Ancient City – Palace Ruins
Board
“We found it, just where we were told we would: In the most remote corner of the kingdom in the midst of an inhospitable swamp on the shore of a dead calm lake covered in mist: The remains of the ancient city state of […]. We had heard tales about the place, but when we stood before its remarkably preserved walls, the place seemed even more eerie than any elder’s drivel could paint it.”
I started working on this many months ago, I’d do it differently if I started with it nowadays, but I’ll leave it as it is.
It is another location in my game world: The remains of a royal palace, that dates back over two millennia. A cataclysm and a great tragedy sealed its fate long ago, but for some reason, no new settlements arose nearby, no stones were robbed from the site.
But the ancients not only build sturdy walls with a high quality mortar receipe, they also left curses and hostile guardians behind. A few -more or less lucky- grave robbers tried to loot the ruins with mixed success… how will your heroes fare?
There are several entrances to underground structures around this upper ground map, which I build as separate maps and may upload in the future.
Very, very cool!
Thank you very much! =)
Just want you to know you’re one of the best builders on this site. The quality of your work is always top-notch. Thanks for keeping things alive!
Thank you! =)
I like your takes on Roman architecture btw!
Thanks! I tried my best within the limitations of the pieces and Talespire to recreate the major buildings as accurately as I could. I spent a lot of time reading through architecture, history, and archeology to find stuff for reference. I was incredibly surprised to learn how many things we don’t know about many of their most prominent sites. Vindolanda, on which I based one of my boards, has a whole section that historians just guessed about based on writings and other similar structures. Credit to Dustdown for creating a kind of thematic template. I love the details on his builds! I wanted there to be uniformity between different builders so that people had access to a wide variety of structures that could be put together fairly seamlessly.
At least the Romans loved to plan new cities on a grid. That’s helpful when it comes to TaleSpire. =)
Dustdown’s work is great, indeed! Learned quite a bit about lighting from him.
Taking inspiration from real world history is -even for fantasy builds- super important imho. One ends up with more believeable and thus more immersive results. This map has some influences from ancient Mesopotamian architecture, but I must admit I took a lot of artistic freedoms, not only because of the limitations of the tile sets.
Oh, I thought it had a Mesoamerican flair to it! I want to make some Edo Period Samurai stuff but it’s so hard for me. Somebody on here did the temple from the last samurai and it’s easily the best I’ve seen on here but my god the effort they had to put in to create the roofs! I’ve been trying to hack it apart to make smaller slabs of just the roof portion for easy creation of other buildings but it’s hard to cut the right spot out because it’s comprised of HUNDREDS of tiny, hand-placed cylinders. The absolute mad lad!
Well done in making a large ruin settlement! Looks fantastic!
Thank you!
In my game world the ruins are mostly deserted (besides undead and the occasional passing grave robber or monster). Realistically a place as old as this it wouldn’t look as intact or would be much more overgrown, but there are certain factors and powers at work here, that kept vegetation and looters somewhat away.
Gorgeous!
I am running a desert campaign.
Our party has to go into an old temple to find clues. I have been struggling to build the right kind of place. Then I saw this and it was perfect.
Thank you. This is truely great work and my players are going to love it!
Fantastic work. Excellent environmental detail.