The Octal Stacks
Book week ended up being just 2 posts, as life got on top of my and the schedule fell apart again. I won’t bore you with details; for now, suffice it to say that I’m not going to be able to keep up with the post schedule for the next couple of months. I’m still going to be posting, but I can’t guarantee how regularly it will be. I’m optimistically aiming for once a week, even if that just means more maps (since they take less time than articles and the like), but don’t hold me to that. Once things settle down I’ll revisit the schedule and see where we stand.
April’s Best of DMs Guild post never materialised. At the moment I’m still reading material for it, and I may simply roll it into the end of May roundup and do one bumper post then with two months’ worth of content.
For now, here’s the map that was meant to appear during Book Week!
[Click to embiggen]
The Octal Stacks is a large library that contains an enormous collection of tomes on all kinds of niche and esoteric subjects. The wide foyer – dominated by a large brass desk manned at all times by a pair of the Stacks’ librarians – gives way to a series of rooms holding towering shelves packed with books of all shapes, sizes, and contents. There is only one floor (aside from the basement), but the roof rises 30 feet above the ground and the stacks rise right to the top of each room.
The west basement holds a small shrine to the Goddess of Knowledge, and a double-locked room containing the Octal’s private collections – rare, powerful, or dangerous works and artifacts that are kept locked away from the general public. The east basement also contains the only entrance to the southern reading room, which is reserved for VIPs and which contains some of the more unusual and valuable works in the library (though nothing like the treasures to be found in the private collections). The southern reading room also holds a pair of sturdy display cases on the northern and southern walls that hold a collection of unusual (and, in many cases, magical) trinkets, ornaments, and items of historical note.
The eastern basement is a storage room, holding yet more books that are yet to be catalogued, sorted, and shelved, along with various crates and packages containing new acquisitions.
[No lables – click to embiggen]
Chris
June 18, 2018 @ 1:17 pm
Hi Chris
I’ve only just come across this amazing site when I was looking into Island Campaigns for D&D. These posts have been fantastic and I love your thought process and maps. I was wondering, how do you draw your maps? Do you have a particular tool that you use?
loottheroom
July 3, 2018 @ 11:41 pm
Hey Chris! I use Staedtler Pigment Liners – usually I use a 0.5mm for thicker external lines, a 0.2mm for my crosshatching, and a 0.3mm for details and decorations. Then I scan them and convert them to vectors in Illustrator (so that I can resize them however I like) and add a grid. So, pretty low tech, and nothing fancy other than some fineliners that I happen to like 🙂