Graxworm – Map 4 – East Eye Orreries (Patreon)

The Graxworm is a massive dead dragon of mythic scale, fully miles long and large enough to contain a town in the mouth. Creatures have set up here to “mine” the massive corpse for its valuable materials – leather, scales, ichor, tendons, and more. Practically every bit has some value to someone, and in the long term the expectation is that nothing will remain, not even the massive bones. We’ve started our explorations of the Graxworm at the top – the head of the deceased creature – today we are on the opposite side of the skull from last time – the eastern eye socket.

Climbing above Graxworm Town via the stairs cut into the rearmost teeth of the great dead wyrm, one eventually reaches the eye sockets. From here the paths diverge – leading further up to the watch towers on the horns, or back down into the skull towards the council chambers. There is also a small passage in the walls (an old tear duct) that leads forward and down to the sinuses of the great beast. This is the eastern eye socket that is used as an observatory and contains a pair of linked orreries to attempt to make sense of the skies as well as the conjunctions of micro-planes, demiplanes, and various “outer” and “inner” planes.

The two orreries move slowly and often seem to be on the verge of colliding with each other. A small telescope is also on the edge of the eye socket, but most attention is spent on planar conjunctions and stellar phenomena that is visible to the naked eye.

For those using the east stairs to get to the council chambers, a pierced wall with curtains has been erected to separate the flow of workers and petitioners from those working and studying in the eye socket. A few study tables are here, but the actual library of the orreries is in the rooms cut into the southern bone structure of the socket. Here we have a library, a study area (including quarters for the head librarian separated from the study area by curtains and bookshelves), and beyond that the “secret stacks” where more important and esoteric texts are kept under lock and key.

The Graxworm Megadungeon was proposed to me by Gallant Knight Games – a dungeon set within the corpse of a dragon some seven miles in length. If I were to map out the whole thing we’d be looking at a good 100+ maps, so instead we’ll be focusing on points of interest as a sort of “point crawl” megadungeon setting. We’ll be posting a few maps in the set every month for… well… quite some time!

The 1200 dpi versions of the map were drawn at a scale of 300 pixels per square and are 6,600 x 9,600 pixels in size (22 x 32 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) – so resizing it to either 1,540 x 2,240 or 3,080 x 4,480 pixels, respectively.

https://dysonlogos.blog/2024/04/25/graxworm-map-4-east-eye-orreries/