I just wanted the classic Hexblade back: a spooky, Shadowfell-infused magic swordfighter that actually works with the new core rules. Since WotC didn't give us one (and have since said they probably won't), I decided to homebrew it myself.
Basically the title.
In your D&D world, are there natural illnesses that end in death?
Maybe there are for those who can't afford the material Temple services and almost certainly not for the super wealthy. What about for those in between?
Hello travelers and storytellers! I am the artist behind Mountain & Myth, a specialized digital cartography studio. As an active Dungeon Master and an indie fantasy author, I know firsthand the hours you pour into your worldbuilding lore, and how vital it is to have visuals that match that passion.
I provide bespoke, human-drawn digital cartography that translates your narrative into high-resolution visual geography. Every coastline, mountain range, and city district is custom-drawn entirely by hand with absolutely no AI generation and complete, ironclad copyright security for your published works.
Note: All starting prices below are for Personal Use (home tabletop games, private campaigns, personal social media). Commercial licenses are available for a one-time fee of 50% of your project total.
World, Continent, or Region Scale Maps
I am currently accepting new commissions! If you are ready to bring your world to life, you can reach out to me directly:
Hello travelers and storytellers! I am the artist behind Mountain & Myth, a specialized digital cartography studio. As an active Dungeon Master and an indie fantasy author, I know firsthand the hours you pour into your worldbuilding lore, and how vital it is to have visuals that match that passion.
I provide bespoke, human-drawn digital cartography that translates your narrative into high-resolution visual geography. Every coastline, mountain range, and city district is custom-drawn entirely by hand with absolutely no AI generation and complete, ironclad copyright security for your published works.
Note: All starting prices below are for Personal Use (home tabletop games, private campaigns, personal social media). Commercial licenses are available for a one-time fee of 50% of your project total.
World, Continent, or Region Scale Maps
I am currently accepting new commissions! If you are ready to bring your world to life, you can reach out to me directly:
Hey everyone,
I’m the artist behind Mountain & Myth, a cartography studio specializing in custom, digitally hand-drawn maps for Dungeon Masters, authors, and worldbuilders.
If you are tired of trying to force your homebrew world into generic, cookie-cutter map generators, I can help. I draw everything digitally completely from scratch. Absolutely NO AI. Whether you need a massive world map or a specific region for your next campaign, every piece is tailored to your exact lore and geography.
I use a strict flat-rate pricing model, so there are never any surprise hourly fees. All maps include two rounds of revisions and are delivered as high-resolution, VTT-ready files.
If you need a commercial license, we just add a one-time 50% charge on the total.
You can view a full gallery of my recent commissions, styles, and details here: https://mountainandmyth.com/portfolio
If you're ready to bring your world to life, please send me a DM here on Reddit or reach out through my website. I'd love to chat about your setting!
TLDR: To save money, AI companies are secretly compressing, rationing, and swapping out models behind the scenes, making your everyday chatbot noticeably dumber and lazier.
I asked Gemini why individual users are noticing a degrading experience with AI chat bots. Here is what it said:
"It isn't just a figment of your imagination; individual users are absolutely experiencing degraded performance, and it is a direct consequence of the aggressive cost-cutting and optimization happening behind the scenes.
Here is exactly how the push for financial efficiency ruins the individual, day-to-day user experience:
They compress the mathematical weights of the model so it requires less computer memory to run your prompt. While it makes the model incredibly fast and cheap for them to host, it strips away the subtle nuances. A quantized model is far more likely to miss complex instructions in your prompt, give generic answers, or lose its "creative edge."
This is why a tool might feel brilliant on a Tuesday morning but incredibly dense and repetitive on a Thursday afternoon.
Squeezing the "Thinking Process" For newer models that use an internal "chain of thought" (where the AI explicitly reasons through a problem step-by-step before answering), every hidden thought costs money. To keep individual subscription plans profitable, companies place strict limits on how long the model is allowed to "think" before it forced to spit out an answer. Cutting that reasoning time short leads directly to flatter logic and more frequent hallucinations.
Over-Aggressive Caching To avoid paying to process your entire prompt from scratch every single time you hit enter, systems rely heavily on prompt caching. The AI tries to match your request to previous patterns it has already processed. If it relies too heavily on cached data, the conversation loses its immediate context. The AI starts giving you answers that feel like they are recycling old parts of the conversation rather than truly listening to your latest instruction.
