Dungeon Map

[grayrt]

Hi everyone -

I've been lurking for a while, and have found this place to be a fantastic resource for inspiration and education.

While I'm nowhere near some of the proficiency on display here, I'm hoping that by posting my latest WIP I can motivate myself to keep progressing. Attached is my current "homework" piece: a dungeon map intended for VTT gaming, made exclusively in Photoshop. The inspiration for this is a module I'm working on publishing at the DMs Guild site, and it's supposed to be a simple abandoned cave with a hidden secret intended to be discovered only by the worthy.

For me, this is primarily an exercise in setting up my workflow, starting with a base 24x36" template with a custom-blended background texture. I've currently got this set up to be 100 dpi, which I think seems to be working well so far. I initially tried 300 dpi in case I wanted this to be printed at high quality, and while I didn't really run into performance issues with the working file, it did seem excessive.

The linework and layer styles are cribbed from advice given by Jonathan Roberts' fantasticmaps.com blog.

Work to be done still:

1. Cleaning up the grid lines that currently run inside the cavern walls. I think this was introduced when I stroked the walls with a jittery brush, which was intended to give the illusion of a rough cavern wall. While I could just use an eraser brush to remove them, in my ideal workflow those would be obscured by a layer mask (or something) so that when I added the grid layer they just never showed up in the first place.

2. The map name text needs to be visually separated from the background texture, either via drop shadow, outer glow effect, etc.

3. A map key.

4. Additional detail objects, such as doors, rubble, dungeon accessories (statues, etc).

5. Additional map details for visual interest/aesthetics, such as an interesting border.

6. Tweaking the layer effects to bring more visual contrast between the cavern walls and the floor.

[grayrt]

Ok, Rev B of this WIP.

In this revision, I've added a few things. I've added an additional stone texture to the floor, lightened the grid lines, cleaned up the grid lines where they spilled over into the walls, increased the wall stroke thickness, added a glow+drop shadow to the title, changed the title text to all uppercase of varying text size, added a border, adjusted the wall glow+shadowing, and increased the contrast between the chasm and the stone bridge to more accurately display the height difference.

Still to-do:

1. Map key

2. Additional detail objects, such as doors, rubble, dungeon accessories (statues, etc).

3. Possibly add tweaks to the border to make it more visually interesting.

[jpstod]

Loving the Simplicity of the Map..Try not to overthink it.

[grayrt]

Final post here on this. There's plenty more that could be done to it, but I've learned when I need to just call something done so I can move on to the next thing.

In this revision, I added the room numbers, and a quick and easy key. Not much else was added, frankly.

Even though this looks pretty plain to me, I learned a modest amount about what kind of workflows work for me, some of the basics of working with layers, textures, etc.

Now, on to the next thing!

[Sharpe]

Hey, nice map!

Clean and simple, and a cool design. I can imagine the delvers thinking, "Hmm . . . Must be a secret door here," in the first room, and then thinking they are probably done finding secret doors after the second. But, no, there's one more!

Congrats on your first rep point from me for it, too! :-D