Graxworm Map 8 – Spinal Mine (Patreon)

The Graxworm is a massive dead dragon of mythic scale, several 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. Just to drive home the scale of the Graxworm, today we are examining one of the spines along the fell beast’s back where mining operations have been set up.

Atop the Graxworm corpse are these massive spines along the dorsal vertebrae. These served the great worm as defensive spikes as well as seeming to gather magical and elemental energies in life. As such, they seem to be separate from the typical bones of the corpse and are of a harder material still imbued with residual elemental energies (when storms come through these mountains, lightning will repeatedly strike the dorsal spines and they can seem to glow during these events).

Not all the spines have been mined, but a few have. The material of the spine is softer on the inside than the outer edge, and the core seems to hold the most “energy” so mining operations initially focus on this part of the spine before gradually breaking down the entire spine leaving a gaping hole in the vertebrae below. This is an example of one such mine that cuts up from one of the beast’s cervical vertebrae into the spine above and breaks through the hard outer shell of the spine in three places (providing an impromptu watch platform as well as allowing for fresh air to circulate into the structure.)

The stairs and platforms are made from bone also, with leather ropes to raise and lower loads to the vertebrae below and then down to the main passage in the throat.

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 10,200 x 13,200 pixels in size (34 x 44 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 2,380 x 3,080 or 4,760 x 6,160 pixels, respectively.

https://dysonlogos.blog/2024/06/17/graxworm-map-8-spinal-mine/