the entirety of a City, and the map of the Empire, the entirety of a Province.” Still unsatisfied, “the Cartographers Guilds struck a Map of the Empire whose size was that of the Empire, and which coincided point for point with it.” But posterity, when they lost their ancestors’ obsession for cartography, judged “that vast Map was Useless, and not without some Pitilessness was it, that they delivered it up to the Inclemencies of Sun and Winters.” With that enormous map, in all its singular accuracy, cast out, smaller, imperfect ones presumably won the day again.

With that well-known story “On Exactitude in Science,” Borges illustrated the idea that all maps are wrong by imagining the preposterousness of a truly correct one. The Vox video “Why All World Maps Are Wrong” covers some of the same territory, as it were, first illustrating that idea by slitting open an inflatable globe and trying, futilely, to get the resulting plastic mess to lie flat.

“That right there is the eternal dilemma of mapmakers,” says the host in voiceover as the struggle continues onscreen. “The surface of a sphere cannot be represented as a plane without some form of distortion.” As a result, all of humanity’s paper maps of the world–which in the task of turning the surface of a sphere into a flat plane need to use a technique called “projection”–distort geographical reality by definition.

The Mercator projection has, since its invention by sixteenth-century Flemish cartographer Gerardus Mercator, produced the most widely-seen world maps. (If you grew up in America, you almost certainly spent a lot of time staring at Mercator maps in the classroom.) But we hardly live under the limitations of his day, nor those of the 1940s when Borges imagined his land-sized map. In our 21st century, the satellite-based Global Positioning System has “wiped out the need for paper maps as a means of navigating both the sea and the sky,” but even so, “most web mapping tools, like Google Maps, use the Mercator” due to its “ability to preserve shape and angles,” which “makes close-up views of cities more accurate.”

On the scale of a City, in more Borgesian words — and probably on the scale of a Province and even the Empire — Mercator projection still works just fine. “But the fact remains that there’s no right projection. Cartographers and mathematicians have created a huge library of available projections, each with a new perspective on the planet, and each useful for a different task.” You can compare and contrast a few of them for yourself here, or take a closer look of some of the Mercator projection’s size distortions (making Greenland, for example, look as big as the whole of Africa) here. These challenges and others have kept the Disciplines of Geography, unlike in Borges’ world, busy even today.

Original article here.

Hommlet in Blue

I've posted info and maps on Hommlet before (here). But since I'm running this online now, I've been revisiting some of the old material and updating it somewhat. One thing I've done is, like the Keep on the Borderlands maps, convert the Village of Hommlet map into the old school blue format. Just for consistency sake. Heck, there's dozens of iterations of the map out there, but I didn't find any blue ones, so I went ahead and did it up myself.

Hommlet

Keep on the Borderlands - completed

The online Roll20 group has finished the Keep on the Borderlands and is moving on to the Temple of Elemental Evil, so I will be going back in to the old B2 Keep on the Borderlands map posts and updating them with the DM maps.  The index page can be found here. I've also included the battlemap I made from the Cave of the Unknown map by Druvas.

Cave of the Unknown

Not to take away from Druvas' original[since I'm a fan of the old style blue maps], it just didn't mesh well with the other battlemaps I was using so I put this one together. 

Simpsons Alignment Axis

Because who really hasn't seen at least a few episodes of this classic show.

& Magazine # 13

& Magazine #13 – Character Races!

by Bryan Fazekas 

After a year’s hiatus, another publication of & Magazine Issue #13! DOWNLOAD THIS ISSUE here

In this issue featured: Character Races!

Brown Elves – Player Character Race - a surprising crossbreed
Canaer – a variant grey elf
Aquatic Player Character Races – some ideas for an aquatic campaign
Elves of Black Shadow – inspired by a 90’s game

Plus lots of bonus articles.

(For those folks interested in such news.)

B2 - Keep on the Borderlands - #4 Common Stables & #5 Warehouse

My continuation of the mapping of the buildings inside the Keep. While these maps aren't really needed by anyone, per se, I just did them to complete the set of floorplans for the Outer Bailey. I mean c'mon, they're just basically big rectangular boxes as you can see here.

COMMON STABLE: This long building is about 15’ high, with a 3’ parapet atop its flat roof, so that it can be used in defense of the gate. The gateside wall is pierced for archery. There are always grooms inside tending to horses and gear.

I added some of the contents for the warehouse, so that it didn't look so pathetically empty. Otherwise it would have just been a legend with a big, empty rectangle next to it.

COMMON WAREHOUSE: Visiting merchants and other travelers who have quantities of goods are required to keep their materials here until they are either sold to the persons at the KEEP or taken elsewhere. This long building is about 15’ high, with a 3’ parapet atop its flat roof, so that it can be used in defense of the gate. The gate-side wall is pierced for archery. Its double doors are chained and padlocked, and the corporal of the watch must be called to gain entry, as he has the keys. Inside are two wagons, a cart, many boxes, barrels, and bales - various food items, cloth, arrows, bolts, salt, and two tuns of wine.

B2 The Keep on the Borderlands Map Index

A couple of days ago as I was busily posting the various maps for the buildings inside The Keep on the Borderlands, Zach H. over on Zenopus Archives suggested I put up an index post so that it would be easier for folks to dig through this info. Now, while I try to be diligent about labeling all my posts, I can see the merits of putting a dedicated post where folks can go and jump directly to what they're looking for without having to wade through all the rest of the muck and mire.

So here it is folks, the index to my B2 posts up 'till now and (hopefully) any future missives that might come out will get indexed here as well.

