Tags
Caverns, Descent into the Depths of the Earth, Dungeon, Dungeons & Dragons, Fantasy, Maps, OSR, RPG
When travelling the depths of the underdark, there are passages and caves that most “civilized” denizens ignore because they are small, narrow, and fraught with obstacles. These “tertiary” passages sometimes make for useful escape or access tunnels and these have their connections to the primary and secondary passages concealed behind secret doors or other hidden access points.
Tertiary Passages into the Depths of the Earth
Tertiary tunnels are usually about ten feet wide with ceilings between 8 to 25 feet with an average of 15 feet or so. While drow still patrol these passages, encounters are more frequently with monsters such as xorn, lurkers above, trappers, mind flayers, and various underdark vermin.
This set of tertiary passage geomorphs includes a redraw of the original from Descent into the Depths of the Earth (on the far left), along with four new example passages for use when handling encounters along these nearly abandoned and secret byways.
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Dyson's Dodecahedron 
Hey! Now that you’ve done these wonderful straight paths, how about some curved paths, or connectors?
Yes, junctions would be a good idea: Those would make likely places for encounters. While you are more likely to have a meeting encounter with someone simply going the other way, ambush and ‘checkpoint’ encounters would be more likely to set up where they get two passages of traffic.
Curves, OTOH, aren’t as important: This sort of map is for the 100-400′ of encounter in a dozen miles of walking.
I’ve done up a couple of connectors (mostly as an exercise to learn to make better maps.) I think they would be really useful.
I do think curves would be useful too. They’d make for a good reason to not see an oncoming group a long way off. (Likewise, detours around a significant obstacle or feature – brushing up against the shores of Darkling Lake…)
Reblogged this on DDOCentral.
These look fantastic. Has anyone worked out what size paper this image needs to be printed on for the grid to come out at approx 1”.
Since the grid is 10′ per square, if you want it printed for miniatures you would want it printed to 2″ per square.
Measuring the squares in photoshop, these maps are roughly 5 squares / 50 feet = 1 inch or 1200 pixels.
So if you want 1 square to equal 2 inches, you’ll need to blow this up roughly 10 times, to 120 pixels per inch.