Rootbound Barrow, Adept

Welcome back, Adepts! This week's map is the Rootbound Barrow (11x16), another bite-sized cave map—perfect for slotting into your adventures when your players have spent too long hunting for caves in conspicuous rock faces and you feel like throwing them a bone. Won't you look cool when they find that secret tomb you totally wrote into the story earlier—and you even have a map ready to go? Wow, DM of the year over here, huh?

Your alternate version of this map features an emptier cave—a variant missing the tomb props, now simply a round chamber full of roots and rocks. Who knows what secrets lie in the dust and the gloom? As usual, I like to suggest there might be an old skeleton among the roots, clutching a pouch or chest—both mysterious and potentially (definitely) cursed—perhaps with swarms of bats hindering the players. But, you know, there could also be goblins here too, if you want.

1. I went with a straightforward design for this one—nothing too crazy. I've got plenty of complicated cave maps, but not many that are just an entrance and a chamber with something inside. To make it a little more exciting than a plain ol' rocky cave, I added some roots to spruce up the place and give your players something to trip over. That said, I didn’t want to go too hard on the jungley props, so the map stays generic enough to fit into creepy cliffsides, tunnels connected to city sewers, or sparse savannas.

2. Holy cow, I keep forgetting how much I hate drawing roots. I don’t know why it’s so hard for me to get them right, but it takes me absolutely forever to reach the result I'm looking for. My first two attempts were wildly chunky—so unrealistic in their girth that I couldn’t even imagine what kind of trees they were supposed to come from. I eventually landed on the type of roots that felt right for the cave: spindly things that creep across the floor without tapering much as they emerge from the walls.

Then, in a heart-wrenching moment of clarity, I realized I had overfilled the place. I ended up deleting about half the roots I had spent so long drawing and rearranged the rest to look a bit more natural. That always hurts.

As for the props, I didn’t want to go overboard with detail—I wanted the space to feel ancient and a little decrepit. I did give the tomb itself a bit more identity by adding a small sword, which I think gives it a somewhat heroic energy. A few urns filled in the rest of the platform nicely, along with some dusty braziers—again, nothing crazy.

3. As for the colors, I must have been feeling a little crazy at the time because I threw caution to the wind and went full monotone—there’s barely any variation in this cave. Usually, I make a point of making the manmade props stand out with distinctly different types of stone, but since I was imagining this as an old, dusty, overgrown barrow, it felt out of place to throw in splashes of color or vibrant mushrooms.

The age and dreariness were what I wanted to punctuate most with this map—so, no fun allowed, I suppose. Still, it was an interesting challenge to work with such a limited palette, and the result turned out surprisingly readable and atmospheric. Maybe this is something I should aim for more often?