Scribbles and Horrors

The gift of creative energy has been bestowed upon me, and so here is a deeper part of my underworld: Redux Zeta III.

No, this is not a disentanglement from, but a progressive knotting into

- Gravity’s Rainbow, p. 1

Zeta III is three levels beneath Epsilon and two levels beneath Delta-Zeta I. Its main connections are with Zeta I and Zeta II. 5 of the arms of Zeta I’s large star descend via slopes two levels to Zeta III: these are those curvy 30’ passageways. You can also see the two gargantuan rectangular rooms–Zeta III is the floor of those rooms.

The scale is the same as my other maps, though it’s not on graph paper. For reference the three parallel passageways in the upper left are each 20’ wide. The smallest corridors tangled in the center are about 2’ wide.

Unlike Delta-Zeta I, I have many concrete ideas about Zeta III’s denizens. In the colossal rectangular open spaces are huge roly-poly’s. The large 100’ hallways are the domain of the Ormyul. The many densely packed chambers on the left hand side of the map contain an extensive library. The larger 15’ passages are home to Snail Men. The balance will be made up with creatures similar to those found in this painting–surreal sorts of colored blob creatures.

I suspect a workable method of mapping Zeta III will be a node map with lines representing corridors and nodes representing rooms or intersections. In part because in many ways the way it’s drawn is already a node map, just with added embellishments.

I’ve been making maze drawings with overlapping passages since middle school. I’d always wanted to find a way to make them D&D maps, but the logic never quite made sense to me. Still stuck in my foolish notions about dungeons having to make some kind of sense I wasn’t in a place where I could make something satisfying. For some reason I’m there now. It’s strange how as we get older, we come into age for certain things.

I’m definitely not the first person to draw maps like this. The ones here are beyond astonishing and beautiful. I tried to mimic some of the elements from those, with “windows” cut out of the bigger spaces and lots of parallel passages. I couldn’t hold a candle to their precision, though, and moved into my own chaotic knotwork.

I found myself experimenting with a bunch of different styles here. The 100’ passages sort of break the map up into sections, and in each one it appears I’ve tried something a little different. I won’t say this was intentional–it just sort of happened. Some of the styles I like more than others. I’m especially intrigued to explore more flora-like structures, with leaves, vines, and flowers.

The blue shading adds a lot. I didn’t intentionally choose TSR module blue, I was just looking for a somewhat neutral color which would provide good contrast, which I suppose is why they chose it.

There’s lots I’m happy with in this map, though I sort of hate how the big 100’ passageways look. They don’t fit in with the rest, and I feel like they are awkwardly in the way. This was sort of intentional–I wanted them to be separate from the main tangle, blocky and sharp obstacles–but I feel like they just sort of look bad. I drew too early in the process, and too hastily I think.

It is possible that they will look less bad once I give them somewhere to go–you can see how the map extends off three edges; more maps of this type will need to be drawn up. Perhaps its just that they’re such a huge structure you need to zoom out farther for them to make sense.

I have plenty more paper.