Death Metal Necromantic Music-Powered Airship (22x34) (Patreon)

From on high above the planet comes sailing down a meteorite, carved from green fire and filled with hate - the BARD LICH has returned, with technology incomprehensible and a fuckin' sick guitar.

Good morning! I hope this isn't too far from the graveyard/spooky theme, but I think it'll be liked anyways. This is the DEATH METAL NECROMANTIC MUSIC-POWERED AIRSHIP, featuring a gigantic ship carved from rock descending into a planet's atmosphere, bringing with it an undead villain unlike any you've ever faced before. Because this week, I got over my crippling weakness in drawing actual creatures and drew a lich with a bitchin' guitar, and also a skeleton roadie to go with him.

In other news, Kelfecil of Kelfecil's Tales is working on an adventure of sorts to go along with this. You can expect it to be published on Tuesday or so, and I'll make a new post to mention it once it does go up. In the meantime, if you're in the market for other free adventures, go check out their other work!

Some tactical suggestions:

• Consider having the graves power the ship somehow. Dig the graves up, kill the special undead inside them, and the ship goes down.
• Have the ship progress from space to the sky, and then to the ocean on a collision course with a seaside palace or city over the course of the battle.
• If any player recognizes the Lich's sigil, they suffer a 3d6* HP loss.

* I play OSR and B/X clones exclusively, so if this is insufficent for 5e or whatever you're playing, adjust as needed.

This map was a massive amount of work to put together, so if you see any really bad errors, please tell me immediately. Otherwise, like, subscribe, et cetera, hope you like it!

There is also a metric ton of variants, despite Luck's best efforts to stop me (see Notes). You may want to browse the splash image for clarity, because this is going to be a wall of text.

Variants

• Supporter: You get the Death Metal Necromantic Music-Powered Airship in both day and night, in four environments: SPACE, REENTRY, ABOVE THE CLOUDS, and ABOVE THE SEA. There's also the Mountain Vault variant included, in case you don't want to run the coolest metal concert your players will ever experience. And the greyscale stuff if you'd like to print things without wasting a cartridge's worth of ink. But wait! There's more! You also get both the Bard Lich and his guitar, plus a skeleton roadie! Marvel at my inadequate humanoid anatomy talent!
• Enthusiast: The Enthusiast tier gets an extra tweak to the Mountain Vault, featuring greenery and foliage instead of a grey, drab mountainside! Well, okay, the mountain is still grey. But you also get the Necromantic Airship stripped of its death metal parts, suitable for more ordinary and less rockin' campaigns (in all four environments). And also an empty cloud background, for air combat and the like.
• Benefactor: Benefactors get, in addition to all of the above, cloud vault and wisp-filled variants for the Mountain Vault, an Egyptian-themed airship in all four environments, an empty space map for interplanetary conflict, a variant expressing the POWER OF ROCK for the moment when the villain is overpowered, an ocean map for your ships and the like, and a waterspout variant for the ocean when you really need to sink a ship.

As for the free variants, you get not one but ALL FOUR environment variants for free! This is partially because I couldn't decide which would be most suitable and partially because if you combine all four you can get a really kickass basis for a short adventure. So enjoy it!

Technical Details

• Resolution: 4,760 x 3,080
• Map Size: 22x34 tiles
• Grid Size: 140ppi

Downloads

Supporter: Death Metal Necromantic Music-Powered Airship 

Enthusiast: Death Metal Necromantic Music-Powered Airship 

Benefactor: Death Metal Necromantic Music-Powered Airship (Raw Files (PART 1 / PART 2 / PART 3))

Downloads include all content from the previous tiers.

The raw files are so massive that I had to split the 7z archive into several parts in order to fit it in Patreon's upload limit. If you want to access them, download each part separately, put them together in the same folder, select all three at the same time, and then use 7zip's context menu options to Extract to... the folder you want them in.

Notes

You know how I joked about getting this map out on time "unless something improbably catastrophic were to occur"?

Well, it nearly happened.

I had the bright idea at 4:15pm Thursday to take out the 8gb of RAM from my old box and put it in my new one so that I could finish the map faster. After a BIOS check and exit with no changes, my computer suddenly refused to boot or send any signal to the monitors. Thus began the eight consecutive hours I spent kneeling over my box trying to figure out what was wrong with it. What started with unresponsiveness turned into the computer suddenly and without warning rebooting every 30 seconds to a minute after reaching the desktop, on loop.

It turns out that I picked the single worst combination of CPU and motherboard you could possibly pick - the Ryzen 3600 series is claimed to be compatible with the B550 motherboards, but in reality, they have serious instability issues. My attempt to add more RAM to my computer somehow disturbed a precarious balance that I had inadvertedly obtained. In a way, I'm happy that I discovered this before the return window closed, but it has made the last couple of days miserably stressful.

As of now, my new computer is inoperable and the motherboard has been sent back. I will need to order a replacement. In the meantime, I have equipped my old computer with the 16GB of RAM I need to keep drawing. But for now, I desperately need a break. Maybe I'll fire up Kerbal Space Program tonight, if I have any time left by the time I finish publishing this.

Edit: Now that I think about it, I guess this map killed my PC and forced me to raise my old one from the dead. Ironic.