Cats + Cartography is a series where I post a map I’ve made along with a picture of our cat.
In 2015 my first in person D&D 5e campaign (Remlia and the lands of adventure) had taken some very strange turns. In order to save the world from a moon colliding with the planet, the characters needed to get to the moon itself.
In D&D terms, this was a tricky thing to do.
The only way they could reach it was by opening a portal to the planar city Sigil, book passage on a spelljammer, cross the astral sea and approach the moon from the opposite side.
Which meant I needed a map of Sigil for my players to explore.
Sigil is from the Planescape setting; a city within a donut-shaped ring, consisting of an upper section and a lower section, though technically there is no up or down. At the time I was really keen on city-crawl adventures, so I had my players start at one point in the city and the session consisted of them asking around, despite knowing nothing of the language or customs.
Because I was flat broke at the time, I couldn’t afford to have a licensed map of Sigil printed at the size I needed. So, being flush with time and creativity, I drew my own on a wet erase hex map. It took almost two hours.
I made a time lapse video to show off the whole process.
To fellow Game Masters, I say that doing things this way might not be the most time effective way to make a city map, it will definitely wow your players. Maximum effort goes a long way to running great games!
As always, Delilah likes to help with maps too.
