From the archives: The Rest of the WFRP Town!

 This is it folks - the last archive post - now we're all up to date!

This is the second half of the WFRP town map set featured in the last post. It's also the bit where things get more interesting, what with all the rubble modules which can be added to the buildings, and the VERY, VERY obviously Warhammer bit, which is fortunately on an optional overlay.

Let's get things rolling with this fancy looking shrine. Working with all the different textures and shapes in the tiles was a nice change.

This is the herbalist's shop - if I am not mistaken, this was the first shop map that I did. It's designed to combine with the next map, but that's optional.

Here's the garden map. You can either use it stand alone, or by tucking the right edge in under the herbalist's shop to make it into an attached back yard. It's also the only time I've done wooden walls.

There's rather a lot of rubble piles in this set. I did them all as seperate elements so they could be piled in wherever appropriate to turn normal maps into ruins.

I did a few different shapes and sizes.

A few of the rubble piles included walls to allow for partially collapsed buildings and more variety.

Some of them are even the same size as a full building.

I also made a module which could be slapped down on top of any wall to collapse it...

And here's the reason for all the destruction! The dreaded warp stone powered Skaven drilling machine! This allowed for a fulls Cale Skaven invasion from below, leading to a desperate quest through the sewers and tunnels under Middenheim to find and neutralise the warp stone reactors! This is the most Warhammer-ish bit of the set, but since I didn't add any Skaven icons to the machine, you can get away with using it elsewhere.

Well, that's all folks. We've now unpacked the entire archives. As a result, posts will slow down since I'm only going to be posting when I have new content to share.

From the archives: Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay Town

 I've found the lost WFRP town maps! Turns out I had uploaded them to Google Drive at some point, and deleted them from my hard drive. 

These were created during lockdown in 2020 for a Warhammer role-play campaign I played with my Warhammer mates - one of whom was only going to play RPGs if it was Warhammer related. They were designed to represent Empire towns (Middenheim, Krakenburg and Schmurtziggerheim if I recall correctly) but can be used for any RPG. There are a few empire-ish bits like German text and a giant Middenheim wolf-head crest, but those won't look out of place elsewhere.

This set consists of two sub-sets - one set is for outdoor stuff and uses large areas of cobblestone and paving stones to represent streets and pavements. These are modular and can be arranged to make up any shape of street. The other set contains the interiors of the buildings. These can be placed on top of the street and pavement modules to create the town. A few of the buildings are multi-piece.

Let's start with the blacksmith's forge. One whole corner of this building is open to the street, the top floor held up by stout pillars. I never did make top floors for these buildings.

Next up is this bookshop.  Looks like I forgot to do the crosshatching on the inside wall...

Here's the butcher's shop. Drawing all the details of the back room with the meat being carved was quite interesting.

This general store is the most 'WFRP' piece of the set I this post - what with he welcome mat being in German. Of course, if you ARE in Germany, this won't be a problem, but the massive spoilers contained in WFRP published modules if you CAN speak German will ruin the game. (I know people who studied German at school and therefore know what all the names in those old WFRP adventures mean - all of which contain either massive spoilers or helpful advice about not trusting that character!)

Here's the basic street module - a large area of cobblestones. Since I knew this would be run in Roll20, I didn't bother too much about indicating the squares.

To go with he cobbles is this large area of paving stones. This is used to make footpaths or town squares.

There are two curb stone modules used to indicate gutters along the side of the streets and connect the cobble streets to the paving stone foot paths.

To avoid monotony, I made two.

I also made two corner caps to take them round corners - I didn't think to make one which allows the gutters to meet at the opposite angle...

Well, that's all for this instalment - next time we'll be wrapping up our tour of the archive by sharing the rest of the town!

From the archives: A Brief Sojourn at Bridley-Ney

 Rising up from the archives, gasping for air and blinking in the unaccustomed daylight, come a collection of maps originally drawn for Call of Cthulhu. These include town maps, and a large multi-parter designed to got together as a 1930s light house.

The peaceful island of Bridley New, off the south coast of England.

Town map showing Bridley-Ney town in 1935. Not shown: sinister squid cults. But it's for Call of Cthulhu, so you can just assume they are there somewhere.

This is the complete lighthouse map, assembled from the various scans below.

I drew accessories on a seperate page so I could add or remove them at will - this way the map can also be used for fantasy games.

The tool bench is designed to have the engine block seen above on it. Not very fantasy, so I made it removable.

Okay, so 44 Gallon drums are not very fantasy either, but I guess I wasn't thinking when I drew those it.

To get everything to fit on scalable sized A4 paper, I had to split some of the rooms up inventively. It was a bit confusing drawing like this.

