Heart of Darkling: Bloodmarket Cave (Patreon)

The Darkling River works its way through the underdark beneath the grey hills to depths unknown. This is the eleventh location that I've explored along the Darkling River and the Darkling Lake beyond.

At a confluence of a tributary of the Darkling River and a tunnel through deep gnome territory, Bloodmarket Cave is used by a number of groups to trade with a group of mysterious grey-robed humans that are assumed to be slaves / operatives for an unknown mind flayer colony. They offer black adamantine coins in trade for preserved sapient brains stored in special metal cannisters. They take the full cannisters with them and leave behind empty cannisters to continue the trade.

They seem to teleport in to make the trade, never quite at the same spot, and usually within 40-60 hours of traders arriving in the cave with full cannisters. A permanent trading post has been assembled here, but no one attends to it currently (the last group to manage the site was silently butchered by something terrible and evidently invisible and no one has decided to take up residence here since). Traffic arriving from the tunnel system into the underdark need to cross the Darkling. To assist in this, there is usually a small boat at the dock on the right – and a series of spikes hold a rope along the cave wall of the tributary to help pull against the current.

The 1200 dpi versions of the map were drawn at a scale of 300 pixels per square and are 12,000 pixels (40 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 2,800 pixels wide or 5,680 pixels wide, respectively.

The 1200 dpi versions of this map (with and without grid) are at the Dodecahedron https://dysonlogos.blog/2020/10/10/heart-of-darkling-bloodmarket-cave/