Balor's Burrow. (It's burrific!)
It's scary! A balor is ready to give birth - or rather, lay some kind of demon egg - and has burrowed into the side of a hill by breathing fire and melting the terrain in his path. When she gets to her destination, the balor conjures a gigantic fireball, twelve metres in diameter. The fireball melts the surrounding terrain to make a rough-edged, spherical cave. The singed walls of the sphere make it strong enough not to collapse. At the bottom of the sphere, the balor gathers some rocks which survived the fireball and spits up a little pool of lava, where she can place her egg.
It just so happens that this path goes directly underneath a neighbouring dugout warren, belonging to some happy dwarves or something. All the dwarves have escaped through the roof.
When the party comes along, they notice that all the dwarves are missing, so they investigate, going through the dwarves' entrance. This is a great chance to let them decide between stealing all the dwarves' stuff or leaving it be. Underneath a tunnel connecting the two halves of the dwarven dugout is a little hole where the party members can slip through into the balor's burrow chamber.
Enough backstory - now for the good stuff.
I'm stuck in a few ways, because (a) this is my first dungeon-style map, (b) my sphere isn't spherical enough, and (c) I'm not sure what to do about lighting.
My instinct was to keep all the lighting from a uniform source, having the shadows on everything face the same direction. That was my instinct; my conscience, however , was telling me to obey the natural light sources of the burrow (the lava pool, for example). I couldn't decide what to do about this dilemma, so here I am, coming to you.
Any crits or comments are very welcome. My last map took me about six months to make; I hope to have this one done by the end of tomorrow, so I'm not expecting anything huge.
If you have ideas for what to do with the rest of the caves, please let me know. And if you have any ideas on how to make the sphere more "round," I'd love to hear them, too.
Thanks for reading!
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