Tags
Cave, Cavern, Caverns, Caves, Dungeons & Dragons, Fantasy, Labyrinth Lord, Maps, Old School Essentials, OSE, OSR, River, RPG
This map came about during one of my Twitch livestreams when a viewer asked how I would handle a cave with tiered pools, where water carrying lots of sediment and minerals has slowly worked its way down a cave making tiered pools along the way. So, unlike most of my maps, this piece focuses almost entirely on a single chamber in a larger cave – the tiered pools chamber and a few associated spaces.
The height of the tiers is not specified (as with the scale of the squares, but I generally “think” in 10-foot squares). Likely the typical tier is about 2-3 feet above the previous, but to make the scene a lot louder and more imposing, you can increase those tiers to even as much as ten feet each, making the descent or ascent quite challenging. And obviously, someone or something lives in the cavern on the left that accesses the tiers at two different levels (the lower cave being above the water line by the arbitrary height of the tiers used).
In the end, this was fun to draw and envision, but I really should have connected it to… more. Maybe the stream on the lower left connects to one of the caves in the Eleint Passages from the beginning of the month? Or this might be a small tributary of the Darkling.
The 1200 dpi versions of the map were drawn at a scale of 300 pixels per square and are 14,400 pixels (48 squares) wide. To use this with a VTT you would need to resize the squares to either 70 pixels (for 5′ squares) or 140 pixels (for the recommended 10′ squares) – so resizing it to either 3,360 pixels wide or 6,720 pixels wide, respectively.
The maps on Dyson’s Dodecahedron are released for free personal use thanks to the support of awesome patrons like you over on Patreon. Every month over 600 patrons come together to make these releases possible. You can help too in order to keep the flow of maps coming and to improve their quality – and even get a map of your own!
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I think it’s fine as is: It gives a different environment for an isolated encounter. It could also be presented as an environmental encounter where the party is simply being offered a “fast or safe?” decision. (e.g. “Do you want to lose an hour of travel time or have to make some skill/stat checks?”)
Safe? The party is strung out and out of the normal marching order when the real encounter reveals itself.
Fast? The party is properly grouped, but they have to make checks at the start of the real encounter. Failure means they fell and start the encounter prone, (or worse if failed particularly badly).
Speaking of the Darkling River, I’m looking forward to seeing the Vorpal District…