The Caves of Chaos - complete map

Here we are at the end of our journey through the Caves of Chaos.



Here's a link to a large version of the map. I'm very pleased at how it turned out.

I've had great time blogging again this last 12 days - and I managed to post every day. Here are all the individual lair maps:

A: Kobold Lair
B: Orc Lair #1
C: Orc Lair #2
D: Goblin Lair
E: Ogre Lair
F: Hobgoblin Lair
G: The Shunned Lair
H: Bugbear Lair
I: Caves of the Minotaur
J: Gnoll Lair
K: Shrine of Evil Chaos

I have generated a to-do list of things I want to fix:

- Add in the slopes described in the module but omitted from the map
- Mark which of the alcoves are fireplaces (as specified in, and inferred from, the text) - especially for #9.
- Add text near the entrance to K
- Remove the screen from #59
- Fix the width of the wide corridor top left where it gets narrowed
- Add C for Gelatinous Cube in the two alcoves (all fixes for The Shrine)
- Enlarge the obviously too-small #38
- Join the dead ends in the Goblin Lair with collapsed tunnels

That's two fixes for the map which were apparently lost when they created the map for the original module, two fixes for how I've presented the map, three minor map-improvements and one encounter change. I think it's acceptable to have a couple of minor tweaks that are my own whilst still presenting it as "The" Caves of Chaos rather than "My" Caves of Chaos.

I'm musing over what to tackle next - a review of Gunderholfen or Old School Essentials, redraw the Caves with the fixes, do one of the other B2 maps (the ravine/the wilderness/the keep), complete & publish my redone key for the caves, my look-up tables for on-the-fly extra details, draw a publishable version of my own multi-level Castle Blood dungeon (with all it's complex inter-level connections), or do a map of the fascinating local former Medieval Priests College which I now have a personal attachment to!

Whatever it is, let's not leave it three years until the next post this time...

K: The Shrine of Evil Chaos

I love this name. Why does it sound so odd, and the word "Evil" so redundant, when we are all so willing to let "Chaotic Evil" pass without comment?

Anyway, day 11 and our final lair:


This lair is the largest lair, and occupies the entire west section of the map, but only connects to one other - the Gnolls at J - which it almost entwines. It also abut the Hobgoblins (F), and enfolds parts of The Shunned Lair (G) and the Minotaur (I), which makes it (like J) more tricky to spot as a separate lair on the map.

Note that the entrance here, like with the Gnolls and the Bugbears, has a passage directly infront of it - but at a lower level. I think this shows that Gary put a reasonable amount of thought into drawing this map to make it consistent. I'd love to see the original to see how much it was changed by whoever drew the published version (uncredited).

I'd like to fix the wideness of the large corridor when it goes narrower when it's a diagonal - I've done this for other diagonal corridors on the map. This is a common problem on maps drawn on squared paper - but all you need is to make them 50% wider and it works. This needs planning as it would encroach upon the lair of the Minotaur.

On this map in particular I think that the simple traditional "S" for a secret door is much clearer and thus suitable for play than the version on Dyson's map. Similarly I've just drawn boulders filling the corridor which is simple but I think effective.

I've omitted the shape on the west wall in the Shrine - to me it confused the map and it's just supposed to indicate that the wall is made of a special stone. Like the original I've not drawn in the pews on the south wall - in general furniture is omitted - but this means the resultant offset of the shrine remains unexplained.

I have drawn the screen hiding the secret door in #59 though, and I think this is a mistake and I'll remove it.

I think the lair would have benefited from a hidden connection to another lair, but a less contentious change is to give it a more portentous opening. The text describes the "worn path through the copse of obscenely twisted and oddly bloated trees" but this is not marked on the map. I should add some notes to the map for the entrance marking the sense of lurking evil, deathly still corridor, faint groaning, shrill piping, and the black/red stonework. I like the various different types of cavern entrances illustrated in The Forbidden Caverns of Archaia, and might upgrade the entrance to something like the elaborate carved Archway illustrated there on page 41.

