Sewer Cave, Adept

This week's map is the Sewer Cave (25x25), a simple series of sewer tunnels with a developing issue for the town which will probably need to be addressed soon. Anyway, it's been a while since I've drawn up a sewer map and I felt like my previous ones were kinda unimpressive so I figured I ought to make at least one that I'm happy with. Not bad, I think, certainly an improvement!

1. So, sewers. I feel like there's 2 ways to take them, labyrinthine or straightforward, and those two can be boiled down to how big the map is. A big sewer map will almost always be a maze and a small one will be fairly straightforward- my previous sewers have been a bit too big and thus too complicated and a bit visually boring since I couldn't give each part as much love and care it would need to be interesting.

For this iteration I zoomed in a bit to 25x25", cut out all the long and boring tunnels and instead focused on a single corner and something that makes it exciting- a collapsed section that's become some sort of water-filled cave. I expanded on that to make the tunnel section feature some more terrain for players to maneuver and provide corners for cover, but I wanted to keep the concept simple and straightforward.

2. This took a long time. A long long time. Partially that was because I had some minor but painful health issues (that I won't get into here) which ate up afternoons with doctor appointments and made concentrating on drawing difficult, and secondly I had a week-long vacation which always ruins my motivation to work upon return. So anyway, it was a tricky map but not for the usual reasons.

I'm trying to remember what my issue was with past sewer maps. I think my way of drawing every individual piece was kinda boring at the time- the walls were plain and squarish, the floors were uninteresting tiles or cobble, the props were too sparse, and the little grimy details were too infrequent. This time around I just wanted to give this setting its due and detail it until I was satisfied.

3. Strangely enough, I decided that the starting point for this map would be the palette from one of my Autumn maps, the Forgotten Graveyard, not that there's much resemblance to be seen there. Somehow those colors felt like a good jumping-off point and I worked backwards from there, making special care to have some lovely contrasting colors between the sewer and cave sections.

Side note- props to Dungeon Mapster, his sewer maps are always an inspiration and I totally imitated his sewer grate shadows that you see in all his sewer maps. One of which inspired me to start making my own maps, so please support him as well- I believe he's one of the best in the biz.