I’m a big fan of set piece battles like the princess rescue scene in Conan the Barbarian, but it’s difficult to find good encounter maps. Most DIY dungeon maps out there are just a series of rectangular rooms, which, let’s be honest, are boring as hell.

I think a good dungeon cartographer needs to consider what it’s like to walk through the dungeon he-or-she is drawing, to explore it, get lost in it.; otherwise, the layouts and room design just becomes repetitive. Dungeon cartography isn’t about just being able to draw a straight line on graph paper; it should be a creative endeavor on the level of  populating or writing the history of the dungeon.

And at the core of this problem is the lack of set pieces, places where shit goes down. Of course, any room can be such a place in a good dungeon, but sometimes you gotta have a place where the big bads gather. I’ll be posting a lot more of these types of maps in the future.

So here’s the multi-use Orgy Lounge/Cannibal Soup Kitchen of the [Insert Terrible Monolithic Cult], inspired by that scene in Conan the Barbarian. It’s not a full dungeon, obviously, but can be easily dropped into a dungeon or castle when you need somewhere to run a large battle or sneak-about.