I’m, as ever, playing around in Dungeon Alchemy and trying new things from the new update. It’s a good way to also get inspiration for encounter spaces so that’s an added bonus. This evening’s quick map depicts a campsite in some ruins on the edge of a lake. At the bottom of the lake is a flooded mineshaft, and a hazy low fog hangs over the opening to that pit. The tent is large and of good quality – a covered wagon is parked up nearby, and assorted torches and barrels stand alongside pots, pans, waterskins, and other signs of recent use. It is night time and the campfire isn’t lit. Is the owner inside the tent? Or have the nearby will o the wisps witnessed something come out of the lake?
I enjoy environmental storytelling, so there’s all sorts of bits and pieces I’ve been able to place like a bear trap and a raft tied by the shore. As usual I’ve uploaded Explorers Camp.zip for Roll20 export, or you can just right click and download the map and size accordingly. It should be a 32×32 map if you are manually sizing it. If you use it, let me know what adventures it led to.
This is an early map I made when I first got Dungeon Alchemy after the KickStarter – so wasn’t made with thought of any particular type of encounter or other use. It was mostly an exercise in trying to visualise a layout on three floors and would probably not be a great place to actually live. If nothing else, it is lop-sided and overhangs on the top floor while leaving either a large flat roof or a very oddly sloped set of shingles. Trying to visualise it do give me a headache – but then perhaps this is a magical place and not necessarily all on our plane of existence.
Looking at the layout – the top set of rooms is the ground level floor, with an entrance hall or porch in its top right corner. There’s a large sitting room to the south and a smaller hallway or reception to the west. This leads to a long thin corridor, off which the dining room, kitchen, toilet, and servants’ quarters are set. At the bottom of that corridor there are steps leading down into the cellar, and stairs going up to the master bedroom.
The master bedroom is the room on its own to the right of the map and isn’t anything particularly exciting.
The cellar has steps coming down near the well, along its north wall – and that main cellar area is mostly used for storage and drawing water. Each of the chambers off from that are full of work tables and supplies in crates. Its a rambling open area that could hold experiments or McGuffins that a group could be searching for.
So, I’ve included the exported file, jpeg, and text file as usual as usual as alchemyhouse.zip but am treating this as an example of the early learning curve while playing with a new toy. Enjoy!
We picked up the story from last time with the group making their way across a frozen lake towards a burning trading post. Battle was joined with a group of four trolls, and at the end of the last session, Kerne had slain one of them with a deluge of acid.
This week, the remaining trolls ran for cover, running around or into the trading post, forcing the DDC to pursue them. This was the moment they found that the trolls had left concealed bear traps in their paths – a level of preparation and use of tactics not typical of troll encounters. They lost sight of two of the trolls, but the third could be seen through the trading post’s windows. Valenia and Caeluma therefore focused their efforts on shooting into the burning building with varying degrees of success.
Arwan made his way inside in pursuit and was charged by the troll he found in there – and despite weathering powerful blows stood his ground. Valenia finished the troll off with acid-infused magical arrows and just for a moment all was quiet. Arwan extinguished the largest fire in the building by summoning water – and then the other two trolls reappeared.
They had climbed onto the roof undetected and crawled over the top to try and flank the group when the damaged roof collapsed. One leapt clear and landed next to Kerne – the other fell through and landed next to Arwan. In the blink of an eye Kerne was on the ground and bleeding out, with the troll preparing to eat them. Caeluma and Arwan fought the other troll with magics that severed limbs and dropped it quickly.
Valenia risked the irate troll’s claws to heal Kerne, saving their life but getting her back sliced open in the process. Inside the trading post, the fallen troll’s separated body parts began to fight on independently. For a few moments, as fast as the DDC knocked the trolls down, they or their body parts got back up and continued fighting. Then Arwan called on the gods to summon a flame strike from the heavens. The column of fire punched down through the broken roof. It incinerated the troll remains in moments. Outside, Valenia and Thorin finished off the remaining attacker with acid.
In the aftermath, the group took a short rest and investigated the wreckage. There was nothing of any worth remaining in the ruins, but each of the trolls wore two tokens. The first was a bone and iron brooch in the shape of a humanoid skull. The second was a crude silver fist wrought in silver on a silver chain.
Valenia’s investigations also found deliberately dumped animal and human remains. Blood and gore were placed to form a lure to the area, and based on the blood on the troll remains, they had been the ones placing the lures. They mirrored the gore piles found earlier in the forest trails. The DDC decided to return to the Hold to plan and research their next move.