Maps

• B2 kick-off post with the Greyhawk environs map, wilderness surrounding the Keep hexographer map, and my take on the map of the Keep itself.
• #4 Common Stables
• #5 Warehouse
• Private Aptarment # 7a Jewel Merchant 
• Private Apartment # 7b Priest
• Private Apartments # 7 c/d/e
• Smithy/Armorer # 8
• Provisioner # 9
• Trader # 10
• Loan / Bank # 11
• Travellers Inn # 14
• Tavern # 15
• Guild House # 16 - my old school blue version
• Chapel # 17
• Fortress # 24
• Caves of Chaos colorized re-spin

B2 - Caves of Chaos - My Spin

In my continuation of B2 posts and since I'm overly fond of maps I give you the following. Inspired by the colored Caves of Chaos map from Telecanter and the "Caves of Chaos is a One-Page Dungeon" map by Zach S. as well as this guys annotated version, I've modified and made my own mash-up version of all of the above.  Why did I do this, because the sum of the parts make up a greater whole, I felt. With labels showing what areas belong to which tribe, which guards/monsters are in what rooms, and what directions they will take upon being alerted as well as what surprises the party's likely to encounter upon a second visit to the same cave. For me this map represented 90% of what I needed to run this module in a concise manner.

Here is a DM non-colorized version with no trees shown for those who might want to make their own notations and scribbles or what-not.

And here is a player's version of the map with no room numbers or secret doors/passages shown. Also, sans trees.

Just borrowing the best parts from here and there to make my job of DMing easier and thereby (hopefully) more enjoyable for the players.
If for some reason someone wants any of these files in an even larger/more detailed format just PM me. I just uploaded a somewhat conservative file size to avoid hogging anyone's bandwidth.

B2 - Keep on the Borderlands - #17 Chapel

My continuation of the mapping of the buildings inside the Keep. This is the final map in this series the Chapel (#17) alongside the Inner Bailey wall behind the warehouse and opposite the Guild House (#16).

The spiritual center of the Keep is located in a building that has a peaked roof two stories tall; the interior is one large room. The altar is located at the eastern end, with a colored glass window above it; the window is 20’ tall and 8’ wide. An offering box is fastened securely atop a heavy pedestal in the southeast corner.

With this last building my series on the buildings inside the Keep comes to a close. I will put up a index post with all of the relevant posts linked so that it is easier for folks to locate these maps and info. For now just select B2 in the labels at the bottom of the post to get the relevant articles listed.

These maps are all of the old school blue I'm fond of, based on some hand drawn maps I found some time ago over on Dragonsfoot by paleologos.

edit: DM map

B2 - Keep on the Borderlands - #15 Tavern

My continuation of the mapping of the buildings inside the Keep. This is the Tavern (#15) located across from the Fountain Square and alongside the Travellers Inn.

This place is the favorite of visitors and inhabitants of the KEEP alike. The food is excellent, the drinks generous and good. The place is always active, with patrons at any time of day or night. The barkeep, if talking with a good customer and drinking to his health, will sometimes talk about the lands around the keep.

The cellar is where drink and food are stored and prepared, and where the servants sleep. The family sleeps in the small loft. 

The cellar and loft, which houses the bedroom/living quarters for the Innkeeper, his family and staff is not detailed here, in the player's version of the map. At some later point I will re-visit this post and put up the full floorplan.

We're down to the home stretch with only one more building, the Chapel, left to go. These maps are more of the old school blue I'm fond of, based on some hand drawn maps I found some time ago over on Dragonsfoot by paleologos.

edit: DM's map

B2 - Keep on the Borderlands - #14 Travellers Inn

My continuation of the mapping of the buildings inside the Keep. This is the Travellers Inn (#14) located across from the Fountain Square and alongside the Tavern.

This long, low structure has five small private rooms and a large common sleeping room for a full dozen. (Servants and the like always sleep in the stables, #4., of course.) Private rooms cost 1 g.p. per night, but sleeping in the common room is only 1 silver piece per night. The innkeeper and his family live in a small loft above the inn. This building is some 18’ high.

The 2nd story/loft, which houses the bedroom/living quarters for the Innkeeper, his family and staff is not detailed here, in the player's version of the map. At some later point I will re-visit this post and put up the full floorplan.

We're down to the home stretch with only a couple more buildings to go. These maps are more of the old school blue I'm fond of, based on some hand drawn maps I found some time ago over on Dragonsfoot by paleologos.

Edit: DM's map

B2 - Keep on the Borderlands - #11 Loan Bank

My continuation of the mapping of the buildings inside the Keep. This is the Loan Bank (#11) located across the street from the Trader and alongside the Outer Bailey wall.

This low building houses all of the banking needs for the average dungeon adventurer. Here anyone can change money or gems for a small fee. The banker will also keep a person’s wealth stored safely at no charge if it is left for at least one month, otherwise there is a nominal fee. Unsecured loans can be obtained for up to 5 gold pieces; over 5 gold pieces requires some item of security deposit be left for the loan. A sign on the shop states clearly that this place is under direct protection of the KEEP.

Rates/fees are as shown on the floorplan. The strong room of the place is in the cellar. It is protected by a locked iron door which leads to a small vault with 12 compartments each protected by locks and other means. The cellar, which houses the bedroom/living quarters as well as the vault, is not detailed here, in the player's version of the map. At some later point I will re-visit this post and put up the full floorplan.

Over the next several days I will be posting additional floorplans for most of the other buildings in the Keep. These maps are more of the old school blue I'm fond of, based on some hand drawn maps I found some time ago over on Dragonsfoot by paleologos.

edit: DM's map