Tags
Commercial Maps, Dungeon, Dungeons & Dragons, Fantasy, Heart of Darkling, Labyrinth Lord, Maps, Megadungeon, OSR, River, RPG, Underdark
The Darkling River works its way through the underdark beneath the grey hills to depths unknown. This is the eleventh location along the Darkling River and the Darkling Lake beyond.
At a confluence of a tributary of the Darkling River and a tunnel through deep gnome territory, Bloodmarket Cave is used by a number of groups to trade with a group of mysterious grey-robed humans that are assumed to be slaves / operatives for an unknown mind flayer colony. They offer black adamantine coins in trade for preserved sapient brains stored in special metal canisters. They take the full canisters with them and leave behind empty canisters to continue the trade.
They seem to teleport in to make the trade, never quite at the same spot, and usually within 40-60 hours of traders arriving in the cave with full cannisters. A permanent trading post has been assembled here, but no one attends to it currently (the last group to manage the site was silently butchered by something terrible and evidently invisible and no one has decided to take up residence here since). Traffic arriving from the tunnel system into the underdark need to cross the Darkling. To assist in this, there is usually a small boat at the dock on the right – and a series of spikes hold a rope along the cave wall of the tributary to help pull against the current.
The 1200 dpi versions of the map were drawn at a scale of 300 pixels per square and are 12,000 pixels (40 squares) wide. To use this with a VTT you would need to resize the squares to either 70 pixels (for 5′ squares) or 140 pixels (for 10′ squares) – so resizing it to either 2,800 pixels wide or 5,680 pixels wide, respectively.
This map is made available to you under a free license for personal or commercial use thanks to the awesome supporters of my Patreon Campaign. Over 500 amazingly generous people have come together to fund the site and these maps, making them free for your use.
Because of the incredible generosity of my patrons, I’m able to make these maps free for commercial use also. Each month while funding is over the $300 mark, each map that achieves the $300+ funding level will be released under this free commercial license. You can use, reuse, remix and/or modify the maps that are being published under this commercial license on a royalty-free basis as long as they include attribution (“Cartography by Dyson Logos” or “Maps by Dyson Logos”).
Please note that the promotional version of this map (the one with the brown paper background) is not included in this commercial use license.
I love the Darkling series. My group is about to take our first foray into 5e, in an underground campaign world ruled by gnomes. I’ve created a series of adventures based around floating down this river and the maps have been such a great starting point for my designs.
Awesome! I plan to keep making more. It kind of slipped off the radar for a while, but I also love the way it provides anchors to the weird exploration of an underdark campaign.
Wow!!! I am stoked to see what will be next, I love the Heart of Darkling series!
What is the relationship between the Heart of Darkling series and the Darkling Depths series?
Just the naming.
Nice to see this project back again. It’s a very flexible concept, and one I can see myself trying to work into a game.
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