Over a year ago, I began a redesign of the classic D&D starter set – The Lost Mines of Phandelver, to better fit the adventure into my world and redesign the Wave Echo Cave megadungeon. Since then a lot of stuff got in the way, but I’m starting to get back into the swing of it. I’m running the adventure for my group and thought I’d pick back up where I left off. I introduced this project here, so please check back on that entry for any context and changes I made initially. In this post I took heavy inspiration from Kenji at Crosland and have wholesale quoted certain sections from his ideas in my write up below because he had some fantastic design notes. This section of the adventure is designed to fill some gaps in the overland travel where the party are searching for the lost mines and discovering different things in the lead up to it.
Continue reading “Lost Mines of Phandelver: The lead up to the Mines”Category: Mini Maps
Lost Mines of Phandelver: Redesigning the Starter Set to fit my world
The Lost Mines of Madril – Basic Map, Key and Context
As part of my Summer break, I am taking the time to redesign the Dungeons and Dragons Starter Set Adventure – The Lost Mines of Phandelver. I have begun running the adventure for one of the groups I DM for and after reading ahead, quickly realised that I wanted to change so much to not only improve on the adventure as written, but also to increase the level of realism and better fit it into my world. Now, I know that the Wave Echo Cave/Lost Mines are quite far off in the adventure for my group, but I was inspired by the map made by Hituro here, and decided to take it further and develop my own. This post will serve to just introduce my map and give it context in my world, before I later develop a full map legend including room descriptions, encounter designs and loot. That should hopefully follow.
TL,DR – Feel free to skip past my In world Lore and go to the section labelled Map Key for exactly that – A key to my maps.
Continue reading “Lost Mines of Phandelver: Redesigning the Starter Set to fit my world”Mini Map: The Hinterland Caves
Welcome back to Wittering of a Worldbuilder! In today’s blog post I am sharing with you a recent dungeon I ran in a 1:1 game with a friend. He has been playing in a region in my world called The Barren Wolds and although I have had these caves pinned on my hexmap since day 1, he only learned of them and sought them out last session.
The map itself was originally taken from the Mudworldblog and I have added to it and tried to Jaquay it a little so that it can fit the ideas I had for it in this region of my world. So, here I give you: The Hinterland Caves!
Mini Map #2: The Classic Tomb
Welcome back to Mini Maps! In these posts I share a small dungeon map from my world that is designed for use in tabletop roleplaying games. Today I present the Classic Tomb!
This map was created in Microsoft Paint using a simple gridded base and drawing the room shapes on top. I used interesting plans and images of real life catacombs and tombs to inspire this design and wanted to make the tomb realistic in nature as a common design for a relatively wealthy tomb. I have also tried to adhere to the classic 5-room dungeon design which is laid out below. This should hopefully allow anyone to cut and paste this tomb design into their own games.
Continue reading “Mini Map #2: The Classic Tomb“Battlemap Encounters #1 – Bandit Ambush
Welcome to my first attempt at creating a series of levelled encounters built around the same battlemap premise. In this Encounter map, I intended to set up a classic bandit ambush on a forest road. The Encounter ideas are scaled up for different level parties and are of course subject to DM discretion. The purpose of these posts is not to provide perfectly balanced encounters, but to give a variety of challenging encounters for your players. I don’t often follow the Challenge Rating system from 5e and prefer to design exciting and challenging match ups for players, using elements of Matt Colville’s Action-orientated monsters as well as the use of hazards, traps, terrain and dynamic environmental events. If you feel the encounters are too difficult or not difficult enough, it is up to you as a DM to alter the encounter as you see fit to match your party.
Continue reading “Battlemap Encounters #1 – Bandit Ambush”Mini Map #1 – The Lost Treacle Mines
Welcome to Mini Maps! In this post I share a small dungeon map from my world that is designed for use in tabletop roleplaying games. Today I present the Lost Treacle Mines!
This was in fact my first ever dungeon map, drawn on squared paper in pencil and then inked with a simple biro pen. There are a couple of ink smudges in places and some areas of confused hatching, but otherwise I am very pleased with the final look. I learned a lot both in the design phase and the drawing and inking phase, which I will hopefully apply to future map designs.
Continue reading “Mini Map #1 – The Lost Treacle Mines”
Wittering of a Worldbuilder 