I have a thing about sewers and D&D.

I believe that sewers is a trope that I won’t get bored of. Or at least there are too many things to put in sewers to get bored of them easily. For example, anyone, or anything, that wants to hide can go there. From monsters and killers, to mutants and smugglers.

You want a hideout for your thieves guild? Sewers. What about a place to put a wererat colony? Sewers. A crazy wizard that wants to blow the entire city into smithereens because someone said this hat doesn’t go well with his robes? Well, a good way to blow up a city is to put unstable alchemical components in the sewers. I think you get what I want to say.

That’s why I decided to draw a map of a part of a sewer system. It’s actually the first time I draw something like that, but it’s not that different from a cave system if you think about it.

Kosais is a very beautiful city. Everyone seems happy and is nice to each other. The city is clean and everyone tries to keep it this way. However, no matter how clean the city is, something smells fishy, and that’s probably the sewers. The sewers are the city’s open secret. They’re like the exact opposite of the surface. Imagine how the material plane has the Feywild and Shadowfell as its mirror planes. Or, for the World of Warcraft fans, it’s like the tower of Karazhan.

First of all, you have the black market. Do you want anything illegal? You go there. From substances and banned trade goods, to spies and assassins. The market is being ran by a coalition of various factions and, at this point, the city guard is so powerless against them that they’ve stopped chasing them. On the map, the black market is on the top right. Its entrances are hidden and guarded, and there’s also a convenient escape route in case something unfortunate happens.

The lower half of the map depicts an area of the sewers where there’s currently a turf war going on. It used to be the place where a wererat colony would hide. However, recently there’s been a sudden increase in the number of oozes there, which has lead to a struggle between those groups.

The top left of the map is a small area where some of the homeless people of Kosais go. The city is too beautiful to have beggars and the like so the policy is to drive them away. Some of them have managed to hide here. Deep at night they go to the surface and try to find food and clean water. The problem is that in the area they use as sleeping quarters there’s a hidden entrance to a wizard’s alchemy laboratory. This wizard likes to experiment with highly volatile substances whose majority is banned in the region, so she hid this laboratory in the sewers. However, it’s a matter of time before someone finds the entrance and an accident happens.

Cartography by Chris Karelis, also known as The Kind GM, is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

For now, I’ll be releasing the maps under the above Creative Commons License, but this may change in the future.

I hope you will find this map useful. If you end up using this map please let me know how you used it. Also, any feedback would be really helpful. I had fun drawing this one and I may return to it at some point. Or at least I’ll probably draw another sewer map in the future. A megasewer maybe?

And until next time, have fun!