Creating Battle Maps, Part 12 - Dungeon Mastery

Apart from some occassional niche cases, I feel I’ve covered everything a DM would want out in the wilderness in these tutorials. The next step is to delve into the ever-present dungeons.

It actually makes a lot of sense to have done these first - dungeons are generally where most of the action happens in fantasy role-playing games. The problem - and the reason I focused on outside first -  is that it is far easier to create chaotic, imprecise things like trees using Photoshop trickery than it is to create man made items the same way. There are, therefore, some things you may find in dungeons that I cannot help with. If you want a statue, for example, you’re just going to have to draw a statue.

(Although I do have the glimmerings of an idea involving a pedestrian footbridge, a friend and a camera. We’ll see if that comes to anything...)

Many of these techniques have less refinement than the outdoors ones. Those I have tweaked over many years and occassionally replaced with newer, better ideas (particularly with the trees). I’ve done less work in dungeoneering and, in some cases, no work at all. Some of these tutorials I will be making up as I go, although as with the statue above, I can definitely see the shape of what needs to be done, even now.

Let’s see how we go.

Part 13 - Staying Grounded.