Saga Mackenzie

@sagamack.bsky.social

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Fantasy Cartographer, Illustrator and writer. Crit award nominee 2024, ENNIE Award Nominee & Winner (Gold - Uncaged: Goddesses) (she/her). , Discord sagamack Tags: #cartography

The cover image of my next "mapping the mist" pack, which contains one single-bedroom top down apartment map. The subtitle on the pack reads "Nights of payne town 2-2, The Woodworths Apartment. Notably i've put the apostrophe in Woodworth's in the wrong place. Woops! need to fix that.

The image in the background is a section of the small map, showing the apartment lounge and kitchen/dining area which form one open plan space, with windows overlooking a section of street below.

three non-official character sheet pages for use with the solo game Apothecaria. The left sheet contains personal details of the character, along with things like tools, upgrades and spare reagents. The second sheet is for tracking a patient and all the ingredients needed for their cure, and the last page is where you record the various potions you drink. The latter one has potion bottles that can be coloured in for added flavour.

cover image for my new map pack. The title reads "Mapping the mist : Nights of Payne Town 21. Subtitle of "Downtown Disaster - Corner of Pine and Fifth". The image in the background is the emergency version of the map, where a crashed yellow sports car is barricaded off with a couple of police cars in attendence. Two buildings have visible interiors on either side of the road - a burger joint on one side, and a sushi bar on the other. Finally, the Cauldron of Mist and City of Mist logos are in the bottom right.

A pair of paper refill pads from the shop WH Smiths. They're A4 in two different types. One has a verticle hexgrid marked out, with space along the top and side for additional details. The other is the same but with a traditional square grid.

my fingers holding up a small dungeon map filled with various stone tombs, painted on to a standard sized playing card. It's painted exclusively with blues and yellows (the latter for various bits of torchlight through the complex). It's hand painted with regular acrylic and some of my miniature paints.

The new map of Night City created for the Cyberpunk Red TTRPG. Dark blue background with neon yellow main streets fading down to a lighter blue for the smaller streets. The water is cyan with a faint grid to give the whole thing a bit of a digital look.

The cover of the book "Beneath the Rising" by Premee Mohamed. It's a stark white cover with a black patterned swirl surrounding the title text, into which two silhouetted faces can be seen. The swirl is not entirely unlike the alien language used in the movie "Arrival" which does make me slightly suspicious of where the designer got the idea...

A pseudo-3d city map showing a mountain-locked city choked by snow, built up in separated concentric rings. Reflected light from various warming towers melt enough of the snow amongst the gathered structures to create a livable space that can be farmed. On both sides the city is flanked by impassable rocky mountaintops. A map key on the right proclaims this to be 'Lichtberg'

a photograph of a page from the new revised Odyssey of the Dragonlords book showing the images of a couple of major NPCs - a dwarf forgemaster and armoured human king with a battle axe hoisted over one shoulder. The focus though is on the generative AI alt-text popping up on screen, describing the dwarf character as "A woman in a gold dress". Below is a line stating that this incredibly descriptive passage was generated by AI, as if that wasn't already obvious.

A poster size map for The Warlock of Firetop Mountain. The central section is a full map of the dungeon complete with boxes for entering page reference numbers. The dungeon itself is the interior of a mountain split down the middle with an underground river. At the top, a separate parchent 'boxout' contains the infamous maze of zagor, a difficult 'dungeon within a dungeon'.

To the left of the map is a list of achievements to try to complete to aid replayability of the book. There's also a small list of 'unique deaths' and bad ends to try to hit. On the right is some space for a person to record four attempts to progress through the book, complete with character name, statistics and somewhere to enter how much gold they finished with, and what their characters fate is.

The single page expansion map for the Guide to Fauna expansion. This is also split into rows and columns of hexes, separated by playing card symbols. Several small planet or space station illustrations are scattered across the map, and the whole thing is separated into sectors of varying danger, from green to red.

me holding a painted miniature of a Nightmare - a jet black spectral hell horse with a flaming fire mane and hooves, leaping over a pair of crumbling gravestones. There is a raven sitting on its back for extra evil portent.

photograph of a squid like kraken with a wide open maw full of teeth. It's skin is turquoise blue with red suckers in the exposed undersides of each tentacle and around the flesh of the maw. A cluster of bright green eyes are hidden within the mass.

A colourful starfield cover with a purplish red nebula and some sort of rot or corruption creeping in from the right hand side. The Builder run for "life" is superimposed in the background. The title is : "12 Delves - twelve months, twelve delves for coriolis: the great dark. January's delve is called 'The Saltstrain'.

