Hurricane Dungeons

Helene hit my neck of the woods pretty hard. I was without power for 9 days and just got internet back a few hours ago. My yard is a disaster, but I feel fortunate that there was no major property damage or injury to my family and friends. It was much worse to the north of us...cataclysmic even. Living a week without lights and technology was a major inconvenience, but nothing compared to what others are suffering from the storm.

I'm a night-owl by nature and can't really get to sleep before midnight/1 AM, so I spent a lot of that time reading by candlelight, mainly the AD&D DMG—a copy of which I just recently reacquired after selling my D&D collection back in the 90s. It's a sometimes-difficult read, but something in Gary's language is magical and really inspires me.

I typically hand-draw a sketch of any adventure I'm working on, but then create the finished maps in Photoshop. Map-making (and world-building by extension) was the juice that got me into D&D in the first place. I pored over maps in The Hobbit and Lord of the Rings, The Phantom Tollbooth, The Belgeriad, and many of my other favorite fantasy novels. I even decided to become an architect! (I didn't.)

Rather than pay attention in class, I drew elaborate interiors of complexes and spaceships, like this...

So, D&D was a natural lure, and I have tons of hand-drawn maps from my youth. I still love to create maps, and since I was just sitting in the dark, I thought I would try drawing a finished map by hand on actual graph paper. I was happy with the results—nothing elaborate; just a bog-standard labyrinth with little forethought to design. I just let the pencil flow.

Pleased with the results, I did another one the following night, and then ended up doing one each night of the power outage. I tried keying the first map with the random tables in the DMG, but the results there were pretty empty and boring. I might try to key these someday for fun, or use them for a rando dungeon level here or there. In any case, these maps are a memento of the storm.