So, while the companies claim their core models are technically more powerful than ever on paper, the version you actually get to play with in a free or standard $20/month chat box is being constantly trimmed, compressed, and rationed to keep the provider's margins out of the red."
So, my party needed to get to the Plane of Air, and their only viable route was a planar portal guarded by a devil. Instead of fighting, the devil offered them a deal: he’d grant them passage if they agreed to certain conditions. The important two are:
My players are cautious, so they spent a good 45 minutes out of game scrutinizing the contract. They wrote in a few amendments and clauses to cover their bases, feeling incredibly smug about it. The devil smiled, signed the amended contract, and ushered them through.
They did their business in the Plane of Air, found an evil Aarakocra to kill with the dagger, and immediately used revivify on him right after to keep their hands relatively clean. Loophole found, right? They headed back to the portal to go home.
When they arrived, a group of the devil's minions were waiting. A fight broke out. On the second round of combat, one of the devil's mages targeted the party's fighter and cast banishment.
The fighter failed the save, vanished from the Plane of Air.
The table went completely silent as it clicked. By being forcefully banished, a PC had left the Plane of Air by a means other than the portal. They were officially in breach of contract, and the devil claimed their souls on the spot.
This turned into a month-long side campaign. The players rolled up an entirely new party of characters tasked with staging a cosmic heist/rescue mission to get their original characters back from the Nine Hells.
They actually succeeded, which was awesome, and we transitioned back to the main campaign. But because they spent a month of in-game time dealing with the fallout of that contract, the main villain’s plans had advanced significantly without their interference.
Never trust a devil, even if he lets you edit the terms.
Hi I'm Dustin with Mountain & Myth, an independent cartography studio specializing in hand-drawn custom fantasy maps for your D&D campaign or fantasy novel. Every layout is drawn completely from scratch. Every map is drawn 100% by hand because your world deserves custom geography tailored specifically to your lore.
All files are delivered as high-resolution (300 PPI) digital assets (PNG, JPG & TIFF), perfect for sharp zooming on Virtual Tabletop platforms or printing large-format physic props.
Transparent Flat Rates:
The Atlas Bundle: If you are mapping an entire series or a massive campaign world, pick any 3 or more maps from our options and take 25% off the combined total.
Commercial Licensing: If you need a commercial license for your book or published gaming product, all we ask for is a one-time additional charge of 50% of your project total.
Your project includes two full review rounds: one at the initial layout sketch phase to verify boundaries, and one for final spelling and polish during rendering.
Slots are limited to keep turnaround times predictable. You can view the full gallery and claim your slot through the studio link below.
Portfolio & Commission Inquiries: https://mountainandmyth.com
Hi I'm Dustin with Mountain & Myth, an independent cartography studio specializing in custom hand-drawn fantasy maps. Every layout is drawn completely from scratch. Maps are never made with AI or map generator software because your world deserves custom geography with every single line drawn to align with your specifications.
All files are delivered as high-resolution (300 PPI) digital files (PNG, JPG, & TIFF), perfect for sharp zooming on Virtual Tabletop platforms or printing large-format physical props!
Transparent Flat Rates:
The Atlas Bundle: If you are mapping an entire series or a massive campaign world, pick any 3 or more maps from our options and take 25% off the combined total.
Commercial Licensing: If you need a commercial license for your book or published product, all we ask for is a one-time additional charge of 50% of your project total.
Your project includes two full review rounds—one at the initial layout sketch phase to verify boundaries, and one for final spelling and polish during rendering.
Slots are limited to keep turnaround times predictable. You can view the full gallery and claim your slot through the studio link below.
Portfolio & Commission Inquiries: https://mountainandmyth.com
Recently i was working on a map for someone who needed it to be "accurate" for in-world navigation. So distances needed to be accurate and proportionate. Which i can totally handle when Im drawing a continent or a zoomed in region. That's all good. But a world map, drawn flat, doesn't work that way. The poles were what got me. After doing a deep dive on real world maps and how they work, I did the best i could to stretch them across the whole top and bottom of the map which seems totally counterintuitive.
The distortion is a nightmare! If I want an arctic coastline to look normal on a sphere later, I have to draw it on my flat canvas looking incredibly warped and bloated. It feels like painting a picture in a funhouse mirror.
How do the rest of you handle this for your settings? Do you just accept that the map scale lies at the top and bottom and handwave travel times for your polar expeditions? Or do you scrap the single world map format and draw separate polar projections when your players head north?