I’ve included the map here, as well as the zipped file of the Dungeon Alchemy base file, jpeg, and text file with dynamic lighting, door, and window location details: tradingpost attack.zip
I started showing boy s the basics of Dungeon Alchemy while we were away so that he could design the shrine that his character Caeluma is founding at Amberhammer Hold. He’s got a basic layout sorted out, and will now need to do the tweaks and nudges to the decor and props to finish it all off.
This has brought me back to making some random maps to toy with some more of the new features in the recent update, which has led to this mixture of landscape and hidden crypt dominated by the wedged skull of a long-dead dragon:
Entry to this snowbound pass through the mountains is under the skull wedged above the southern end of the pass. A small crypt or shrine has been tunnelled out of the mountain rock, with its entrance at the top of a rocky slope covered in ice and snow. Danger might come from within that structure, or from bandits on the clifftop or even on top of the skull. Perhaps a yeti has taken up residence in the pass, or a troll preys on the unwary.
As usual I’ve put together a zipfile of the original .dam file, the exported jpeg and the text file containing lighting information – and that is included in this blog: dragonskullpass.zip
If you use this for anything, please let me know – I’d love to hear how you used it.
This map featured in our recent one-shot and was a good chance to flesh out the local suburb and bring the group up to speed on what their erstwhile companion had been up to while they were out saving the world.
The club house was founded by Coal, a warforged rogue, to provide a safe space, meals, and general support to local youths – and it is almost certainly only a vicious rumour that it is also a front for a small guild of thieves with a side line in community support.
Just to remind you, this is what Coal looks like: a lithe robot in a suit, with a flowing long coat, various blades and spiked objects close to hand, and quite often a tame mimic nearby as backup.
So, here’s the clubhouse. I only created the main public area – mostly due to time constraint – but also to save some surprises for the future. There’s a large hatch in the main area in the floor suggesting a cellar. There are also stairs to an upper floor.
The general layout was inferred from the more generic area map of the suburb we’ve been using in the main campaign, and created using Dungeon Alchemist. This allowed me to then embed support for dynamic lighting, doors, windows, and movement restriction for walls. As it is on the edge of a public gardens, that provides a pleasant backdrop, while there are buildings either side, suggested by the free-standing walls. In the wider area map, the building to the left is a tea shop and cafeteria famed for its range of produce and cakes. To the right is the home of Iron Ryan, who is a renowned pit fighter, rival to Thorin, and general friend of the DDC who dated Kerne for a while. He’s a regular visitor at the club house and teaches self defence classes – and is most definitely not working as muscle for Coal, and you won’t repeat that rumour unless you fancy waking up tied up and on display somewhere public.
There are two entrance lobbies from the street that lead into the main hall – and the ground floor contains two study/lounges, an office, a toilet, a kitchen, and a pantry. In our game it made a good place for the group to receive their rewards, debrief Coal on the mission, and give young Odif a present.
I have, as usual with a Dungeon Alchemy map, created a zip file with the original file, a jpg export, and a text file giving all the additional sizing/doors/windows/dynamic lighting support. To use it in Roll20, upload the jpg to a blank map and put it on the map layer, then cut and paste the text file into the chat box while you have the Dungeon Alchemy API script running. It will resize and label the map accordingly.
Feel free to download, and if you use it, drop me a note to let me know what stories unfolded: coalsclubhouse.zip
I put this together for my games as a generic guest house map – largely because of the reverse heist that we’re doing for the one-shot adventure. Its a town-based guest house with three floors. Five rooms are for guests, while the sixth is a master bedroom for the owner. There is a latrine on the first floor. and a bathroom on the top floor. The whole map is geared for a 39×22 grid which leaves a small border around the whole thing – and the floors go from left to right as they ascend.
There are two doors on the ground floor – one from the garden at the top, and one from the alleyway on the left hand side – and various odds and sods plonked into the map by Dungeon Alchemy. I’ve included a zipfile below with the map jpeg export, original dungeon alchemy file, and the generated text file that defines walls, doors, windows, and light sources for Roll20.
As ever, for Roll20 you import the jpg to the background layer and then, while the dungeon alchemy api script is running, paste the text file contents into chat. That will resize the map and graphic and line up all the walls and features. Let me know what adventures you have with it…
I spent most of yesterday quietly rumbling through a low patch with making maps, watching old Time Team videos, and playing on the XBox in between conversations with people. It was an unashamed day of taking care of myself, and my partners very wisely let me get on with it and made sure I ate properly and didn’t mumble into my beard too much. I ended the day with the beginnings of a migraine (light flashes and loops of a song fragment) but the near total shut down was very much needed.
And so to the map: I was looking at potential lair ideas and followed on from the bridge maps I’ve been experimenting on. There’s always an epic feel to raised areas over a lava field so went with something that could possibly once have been natural and that now shows signs of having been coopted and adapted.
