Scavengers’ Deep – Map 8 (Patreon)

The Scavengers’ Deep is a reminder of the amount of work that went into underground structures during the great war. Generally, the elves only built underground when hiding their breeding and research facilities, whereas the forces of the kingdoms, assisted by the dwarves, were constantly building underground as the elves were unrelenting and would completely raze any surface defences that they defeated.

But the structures now known as the Scavengers’ Deep are atypical, an elven complex mixing some (ruined) surface structures, natural caves, and significant sprawling underground complexes dedicated to research, training, and breeding their slave species.

This is the eighth map in the Scavengers’ Deep series – sitting east of Map 4 and south of last month’s Map 7, and is significantly more connected to the rest of the Deep compared to map 7. This region of the deep is a mix of caves and elven structures that twine around and over said.

Connections between this map and the other portions of the Deep are few – the complex here is reached via the two passages from the small complex at the south end of Map 7 or via the cave on the west side that leads to Map 4 – in effect both of these lead to the same cave that crosses between Maps 3 & 4 before splitting off into these two routes to this complex. The main point of access for the complex will be detailed in a later map, as the complex leads off to the east side of this map to an area that will be drawn out in the coming months.

The complex proper was used by one of the elven factions in their arcane experiments. The sublevels on the west side include a shaft that has a massive deep red magical crystal harvested from one of the scarlet hells that is “tapped” at the base by a pair of conduits that don’t seem to draw or feed anything to or from the crystal anymore. Evidently there was a similar crystal in the second shaft, but there are just a small number of shards there now (nowhere near enough to be the remains of such a crystal, mind you).

The upper level of the western side of the complex here had some sort of guard animal in it (evidenced by a massive chain with a broken collar on the floor) and a number of pits / shafts leading back down to the main level below. A secret room off to the south was some sort of magical laboratory, with a much smaller piece of the deep red crystal smoothed into a near-perfect egg shape hovering in the air over a lighter red stone platform covered in sigils of the scarlet hells.

Twisting around and beneath the structures are a number of narrow caves and a small underground stream (coming from the west side) that fills a shallow pool before extending off the south side of the map towards Map 9 (and eventually to the waterfall into the pool in Map 6).

The 1200 dpi versions of the map were drawn at a scale of 300 pixels per square and are 14,400 x 14,400 pixels (48 x 48 squares) in size. 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 suggested 10′ squares that this is designed around) – so resizing it to either 3,360 x 3,360 or 6,720 x 6720 pixels in size, respectively.

https://dysonlogos.blog/2024/06/28/scavengers-deep-map-8/