How to depict a city that's half underground?

[anavocado]

I'm a dm and I'm making a physical map to give to my players and I've come across a bit of a wall. I have a dwarven city build into a mountain that has an outer (walled) merchant section. In it, there's a large entrance and a couple of smaller entrances into the mountain itself that leads to a ginormous cavern, which is where the rest of the city and an underground river is. My question is how to visually depict the mountain that the city is built into and separating the the sections, as well how to demonstrate different levels of height within the city, or do I even need to?

[Azélor]

You could have the different levels mapped side by side if they are stacked on one another.
If you want just one map, you could use different colours or you could make the lower levels darker, although that might not be an accurate depiction of the city.

[Falconius]

It's a huge problem to tackle. I've tried thinking of all sorts of ways, but none of them are entirely satisfactory. I'd suggest going the Dwarf Fortress route and just depicting it top down on one level and show the outside as normal and then the inside surrounded by black (or some other fill colour to depict solid rock). And pretend there are no other levels. If you find levels to really be necessary, map them separately as a match for the ones above or below it, again like Dwarf Fortress does.

I looked up mining maps to see if they would be useful, but talk about complex maps. The old ones are usually elevation type maps showing the different levels of the tunnels, which whilst cool, is not really useful for gaming purposes. In modern operations they do these wild 3d maps with all the different rock types and ores they found on the way and estimated findings furthur in the rock. The modern stuff is extraordinarily expensive to get software for, and really entirely useless for our purposes here.

[Tiana]

Hm, a fun way around might be to do a sideview of the inside of the mountain instead of a top down. I can't find many examples but here's one done by Dyson Logos which shows a partly underground ruin as a side view of multiple layers.


He's also done another map I think might be inspiring for the question.


This is a village with a nearby dungeon which is underground, accessible by digging around in the pile of rubble shown, and there's a couple of examples of the tunnels overlapping in the top view to show that it's a multi-layer dungeon.

My solution to "it's partly underground" was to do multiple top-down slices which would reveal all of the layers.

And then the final module will hopefully also have a side view sketch to show that it's a tree hanging over a crevasse that you could go into and explore the root tunnels which have been dug out by the occupants.

Those are the only solutions I can imagine (overlapping, slicing, or side view). You might mix and match, do a top of the exterior city and a side view of the interior city (if it's tall and narrow) or do several slices with a key to explain the layers.

[Simonson]

A friend of mine is experimenting a lot with drawing dungeon style maps in different ways. Might be of some inspiration? Here: https://www.instagram.com/paths.peculiar/

[DrWho42]

like Azélor said, probably multiple maps to depict the layers although a 2D overview (like an ant farm) might help