Cavern Basin, Adept (Patreon)

I'm back after taking a week off with a new map, the Cavern Basin (30x40)! This time I've decided to make an extra cave map, sorta building on the Gloomy Cave. Meaning, this one won't perfectly align with the other but I've left avenues for them to be easily used together. 

Anyway, your alternate version of this map is Caustic, featuring the nasty glowing green slime that I love to swap in in these sorts of maps. I think there's no better way to express danger than with a glowing, steaming pool of glowing ooze, so maybe your players will think twice before wading in. If not, don't just stop at rolling up acid damage, how about rolling on the short-term madness chart after taking a big breath of those fumes and failing a Con save?

1. It's been a while since I've made a water-focused underground map, and I think I've only made 1 (or maybe 2?), so I felt that it was probably about time for me to flesh out this space a little further- especially now that I've been drawing cave walls differently. 

This time around I decided that there shouldn't be any easy paths through the map. Yeah, there's plenty of land to play with as need be, here and there on the edges of the frame, but I wanted the water to be the #1 obstacle here. And, presumably, you'd be facing off against a swimming creature, maybe something with tentacles that can reach after players hiding in the recesses, or an amphibious monster, enemies that can take advantage of the terrain and make life real difficult for adventurers who might be focused on passing through. 

And, in case swimming combat isn't your bag, I've made sure to include a fair bit of dry land and tunnels, so maybe the players are simply trying to escape from whatever hides in there. 

2. Not too much to talk about here, but I certainly don't think I'll ever complain about drawing these new cave walls. That said, it's still a fairly boring part of the map to draw, lots of small and unimportant details that I have to add in order for it to feel fleshed out. Not that they're really unimportant, my point is that their absence would be noticed and the map wouldn't feel quite right.

Beyond that, this map was fairly basic to draw- rocks are rocks and water is water, I don't think I'll ever decide to tweak how I draw either of these things. 

3. The colors for this one were intended to be comparable to the Gloomy Cave, with the intention of making them feel like part of the same cave system. Even so, I did toy around with some of the colors, deepening the color of the darkness to a more shadowy blue, tinting the water to be a bit more green and murky, and tweaking the ground color to be a little less yellowish and more gray. These changes make the map feel like it's deeper underground, in my opinion, and shift the tone to be less cheerful. Mostly though I felt like this version looks more balanced and visually appealing, which is its own reward.