1 {a portion of a dungeon map}
1 Caption: Making maps

I've written about maps once before. I mentioned then (over a year ago now) that I still had an outdated large format atlas sitting on my bookshelf. Well, over the Christmas/New Year break I have done a housecleaning of my overflowing bookshelves and decided the atlas finally has to go. There's no real justification for keeping an atlas that still shows East and West Germany, and the USSR, and Czechoslovakia, and North Yemen, and New Hebrides, and Rhodesia. Except for the love of maps. And even that is not strong enough in this case. I need that bookshelf space back.

But while ditching old maps of the real world, I have been busy creating maps of places that don't really exist. In that previous annotation I also linked to a community on Google+ called Map-Making in Games, which is full of inspirational postings by people with ideas that can be used for mapping fantasy worlds, and actual maps that people have created to share. Finding some inspiration there, and some free time over the past few weeks, I have been sketching a few maps of the classic dungeon adventure style made famous by early Dungeons & Dragons adventures.

I've been sketching them on my iPad, using the app Paper by FiftyThree, which is one of my favourite apps. (I also use it to draw comics, such as the couple I've posted in this slot recently.) It takes a bit of practice and patience drawing on something not designed for precise pen input, but it's starting to pay off. And there's no grid paper either, so I'm drawing completely freehand.

I didn't want to spend a lot of time writing something today - I'm still in holiday mode. And I have a whole lot of other things I want to do this year. So I'll just leave these maps here. I hope some of you find them inspiring. Feel free to use them for your own dungeon adventures, if you wish. (Click for larger versions.)