On Assignment

 This will all end in tears

Hey folks! I’m telling myself to keep it short this week. I’m diving in to a new illustration gig, which will consume my evenings and weekends for a few weeks. My day job is consistently pretty stressful and I’m way behind schedule, so blogging may take a bit of a backseat for now. I do intend to keep sharing maps and hopefully stay only about a week behind on the daily dungeon entries, so please stick around!

For fun, here are some little figure studies I’ve done recently to work on motion and fluidity. I like to think of them as dancing skeletons. I haven’t done any live figure drawing in many years and my grasp on anatomy has always been tenuous, but it seems to be good enough for old school RPG work. These little gestural sketches help me start loose, even if I tend to overwork things to exhaustion. The new assignment is to create three character illustrations for an upcoming but unannounced project. More about that later…for now, I’ve started hashing out proportions and movement in blue for the first character and I’m feeling OK about my progress.

Let’s talk about the dungeon! If you were here last week, you know I love a hexagon. You also know that for some reason, level 5 is not as much a dungeon floor as it is a fairly expansive underwater hexcrawl, surrounding the central shaft of the dungeon up to this point. I’m not even going to get into how much that increases the whole scope of this project. I had intended to create a hexcrawl for the surface of the world as well, so why not another? Fortunately, May has 31 days, which allows me to organize the Gardens in an interesting way. Four sections of seven hexes each and the extra three days become the “bridge” across. The central dungeon descends through the middle, but only grants access to two other hexes. Of course, there are plenty of other ways to reach the Gardens, and you could always just…swim.

The timing of my post didn’t really line up, so you’ll have to check out the previous one to see the first chunk of the Floating Gardens.

Week 19: So, due to the constraints of my planner notebook format, some of these hex chunks are sideways. Makes sense to me. I have yet to stick them all together to see what that looks like. Rough draft…just gotta keep moving. The increased scope of the Gardens means I’ve created a lot of very different ecosystems and faction relationships in rapid succession, so there is a LOT going on here and it’s fun to reread some of this a couple months later. I’ve also decided that beyond the general description, each hex should have a Secret. This chunk of the Gardens contains a Silt Desert, a village of tiny people, an ancient beast trapped in a labyrinth, and a shitload of seaweed.

Week 20: That’s a lot of weeks! This one is visually my favorite of the hex chunks. The dark hexes represent an expanse of empty sea that is magically dark and difficult to breath even for sea dwellers. The entries for those hexes are mostly a table of things that might ambush you in the dark. Good times. Of course, if you gain the respect or friendship of the Mountain, you may be granted safe passage. Yes, it’s an actual mountain…kinda. On its slopes live a community of water sprites who herd giant water fleas and ride waves of massive drifting leaves to move throughout the Gardens.

Week 21: Something has poisoned and killed much of the north side of the Floating Gardens. Think it might have something to do with the Giant Haunted Palace? No way to know for sure. Lots of fun things to think about around here, like lamprey skeletons and a minor sleeping god. Some big answers may be found, and PC indiscretion (or ingenuity) could set some major things in motion. But there are also helpful beings here, and a nice place spend the night. Stay for a while! Stay forever! This chunk features some of the things I’m most excited to illustrate when the time comes.

Week 22: The last three days of May create the bridge between the north and south chunks of the Floating Gardens. In the center is the rest of the dungeon, or at least a small access point. This is guarded by some serious opposition, as a lot of things lie in the balance between the Upper and Lower sections of the dungeon. That transition will be covered a bit better at the beginning of Level 7. I know, it’s complicated. I really need to work on that map of connections…

This page also features the first four entries from June. This is actually the area directly below a specific room on Level 2, but it would exceedingly difficult to access early in the party’s exploration of the dungeon. Nothing is impossible, and I look forward to seeing what happens here during an eventual playtest. The difference between a Metroidvania video game and a TTRPG Megadungeon is that one of them is breakable, and I like to encourage that.

This post has been converted from a previous Substack post and dated accordingly. Please let me know if it seems like something got lost or if you find any major formatting issues.

Okay, that’s all I’ve got tonight! I’d love to have time to write extensively about hexcrawls, but I probably don’t have anything new to add on the game design front. I just like to draw them and write random tables. I’ll see you soon, but don’t forget to subscribe and share! Tell me why you think hexagons are cool!

Andy