Perspective dungeon map sketch

Tried out the perspective ruler assistant in this one. It's not a finished map yet, but enough for a proof of concept.

Caverns

Here's my first try at a caverns map in Krita. Krita is free open source software by the way so give it a try if you don't have a favorite paint program ready to hand already.

I didn't decide on an entrance yet, so this map doesn't show one. If you use it, it will take that much modifying at least. The dots are stalactites.

Continuing dungeon mapping with Krita

This time I went for a bit more of a Dyson-like effect and then started playing with shades and textures on the floors.

I like it pretty well except the bordering is a bit messed up where it came close to the edge of the image. Have to make sure I leave some room there. 

Met on the road in Lemuria

For a long time I've been meaning to get into running a Barbarians of Lemuria game. So far, I've just done a a one off scenario. Here's a few NPCs as I reacquaint myself with character creation.

People your PC might meet travelling in Lemuria:

Rang Kar  (starting PC or equivalent NPC )

Retired spearman of the line and gentleman farmer

Rang Kar left Malakut military service after 12 years, and has been farming the plot of land in a border province he earned as a soldier's retirement.

Soldier 3, Farmer 1

Strength 2

Agility 1

Mind 0

Appeal 1

Brawl 1

Melee 2

Ranged 0

Defence 1

12 Lifeblood

Boons - Fighting-spear, Blind combat

Flaw - Landlubber

He's usually out with just a dagger and a staff, dressed in homespun laborer's garb a cut better than a peasant's, and his pocket change is just that, perhaps driving a wagon, plowing a field, or herding some livestock; but he has a full set of legionary medium armor packed in a trunk, and spear, shield, and sword ready to hand hanging on the wall.

He's fierce in defence of farm and family but definitely no longer going out looking for fights.

If the gods are fickle, he's just one tragically burnt out farmstead away from an adventuring career...

Zenna of the Forty Veils  (starting PC or equivalent NPC)

Parsoolian entertainer with a secret second life

Dancer 3,  Assassin 1

Strength 0

Agility 2

Mind 0

Appeal 2

Brawl 1

Melee 1

Ranged 0

Defence 2

10 Lifeblood

Boons - Carouser, Pirate killer

Flaw - City dweller

She will always have at least a strangling wire or a hairpin, most likely a dagger. Possibly more than one and poisons if pursuing an assassination.

Caravan guards (rabble+ & standard NPC)

Three swaggering bravos with a few journeys under their belt, a shade better than your average rabble

Guard 1

Melee 1

4 LB

Light or Medium armor

One or two of: dagger, sword, spear, mace, and/or crossbow 

Their leader, Stonnek (the sot, behind his back)

Str 1

App 1

Melee 1 

Defense 1

7 LB,

Guard 2

boon - detect deception, and flaw - drunkard.

Barrow Map

Another map to learn more of Krita.

This one is pretty similar but using the straight line tool a lot and doing less detailing. Its a barrow tomb complex.

Krita

So I was playing too much Neverwinter the last couple weeks and to wean myself away and get a bit creative again, I hooked up an old Wacom tablet to my PC, got drivers installed, and then went looking for a free graphics program to play with. I came across Krita, from http://krita.org and started learning it with the usual pages full of doodles. Once I started to have a rudimentary handle on it, I started trying to make something decent. Here are my first couple experiments in dungeon cartography in Krita. So far, I find it doesn't have the clearest interface, but it does have a lot of useful tools. With a bit of practice, I might get some useful results out of it.

The recipe, such as I remember of it:

I started by flipping through the textures until I came across the hachure one of the gray lines, and filled the page with that using the paint can once I had set it to pour the pattern using a check box in the tool options palette on the right.  

Using the pencil_texture brush tool, I sketched in the room and hallway background shades. I sketched in the outline lines simply using a variety of of the brushes set to a few pixels wide, liberally using control-Z undo until I got them outlined simply. 

But that looked really boring and had slightly wiggly borders since it is harder to draw nearly straight lines with either mouse or tablet than a pen on paper. So, to add interesting doodads that inspire DM creativity, provide shadows for thieves to hide in, etc, and primarily break up the crappiness of the initial outlines, with a couple of small pen tools I went back around the outlines and reinforced one here, made little bits and interior walls stick out there, put some rectangles that could be boxes or chests or furniture in other places. Added some details to the floors as part of this. Whenever I had to change back to the not-quite black for outlines after doing something else, I used the eyedropper on one of the fatter lines to pick it back up in the same color.

Went back around with an airbrush tool that I thought I had white in but was really a very pale green offwhite (which I think intensified a bit in saving as a JPEG) to trim in the hachure background to be just around the dungeon, except for a few bits I missed at the edges. A few touches of red spatter spray for blood of prior violence and green stippling with a small brush for green slimes or something like that pretty much wrapped it up. 

Hook Horrors

"My rat is full of basements. Can you clear them out?"  This inverted hook made me laugh last night when I thought of it and how it might be worked up to make it plausible. More mundanely, the proprietor of a tavern named The Rat has discovered dungeons below the premises. More graphically, there is a large structure in form like a giant rat statue, or an actual enormous petrified rat, and the resident needs similar aid. If its a real, live, rat or even giant rat, you're getting into space warping or some sort of Fantastic Voyage scenario of shrinking PCs. A Tardis shaped like a rat?

I came up with a few more this morning.

"Sheep are stealing our goblins!"

Hordes of vicious elves and dwarves are ravaging the countryside. The Dragon King of Orcs needs your help to stop them.

"My hovercraft is full of eels... seriously".  Alternately a location in a hex crawl, a stranded hovercraft half submerged in a swamp, and full of eels, or eel-men.

The tavern stumbles into a dying man with a map.  Perhaps the tavern the PCs are in is on legs in the mode of Baba Yaga's hut?

The tomb of the undead needs protection from grave robbers.