Graxworm Map 9 – Watch Tower Base (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. We’re returning to the head of the beast for the next two maps – exploring a watch tower built into one of the horns atop its head.

A pair of horns on the head of the Graxworm have been converted into watch towers to provide an eagle’s eye from the highest point in the region. As the enclave within the Graxworm has grown larger and more organized, the towers have added aeries for flying mounts, with quarters for their riders separate from the barracks of regular watch troops that maintain the tower. The riders look down on the barracked troops because they don’t ride their great winged mounts, and the troops generally laugh it off since the riders have taken over most of their work, making this posting a quiet opportunity to play dice and cards and to occasionally make the long trek up the stairs to the watch above.

Getting up to the watch involves climbing up the long stairs through the skull of the Graxworm. Two sets of stairs meet in the upper recesses of the skull and then climb further into the horn – one comes up from the eye socket and the other from the council chambers. There’s a small chamber where the two stairs meet, but it is empty and unguarded (and not on this map). Getting from horn to horn involves either climbing down to the council chambers (the long route), or walking across the top of the skull from one tower to the next.

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/2024/06/19/graxworm-map-9-watch-tower-base/