Channel Updates - October 2022 (Patreon)

Hello everyone! Since this month is a five Monday month, I'm taking a much needed week to get caught up on my map work and so there will be no map post today. 

Instead, I thought this would be a good opportunity to discuss the channel, where I am at and where I plan to go. So let's get into it! 

Future Map Projects

Castle Ravenloft: Work on The Rooms of Weeping has already started! After this, I will be working on the castle in between my other projects in this order: The Spires of Ravenloft, Larders of Ill Omen, and Dungeon and Catacomb. Once the core castle is complete, Pyram King is adding a new location and alternate dungeon called "The Pillars of Ravenloft" which I will be working with him to flush out. I also plan on creating variants for past iterations of the castle once the core maps are all done. 

CoS Third Party Content: There are still some loose ends on popular third party content which I still need to create. The big one is finishing the Interactive Tome of Strahd, the extra locations added by MandyMod (The Orphanage, Reformation Center, etc) and other locations added by Lunch Break Heroes, Pyram King, and DragnaCarta. 

The Mad Mage: The encounter listed in the book is pretty lackluster for such a key NPC. Pyram King and I will be partnering to create an awesome encounter for your party, so stay tuned for more details regarding this project! 

Generic Locations: I do plan on creating more roads, forests, druid forests, swamp, and snowy encounters along with additional city street maps. My goal here is to ensure you're not lacking maps for random encounters and have a wide variety of options at your fingertips. 

Updated Older Maps: I've been at this well over 1.5 years now just mapping out Barovia! In that time of working on maps almost daily for 40+ hours a week, I've honed my skills and learned new techniques to enhance my maps. I want to re-do older maps I made when I first started into 2.0 verions. Creating 2.0 versions of some of my older work will help bring everything back inline with my current standards of map making today and give a consistant and cohesive feel to my CoS map library. 

Lunch Break Hereos Adventures: It has been such a joy working on these original adventures created by the LBH channel and it has giving me unique and different challanges outside of your typical Barovian maps. If you have not yet had a chance to check them out, I highly recomend these short adventures! They are great to slot into your current camapaign, or run them as a fun one-shot. As a patron of my page, not only do you get the maps but the adventure PDF and any of the other assets added with it (Tokens, portraits, etc). I will be continuing my partnership with LBH for these awesome adventures. With that said, I always try to keep in mind the versatility of the maps when I make them where possible. I will try to create variants which removes key story elements and makes the map more generic for use outside of these adventures (You'll see this with the next LBH release).  

Future of the Channel

The map work mentioned above will keep me going for some time now, however at one point, I will feel CoS will be near an end. Pyram King and I are already discussing the next module we want to tackle together and I'm very much looking forward to that. 

When I started this page my main goal was to make this a one-stop shop for maps to support modules with an emphasis on mood and detail. I have a methotical aproach when it comes to map coverage and I really like to hit as many areas as possible for a module before I proceed to the next. Ideally, no matter the adventure you're running, my goal has and always will be to have a nice full compliment of maps at your disposal for any circumstance.

I plan on polling our community to see what modules you are all running currently or wish you had more maps for. My goal is to provide you with value on this page as we pivot to other modules. I want to continue to create more Dark Fantasy maps as well as explore other Domains of Dread. I will need to find a good balance of branching out into other modules while still producing the dark and spooky content that I started with! 

If you read this wall of text, I thank you! Each of you are valued members of the DM Andy Maps community and I hope I can continue to give you the best quality maps possible and give you the best value for your contributions each month. I'm excited to see the future of the chanel and where our adventures will take us all!

Cheers, 

DM Andy