Autopsy #2

Party assembled, underearth entrance assured, I started by pulling up the Palace.

Shifted the black to brown, it's easier to work on.  This way I could do some quick caverns for the sewers.  All those jakes and storm water grates have to go somewhere.  I figured large drops.  Water flow matter in the city, it's a rain forest. 

 Sketched in the old kitchens, then took what thy thought they were going for, the old treasury and stuck it under water. Come on a treasury?  Long ago looted and flooded to boot. So I swapped in the Old King's Wizard's quarters as the goal for booty.  The cool thing about drawing on the computer is it makes it easy to cut and paste floor plans for new levels. You just erase what you need to erase.  It lets you line up things, which in the case of this party came in handy once that dwarvish cleric got high in enough in levels to start casting rock to mud, lower water, and assorted mining related spells.  That gray grid is just a convenience really.  It makes drawing a room for a combat quick. I paste it in and out as needed, you use the color clear a lot when doing this. 

These are the sketches, so don't judge the final product on them (check out the previous post.)

I just keep pasting in the map as I continue, the elevations start to make things tricky.  The player's map will often contain alterations.  The one below has filled passages, collapsed ceilings, and a flooded puzzle.

So a quick synopsis.  We have the old storage rooms of the basement, the dungeon, which is filled with skeletons and a ghoul I decided became a ghoul by devouring his fellow prisoners.  So rather than enter the kitchen through the rat filled tunnels.  To the north are some irregular caverns, the usual spiders and ants.  Water filled passages might be half-filled, as good as a dead end to the Smith.  Beyond that was the front door to the Mushroom men section, a campaign specific race of myconids.  Their chief skill being they can grow new crops of troops in six weeks, modified to fit the party's last attack.  So the original sluggers eventually became black mushrooms who's spores neutralized magic, but that was for later.  Meanwhile what I thought would be the focus, a series of puzzles instead was a deadend.  The yellow star room for instance was never used and nobody ever entered the flooded room till they cracked it open by accident.   So in the mean time they set off to the south to explore the old servant's quarters.