A hand drawn digital art city map showing the city of tidefall - a circular city sitting next to the sea and split into two circular tiers and four districts, representing different phases of the moon. The more lavish interior circle holds all the government buildings while most of the outer ring is the common areas. to the northeast on the shoreline is the rich folks area with a lot of standalone manors, and east of the city wall is farmland. The northern half of the outer ring on the shoreline holds the docklands.

The border of the map includes banners with symbols representing the six factions in the setting - phases of the moon, palace, whale, rose and Kopesh. The lower half of the border has the titleof the map in the middle and illustrations of the cities main sea goddess rising out of the surf in a flowing blue-purple gown, and aside representation of some buildings from the city.

The rear of a goblin miniature from the epic encounters Symbaroum box set. The goblin is painted in muted greens and browns, with a black top knot hairstyle and a grasping a staff made from a gnarled length of tree root.

A photo taken of the credit scroll on the film 'Suffer'. My name, Saga Mackenzie, appears credited as cartographer.

photograph of four Duergar - grey skinned deep dwarves - miniatures on my messy work desk. Their leader is in back, painted with frosty armour and twin magical axes but is mostly hidden beneath a wolf-like helm. To his left is a duergar miner, shirtless with a pickaxe in one hand and a lump of rock under his other arm. The rock is glowing green with some sort of mineral. Down and right is a Deep dwarf berserker with fire axes and a punky hairstyle, and lastly to her right is a hooded and robed deep dwarf cleric, clutching some sort of green stone hand (maybe made from the same mineral mined by the miner?) and about to cast a spell from an outstretched hand.

Colourful cover of a large softback book titled "Carved in Stone - A Storyteller's Guide to the Picts" There is a painting of travelling picts with their livestock moving through a forest beside a fast flowing river, with a waterfall in the background. The rest of the cover is covered in pictish knot carvings.

A map of the gamebook "warlock of Firetop mountain" showing all the rooms and connecting corridors that can be explored without any specific details to avoid spoiling anything. The border is colourful and decorative, showing an image of the warlock himself, and the red dragon that guards his hideout, curling around the edge of the map and blowing smoke to form part of the border. A decorative rose compass is top right next to a cutaway map of the 'maze of zagor' one of the more confusing and difficult sections of the book. Scattered across the entire map are the six important keys you can discover during the adventure. Finding the correct three will open the chest of treasures at the end of the book, and all of them are places roughly close to where they are found while playing the game.

A very grumpy little crow plushy looking down on me and my laptop in silent judgement, perched on the top row of my TTRPG bookcase. (This section is mostly Free League games and stuff like City of Mist). There's also a very flat looking Ludo from Labyrinth plush with a somewhat disconcerted expression, none too sure about his new neighbour.

The finished diorama sitting on my studio shelf. It's contained within a small shiny black picture frame with a thick simple border about half an inch wide. Full size it's about the size of an a5 piece of paper. The frame is deep and contains a small diorama depicting a ferocious minotaur emerging from some kind of labyrinth. The greek letters for "DEATH" are inscribed in blood above the entrance and surrounded by bloody hand prints. The labyrinth entrance is a flat 2d surface painted with a simple perspective trick for a 3d effect, although it's mostly obscured by the miniature. The minotaur is standing on a rocky base surrounded by grass, rubble and mushrooms as well as a discarded shield, painted with the symbol of a stylised Minoan Labrys.

photograph against a white background showing my hand holding up Ba'Lor, an almost complete miniature (not really mini though) of a large demon lord with flesh-tone skin and bony extrusions and tail, and ragged red-black wing membranes. He's still missing one wing and his hand weapon choices which are still work in progress.

An image showing three different character sheets made as a fan requested project for the Apothecaria solo game. The left sheet contains character details, including a graphical image of a wand with custom parts. The second is a patient records sheet detailing the disease they have and what you need to cure them, and the third is for potions, with space for four different potions represented by illustrations and space for the details which you fill out by hand. they are all black and white line drawn.

a box containing a whole lot of packaged miniatures from the Dungeons and Laser's 'Caves' crowdfunding project. Mostly these are various cavern terrain pieces, but there is a lot of stretch goal scatter terrain and miniatures included.

A painted miniature depicting a dwarven noble wearing blue and purple robes adorned with silvery jewellery and a silver crown. She is clutching an elaborate scroll in one hand, while another sits propped up on a stack of books.

a non-official character sheet made for a fan of the game Apothecaria. It has spaces for tracking the year as it progresses around the border of the sheet, as well as for customising your witch with a wand, spaces for tools and equipment, upgrades and spare reagents.

A photo of a painted vending machine miniature with a red front casing. It's glass window is shattered, revealing tiny cans of Irn Bru, Pepsi, Coke and Red Bull. There is a massive purple tongue growing out of the collecting hatch, betraying that this is actually a hungry mimic in disguise!

