So about half a year ago, I set out to run I6: Ravenloft for my players online. I chose to do this through Foundry VTT, since I had fairly recently programmed a custom JavaScript module to accommodate my homebrew not-quite-GLOG-hack system. And, since Foundry has fairly bad built-in tools for improvisation and some complex fog of war systems that essentially demand imported maps possess wall data that only Dungeondraft can reliably produce (without being a service as a software substitute platform like Inkarnate), I decided to make some player-facing maps of the entire castle in Dungeondraft.



(If you'd just like to see the maps I made, you can grab them here on Imgur. I made them using my free Home Architect Pack for Dungeondraft.)

Anyways. The thing about Dungeondraft is that every layer on the map has to be the same size. You can't have one floor of the building be larger, physically, than the others. When you set the boundary size, it's for the entire map and all the floors. This means it's really easy to tab up and down through the floors, letting you quickly and precisely see the alignment of every floor with each other. If Dungeondraft weren't such a bad drafting tool (it's not great at sketching out and tweaking a map, ironically, because of how you have to draw walls; it's much better at laying the finished product) it'd be the best map editor I've ever used.

But what this let me do is catch an error that's slipped into every single published version of Ravenloft since its inception.



Check out that cyan bilateral symmetric axis line. It's the same mirror axis that most of the castle's floors base itself around. On the main floor, it runs down the main hall; outside, it's the line down which the castle walls are mirrored. It also runs straight through the overlook behind the castle, the one that juts out and over the cliff face that Ravenloft is situated upon.

And here's the main hall, on the main floor, with the blue lines matching the blue in the image above.



You shouldn't be looking at the position of the halls. You should be looking at the position of the High Tower Staircase and internal chute. Is it just me, or is it 20' further north (top-right) on the catacomb map?

I cross-referenced this extensively with the position of the other staircases in the castle, the illustrations of the overlook's support, and so on back when I made the maps. As far as I can tell from my measurements, the catacombs are misaligned with everything else. I can only assume that the designers got it in their head that they wanted the high tower staircase landing to open directly into the crypt's main hall, to provide a grander view. The problem is that the only way to achieve that is to shift the staircase 20' north. And I can't blame them for making that error. This is an enormously complex castle. I guarantee I wouldn't have found it if it weren't for the very specific way I was drafting my maps out.

If you'd like a more complete breakdown of what I found, here's the complete article. If you're into Foundry or another VTT with support for the Universal VTT format, you can grab the map files from the download there, too. And if you just want the map images, well, I linked an Imgur album at the top of this post.

Also, they say the best way to figure out if you're wrong is to post publicly on the internet, so if you think I'm wrong, I'd like to see some counter-measurements if anyone's got them.

Also, for the record, this is how I fixed it in my maps.



A short 20' hallway north (and a decorative dais at the entryway), and a diagonal modification to the north hallway that connects to a crypt door.

Do you think this is something in the programing your did or something Foundry isn't handling correctly?

Quote from: GhostNinja on April 04, 2023, 09:50:21 AM
Do you think this is something in the programing your did or something Foundry isn't handling correctly?

This doesn't have anything to do with Foundry. This is a spatial alignment issue I found on Ravenloft's module maps while re-drawing them in Dungeondraft. You can find it by identifying the centerpoint mirror axis of the castle (running down the main hall), measuring the position of the K18 staircase in relationship to it, observing that the centerpoint cuts straight through the middle of the overlook at the back of the castle past the garden, observing that the bay windows of the tomb down at the bottom of the map are aligned evenly with the overlook's supports (which stretch down to meet the catacomb's cliff-face structure and do so symmetrically), and then observing the tomb and crypt grand hall alignment relative to the K18 staircase on the catacomb level. The same exercise can be repeated on every map of Ravenloft published in official modules.