Shrine to the Stars Between

This was my first attempt at the "One Page Dungeon" contest. I ran out of time and was unable to finish before the deadline, but I'm still really happy with how much of the map turned out. It's three-level temple, meant to fit into a medieval city block in some fantasy town. The temple is currently boarded up and abandoned, but the adventurers must enter and explore the dangerous and spooky place to rescue children who've gone missing from the local neighborhood. Who is holding them? Are they to be sacrifices to the nameless gods this temple once served? Is the temple secretly being re-occupied?

Obviously, I was heavily inspired by Sutherland's maps for Castle Ravenloft.

NOTE: This map was entirely created in Adobe Illustrator. There was NO 3D RENDERING used. Everything you see is a flat vector shape, drawn, rotated, given a fill of some sort, etc. No actual 3D extruding was used at all. It's the same process I use when freehand-drawing an isometric scene in a paint program like Procreate, except translated to vector shapes in Illustrator: I draw the top-down plan, rotate 45 degrees, then "squish" the plan by 57.77% to get it to isometric view proportions. Then I extrapolate upwards from there. The staircases are blended shapes that were expanded, run through that isometric process, then manually nudged apart to look three-dimensional.

I also learned about masking vectors with gradient transparency, which was a freaking revelation for an old-school graphic designer like myself, I tell you. We couldn't do that with Illustrator back in the 1990s!