My players got the sense of foreboding and knew to be careful here so handled the Wight (oil + flaming torch) and Medusa (using a mirror) well. The Medusa encounter has a bad rep - but note that she has a vial with which she will bargain (in bad faith) to turn people from stone to flesh - so uncautious & unlucky adventurers have a way out. The amulets of protection from turning on the other hand do seem to me to be a poor feature - it's similar to how he filled the Tomb of Horrors with "secret doors only detectable by magic" - like he regretted allowing things in the rules. For a starter adventure he should have confidence in the rules and just presented the undead as is - so I think I would limit the amulets to the undead guard patrol (to make them more special), and I'd make it clearer that there is one group of guards which as a DM you could track. For example, they could patrol the corridor slowly starting at a random position in a random direction.

As I've said before I prefer oddities on a map to have a reason, and there are two odd 10' square alcoves on the map. I'd turn this into a way of improving the otherwise potentially inexplicable gelatinous cube at #63 (where did it come from?). I'd say it it would be lying in wait at one of the two alcoves at random, and when it sensed movement (the players) it would move randomly to (roll d6):
1. outside #64
2. bottom of stairs
3. outside #60
4. outside #62
5. outside #63
6. simply moves to the other alcove
After an hour it would simply return to the other alcove.

Thus we come to the end of the last lair. Tomorrow I'll give the combined Caves of Chaos map.

J: Gnoll Lair

Nearing the end of The Caves of Chaos: Day Ten - the Gnoll Lair

The Gnoll Lair has a problematic map. As part of the greater Caves I could never spot which bit was the Gnoll Lair, but splitting it out has fixed this. Now I can see clearly it's a snaking cave system which is sadly almost linear in nature. As discussed before, there should be a slope every time a cave crosses an above-ground contour, so that means there should be a slope down along the unknown passageway. It could be nicer for the slope to be either side of the corridor outside room #49, which would make it slightly less odd that there's no connection between the entrance and the lower corridor - but I'll probably stick with a slope in the passageway.

I don't know why neither the Natural Cave nor the Unknown Passageway get their own entry number in the key and have to share with another room - very odd - but it's reasonably clear when you add the description of the features onto the map.

The entrance doesn't stand out on the map usually, so adding the labels such as "Gnoll Lair" make it stand out more, especially on the combined map. I used a digital shaded fill - I could easily have shaded it manually but getting it scanned right would be tricky.

I used grey for the fill - I could have used different colours for the different entrances or colours to indicate lit areas. I'm still not sure about the use of colours - in general I prefer it sparingly if at all for a dungeon map. I've used blue for the water, and I may use red when I add the fireplaces.

Finally tomorrow we'll head into the Shrine of Evil Chaos.

I: Caves of the Minotaur

Have you got your string? Let's enter the labyrinth...

It's day nine and I nearly didn't manage to complete today's post - my group was in the East Wing of Castle Amber having too much fun. One is currently possessed by Princess Catherine, one has been temporarily Feebleminded by picking an unfortunate Tarot Card, and one has been turned into a dog by reading a cursed scroll!

Fortunately there's not much to say about this lair. It was rather complicated to redraw with any degree of fidelity, so I printed out the original to the correct scale and traced it. I might redraw the secret door so it's a slab of stone hiding the alcove. I need to work out where to put in some slopes.