Well, even sinister squid cultists enjoy roast dinner it seems...

Well, that's about it for the archives. If I dig anything up, it'll go up on a Monday or Thursday I guess...

Curse Crypt expansion - massive open rooms!

 Recently I have been planning a way to run an RPG session during lunchtimes for my school games club. Time will be very tight so something like DND is not an option. Which is a relief, since I don't much care for DND at the best of times. I've been working on a fast playing combat-focused rule set taking inspiration from Lasers and Feelings, Dungeon World and Gloomhaven, and I've realised that this will require some fairly open-plan maps. So I've spent a little time working on an expansion for the Cursed Crypt with REALLY big rooms. It's still based on 8X8 tiles, but you can now make a huge room by combining these together. I'm planning of varying this up a bit by using some overlays with things like rubble, statues, pillars etc.

At present, this is the only way into the big room - I'm going to make some other options.

Having a whole 8X7 inch are to work with allows for some pretty big features like this huge rubble pile from a collapsed wall (I assume part of the roof went too)

The first tiles I made were the corners - I plan to use tokens or overlays to put things into those round areas, like statues, shrines, healing pools etc.

Both of them are pretty similar really, but since a room needs four corners, I didn't want too much repetition.

This open expanse with no walls is designed to go in the middle, allowing a room made up to 3 by 3 tiles. This is a good table top size - not too big that it won't fit on a table, but big enough to allow a lot of movement options and prevent PCs from blocking one another in.

This version is fancier - objectives can be placed on the plinth, and the pillars help to break up lines of sight and movement. When the room is as open as this one will be, ranged attackers have a field day, so adding cover is important.

I will be making some more tiles to further expand the set. I'm also printing these and gluing them to thick cardboard for use on the table top. I've got them double sides, with parts of the original cursed crypt on the other side.

From the Archives - The Blighted Temple!

 Digging around the archives, I have unearthed the Blighted Temple. This is the biggest and most complex map I've done. Although it was always planned to connect up into one piece, it was drawn on several sheets of paper due to restrictions on the size of my scanner. To save a little time, I made the map symmetrical so I could re-use parts. I drew both a squid-enhanced and empty version of the pool and edited them in over the original drawing.

This is the complete temple.

Here are the original drawings:

From the Archives - Noisome Alleys!

 Plunging back into the archives, it's time to look at some newer maps - Noisome Alleys! Although I have a set of town maps, they are really more focused on the insides of the buildings, so I decided to make some twisting, horrible run-down alley ways for ambushes and chases.

Here we have a corner with such lovely accessories as a pile of reeking rubbish.

You can't have twisting alleys without some twisty bits.

This is the first attempt at a 45 degree adaptor. It took me a while to get all the dimensions right.

A hideous dead end - the sort of place uncouth ruffians lure one for a mugging.

There are more of these, but it would appear that although I drew them up, I didn't scan them all. I'll have to get on to that.

Well, the archive is almost empty, but keep checking in on Monday and Thursday for the last few things...

From the Archives: Coloured Original Dungeon and Example Layout!

 Digging around in the depths, I unearthed some example layouts made using the original dungeon. They didn't seem worth a post on their own, but then I figures I'd share some samples of the coloured version too. There are also a few rooms which I appear to have overlooked first time round, so here they are!

The laundry room. It's designed to have some extra furniture tokens added for the mighty cauldrons and ironing boards etc.

The study I posted before in line drawing. Note the glow from the fire - it makes things more obvious
.

The barracks - one of the first rooms I drew, and somehow overlooked...

Here's the colourised version.

This was lurking in a backup folder - it's a work in progress screen shot from Roll20 showing the complete dungeon layout. The lines drawn in indicate where I need to drawn new passages etc. to make things work.

Here's a screenshot showing the dungeon in action in Roll20. The tokens are made using the Two Minute Tabletop Token Generator tool. It is a thing of great excellence. Those pigs in the cell got out and wandered around the dungeon throughout the rest of the dungeon crawl - which, since it was run during school lunchtimes during lockdown took quite some time...

Ah the joy of colour really bringing out the horrors of Orc toilets...

A mighty chapel. I decided I wanted the floors in some of the high status rooms in a different colour to make them really stand out.

Here's the grand entry with one of the evil eye icons in place.

The feasting hall of the orc king in living colour!

Small guard post in colour...

The orc king's bedroom in colour!

This is a screen shot of the complete dungeon in Roll 20, in full colour!

More in-game shots from Roll20.

Further in game Roll20 shots - the room bottom left has not been discovered yet, and there seem to be some bad guys waiting just off the map to be deployed.

Well, the archive is looking a little emptier, but there's still stuff in there! Check back on Mondays and Thursdays for more archive posts!