Scribbles and Horrors

Nearly 5 years ago I kicked off this blog with a post about Level EPSILON in Redux. Well, I am happy to announce that I have finally completed drawing level Delta-Zeta I, which sits directly beneath Epsilon:

(in this map, as with Epsilon, North is to the left.)

The left third of this image is Level DELTA, right two-thirds are ZETA I. Underneath this map is ZETA II (still under construction) and ZETA III.

The Process

Level ZETA has been a long time coming. (It usually doesn’t take 5 years to finish level 2!) After drawing Epsilon in 2021, I immediately wrote up a schematic for Zeta, and got to work:

Quickly I lost steam–it just took too many sheets of 4-squares-per-inch inch graph paper to realistically have 50′ hallways. Over the years I kept returning, would get a little ways into it and then become overwhelmed.

I moved on to other maps at smaller scale–drawn on blank paper or index cards–which have become the main area of exploration for Redux. (One of these I slotted into the space beneath Epsilon and wrote about here: Defunct Dungeon Map.)

When the Redux campaign finally began in 2023 (with actual players!), I started them in my newer levels. Zeta has remained dormant as a Good Concept until now. Now it’s about ⅓ done.

Level Delta (the left side) I completed separately, but recently had the energy to expand connect a new Zeta portion to it. I did a very quick sketch in my notebook with the main features, and got to work.

I carefully sketched out the star first, trying several permutations, before copying it at scale on graph paper. This was entirely nerve-wracking. After this I filled in the space. I used a very fine ballpoint gel pen and a pencil on three 11” x 17” sheets of 10-squares-per-inch graph paper. I didn’t use a straightedge or a compass, everything is freehand with the graph paper as a guide.

I did not count how many hours this took me to draw, and it’s complicated because I was simultaneously drawing portions of Zeta II and Zeta III, but quite a few. It’s been a fairly manic couple weeks. I find once I start working in earnest on levels like these it begins to dominate my thoughts. I see tangled passages when I close my eyes–glimpses of the fantastic. When I get home from work I immediately start drawing and wont stop for hours, don’t even notice when people ask me things.

Notes about the Layout

Many of the passages are knotted together–these are not upward- or downward-sloping passages, but are all level ground. Call it non-euclidean if you’d like. I imagine these sections will be hideous to map out, but that’s my players’ problem, not mine. I like how a topology can be so clearly readable when looking at it flat on the page, but be so bewildering once you try to make sense of it as a 3 dimensional space.

I do my best to make my dungeons fairly easy to navigate once you know where you’re going. Those big 30′ passages can take a party to any section of the map it wants to go if they’re willing to take the long way around, and then if they choose get into the weeds of things they can.

For this project I intentionally included a ton of stairs, elevators, and slopes. Likewise, I paid special attention to the stairways coming down from Epsilon, giving those locations plenty of navigation options. It’s fairly trivial to go from the up-stairs down a level or two.

The 10-pointed star turned out fairly well; half of its slopes go down 1 level to Zeta II, and the other half go down to Zeta III. The octagonal interior reminds me of Dark Souls, for some reason. Stars are neat features because they force a kind of outpouring and an inward tendency–I feel like the big one is sufficiently grand and overwhelming.

There aren’t very many choke points in this map, but there are a lot of shortcuts and longcuts. It’s possible to travel through this map by sort of choosing a direction and going towards it, but there will be resistance in the form of monsters/traps and doors. Lots of doors.

The long staggered parallel passageways to the south were surprisingly easy to draw, and I find them different and visually appealing. They remind me a little of crystalline rock structures, growing. In my D&D campaign before Redux, all the maps of which were lost in the mail, I had some really beautiful organic maps. Recently my maps have been fairly blocky and chunky (mostly because I’m using graph paper.) This isn’t a bad thing at all, but it’s nice to have found a structure which is both blocky and gives the impression of growth.

The big rectangles at the top are immense open spaces–about 100′-200′ down. They make me very uneasy, but they are necessary I think. It might be possible to run BITS in them.

The lower left corner of the Delta map came to me in a dream. I saw it in a flash, and then worked to make it real. I’m glad I did, turned out great.

Not everything worked. My linework in some places is less clean than I’d like it to be. Also I drew to the very edges of the graph paper to get the connections precise. This worked, but was sort of a pain to deal with. Some areas feel better than others, and there are a couple of places at least which I feel downright awful about. I made a few mistakes with the pen, and when I went to correct these with whiteout I whited out the correction instead of the error. I was blessed to only have to do this 3 times, though.

For me, the concept of the underworld includes immensity and unknowability: complete indifference to visiting inhabitants. I want viewers of this map to have to sit with the notion of these vast empty subterranean spaces. I want it to be a kind of struggle. The underworld is awe-inspiring and bewildering and strange, not because it is large, but because it is unyielding to interpretation. I paid attention to navigability when drawing this map, but haven’t worried too much about mapability. In part this is because I’m blessed with players who enjoy mapping, but also I’m beginning to question whether it’s important for my dungeon maps to be game-friendly at all. I’ve decided to begin focusing on things which I find to be beautiful and meaningful, and trusting the people I play games with to find them beautiful as well. This has been freeing.

It’s possible the best game with which to explore this map won’t be OD&D, perhaps it will be something like Conventional Dungeon Paradigm, or something else entirely. Regardless, only a tiny percentage of the spaces depicted on this map will ever see the light of a PCs torch. The exciting part is that any one of them could, and many will.

Notes about Contents

It takes a very long time for me to develop dungeon contents which are satisfying. Check back in like, uh, 4 years.