The First Breach (Patreon)

The first of the dwarven earthships to come to this world failed to breach the surface and its engines failed somewhere beneath the Plains of Harr – now the Harr Badlands after centuries of war between the Kale and the armies of men.

After the fighting was over, dwarven engineers sealed off the ancient ship, but only after bringing the ship’s mind up from the depths and building a small temple or memorial for it. The ship’s mind still resides in the great hall of the First Breach, offering advice to those who would seek it out.

Unfortunately, it is most definitely insane.

Now the door to the Breach is locked and the dwarven caretakers have departed with their kin in the working Earthships deep underground to travel between the worlds and hopefully find their way home.

The Breach in turn has been breached again by others – subhuman creatures who listen to the mad whispers of the ship’s mind and have dug down along the old paths the dwarves sealed… perhaps as deep as the ruined earthship itself?

The great stairs down to the hall where the mind holds court curls around a massive statue of the dwarven captain who lead the ship here and who died in the wars thereafter. The smaller statue down the hall is a representation of his daughter, the engineer of the lost earthship, who rescued the ship’s mind from the crushed remains.

I drew this map after a discussion with one of my players who had recently picked up a Canson brand pad to draw maps on based on my own promotions of said graph paper as some of the best I’ve ever drawn on. I realized that I hadn’t drawn on either of my Canson pads in almost a year and broke out the 4 square per inch pad to draw ANYTHING on it again and revel in the soft quality bond paper that doesn’t bleed at all from my microns.

You can download the map at 300dpi both with and without grid from the blog at https://rpgcharacters.wordpress.com/2015/11/03/tuesday-map-the-first-breach/