The module says "This labyrinth. houses a number of nasty things, but the worst is a fiendishly clever minotaur who abides herein". I'm not convinced by this - a reasonable sized party should easily be able to take on a single 6 HD monster, whereas the 13 Stirges look highly dangerous. When we ran this adventure I was writing up my notes (Stryal was the name I gave to the Evil priest from the keep), so we'll finish today with that account:

With Curufin healed the party of eight (plus pony) set out early next morning for The Caves of Chaos. Stryal says the best treasure is to be found in a cave at the far end of the ravine, and they creep past the Kobold cave, then through the trees. A foul smelling cave entrance is found, hidden in the trees, which Tuck thinks might be an animal cave. Beyond is the chosen cave, and Shadow takes the shuttered lantern and creeps inside, but immediately runs back out again, suggesting they should instead all go in, probing ahead for traps. It is a natural cave, not worked tunnels like the Kobold lair. Everyone feels slightly dizzy, and Turgon cannot seem to draw his map properly. They take the left tunnel, but half the group is worried and wants to leave. Instead they try the right tunnel, and ahead is a sound of squeaking and hooting – Shadow listens hard and can hear the sound of birds wings.Fearing vampire bats the party retreats and tries the left corridor again – a couple of right turns leads past the squeaks and back to the entrance. Tuck suggests turning left every time to avoid getting lost, and after a couple of turns the corridor widens into a cavern. Stepping inside a fearsome beast charges at them – no, not a beast, a human – no a human body with the head of a bull. The roaring Minotaur catches them with surprise and throws a spear at Baloth then rushes forward and bites him with his jaws. Turgon and Tuck rush to meet the onslaught and Foddy joins the fray, whilst Shadow fires arrows and Bullroarer slings stones at the beast. Curufin blasts the beast with a magic missile, but then cries out and clutches at his eyes, suddenly struck with blindness. The adventurers battle fiercely, but Baloth is gored and drops to the ground. Stryal is nowhere to be seen, but the sound of him running away echoes through the cavern. The monster is hit again and again, with Foddy striking the best blows, but the Minotaur injures Foddy once, twice, and then he too lies unconscious on the floor. Retreat would mean leaving Foddy or Baloth to certain death, so our heroes fight on. How much more can the Minotaur take? The teeth and horns turn their hatred on Turgon, but Tuck strikes a fierce blow with his Mace and the Minotaur drops dead.The victory is hard won – four are unhurt, but two lie wounded, and one is blind. The Minotaur’s spear is taken, then the cavern searched – a boulder obviously covers a recess in the wall, but it is Shadow who finds the right place to apply strength to move it. With the help of all the boulder is moved, and beyond is the secreted treasure of the Minotaur taken from its previous victims. A staff, a casket, two chests and a suit of armour – not all can be carried away together with dragging the wounded. The armour and the heavier chest are hidden again behind the boulder and the party struggle back to the entrance. The magical confusion enchantment has been broken with the death of the beast-man.

Seems like the Minotaur proved tough! Tomorrow is the penultimate lair, the Gnolls.

H: Bugbear Lair

Welcome to the lair of the Bugbears:

It's day eight of the Caves of Chaos, and what a friendly greeting awaits us.

I like the layout of this lair - it's on three levels, with slopes and stairs. There are many directions to explore - far better in this respect than the lair of the Gnolls for example. I like the fact that the slave pens are located on the lower level - there's some logic to the layout here. These slave pens are infamous for my players as this is where they rescued Torg.

Torg was first spotted being led in chains by the bugbears into their lair along. They ventured into the cave and rescued him - the burly human imprisoned with the Hobgoblins, Gnolls and rebel Bugbear in #41. They also freed the prisoners from #40 - Ryat and Sharl (two humans), Forgack (a dwarf), Ellan and Elland (two elves). Back at the keep there was joy at the return of the prisoners, but in the morning Ryat and Sharl were found dead and Torg was missing.

The next time the party arrived at the Caves they got ambushed by the Gnolls, led by Torg who had come to the caves in the first place to work for the Gnolls who wanted him to help defeat the adventurers. They defeated the Gnolls, and Torg was taken as a prionser back to the keep and handed over to Castellan Narik. Unfortunately Torg is in league with Narik's lieutenant, who killed the jailor and the pair escape.

