Tiered Pools Cave (Patreon)

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.

https://dysonlogos.blog/2022/12/19/tiered-pools-cave/