Cage Street Sewer Nexus (Patreon)

We continue our explorations of points of interest in the sewers beneath Waterdeep. This series of maps is designed to mesh perfectly with the sewer-based maps that I drew for Waterdeep: Dragon Heist.

Today we find ourselves at an interesting little nexus of sewers and associated basements of street-level structures.

The most obvious point of interest is the large pool in the centre of the map – here a number of much smaller sewer lines (more pipes than standard sewers) combine to join the main sewer line that runs past to the south. The pool has a raised walkway around it from which workers can push lengths of rod up the pipes to try to clear blockages.

There are a total of four substructures around the periphery of this sewer intersection.

On the upper right is the sealed off basement under a house. At some point the basement access was removed, and the stairs here lead up to a flat floor with no means of access to the street level short of a crowbar and/or axe to work through the floor above. Access to this basement is via secret door into the sewers and it was used for secure storage by one criminal organization or another until they lost track of it during a change of personnel. Now it is just a spider-infested room full of old stolen goods.

On the lower right are a pair of basements of functioning businesses. Each has a sewer grate leading below to the sewers for easy dumping of liquid and semi-liquid goods. Unfortunately, one of these is a street “butcher” and the liquids drained here are mostly dog and rat blood and innards. This tends to attract ghouls to the area, and thus both of these grates are very well secured.

Finally we have the basement of a successful business on the left side of the map, and the attempts by a few ne’er do wells to tunnel through the wall from the sewers to said basement for late-night surreptitious access to said business.

1200dpi version and free commercial-use license is here: https://dysonlogos.blog/2019/11/04/cage-sewers/