Torg later re-appeared as one of the Slavers in A4, where he got his just deserts - he was shot on the boat at the end and fell into the water. Unfortunately he was turned by some aquatic ghouls, who then led night raids upon the port of Specularum, until the players killed him for the second time. They really hated him by this point!

This lair in particular suffers from wide corridors but small rooms. #38 in particular looks very small for a common room - it is smaller than the slave pens. I think I may enlarge #38 slightly while keeping it the same shape - there is space on the map for this.

Next up is the Minotaur, so remember to bring some string.

G: The Shunned Lair

Day Seven: Shun not the cavern, yet proceed carefully.

This cavern stinks - so I'm in a quandary as to whether smells and light sources should be marked on these maps. They can make it very cluttered, but on the other hand they can prove useful. The old Judges Guild dungeon maps made great use of sounds marked on the maps - as per this one here.

When we played Keep on the Borderlands, this lair made mapping unenjoyable. It looked very simple on the map, but describing it to the players was rather tricky and unsatisfying - it distracted us from the atmosphere of playing the actual game. For the Minotaur it went one step further, since I had to give incorrect descriptions to the players to simulate the confusion. This module was my first time DMing in 15 years, and trying to solve this problem over the next year or so lead me to my favoured solution - tracing maps for the players.

Next up is the Bugbear lair - the home of our group's most memorable NPC!

F: Hobgoblin Lair

Day Six and it's the turn of the Hobgoblins:

Drawing this map I was struck by the odd long winding corridor joining #23 to the rest of the Hobgoblin lair, and I'd prefer it to make a feature of it instead of it just being odd.
Then I noticed that there are two sets of stairs leading up from the Goblin lair at the east end, but only one at the western end. Hence it would make a nice feature for #23 to be higher than the rest of the Hobgoblin lair, and make the corridor to 23 slope upwards.
.
The text says that "corridors slope upwards and downwards between the contours, even when stairways are not shown". I always took this to mean that the corridors slope up and down in a random fashion, but by referring to "between the contours" it's clear that it means that it's no accident that there's often stairs when you cross contours - it's supposed to be tiered in this fashion. So, roughly speaking, there's supposed to be slopes whenever you cross a contour. I'd never noticed but that is indeed where the stairs and slopes generally are (10 are on or just next to contours - only one isn't).

So I'm going to mark slopes on and say all caves are actually level except where slopes/stairs are marked. The stairs are roughly 1 in 1 and go up 25 feet in 20 feet. (One in the bottom right is only one square, one in the middle bottom is 3 squares and I'll assume they're the same steepness). The slopes are generally 30 foot long, and going up more than half this would be incredibly steep, so I say 30' slope = 10' steps.

To make it all match up then, you need something like the following:
- a slope in the corridor going up to #23
- a slope in the corridor going down west of #13
- two slopes between the entrance to I  and #36. It's tricky to place these, so I might put a lot of 10' slopes here.
- a slope going down in the secret corridor north of #50

I'm quite surprised that by doing this I've solved the mystery (or at least mystery to me) of the mention of fireplaces and sloping corridors in the text!

This is the halfway stage - just five more lairs to go now. The next Cave of Chaos is The Shunned Cavern.

E: Ogre Lair

Day Five: The turn of the Ogre:

Firstly - my new pens have arrived - 6 Pigma Micron Fineliners sizes 005 (0.2mm) to 08 (0.5mm) - yay - which reminds me that when drawing the Caves of Chaos I drew it with quite thick pens at double size (on 1 cm square paper) and then after scanning and adjusting printed it out at 5 mm = 10'. This meant that my lines all looked a lot neater, but some of the text has come out a little smaller than I would have liked. I think in future I'll work at true size.

A more serious problem was that some of the lairs - particularly F and K - were too large to fit on one sheet of A4. Joining them back together digitally in most cases was fine, but I ran into the same problem Pete Fenlon's MERP maps had. At one point I had three separate caves overlapping, but with one small 10' square section which I had accidentally omitted off all the maps!

