Mesa Caves?

[soggymuse]

Hi guys! So I've lurked a long time around here, but this is my first time actually posting anything. I finally got a few of my maps up in a gallery (I was going to post more but it looks like there's a quota, oops) and I'd like some input on my current map.



As you can tell, it's a WIP. I'm working in Paint Tool SAI (because it renders lines for sketches better than Photoshop), so I'll fiddle with line widths and make it prettier eventually, but I'm having issues now with adding shadows. (SAI's not really set up for layer effects.)

I'm thinking about starting again in Photoshop now that I've got the basic layout done, but before I do that, I'd like some opinions. I've never done an underground map before so there's some things I'd like to check.

Background

To explain, this cave system is inside a mesa that edges onto an area of mud pits. There's a series of hot springs and pools inside the caverns (the source of their fresh water), so obviously there's some geothermal activity here, but mesas are apparently formed by erosion. I haven't been able to find anything on Google about caves through mesas, either, only things like the cave cities that, from the photos, don't actually go very deep past the edges.

I've explained the Burrows here by saying that the tunnels and caverns were formed (or at least helped along) by what the residents call "wind gods". These are a species that controls the wind; they built a temple on top of the mountain and spend most of their lives seeking spiritual enlightenment through academic pursuits and meditation (that includes a Tai Chi-esque martial art form involving command of air flow around them and their surroundings). In other words, they've caused so much erosion that the Tahnih tribe were able to move in. (There's also some sort of mole-like creature that burrows through the mesa that's helped the tunnels along, and that the Tahnih hunt to supplement their diet since the surrounding area is dry (where it's not boiling mud pits) and sparse.)

Fact Check

First, is this at all likely? I'm writing a fantasy/romance series and this is actually a side from the main story arc so it never bothered me before (it wouldn't actually have come up beyond the name "Tahnih Burrows" so it didn't matter if it was geologically possible). Now that it is going to be an actual setting for a story, though, I'd like it to at least be feasible. I've done my research but haven't found a heck of a lot about mesas and caves, so it's hard to gauge how likely a cave/tunnel system like this would be.

Second, how big can mesas get? I'm stupidly terrible with spatial awareness. (My dad has frequently tried to explain space as "like a football field" or something and I have no idea what that actually means. I'm bed-bound, so it's not like I can go out and measure stuff, either.) On the texture map for Anuur, the Burrows didn't seem that big but then I was looking at the sketch version and realised it's actually pretty huge. (Each grid square on the world map is 316 miles across so the area works out at 949x791 miles. That doesn't seem that big to me until I try to map it out and realise it would take 33 days for someone to walk, as the crow flies, the width of the Burrows. Given the story, it needs to be less than half a day to get from the Mudlands (just east of the Burrows) to a healer's cave, and then less than a day to reach the heart the of the Tahnih community (the hot springs and council chambers).)

I thought about turning the Burrows into a Badlands-style region with lots of smaller mesas clustered together instead. Most of them would be simple flat-topped mountains; the only one really affected by the extra wind erosion and mole tunneling would be the one with the temple on top. So how big could each mesa get? (The Burrows map is approximately 22x18 squares at 10 feet each, which makes it quite tiny by comparison.)

Should I scale up the Burrows map (and redraw altogether)? Or leave it as it is and say the Tahnih mesa just happens to be one of the smaller ones?

Here's a copy of the sketch and texture maps to show the difference and the original outline.



Changed to WIP (19/10).