Longboat Mountain – The Drop Cave (Patreon)

Near the trail that leads past the Drop Falls (location C on the Longboat Mountain overview) is a cave that was evidently cut into the mountain by ancient waterflows that have since been re-routed. The waters used to flow out with extreme pressure from a small tunnel at the bottom of this cave, but some time after the water course changed, that exit collapsed.

Now the lower areas of the cave are home to strange fungi people – myconids hiding in the mountain to escape the Mother-Fungus. (If you have a copy of Skerples’ “The Monster Overhaul”, you can generate more information about each myconid on pages 55-56). But in their attempts to escape the Mother-Fungus, they are blind to one of their own slowly turning into a new Mother-Fungus. The leader of the myconids sits on the throne in the lowest cave but has actually sent rhizomes much deeper and has infiltrated the Silver Stair and is planning to bud a great new myconid brain down there where none will find it. If that is done, this colony of myconids will become their slave, extensions of the new mother-fungus.

The structure of the cave is based around a chimney cut through the stone by ages of water flowing here. The first level includes a small cave separate from the main cave that is only accessible via the chain shaft before the shaft joins the main caves on level two (see the water wheel on the Drop Falls map for more about the chain, chain shaft, and where it leads). While one can descend to level 2 via a twisting tunnel on level 1, there is no such access to level 3 – so it must be accessed by climbing down the chimney from level 2, or by hanging on to the chain in the chain shaft.

While the lower levels of the cave are home to the many rebel myconids, the first level is home to a pair of owlbears who den in the first large cavern section, and a massive grey ooze in the room with the stagnant pool. At some point in the past, others used these caves and decorated the second level with statues (each statue is posed so it points down a hallway always towards the pyramidal structure in the upper left corner) and a strange truncated pyramidal structure about 8 feet tall with a 1-foot-wide glowing glass orb floating eight inches above it.

The 1200 dpi versions of the map were drawn at a scale of 300 pixels per square and are 10,200 x 13,200 pixels in size (34 x 44 squares). 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 2,380 x 3,080 or 4,760 x 6,160 pixels, respectively.

https://dysonlogos.blog/2024/07/17/longboat-mountain-the-drop-cave/