Handpainted maps for the Temple of Elemental Evil


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Around the summer of 2011, my wife and I really wanted to play through a classic dungeon adventure. We'd played plenty of D&D 3.5 (mostly home-brewed adventures), two Star Wars campaigns set about halfway between the KOTOR games and the prequel movies (using the BESM system), some Shadowrun, some Deadlands, and it was time for some hack and slashing.

However, since we didn't have to script the games any more, it seemed like we would have a lot more prep time available, and we went a little crazy and decided to handpaint the battle mats for the entire adventure, starting with the moathouse, and continuing on fast enough to keep up with the pace of the adventure.

Finally, two years later we've finished. 27 maps, weighing over 15 pounds in total (paint's heavy!), covering 200 square feet. And just in time, as we're going to be studying abroad for at least a year and need to get rid of pretty much everything we own. Hopefully, linking to them on ebay doesn't violate the messageboard terms of use. I don't intend to infringe or be a jerk. We've also got a fairly-well-updated webpage from the game with summaries of all the sessions and some character details.

We used most of the monsters as-is with their pathfinder stats, rebuilding some with templates or whatever to scale them for the party's level, and built the NPCs as close as we could to the ones in the book and still be decently challenging. When we finished, the party was five 8th level characters, one PC death, and with two players having dropped out and two new ones dropped in to fill the gap. Most of the PCs had the wealth of 13th level characters, and there were almost a dozen NPCs, mostly staying at our camp to guard the huge pile of loot.

We're hoping to sell them, partly because we spent a lot of money on paint, brushes, and masking tape while making them, but partly because we think using them was great fun and wanted to spread it around. It was what we'd wanted to be able to do when we were teenagers but didn't have the ability to manage. If anyone knows somewhere besides here that would be good to publicize them, let me know.


Wow. Those are amazing. Nice work and good luck on moving them! Too bad you have to let them go though...


Thanks! We'd have tried to pass them on even if we weren't moving because, really, they're kind of a single use item. I do plan to take a nice, really-high-res photo of the moathouse, which is probably the best of the lot, so I can make a print later and put it up on a wall or something.


Very cool. Good luck with the sale and the move abroad. I look forward to reading about your campaign from the link you posted.

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