Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.
Rocket your D&D 5E and Level Up: Advanced 5E games into space! Alpha Star Magazine Is Launching... Right Now!

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Zaruthustran" data-source="post: 3316117" data-attributes="member: 1457">Go on at least one cave tour in real life. Ideally an overnight wild cave outing, where it's just you, a buddy, and your headlamps against the darkness.You'll experience tunnel-vision. You'll get dirt in crevices you didn't even know you had. You'll forget weird concepts like "green", "blue", "spacious", and "dry". You'll look at a hole the same diameter of a basketball hoop and think to yourself, "I should crawl into that hole--it's plenty big, and it could lead to something cool". This thought will seem perfectly reasonable to you.You'll come to understand that caves--real caves--are wet, dusty, dirty, twisty, cramped, flat,   multi-level, and utterly alien. They're fun to explore.Why this matters: your Underdark expeditions will be much more interesting. They won't be 10' wide passage of rough stone. They'll be canyons one foot wide, extending 30' up and down, the characters shimmying along on 3" serrated stone ledges that occur every 6 feet or so--the remnants of the stream bed that's cut it's way through successive layers of rock and still flows below (all caves* are created by water). Or they'll be clambering over a wide room, once with 20' of clearance between floor and ceiling, but now filled to within 3' of the ceiling by "breakdown": chunks of broken rock from an earlier partial cave-in. Or they'll be walking along the bottom of a passage (which usually means wading through a shallow stream) when they notice the ceiling getting lower and lower until the passage ends with the ceiling reaching the surface of the water--the stream has "sumped", and they need to backtrack or go for a swim (and hope the ceiling resurfaces downstream). Or they'll be camped out in a nice and dry area, and suddenly the cave is entirely full with water: it rained a few miles away, and all that water needs to go somewhere. Caves are literally drains, and water from miles and miles around winds up flushing through cave systems (or raising the water table enough for the cave to entirely or partially sump.Your players will appreciate the extra detail and being presented with challenges that don't have hit dice. If there are no caves in your area, rent or DL one of the NOVA or National Geographic Explorer episodes that deal with caves. Or look up the National Speleological Society's homepage: <a href="http://www.caves.org" target="_blank">Caves.org</a>.-z* At its most fundamental level, a cave is a canyon with a ceiling. The Underdark is essentially the Grand Canyon, or rather, the Grand Canyon if it were sunk a mile or two below the surface of the earth. Lava tubes are caused by lava. They're not caves; they're tubes. Cracks in the ground from tectonic action are cracks and/or fissures. Tunnels dug by man or animal (or monster) are tunnels. Caves are created by water, usually a stream that still flows and that may be exposed on the surface or submerged into the land.</blockquote>

Verification