Ive decided that in 2024 I will attempt to take part in the drawing challenge, dungeon24. These challenges started a few years ago (AFAIK) to encourage artists to draw something every day. At the end of the year you’d have a mega dungeon with well over 300 rooms to explore.
Last year I sucked at the challenge, not even completing January!
I decided for this year I would try again, but instead of adding to one map 365 times, I would try something different every month. So I would hopefully end up with 12 epic hand drawn maps.
Thats the plan anyway!
For January 2024, I wanted to start the year by drawing a simple overland map. That way I could elaborate on various locations for subsequent monthly maps.
I decided to knock up a small generator for this part of the Dungeon24 drawing challenge. Every day I will roll on the following table to decide what group of hexes to add to the January map.
January Map 1D10 Generator
- Plains
- Mountains
- Swamp
- Forest
- Settlement
- Point of Interest
- Hills
- Lake, rivers or Shoreline
- Map Details and Misc.
- Double roll
January History
1st. Added the starting town, the coastal port city of First Hope, as well as a stretch of the coastline. This is where we are starting from:
2nd. A roll of rivers worked really well early on in the map.
3rd. Mountains fits perfect too! Rivers from yesterday now can have an obvious starting point.
4th. East of the mountains we see the result of an ancient battle involving a gigantic blue dragon – the abyss, the rift or the void (depending on who you ask).
5th. Our first forests appear on the above, sitting around a lake at the base of the central mountains.
6th. More trees have sprouted – now almost completely surrounding the draconic rift drawn on the 4th.
7th. One of my favourite features so far – a swamp in the North West corner. Lots of twisting hard-to-navigate rivers.
After our first week – this is what the map is looking like:
8th. Names, glorious names! Lots of followers over on Twitter suggested great names for various areas of the map. Can you spot yours?
9th. Our first expansion of the coastline since day 1. We get a rough layout of the whole map as it may turn out. The seas have been shaded a mid grey too, hoping to make it more clear land vs water.
10th. Details! Apart from a few touch ups, we largely see changes with the addition of a map border and a compass rose.