MERP had this problem at Wold which was not on any of the maps, and Pete Fenlon did a small map section for "#4001 Northwest Middle Earth Map Set" which was supposed to overlay the other maps and allow you to join them together. Many, many people tried (I have two copies of the book - one chopped into pieces as per the promise that you could piece them together) but until about 5 years ago no-one had ever succeeded.

But I digress - back to the Caves of Chaos...

In contrast to the last lair (which was too big), this one is apparently too small - but I think this is an advantage of this "big map then split into lairs" approach. I've got lots of old modules whose maps slavishly adhere to the size and shape of the paper, and several OSR megadungeons which split their maps up into sections which all adhere to the same size and shape.

My next project for the blog is likely to be to redraw the levels for my own Castle Blood, which is highly complicated and has many intricate connections between levels. For example it has sections which are connected to levels above and below but not to the level around them. Sections pass over, round and through other sections. For anyone else other than me it could be confusing to see how it all fits together - but it all just evolves naturally for the players as they explore. It is quite a surprise to arrive somewhere you couldn't manage to access by a completely different method. (This is a trick I picked up when I developed the Mobile phone game Bounce for Nokia). The way of presenting it is clearly to give an overall map, but then also separate maps of each individual section, also with side-elevation maps. There is an alternative approach some use where they colour individual sections, but I prefer this chopping up method better.

Tomorrow we move on to the halfway point - the Hobgoblins...

D: Goblin Lair

Day four and it's the turn of the Goblins...

With this section I drew the stairs the wrong way round and had to re-do them - in the original map key it has "stairs up" and "stairs down" but in the middle of a corridor that tells you nothing!

I need to mark the fireplace in #19, and the Chieftain's Room shows I need better pens - I've got some on order. For these lair maps I also should add the letter for the adjoining sections.

This map is an unusual shape which I thought was a problem - on a two-page dungeon spread you'd have to put this diagonally across the page with the key top right and bottom left - but this would make for an interesting layout.

I was surprised there's no lock on the door joining the Goblins to the Hobgoblins, it's not even jammed - they are simply "watching the door" and "battle ready" - which seems highly unlikely.

The oddest thing about the lair however is the dead-end passageways. There are no less than eight dead-ends on this section, whereas there are only two other true dead-ends in the entire rest of the map (excepting two 10' square alcoves). There's no indication of their purpose, and game-wise all but one of them you can see to the end without going down it. Functionally they might act as time-wasters so you get got by a wandering monster whilst searching for a secret door... It is odd to find such a high concentration so they really deserve some explanation. Harder rock that couldn't be mined? Or a rockfall joining each pair of dead ends together? The right hand dead end looks like a natural cave so could have something unusual.

It looks like tomorrow is going to be a short post.

C: Orc Lair #2

Welcome to The Caves Of Chaos day 3 - and the mystery of the fireplaces!

Regarding contents I've added the net trap, and clarified that there's a guard outside the  leader's room, and the secret meeting room is duplicated on the map as it's shared with the last lair.

The oddity on the map is the alcove in the common room. I kept all the roughness of the walls on purpose - deciding that it was on purpose, not just an overly rough map. Room #9 has an oddity that could be an alcove which matches up to the "great fireplace on the south wall" in the description. Room #30 refers to "near the fireplace (southeast corner)" which matches an alcove on the map. Room #38 refers to a fireplace (no location specified) and there's an alcove on the north wall, likewise a reference with no location in #50 and an alcove on the map.

Hence I think it's likely that most of the alcoves on the map are supposed to be fireplaces, including #15 (Common Hall) here, and similarly earlier at #6 (Common Chamber) which is slightly less pronounced on my map than the original. Looking for other suspect alcoves we see one in #19 (Common Room), and finally one in #25 (Common Chamber).

That puts fireplaces in the common room of every humanoid lair, except for the Gnolls who have theirs in the Chieftain's Room!

