Snakebite Sinkhole (Patreon)

Rattler Cauldron. That’s what they call the cauldron lake down in the vale. A clan of mud-born kuo-toa lived here, long separated from their theocratic culture and sunken into degenerate rituals that they don’t recall the purposes of. Their shamans carried fetish-adorned poles that rattled much like a rattlesnake’s tail. The clan of kuo-toa was wiped out when they threatened the safety of the locals, and the lake has been little more than a curiosity since then – with the occasional group of teens “exploring” the cave in some grand adventure or another.

But farmer Gullen’s prize pigs have gone missing, and he reports that rattling sounds are coming from the old cauldron again.

As a cauldron lake, the descent down to the lake proper from the hills is very steep and potentially hazardous – but on the northwest edge of the lake, there are some caves where fresh water descends from the hills to the lake. The stream that flows from the hills into the cave can be followed down into Snakebite Sinkhole (the entry on the upper right side of the main cavern), or one could climb down through an older streambed that is long dry on the west side of the cave, a mere seventy feet from the cauldron lake proper. Floating at the edge of the lake, near the caves, is the corpse of a pig.

Of course, there’s no other sign of farmer Gullen’s pigs here. He got rip-roaring drunk one night and wandered the hills and lost his pigs. One rolled down the shore of the cauldron lake and drowned, and Gullen decided that the Kuo-Toa were behind the whole thing. There are no Kuo-Toa down here, just three teenagers from town who think that the party are kuo-toa hunting them.

The 1200 dpi versions of the map were drawn at a scale of 300 pixels per square and are 7,200 x 7,200 pixels (24 x 24 squares). To use this with a VTT you would need to resize the squares to either 70 pixels (for 5′ squares) or 140 pixels (for the recommended 10′ squares that match the description) – so resizing it to either 1,680 x 1,680 or 3,360 x 3,360, respectively.

https://dysonlogos.blog/2026/05/20/snakebite-sinkhole/