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I'm at it again with caves and Torstan's techniques that I've been playing with lately.
This time I wanted to try and fill the caves with some moss and such to make it feel like there was a different ecosystem inside the cavern. Maybe some holes in the ceiling let in enough life to keep the moss alive. I'm not sure how I'd show the 'holes' so I just left it as is.
I also experimented a bit with shading over on the left-side pool whereby I mixed the blues of the water with the greens of the moss to hopefully give the look of a pool that was filled with some kind of aquatic vegetation.
I was tempted to populate the caverns with mushrooms and the like but didn't want to nail down the chambers that much. I figure that if someone uses the map they may have a different idea for what would go where.
I also decided to flip around the color scheme between the blue and the green and what ended up was, after some tweeking, a whole new enviroment: an island chain.
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This first variation has the islands surrounded by shallow water - perhaps something close to the coast where the land is only a few feet above sea level except for the hilly parts at the center.
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The second variation has the islands surrounded by deep water - perhaps a small place for pirates to bury treasure or whatnot. The small pool of fresh water on the bottom right could be the beginning of an adventure whereby people have to fight whatever has claimed it.
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The third variation is just a play on the 'deep water' model but this time I wanted to take a section within the chain of islands and make it different. Using shading to darken the water layer, I was attempting to create the sense that the water is different - not necessarily 'just' deeper but perhaps tainted, toxic or otherwise dangerous. But that's something for the DM to figure out.
Comments welcome.
Feed back invited.
Encouragement appreciated.
-Green Pilgrim
Full-Sized copies of the Maps are located here on my flicker page.