INSIDE MAKING A DUNGEON MAP FOR WANDERING HEROES OF OGRE GATE

One of our artists has posted an interesting look at the work he is doing for Wandering Heroes of Ogre Gate (You can find the post HERE). This shows the development of the Tomb of the Timeless Master map. It is still in the early stages so this is all laying the groundwork for what is to come (here is a link to a post that includes an image of a finished map for another location). 

Michael also talks about how we communicate and develop the map concept. In this case I had a map I'd used in my own Wandering Heroes of Ogre Gate campaign with entries written in a separate document. He takes that two-dimensional map and creates a 3D model. But the process isn't always smooth. This isn't addressed in Michael's post but it is something I find very helpful when working with him on a project. 

It is one thing to have an idea of something in two dimensions sketched on a page, but when Michael makes a living image to scale, we often have to talk to tweak things because my idea just doesn't work when you hold it under the light of a 3 dimensional model. In this case he found a lot of issues with my original numbers for heights. Some of these were simply due to the need to show everything from a certain angle (a high spiral stairway in the foreground could obscure important rooms for example), but a lot of them were a product of me failing to visualize the scale in the first place (i.e. thinking through what what a 50 foot high stairway really would look like in relation to other parts of the map). This helped us improve the dungeon. 

Anyways, folks curious about the process should check out the post.