I've not seen fireplaces drawn on other people's version of the map, and I've often seen the alcoves changed/reduced/removed. So when I collate the maps at the end of this series I'll include fireplaces as an amendment. I think they were clear on Gary's original map, and got lost when it got redrawn. Similarly I think it is on purpose that #58 (Temple of Evil Chaos) has very straight walls on the map when everything else is slightly rough.

Tomorrow we jump across to the other side of the ravine!

B: Orc Lair #1

Here's day 2 of my map-a-day-athon. Orc lair #1:

The obvious new thing about this second map is that I've included the corridor beyond the secret door in grey - other maps I've seen include interconnected lairs in the same map, which isn't helpful when running the game. I'd put the map for each lair along with the room descriptions, at the same scale as the overall map.

This map also reveals some minor issues about the original map. Several lairs have items of interest at or near the entrance that are only mentioned in the Lair entry, so are easy to forget when running the game. For this lair it's the heads in niches on the wall, which I've marked on the map as a reminder.

Secondly, the guard at 9 is supposed to stick his head through the wall and pretend is head is one of the trophies, then when he spots intruders replace it with a Goblin head and go to room #7 for help - except that he can't get to that room!

For #12 Orc Leader's Room the original map has just one tapestry on the west wall. The description says "The room is carpeted, has tapestries upon the walls (note one of these covers the entrance to the cave to the west)" but then later says "If hard pressed, the leader will wiggle behind the tapestries on the south wall and attempt to work the catch on the secret door to the south". When DMing it's fine if no tapestries are marked on the map, or all of them, but it's misleading to have just one, especially when there's a second important one.

Finally - what's that loop on the south side on room #9 supposed to be? As I was working on all the other maps I wondered if that's supposed to be the fireplace mentioned in the description? We'll consider possible fireplaces on the map again tomorrow in the second Orc Lair.

A: Kobold Lair

I've been silent on the blog for a long while - still playing and still tweaking rules - but no blogging. A week or so ago my eldest said she was thinking of running D&D at college and wanted to run the first adventure she'd ever played through, she thought it wouldn't be too hard for a first time DM to run.

There are a few issues with the presentation of the module, so I decided to revise it slightly to make it easier to run. Initially I was just going to add some names, then I thought I'd revise how the room information was presented to make it clearer, then I thought I'd redraw the maps.

I'm going to post one map a day for this project, starting with the map for A: Kobold Lair. I'm sure you'll all have spotted which adventure it's from:


The shading is familiar - it's an old style I've always liked as I noted in a previous post, but one made popular in the last 10 years by Dyson Logos. You need some form of shading for maps where the corridors are the same width as the spaces between them. Previously for my maps I'd shaded the whole background in grey, but it makes it a bit oppressive. Shading just near the walls is better, as it just makes the walls stand out, but if you do that in a block colour it looks odd. The cross-hatch shading works as the irregular nature of the shading works well with an irregular border.

I could have used the version Dyson himself drew of the map, but it has grid squares drawn over it which makes it cluttered, and it gives me no room for the extra info I want on the map. It's fun to draw maps, and I thought it would be interesting to compare afterwards to see where I could improve.

I did the lairs one at a time, then combined them all into one single map which I've printed out on A3 card. This lair was the first, as is clear from the fact that the density of my shading has changed slightly as I drew it.

I put the name of the rooms - enough to remind you on the fly what it is - but often not the whole name (as it gets too cluttered). I used to mark on all creatures, but now I just make room descriptions clearer so it's not necessary. I do sometimes mark the creatures directly on the map when I'm doing one-page dungeon style - but in that case I have more space as there's no room number.

I have shaded in the locked door to the store as that's a detail I used to got wrong when I started out DMing, and it's very easy to mark.

I may add back in a light grid at some point, but it's not that necessary as I draw the players' map on thin see-through paper as I talked about before.