To the right of the map is a fiery magical portal at the top of carved steps coming down onto the broken circle of level ground. Obsidian walls reach down to the cooling lava surface that still puffs with flames and shimmers of heat below. There’s a lit brazier in the middle on top of an obsidian column in the centre of the “donut” and to the north of that, an eldritch obelisk next to a broken altar. There are bundles of books on that and a broken ramshackle bookcase nearby and some scattered timepieces. To the very west lies a tomb slab. Could the old tomb be what this chamber was built for, or was this space found and then repurposed? Perhaps clues are inscribed on the triple-sided obelisk?
This chamber could therefore be the last resting place of a buried being whose grave goods contain something the adventurers seek. It could be where a missing field researcher is found, overcome by heat or monsters that must be overcome. Maybe it is the lair of some dark spirit risen from death and seeking some elder knowledge or to overthrow the lands below the volcano, or far above this hidden space.
The map is based on a 30×40 landscape grid but doesn’t have one superimposed so you can import it to a VTT of choice and grid scale that suits you – I’ve assumed five foot per grid square as a standard measurement when planning this. If you use it, have fun! Let me know if you remember and tell me what story you told with it.
I’m experimenting with some of the new features being rolled out in Roll20 – namely interactive doors and windows, and how to use dynamic lighting settings to restrict movement. The latter is nothing new but I’ve not really been using it. In large part that’s because it’s been fiddly and has had big impacts on people using older kit, but I’m still playing around with it.
The other excuse for this map was to experiment with exporting maps assembled from resources inside Roll20 so that I could then stitch them together with other assets to meld elements together
Today’s map falls into that category, having been assembled from a series of floor tiles before I grouped them together and took a screenshot that I then imported into Paint and cropped to save as a jpeg.
Its a simple enough layout, suitable for an encounter. In this instance I inserted a couple of unlockable grates, put in some light sources, and populated it with two iron defenders for an encounter that a group of third level characters would find easy on their way to some further destination while also allowing some world building from the abandoned desks, crates, and fallen rubble in the sewer space.
Well, it appears to be working, and it only took a little bit of swearing under my breath and some casting around to find where the laptop had defaulted to saving the image so I could import it here. Enjoy!
I’ve been catching up on shows this evening through the fog of painkillers and decided to spend a bit of time fleshing things out around the DDC adventures – so I’ve just drawn this up on Inkarnate. Its only a first draft to get used to a different style of map so I’m not sure yet if it will get used in this format or see major revisions.
I wanted to suggest features I threw in off the top of my head while describing the area during sessions – with hilly approaches from the south east and north east, and a mountainous pass to the north west. I also made mention of a forest that the DDC fled through after their first encounter with the denizens that had taken over the Hold, so that had to make an appearance. I’ve dotted a few farms – two grain and one gourds to the north, and marked good fishing to the west along with a mill.
During the attempts to draw together allies I mentioned an abandoned settlement near a depleted mine so reasoned there would likely be several of those in the area – marked with ruins and mine signs dotted around. There’s also a nice big open plains area to the north of the Hold where the main pitched battle took place, but that can also develop into a location for a trading hub now that House Sivis has opened the teleport circle. I’m still mulling over how much of a time elapse there will be in-game before the next game chapter – if only so the poor adventurers can have a rest and catch a bit of a break to enjoy the fruits of their labours.
It would be rude to do the write-up of Sunday’s game and not put up the battlemap we used. The map shown here is a very much cut down version of the bigger map I’d put together of the whole Hold. That original map was generated using Dungeon Alchemist and exported as a jpeg before my then painting snow in with Photoshop Elements. Then the whole thing was imported into Roll20 and some animated spell effects used to simulate the portal (specifically Black Tentacles overlaid with a gaseous cloud)
The characters were placed anywhere they wanted to be within 20 foot or so of the entrance at the North. The snowy stone was treated as rough terrain with rolls to keep footing every time they moved. The grassed areas were easy to travers as it was only light snow. The entrance hall is where the beholder, mindflayers, and a gazer familiar were staged, and the portal was in the structure on the right of the map. The layout therefore gave lots of options for cover and breaking line of sight with opponents with trees, hedges, and ornamental objects.
This version is a relatively low-resolution image that nevertheless scaled well for the purposes of the VTT – just as well as the photoshopped version was nearly 30Mb in size due to my editing options and I had to drastically resize and compress the file.
Still, here we go – feel free to grab and use. I’ve made up a zip file with the original non-winter cut down map, this winter version, and the associated lighting and sizing text file so that you can import either or both versions to your Roll20 vtt – you’ll need to be running the Dungeon Alchemy API, import the graphic to the mmap layer and then copy and paste the contents of the text file into your Roll20 chat. That will resize the map and add lights for the torches on the map.
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