Grey Waters Cave (Patreon)

A stream bearing grey silt enters Deep Lake about a day from Dreamer’s Reach. Following the stream to its source in the Goblin Hills, one finds that the stream emerges from one of the hills before winding its way to the lake and uphill from the cave is a set of somewhat impractical stairs leading to a tall stone door inset into the hill, watched over by a cupola with arrow slits cut into the stone beside it. The structures under the hill were built by creatures roughly the size of ogres, so the halls are tall and the doors are at a much larger scale than most humans expect. Whoever built it is remembered only by the strange scale of the structure – as the current inhabitants are of much more diminutive stature.

The actual “Grey Waters Cave” is a set of large caverns that cut deep into the hill with lower and narrower sections as one progresses into the damp and unlit stone. In the “central” chamber of the cave there is another door to the hillside chambers, as well as a tomb on the west side. The entrance to the tomb is flanked by a pair of very rough-cut statues that give an approximation of the size and humanoid form of the builders, but the statues lack any real details or even faces – standing silent watch with what appear to be crossed arms, looking down on intruders into these chambers.

Part of the chambers near the entrance overlooks the pool cavern where the grey waters collect before spilling out into the stream, nearly twenty feet above the floor of the cavern proper. Curtains of salvaged tarps are set between the massive columns here, and the area is used for storage by the current residents as well as to post a guard watching over the cave proper.

The Greyfoot Goblins now occupy the chambers but give wide clearance to the tombs which they believe to be haunted. A group of them live on a high point in the cave proper, exiled from the main tribe in the structures over their pro-social behaviour – but they remain here where they can fish from grey waters and occasionally offer help and assistance to the rest of the tribe.

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 that work with this design) – so resizing it to either 2,380 x 3,080 or 4,760 x 6,160 pixels, respectively.

https://dysonlogos.blog/2024/02/16/grey-waters-cave/