A pile of goodies purchased at UK Games Expo 2025. Including : Daggerheart, Heart, Golf Quest, an expansion for the solo game Dead Air, An expansion for the solo game Delve called Biomes, two packs of character cards for COLOSTLE, and a whole bunch of miniatures to paint. My favourite being the 24 weird and wonderful animal companions.

A map of the various outer planes of the D&D world, after a vecna related apocalyptic event has struck. Five of the worlds are now void and open to space, while the rest are all either on fire or otherwise have distinctive appearances.

A black and white line drawing of the Sylvark Bloom - a spelljammer type fantasy space craft shaped out of several trees, with sheltered canopies and dangling roots around each deck. There is both a 3d illustration of the full ship, and several 2d deck plans for each level.

The contents of the sector map pack 2 are listed here, including 40 themed space stations, four new tech-infused planets and 4 new star sector background images.

A screen grab of my Blue Prince save file's progress. It shows I've played 154 loops of the game so far, at a run time of 63 real-time hours.

Esme kneeling, as she investigates an abandoned backpack on the shores of the Chionthar river. From the book of Umberlee prayers, likely one of the unfortunate fishermen lying dead nearby.

A selection of newly printed business cards with my details and a couple of character illustrations on one side in a 'hades' style cartoon style. The rear of the cards are all different and show various maps I've made over the past few years, 50 in total.

Solid ground underfoot again! And familiar territory - a sandy riverbank surrounded by reeds and basked in blue cloudless skies. If it wasn't for the writhing tentacles of the dying Nautaloid ship overhanging everything, it would be a normal summers day on the sword coast. Esme is up first of course, after our miraculous survival, and stands hands on hips surveying the terrain and trying to figure out just where exactly we are...

We meet a friend. Well...i guess more of a temporary ally. The lighting here was so good, with the dusty light of Avernus cast into this chamber that I couldn't resist taking a quick snap as Esme and our new Githyanki ally rush towards the next exit.

We wake up with a double whammy of horror, as Esme - an older ex noblewoman turned paladin - surveys her surroundings : both the interior biological horror of an illithid nautaloid, and the exterior terrors of Avernus, first level of the nine hells. Esme stands between the two, taking in the details with a lot more calm than I am!

A sample page of the finished adventure location, complete with inserted notes, diagrams of some sort of relic or trinket, and a faux-photograph of a cave system. Some of the actual adventure text is blurred out to avoid spoilers.

A map of the cold-light tower, split across two pages, showing several interconnected levels - the base rocky island leads to two surviving levels of lighthouse tower, and beneath lies a small complex of caves leading to thermal vents and acid pools far below.

A section of a larger map of the Inland Sea, showing the East Dales of the southern continent. The area covered by this journal is ringed in red as if someone has scribbled on the map directly, with the word "HERE" marked.

a black and white character sheet for The Innocuous. A player class in the game 'oops, all vampires'. It has a background of creepy grinning balloons and a sewn together teddy bear in the foreground.

An RPG character sheet for the game 'Oops, All Draculas' - This sheet is for the aristocrat charaacter, and so is a pen and ink line drawing containing a tiled 'money' effect background and an ice bucket with a bottle of AB positive blood.

a 2d top down map of an abandoned warehouse in a modern city style.

The cover of my Stock Maps project, titled : Stock Maps - Surface Dungeon 1: Abandoned temple. The map illustration shown is designed in a faux-parchment style and depicts a temple built into the side of a cliff face, with many side crypts and passages, as well as a central room with a deep pit, and an inner chamber with a statue shrine. Everything is general enough that it can have multiple uses if needed.

Map of a sophisticated airship

9 zombie miniatures painted in three different styles: purple and blue cloaked figures, three more naturally painted mercenaries and three green robed ex-druids. They are all led by a red wizard of that, bale, fallow skin and red robes.

a colourful map of a flying sailing ship over blue waters with fluffy clouds around. The interior is detailed with blue and gold (yellow) colourings and between the top and lower deck there is a hanging banner with the ship's name - the Donny D.

The map from the front of the book shows a corner of a larger continent with a lot of ocean and small offshore islets. The towns and cities of Mistfell, Besa, Aerdmure, Arkwood and Adenaport are scattered across the land, with a mountain range - the Worgreth mountains - to the northwest, running off the edge of the map. The entire area is named within a scroll curving around the compass rose: Astria.

A 3d isometric view of a frozen city nestled between high rocky mountains. The city is contained within a series of interconnected circular walls and warmed by devices designed to capture and reflect light. A key at the side of the map declares the name of the city as Lichtberg.

Cover of my next map pack showing the interior of an abandoned warehouse with an attached apartment, set up as the hideout for a bomb maker. Several active bombs are found in the warehouse section for players to navigate around! The title is "mapping the mist : Demon's In Cross end map 3 of 5. Proximo's Loft"