Occasionally I’ll try to post a bit of the behind-the-scenes work that went into creating Raiders of the Serpent Sea. This time around I wanted to talk about the map-making tool, Dungeon Alchemist https://www.dungeonalchemist.com/

I purchased Dungeon Alchemist late into running my Odyssey of the Dragonlords campaign and found it very useful to help put together a lot of maps quickly. It is a fun tool to use and admittedly I can spend a lot of time just fooling around with it. But I was pleased at the quality of the maps it created and it helped me to make better use of my time with the campaign. Which I was running while also juggling production of Raiders of the Serpent Sea AND doing contract work for a videogame company.

Initially I wasn’t really thinking about using it for anything other than my own campaigns but as I got into the final stages of Raiders, I made some plot alterations that resulted in sections that were clearly missing much needed maps. While its impossible for a finite-sized product to include all the potential maps that might end up being needed for a particular campaign, certain maps are essential to important moments and can’t just be omitted.

While most of the maps in Raiders were created by professional artists (thank you, John and Tiffany), I realized at a rather late stage that I had to quickly come up with a few maps to fill the new areas I had created and there wasn’t really time (or admittedly money) to purchase these additional maps. To complicate things further, with some of the writing delays I was hitting, I didn’t completely know how I wanted some of these new scenarios to work until I explored them with my playtesting group.

The team behind Dungeon Alchemist were great with setting me up with a professional license and though I only ended up using the tool for a few maps, I used it a lot more behind the scenes, with the playtesting groups and helping to decide what direction to go. Its ability to rapidly produce high quality maps with a lot of detail that somebody like me wouldn’t normally even think of adding, adds value at the table. Plus, it is fun to use!

Anyways, thanks to the folks over at Briganti for creating such a fine and fun mapmaking tool. For future projects, I’ll strongly consider using it again to help with my behind-the-scenes playtesting, with providing direction to the contract artists hired to fulfill the production maps, and possibly with helping to add more map variety, supplementing the artwork I commission!