Village of Pramayama

I’m going to be updating/adapting this old D&D expert set adventure module (“Master of the Desert Nomads” and “Temple of Death”) to 3.5 for my Al-Qadim game. A lot of the story and encounters are going to be changed to fit my needs, but the nuts and bolts will remain. So, I’ll be doing a series of maps for the adventure. This is the first. I’ve loosely based it off the map provided, but changed almost everything about it. This will be the village where the PCs will begin. Its a small village that focuses on fishing, farming, and a little ranching. Its situated in the scrublands bordering the desert environment.

*Here is a new version that incorporates many of the suggestions provided by folks at the Cartographers Guild and Profantasy Forums.  As you can see, I’ve increased the number of houses and decreased their size (along with changing the overall scale).  I’ve fixed some typos in the text and added a few more labels.

 

Palace of the Twisted King

Since my PCs are frequently roaming about the desert, I thought it would be cool to have some more complex random encounters for them while their making their way from city to city. I stumbled upon side-quest type encounter in Dungeon Magazine (#116) “Palace of the Twisted King” that seemed to suit this purpose. Although I remained pretty faithful to the original layout, I made some modifications to the original design to suit my own aesthetic.

The plan is that they would seek shelter from a vicious sand storm in this ruined way station. However, the real terror for them begins that night as a group of “Meenlocks” torment them from their secret basement tunnels.

Here is the tunnel system that runs below the ruins. Its a very tight tunnel (only a couple feet wide and tall) and at the end is a cave where the Meenlocks dwell when they aren’t torturing unsuspecting passersby.  The * mark the spot where a secret entrance can be found in the ruin map (beneath the sand).

Both of these maps were made with CC3 and utilize objects which can be found in the CSUAC and Dunjinni Forums.  I also quickly combined the two in Photoshop.

Village of Taffarel

The “Village of Taffarel” was my entry into the Cartographer’s Guild September/October 2012 Lite Challenge.  The challenge was to create a village map which depicted a secret of some kind.

This village is situated on a series of small plateaus in a mountainous region of my Al-Qadim campaign.  Its sort of a frontier outpost that sits near the mountainous boundary between semi-arid planes of the north and brutal desert to the south (Al-Qadim proper).  It is therefore largely autonomous and informally ruled by a large extended family whose elders are the head priests of the local temple.  The villagers themselves are primarily former nomads who have settled in this area for protection from other nomadic bands and tend livestock.

This map contains two secrets (although they were not depicted explicitly). Unbeknownst to outsiders or the average villager is that this ruling family is actually a clan of Lycan (Were-Hyenas) who have been terrorizing many of the nomadic tribes and small villages in the surrounding area.  Furthermore, the local temple is a shrine to “Inalla” who is commonly known as a goddess of nature, survival and instinct, but lesser known as the patron saint of Lycans.  The high priest in this temple is the Progenitor of this Were-Hyena bloodline and the family compound to the east is the home of his clan.

The second secret is that this clan of Lycan have also entered into an alliance with a Drow community.  The details of this community and the nature of their relationship to the Lycan still needs to be developed, but it largely revolves around inciting broader unease/rebellion in the Elvish communities of Al-Qadim.  The Lycans protect a secret entrance to the Underdark that lies beneath the temple (more specially, beneath the State of Inalla in the main hall of the temple.)

The temple was made with CC3 and utilizes textures modified from CGtextures.com.  It also relies upon symbols that can be found in the CSUAC and Dunjinni forums (Special thanks to Bogie for providing the Statue of Inalla.)  The rest of the map was created in Photoshop.