An Update — Post-Launch Shenanigans

Good morning, gamemasters. And to my fellow Americans: I hope you had an excellent Thanksgiving!

The holiday disrupted my normal work week a bit, but I nonetheless have plenty of news & several new releases!

New Remasters

Two new remasters have been released today! But in reality, one of them was never actually prior released on Patreon, so it's rather more like a brand-new map pack. The two refreshed packs are:

• The Forbidden City, one of my favorites & an all-time well-received map pack from Miscellanea Maps.

• The Forest Floor Map Pack, a pack of 6 distinct forest maps with a number of variants each, ranging from forest rivers to ancient ruins.

If you haven't already, go check 'em out! Both have also been added to Moulinette for cloud delivery.

DnDungeon Overhaul Improvements

One of the things I wanted to do from the beginning with the DnDungeon asset overhaul was create a comprehensive suite of materials that item variants could be created for. So I spent a little while experimenting with different palettes & different stone colors/textures to figure out what would be most consistently useful. I landed on a palette of 6 stones.

Grey limestone, white marble, yellow sandstone, red granite, beige brownstone, and black basalt. Seems like a good selection. Not too bloat-y.

I'm also doing walls, textures, and everything else in every material color. And it's not just stones — I'm looking at implementing a suite of wood colors, ranging from dark brown walnut wood to light, sandy birch for every significant object & structural component that could benefit from it. It's gonna happen for metals, too; currently, I'll be looking to cover gold, silver, iron/steel, and rusty metal. I will also be doing some 'secondary' materials: jade for a variety of precious objects (such as statues), terracotta for clay-forged items like brick walls or decorations, the like.

Deadline hasn't changed; I'll be looking to get the update out around the end of December, concurrent with the next wave of map releases, although I'd like to get them out before then (say, before Christmas). And speaking of that...

Map Polls

Tomorrow (Saturday), I'll be posting a multi-option poll for those poll-ready (DnDungeon Masters & up) to vote on map concept prioritization. The ideas you all brought up provided a lot of great material. I'd like to figure out now what I should be looking at doing first, which will also guide what extras I should be stuffing into the next asset pack update.

Currently, I've got down:

• Overgrown/Elven-like forest

• Tea/Sake/Geisha/Opium House

• Samurai Residence (i.e. mansion)

• Temple (Buddhist- or Hindu-inspired, I think)

• Flame Emperor's Throne Room

• Criminal hideout/black market in an asian city

• Modular Japanese city streets

• Youkai's lair/den

From my own notes, I'll be adding:

• A Zen Garden

• Modular urban interior pack

• Modular castle interior pack

• Japanese city docks/port

These ideas will be prioritized by the order in which they're ranked in the poll. The top 3 will be included in December's releases alongside a map I'm already working on. Even if they're not in the top 4, I'll want to do them eventually! The poll will run from one week, from November 30th to late evening on December 6th.

If you've got additional ideas, throw 'em at me in the comments here or in DMs or wherever else before Saturday & I'll include them in the poll. I'll be doing my best for the themes & ideas mentioned that aren't explicitly included here, of course.

• Note 1: I can see a weakness in that what I asked for last week doesn't directly translate to clear poll items, so I will be more precise in the future. Still, nice to know what everyone's running. Your campaigns sound like a lot of fun.

• Note 2: As a reminder, map pack releases are published near the end of the month so that I have time to develop new assets for them over the course of the month. I'm not totally satisfied with this, so I'll experiment a bit, & the release cadence will probably relax as options increase.

Minor Boost to Explorer Tier Benefits

In the name of generosity, I am making a change to the tier benefits. The Explorer tier will now get access to all variants in each map pack (in WEBP format)!

This was motivated by a few problems; amongst them being that it was difficult/annoying to communicate which variants were included in the Explorer pack, that the packing process was complicated by the procedure, and that I feel it isn't very flexible for future releases.

The Home Architect Pack 2 Sneak Peek

Who likes blueprints? I like blueprints. I also like easy tools. You know what's easier than a full-blown map asset kit? The Home Architect Pack 2. A fully-featured Dungeondraft pack for sketching almost any map imaginable, coming in a professional's pre-selected palette of colors (to say nothing of the colorable assets).

This is not a high-resolution asset pack. This is for diagrams. Information, prettified. Building plans. Tower blueprints, dungeon floors drawn simply. I'd compare it to Dyson Logos' maps.

Each color has dozens of object shapes, patterns, and paths that can be stacked on top of each other to create the appearance of furniture, obstacles, or other map items. Clever usage & layering produces a simplified, aesthetic diagram appearance. And it's crazy fast compared to making traditional maps for your games.

This is something I've been sitting on for a while, teased at launch, and that I'd like to get out as a new beta soon. I've got a bunch of rough edges to file off & polish up before it can be published, but it's coming soon.

The initial beta will be accessible to all Foundry Lords! Once I've done further testing & gotten some feedback on the state of the pack, I'll be releasing a trimmed-down free version, as well as the full pack on Cyclopean, Itch, DriveThruRPG, & Cartography Assets. Foundry Lords will have free access to the full pack.

If you're curious now & can't wait, you can get the predecessor — the HAP v1 — from the link below right now! I have also attached it to the bottom of this post if you'd rather download directly from Patreon.

Click here to download the Home Architect Pack v1 from Cartography Assets!

(A preview from the original Home Architect Pack is below.)

As always, thank you. Cyclopean's better off for all you being here. It's still Thanksgiving as I'm writing this (in advance), so I'll throw in the note that you're what I'm most thankful for this year. Look forward to more soon.

—Saki