Tags
City, Dungeon, Dungeons & Dragons, Dwarven, Dyson Mega Delve, Fantasy, Labyrinth Lord, Maps, Megadungeon, OSR, RPG, Ruins
When the dwarves left this world in their Earthships, they sealed this city by bringing down the front gates and burying the cisterns that provided water to the multiple levels of the city. Other access points remain (for they had built the city with more than one way in and out), but without the water, it could never again thrive.
The Gates (with grid)
Directly above the Hall of Bronze, and connected to it via the Descent (the large cylindrical chamber that links the Gates, the Hall of Bronze and the Iron Hall), The Gates were a much larger area prior to the departure of the dwarves. (I’m thinking I might draw a quick map of the original Gates that can be used as a player handout – something the local thieves’ guild had done up prior to the dwarven exodus).
Once these great halls were lit by sun and hundreds of massive bronze lanterns, and were home to parades and pageantry. Today the gates are a place of somber dust and debris, lit only by trickles of sunlight that reflect down along with feathers and other detritus from the harpies’ domain above.
The lower right corner of the great hall has a collapsed stairwell leading up to “The Tall Watch”, a tower carved into the mountain above. That tower has been taken over by foul harpies who occasionally travel this level and have even been known to fly down the shaft of the descent seeking victims and adventure.
The Gates (no grid)
Dyson's Dodecahedron 
Are you going to show the dockyards?
I was actually just discussing that on google+ today.
Originally I was intending to leave the Earthship Docks for a later expansion. The Earthship Docks are down beneath the mines. All the Earthships departed years ago save one. That one was too badly damaged to make the return trip, and has slowly gone insane trapped at the docks without a helmsman to take care of it.
Dwarves aren’t all that good at creating the kind of intraplanar teleportation portal required to move armies from one world to another. So instead they build sentient stone and iron ships that dig down through the bedrock and the heat beneath to breach the boundaries between the worlds.
One day the world had about a thousand dwarves, descended from stone giants who had forgotten their sacred mission to protect the roots of the world. Over a period of a few years the dwarven armada showed up underground and a few hundred thousand dwarves from other worlds dug their way to the surface to wage war against the elves.
I wasn’t intending to map anything “below the mines” for the initial MegaDelve… but the Earthship dock may be just too much to resist in the end.
“Earthship”. A little to sci-fi for my fantasy.
Actually “too”.
That’s fine. Huge magical boats made of stone carved by dwarven craftsmen that soften the rock and push through it to travel from one plane to another aren’t everyone’s cup of tea.
I just wanted some method of intraplanar travel that felt “dwarven” instead of just casting specialized teleportation spells.
“Huge magical boats made of stone” are definitely dwarven! Actually, the concept sounds pretty cool and I’m curious to see the docks. I’ll just have to come up with some phoney baloney explanation on that level. Anyway, keep up the good work, we’re all enjoying it.
I’ve been trying to compose these maps into one in photoshop, and it seems like the descent on this one is bigger in diameter than in Hall of Bronze and both maps won’t align with the descent hole in Iron Halls. And if I try to move the whole floor Iron Halls + Venomous Halls, then parts of Venomous Halls won’t align with the floor above it. I don’t know if its intended or not, or maybe its just doesn’t matter for what you’re doing.
But your maps are really inspiring stuff, love them.
Yes, the descent is slightly wider on this level than on the lower levels.