
So, I have an idea for a new map project and I want to get your opinions on it.
The photos above are from the Initiation Well in Portugal. That isn’t what I want to draw, but I think it illustrates my idea fairly well.
Imagine a large, cylindrical pit in the middle of a small village. The villagers don’t know who made it or how deep it is. But it’s deep. If you drop a rock, you won’t hear it hit the bottom.
Looking down into the pit, one can see walkways and chambers dug into the sides. The villagers didn’t dig them, but they use them as homes and shops. The village tavern is down there, too. Below the village are the mines, where most of the villagers work, digging for copper ore.
The tunnels circling the pit go deeper, but the villagers rarely wander beyond the mines. They know there are giant bats living down there, which come up at night. And there are goblins, or at least there used to be. They haven’t seen one in years.
Here’s a rough outline of what each level of the pit might look like:
- 1-3: The village
- 4,5: Villagers’ mines
- 6: A maze of tunnels and collapsed chambers overrun by mold
- 7: Caverns inhabited by giant bats
- 8: Ancient crypt
- 9: A goblin settlement. Possibly friendly. They eat the bats.
- 10: Caves inhabited by giant spiders. Huge webs strung across the pit (which caught the rock they threw in earlier).
- 11: Rough, partially-collapsed tunnels and chambers inhabited by monsters
- 12: Night Hag’s lair in ruins of an ancient temple
- 13, 14, 15: Ruins of an ancient settlement
- 16: Ancient prison covered in mushrooms
- 17: Myconid colony around a crumbling fountain
- 18: Ancient catacombs
- 19: Ancient oracle and library with a long-abandoned scholars’ camp containing notes about the pit’s history
- 20: Mushroom caves. Below this, the pit is filled with water
- 21, 22: Underwater ruins with undead
- 23: The bottom (Sealed vault? Trash and debris? I have no idea what goes here yet)
That’s what I’ve got right now, but it’s all subject to change, especially once I figure out the story of how the pit came to be and what’s at the bottom. If you’ve got a better story in mind, the whole thing would basically be modular, so you could rearrange the levels or remove the ones you don’t need.
Anyway, is this something you’d be interested in? I’d love to know what you think or whether you have any ideas to add. Right now, nothing is set in stone, including whether I draw it at all, so by all means, if you’re into the idea, please let me know!
Initiation: The Dark Descent
love mega dungons and ancient forgotten cultures so this sounds realy fun, a weird idea for the bottom is a ”star gate” like planar portal, right now its set to the plane of water
Sounds like fun. It reminds me a little of this concept:
https://markerslinger.tumblr.com/post/165940395718/the-full-mind-mine-adventure-seed-is-up-you-guys
I’d love to see maps to go with that kind of idea like you’re describing.
Wow, that’d certainly be something to find at the bottom of the pit. That’s wild.
Sounds like an awesome idea. Maybe it was built by an extinct elven empire. The bottom of the pit reaches the root of their sacred magical tree or the place where the last emperor still slumbers or where an ancient enemy wizard has been sealed.
This is a fun concept. I ran a game using Dyson’s shaft tombs maps once that wrapped around – the bottom just lead back to the top – but since it was 400′ or so ‘deep’ and had bridges nets and webs most stuff got stuck pretty quickly. (This was possible since the shaft tombs were entered from a side passage instead of from the top.)
As for what’s at the bottom of yours, it’s probably something that keeps the shaft from filling in or collapsing. There are lots of fun possibilities.
– A huge mouth. Perhaps a monstrous purple worm, or a mollusk that treats the well as it’s shell. Periodically it eats everything in the shaft, and it is about to do so again.
– A ginormous gelatinous ‘cube’ that has achieved sentience and has learned many greats secrets of the universe through extended contemplation.
– A clear crystalline lens. When enemy starships show up in the space above the shaft it fires beams of pure energy into the void to destroy them.
– The hollow world/underdark
I hadn’t considered the possibility of a giant mouth, but… yeah, that’d be an insane thing to find down there. I like that a lot. Thanks for the suggestions!
Sounds really nice. I’d put some form of dimensional portal at the bottom.
I’m going to make some alternate variants of the bottom so people can do different things with the map.
Here’s a thought for Level 23…maybe a connection to an upper level part of your Black Loch project. Maybe there is a section of Black Loch that the elves do not venture to, and that is where Level 23 has a “connection”. Anyway, just an idea. And I have ideas…not all of them are ‘good’. Hahaha
Great work Matt, keep it coming!
I’m planning to make several alternate bottom levels of the pit for patrons and one of them will be a path to the underdark.
Anyway, glad you like it and thanks for the suggestion!