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Cave, Cavern, Caverns, Caves, Dungeons & Dragons, Fantasy, Labyrinth Lord, Maps, Old School Essentials, OSE, OSR, River, RPG
A day’s walk south of GravelThorpe is a gully cut into the soil by the Karaczun – a stream of runoff from the melting glacier that once covered the ruins of the dwarven citadel of Urul-Dar. The gully here is home to a small set of caves and some enterprising halflings from the town had used the location as a base of operations to pan for artifacts in the stream.
They would find the occasional interesting bit of dwarven stonework as well as a pair of cut and polished rubies, and eventually built a bridge across to the second cave, linking the two sides of the gully. This smaller cave they used to store their finds while they would camp in the larger upper cave across the gully. At least, until they were chased out of the caves by a small group of halfling-eating humanoids of some kind.
But with the uncovering of Urul-Dar, there are many adventurers in town… and the halflings who used to pan from Karaczun’s Hollows have a plan to get their place back. They will offer adventurers directions to where they used to pan for dwarven treasure (and show off one of the two rubies as proof of the great treasures to be found while lamenting that they left most of the goods they acquired back in the caves – which is true, but those goods are all stonework and bits of pottery) for a small sum, allowing the adventurers to clear the caves for essentially no reward…
This map is dedicated to the memory of Alex Karaczun, who we lost suddenly and far too soon last night.
The 1200 dpi versions of the map were drawn at a scale of 300 pixels per square and are 9,600 pixels (32 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 2,240 pixels wide or 4,480 pixels wide, respectively.
The maps on Dyson’s Dodecahedron are released for free personal use thanks to the support of awesome patrons like you over on Patreon. Every month over 600 patrons come together to make these releases possible. You can help too in order to keep the flow of maps coming and to improve their quality – and even get a map of your own!
Dyson's Dodecahedron 
I’m so sorry for your loss.
This map reminds me of “Valhalla Canyon” here in Oregon. Until 8 years ago, no one knew that the canyon existed. If you want to use Valhalla as inspiration for another location map, check out this video documenting its first discovery trek. https://watch.opb.org/video/valhalla-oregons-hidden-gorge-cdswem/
Oregon even has several other unique locations, like “Lost Lake”. It sits in the high mountain pass and every winter the lake fills with icy water, and in the spring it further fills with 10’s fo feet more of freezing snowmelt. The lake doesn’t have a standard river outlet, so the lake keeps getting deeper. As summer starts to warm the lake, the ice dam that plugs an old lava tube breaks free and all the lake water rushes into the natural drain hole in the lake in a matter of a few days. The water eventually reappears from a seep which forms the headwaters of the McKenzie River about 30 miles away.
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Dyson, I worked with Alex and am still reeling from the loss. He would’ve loved this. What a lovely tribute.
Dyson, I worked with Alex and am still reeling from this loss. He was such a good human being. He would’ve loved this tribute.
Dear Dyson,
This is Alex’s wife, Nicole. This is an amazing tribute to Alex. He would have absolutely LOVED it!! Thank you so much for this. As you can imagine, we are just gutted. I’m working on a tribute to Alex in our home and the designer suggested making this map into basically wallpaper for the small wall that was above his desk in the basement where he gamed and had his friends over to play D&D. I wanted to tell you that, and please know I’ll send a picture of the space featuring your map when it’s finished. Thank you again. This is so touching.
Nicole
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