I am looking for some validation here, because trying to make spherical geometry behave on a flat grid may send me to the funny farm.
When we look at fantasy maps, we often treat them as perfect satellite GPS navigators. We assume every border, forest, and mountain is placed with mathematical precision. But historically, medieval and renaissance maps were never objective. They were political statements, theological diagrams, and sometimes just outright guesswork.
If a royal cartographer was commissioned by a king, they inflated the kingdom's borders and made their rival’s territory look tiny and desolate. If they didn’t know what lay across the sea, they drew massive sea monsters to cover up their blank canvas.
In a tabletop campaign or a fantasy novel, an imperfect map is an absolute goldmine for narrative tension. Think about a players map marking a grand, bustling fortress, only for them to arrive and find it has been a ruined wasteland for a century. Or a secret smugglers pass that was intentionally left off official state maps to avoid royal taxes. Even lands labeled "empty wilderness" because the local empire wanted to pretend the indigenous communities living there didn't exist.
When I draw custom maps, I love adding these subtle, intentional imperfections—hand-drawn details that reflect who actually made the map in-universe, rather than just presenting a sterile, objective layout. Am i the only one that does this?
Hey everyone. I made this today and i wanted to make sure it was as versatile as possible so I didn't add too many details about the building itself. I would welcome your thoughts!
Want me to draw a world map, continent map or region, I can do that all day long. Its therapy. But dungeon maps have always illuded me. Please help me determine if this is any good! Its supposed to be a two level room with a lava pit cut out of the center.
Hey writers and DMs. I’m a cartographer and I recently finished up this parchment-style regional map. I decided to leave the banner and geography completely unlabeled so you can easily drop it into your current campaign, use it for a one-shot, or build a new published module around it.
I drew this entirely from scratch digitally.
Feel free to download the map and use it for your own games and stories.
A bit about me: I run Mountain & Myth, a cartography studio making custom, hand-drawn maps without using AI or cookie-cutter asset packs. If you are ever writing a campaign or publishing a module and need a map specifically tailored to your exact lore, I am currently taking commissions.
I use a flat-rate pricing model so there are no surprise fees (Region maps like the one above run for $200).
You can check out my full portfolio and commission info here: https://mountainandmyth.com/portfolio
Let me know what you end up naming this region. I'd love to hear what kind of stories you tell with it!
Let me know what you think! What can I improve and how?
Whether you're writing a fantasy novel, developing an indie video game, or just obsessively planning a fictional empire instead of doing your actual job, your world deserves a proper map.
If you're ready to get your world drawn out, here is the pricing breakdown:
You get two rounds of revisions during the sketch phase to nail the geography, plus one final polish round. Files are delivered high-res (300 PPI) for printing or digital use.
Tell me about your setting in the comments. What is the weirdest or most dangerous geographical feature you've come up with? I want to hear about it.
Drop a comment about your world below, or shoot me a DM to claim a spot on my commission schedule.
Portfolio & Contact: https://mountainandmyth.com/portfolio
Hey folks. I run a one-man cartography business called Mountain & Myth, specializing in custom fantasy maps for TTRPG campaigns and fiction writers. If you're tired of your players asking exactly where the tavern is relative to the goblin camp, I can draw it out for you so everyone is on the same page.
I offer two main styles: classic monochrome parchment and full color.
"Big Picture" Maps (Worlds, Continents, Regions)
"Civilization" Scale Maps (Towns, Districts, Cities)
The Atlas Bundle
Grab 3 or more maps and get 25% off the combined total.
All deliverables are high-resolution (300 PPI) and ready for print or digital tabletops. You'll get two revision rounds to make sure we nail the layout before I finalize the details.
Check out my portfolio at https://mountainandmyth.com/portfolio!
I'm Dustin, the artist behind Mountain & Myth. I draw custom fantasy maps by hand, focusing on geography that actually makes sense for your campaign or novel.
Rates
The Atlas Bundle: Order 3 or more maps and get 25% off the total.
Deliverables & Process
Portfolio: https://mountainandmyth.com/portfolio
DM me to get started.
I'm Dustin, the artist behind Mountain & Myth. I draw custom fantasy maps by hand, focusing on geography that actually makes sense for your campaign or novel.
Rates
The Atlas Bundle: Order 3 or more maps and get 25% off the total.
Deliverables & Process
Portfolio: https://mountainandmyth.com/portfolio
DM me to get started.