Today started a little differently than I planned.
My wife wasn’t feeling well and so told me she was staying home.
That meant recording YouTube stuff would be more difficult, as another person in the house increases the noise level.
Plus I needed to do more D&D prep instead.
The good thing about it was that it was likely to pay off for multiple sessions, so I wouldn’t have to work as hard for a few weeks after it was done.
So what did I get done?
Well I finished off the upper level of the mansion map.
This actually turned out pretty nice.
I drew the first level onto a battle map I had, the Patherfinder Flip-Mat Basic Terrain Multi-Pack grass map to be specific which I’ve had for a while and use fairly often.
The only issue I have is that I haven’t coloured in the inside of the mansion, so it has grass on it… but that is just honestly a waste of Sharpie to fill in.
The upper level on the other hand couldn’t be on a flip-mat.
The upper level has a big hole in the middle of it where the players are meant to go up to it.
Because of that, I wanted to actually make it up higher than the ground level.
How would I do that?
Years ago when I was running Hoard of the Dragon Queen I kept scouring the interwebs for any help I could get.
It was the first time I had DM’d and the adventure itself wasn’t the greatest way to start DMing.
The adventure is incredibly linear and was written when mechanics in 5e weren’t fully fleshed out.
So the end product had a lot of errors in it.
It mentioned rules that don’t exist, it had incorrect information on maps.
It was basically just a mess for a lot of it.
So I went to the internet every chance I could get when I was prepping for it.
Which led me to a bunch of articles from GeekDad.
Let me set the scene first:
The heroes had defended the town of Greenest from bandits and an Adult Blue Dragon(!) in Chapter 1.
Scouted out the “bandits” base of operations and rescued some important NPCs by returning them to Greenest in Chapter 2.
They’d gone back to find the BoO mostly empty and had their first dungeon crawl in Chapter 3.
And now were heading to Elturel to meet up with some of the factions in the Forgotten Realms before heading on to Baldur’s Gate… and then Waterdeep in Chapter 4.
So Chapter 4 had to cover a journey of thousands of miles that takes over 2 months to do.
So it focused on the Baldur’s Gate to Waterdeep section.
Which is all well and good, and they give you plenty of things to do for the 60 days that part of the adventure takes…
But they had literally nothing useful for getting from Greenest to Baldur’s Gate.
That’s where GeekDad steps in.
They dealt with the part of the adventure that the book glossed over.
They had 4 adventures to replace the whole of Chapter 4 in the book… cause it kind of sucks.
And it was the adventure they called “The Road to Elturel” that would help.
Part 1 and Part 2 had an awesome map that I just had to do!
It involved going down into a mine shaft hidden under a tomb in a middle of nowhere graveyard.
And it looked like this:
Well… my one looked like that, you can see what theirs looked like in the article.
The adventured turned out great, I think, as my players were totally floored by the map.
But I’ve been able to recycle the components of this map numerous times.
And that’s what I did with the mansion for Ghosts of Saltmarsh.
I draw the map on the amazing A3 1 inch gridded drafting pad that I got years ago and have never been able to find again.
It took 3 pages to do get the full upper level map.
I then took some of the cardboard packaging I kept from the cardboard standees we got for our wedding. (That’s another story entirely.)
and traced around the outside of the cut out and stuck together map.
I then used scissors and a box cutter to cut the cardboard into shape.
I then have the pvc pipe used from the mine map to support it.
The pipes are cut into roughly 6 inch pieces.
So they lift it a nice distance up, but they get in the way too much to actually have the top level stay there while we’re playing.
But once they get to the upper level, we’ll shift to the raised map.
I’m hoping to get the same wow factor as the adventure above.
It should also hopefully impress some of the regulars at The Hall of Heroes too.
Now I just have to finish the basement level of the map and I can actually begin prepping the session properly!