#battlemaps
Residents of the snowy town of Stormnook are the only in the entire realm that pay homage not to one ruler, but two. First, the king of the land, who collects taxes, creates laws, and sets imperial decrees. Second, and more revered among the locals, is the winner of a no-holds-barred downhill race from the peak of this tall mountain to its ticker-taped base. Each year, a new ruler is crowned, their position secured not through bloodline, but through victory.
The rules of the contest are simple. The first rider to the bottom of the trail with sled intact wins, to enjoy all the power and prestige, while the rest watch and join in as the townsfolk raise a mug of cocoa and chant in one voice, proclaiming the Monarch of the Mountain.
Kind of a goofy idea, I started testing some of the new assets I’ve been working on to see how well they worked with differing levels of elevation, and I wound up creating a snow-covered mountainside. As I went on, I started subconsciously adding challenges and turns, and realized that while this map works just fine as a mountainside battlemap, it could also work for a little snowy skill-challenge race between players.
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70+ png assets I’ve been putting together while watching The Witcher on Netflix. You’ll likely be seeing them in use in some forthcoming maps, when I get around to doing the interior spaces of Kaer Morhen. Or, some retired legendary hero’s remote cabin in the woods some place.
Either way, it should round out and add some variety to your asset collection!
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As I’ve been making maps, I’ve tried to create more discrete assets that can be added to the repertoire for mapmakers, myself among them. So, here are some airships, plus some random bits and bobs I put together, good for adding clutter to most structures, buildings, and dungeons.
I like this approach, though it does make map-building a little more arduous in the short term, it’s a good time saver in the long term, so expect more random collections of assets at the end of the month, cobbled together into asset packs.
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A friend recently suggested that I make a map of an “airport,” which got me thinking about what something like that might look like in Dungeons and Dragons. Inspired partially by a terrific Paraglider mod for Skyrim and the home base of the aspiring aeronaut, I made this map. The small cliffside gazebo is littered with supplies and a few prototypes of aerial technology.
Alas, one of those prototypes didn’t work out quite as successfully as he might have hoped, but his base of operations, and the flying contraptions laying there unclaimed, are ready and waiting for any adventurers eager to try their luck.
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One of the things I’ve been trying to make lately has been maps that are a little larger in scope, so I thought I would try making a camp amid the rolling hills, fortified with simple palisade walls, and sparsely populated by simple leather and fur tents. Not some simple camp of farmhands, turned bandit, however, the denizens of this mean and hardscrabble outpost are veterans of guerilla warfare, and outcasts in the land they call home.
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Selected from the November Patron Ideas post: Kavalyr’s Post Office.
I liked this suggestion because it was not something I likely would’ve thought to make on my own, and because it was a sort of funny, whimsical suggestion that I got to have some fun with. I thought about what a post office might be like in a Fantasy world, and decided that this one was A., quite messy, and B., incorporating some alternative methods for pickup and delivery that an enterprising Ranger or Druid might make use of.
For starters, there are a series of tubes for sorting letters and packages into the appropriate carts, running through and around the building, and an aviary on its roof for express deliveries, with a large collection of pigeons for letters and small packages, and one well-trained Roc for exceptionally large and urgent deliveries.
It was a delightful idea, and fun to make. Here’s hoping you’re all going postal in your next campaign.
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