The Torrents - Everyone's Edition

I'm giving out all the patron content for this map to everyone. You can download it from my Google Drive here. I've also put it in the public Foundry module (manifest URL).

The Torrents are one of the ways to reach the Black Loch from the surface, starting as an above-ground river and turning into a series of cascading waterfalls going deeper and deeper underground.

As an entrance to the underdark, I like this for a few reasons. First, it's fast. There's no three-day journey down the stairs. Your party can make it into the bowels of the earth in around an hour. Second, it's super dangerous. There's no better way to emphasize the perils of the underdark than nearly killing half the party on the way there. Also, it's one-way, which is nice. No DM wants to write a whole campaign and then have the PCs decide the underdark "isn't for them."

There's also an interesting possibility with the Torrents that I've been thinking about: you can have the party enter the underdark accidentally. I wrote a few ideas about how you might go about doing that in the DM notes, if you're interested. Personally, if I were going to send a party in like that, I'd wait until a big part of the campaign had just concluded. Then, just as they're heading down the river to meet the king and collect their heaping mountain of gold bars...

"A loud crash wakes you up in your hammocks. The boat appears to be falling."

I'm not saying you should do that, I'm just... I'm not saying you should not do it. It would be really funny, though.

Next up, I'll be drawing a map chosen by the Cartographic Congress: a mountain monastery clinging to a cliffside with a waterfall running past. This will be based partly on Paro Taktsang, a Buddhist monastery in Bhutan. There's something I love about places built in really dangerous locations.

After that, I'll probably do another map from the Black Loch. I've been thinking about adding a location to the loch map based on something from my previous campaign. It's a duergar cult called the Architects of the Awakening and they're up to some pretty twisted stuff. The campaign never finished, but I think it'd be pretty cool to put the bad guys in the Black Loch and see if anyone else wants to do something with them.

Anyway, that's about it. Let me know what you think of the Torrents!