Mushroom Cave, Adept

Hi again, Adepts! This one is the Mushroom Cave (30x35), a nice cave map with a single entrance, great for capping off random tunnels your players happen to stumble down if, perhaps, they encountered the Forked Tunnel from a few weeks back and failed to choose the correct direction via failed checks or failing to catch your clues (it happens to all of us). Either way, it's just nice to have extra locations that don't necessarily lead into anything else, so I expect many of you will find plenty of uses for this one.

 1. As you can see, my initial plans for this map were much more dramatic than what I ended up with. The giant crystals are fun and make the map seem very dangerous, but I felt like they don't quite work with the space when the map is smaller. I may build on this concept later by making a crystal cave arena- a pit with jagged crystals all around the edges, like the Seath the Scaleless boss arena from Dark Souls. For now though, that wasn't where I was at with this map, and instead I felt like making a more generic mushroom cave that can be dropped into campaigns with a little more ease.

As for the layout, I have often wondered how to make single-entrance caves a little more interesting, especially when the entrance is a long tunnel with no visible area outside. This time I played around with using pillars to break up line of sight from the entrance and make more branching tunnels into the zone further in, which I think gives the map a nice bit of extra complexity while still feeling natural.

 2. I tried to drop in the mushrooms randomly.. but aesthetically! So while the mushrooms are placed in random positions I did make a point not to have any block passages completely or sit anywhere unusual like the very middle of a chamber. After that I felt that the center of the cave felt a little too bare, so rather than placing more of the same giant mushrooms in there I instead added a couple little ponds of standing water, perhaps filled from water dripping from above. After that it now made sense that there might be more plant life growing here, so I added a bunch of patchy grass/moss to the ground, which I usually feel looks nicer than bare dirt/stone.

 3. While I was pretty content with everything up to this point, I gotta say I'm not 100% on the colors. I made this map in March and since then I think I've made quite a few improvements on the palette. I still think it doesn't feel too terrible off base however, you could argue that the glowing mushrooms plus the crystals do something to the lighting and also maybe the moss here is a bit different, but more than likely I'm one of a handful of people who care so much about the color consistency of my maps. As always, I'll say that I'll consider touching up the colors here if it still bugs me in a week but I know I'll care a lot less in a few days.