Underwater Caverns Battle Map

[dropbear8mybaby]

Looking for a battle map that would be suitable to use for a watery cavern of cultists who worship an aboleth. I want the fight to be under water with the aboleth mainly.

[EccentricCircle]

My suggestion would be to find a digital image of a regular cavern map which you like, and modify it for the purpose. It should be easy enough to recolour the image, or parts of it, to make it more blue/green.
I've done something similar in the past, modifying boards that I'd made for previous games to make them work as underwater terrain. If your picture editing skills are good you could also add things like seaweed or fish.

I've got an underwater campaign going on at the moment, and its proving quite fun, because everything takes place in three dimensions. It makes combat a bit harder to figure out, so we tend to use more of a theatre of the mind approach rather than using figures. They don't massively help when people can swim over and under one another.

To that end when you are planning out your map, you could consider making different levels, and elements like columns and pits that will add a 3d element to the battle. An aboleth will want to bring its mind control to bear, so the more you can split up the PCs the better. An underwater environment with low visibility can work really quite well for this.

[dropbear8mybaby]

My suggestion would be to find a digital image of a regular cavern map which you like, and modify it for the purpose.

It will be printed out black and white to scale for play with miniatures. I won't be modifying it beyond cutting it to size. It needs to be somewhat suitable for purpose because there needs to be some ingress/egress to the water for the cultists rather than being all under water.

[EccentricCircle]

Ah, black and white limits your options a bit then.

[dropbear8mybaby]

Ah, black and white limits your options a bit then.

Colour isn't important. I'm after a layout that is conducive to the above described parameters.

[Cernor]

Let me get this straight: your parameters are:
1. Map of a watery cavern
2. Contains places for both cultists and an Aboleth
3. Requires no modification than cutting to size.

If that's the case, why not use Google until you find a map you like (as per Eccentric's suggestion), print it off in black and white, then use a blue marker to outline/mark areas of water after printing? The first two criteria are satisfied (because you deliberately chose a suitable map), and the couple of minutes it takes to demark the map will probably be far less than the time taken to actually find it.

Or draw it yourself. It's certainly more time consuming, but you get exactly what you want.
The only other thing to mention would be a random map generator (http://donjon.bin.sh/fantasy/dungeon/), but that fails to fit criterion 3: it requires quite a bit more work if you want lots of detail (altars and terrain and stuff).

[dropbear8mybaby]

If that's the case, why not use Google until you find a map you like...

Oh gee. Why didn't I think of that :sigh:

[Cernor]

Oh gee. Why didn't I think of that :sigh:

If you're going to act so dismissively of people with reasonable suggestions, why not clarify your situation from the beginning? "I'm looking for a map..." Is an entirely different situation than "I'm looking for a map, but Google didn't show me anything I liked".

The only thing I can think of which *might* be useful is the Castle Naerytar Dungeon from D&D 5e's Hoard of the Dragon Queen. It's got a watery section, some caverns, and some normal rooms, but the main drawback is that it's a bit sparsely decorated.