I’m going to take an existing battlemap and turn it into an underwater ruin. Here’s the map I’ll be using – a simple ruin from this Ruined Library map pack. Ruins work well as they can easily be the remains of a unfortunate city subjected to an Atlantean cataclysm. Continue reading “How to turn a map into an underwater landscape”
Tag: underwater
Using clouds to create ripples
I’ve had a lot of requests for tutorials on drawing water recently so I’ll be covering some different techniques of indicating water on maps this week. Today I’m going to cover how to create a rippling water pattern in Photoshop using the clouds filter. This is a little technical, but it’ll become clear why we’re doing this over the next few days.
As light hits the waves on the surface of the sea it’s distorted and that creates a pattern of light and dark across the sea-bed that’s very distinctive. We can replicated this pattern in photoshop with relatively little trouble, but there will be some new concepts so I’ll take it step by step.
What lurks in the shipwrecks of the briny deep?
Today sees the release of The Ship’s Graveyard map pack released in partnership with Kobold Quarterly. The pack details a huge underwater map (25 square feet when printed out full size) with walls of kelp, schools of fish and shipwrecked hulks. The perfect lair for a kraken or aboleth and their dark designs upon the world. When I used this map the players found themselves in the deep after their ship was destroyed by a kraken. At 6000px square (25 square feet when printed out at 1 square = 1 inch) there’s more than enough room for an epic battle against the horrors of the abyss.
Here’s a low res preview of the map in the pack: Continue reading “What lurks in the shipwrecks of the briny deep?”
The Wreck of the Goodwife
This was created as a personal piece and was then picked up by Open Design. It has since graced the back page of Kobold Quarterly #13 in glorious full colour and turned up in Sunken Empires – a sourcebook for underwater adventure. It can be purchased at full resolution – 100 pixels per grid – in the Kobold Quarterly store here.