Northern Dwarven Caverns

[DPSEve]

Here's my first WIP post! Recently, I started a casual drop in drop out Labyrinth Lord hexcrawl for the first time. I randomly generated a map I like with donjon's generator, which was probably a bit to big. But live and learn!

Anyways, after following a prince on a fool's errand for several sessions, my players decided to part ways with him, after they were already over a hundred miles into a large mountain range. Fortunately, they managed to find the dwarven settlements. I had spun a story about dangerous underground caverns, a refugee crisis, cave-ins and dungeons. And my players were interested! So I found myself desiring some sort of underground map. Most of the tutorials around here are for dungeons or surface regions, so I am fiddling around a bit.

So, following this tutorial, I tweaked it slightly to generate some sort series of caverns for the underground. In the tutorial, I rendered clouds twice; once to get some of the larger caverns, and then again to get many more spindly little caverns interconnecting them all. I found some textures that seemed to work alright, and created a rough sketch of a map. I used a jittery pencil to tweak around with some of the areas, and then placed some of the major settlements.

Once thing I'd love to get some feedback on is the water. I don't know much about underground rivers, but I figured that in most cases where I had them, they should go along the cavern walls, since they probably are carving out those caverns. Currently, the water is just sketches, but some tips on how to make it look nice would be welcome. Other caverns are supposed to have been dug out by the dwarves. However some earthquakes have happened, so I am planning to give a map to my players with some old mines marked, where the known cave-ins are, and where known settlements are (I haven't determined where to the villages yet). Then, I'll have my own GM version with interesting locations, that I can hopefully add to whenever I desire.

[Falconius]

Natural rivers in caverns typically seem to bounce from side to side. The eddies can also end up forming deep parts and shelves along the sides. Here you can see an example where they are heading upriver from a concrete culvert which has a really nice flat floor and the river flowing evenly along it to the Victorian culvert that was built over a natural river bed (or at least a river bed which has been allowed to form for 150+ years, I'm not too clear). I've also seen some pictures of the underground rivers that China has flowing through that huge karst region and there the water seems to be fairly centrally located in the tunnel. Also depending on the season they could easily go wall to wall.

I think if you use the same general rule that you have for over land rivers you'd be alright, which is that the slower the flow (smaller the grade) the more it meanders, and the swifter the flow, the more direct it heads. Keeping in mind the addition that the tunnel is going to be an average of the extents of the flow out over a longer distance.

[DPSEve]

For this next part I added in some Mushroom forests, location markers, and labels. It came out looking better than I expected it to, which was nice.

I relied a lot on the quickstart guide for this next part. I used the animated brushes technique from The Fast and Easy Maps tutorial to create the mushroom forests. This is the part where I actually hooked up my new tablet; using it to draw the mushrooms. It looks me a while to get used to using the tablet in gimp, especially since I ran into some technical issues at first (Gimp wants your tablet and main screen to have the same zoom level, or the brushes don't work.) The pressure sensitivity also worked in a nice way for the brush which I didn't expect. Pressing harder gave me larger mushrooms, less pressure gave me smaller mushrooms. I really didn't want to destroy the smaller caverns with mushrooms, so this turned out to be a nice feature.

The labelling techniques I just grabbed from the artistic regional maps tutorial. The markers I used for the towns and villages I had grabbed from jatna's deviantart earlier; and I used different markers for the towns and villages. I used the Enchanted Land and Colwell fonts from dafont.

To spice up the rivers, I just slapped on a shaped Deep Sea gradient which came with Gimp. It looked nicer than I expected on the first try, so I kept it!

The (known) cave-ins are marked with cross symbols. They work for what they signify.