Monday 27 January 2020

J: Gnoll Lair

Nearing the end of The Caves of Chaos: Day Ten - the Gnoll Lair
The Gnoll Lair has a problematic map. As part of the greater Caves I could never spot which bit was the Gnoll Lair, but splitting it out has fixed this. Now I can see clearly it's a snaking cave system which is sadly almost linear in nature. As discussed before, there should be a slope every time a cave crosses an above-ground contour, so that means there should be a slope down along the unknown passageway. It could be nicer for the slope to be either side of the corridor outside room #49, which would make it slightly less odd that there's no connection between the entrance and the lower corridor - but I'll probably stick with a slope in the passageway.

I don't know why neither the Natural Cave nor the Unknown Passageway get their own entry number in the key and have to share with another room - very odd - but it's reasonably clear when you add the description of the features onto the map.

The entrance doesn't stand out on the map usually, so adding the labels such as "Gnoll Lair" make it stand out more, especially on the combined map. I used a digital shaded fill - I could easily have shaded it manually but getting it scanned right would be tricky.

I used grey for the fill - I could have used different colours for the different entrances or colours to indicate lit areas. I'm still not sure about the use of colours - in general I prefer it sparingly if at all for a dungeon map. I've used blue for the water, and I may use red when I add the fireplaces.

Finally tomorrow we'll head into the Shrine of Evil Chaos.

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