Sanctum of the Blind Protean (Patreon)

This dungeon began as a small set of mines cut into the hill where an underground stream was bringing gold to the surface. The mine quickly played out and was repurposed by the cult of Garathon as both a small shrine and sacred crypts.

Then something crawled forth from the main tomb of the Seven Martyrs from Iesta. It seems the teachings of the cult about the nature of the parts of the immortal soul was sorely wrong, and the martyrs crawled forth as a mass of ever-changing flesh. This protean creature quickly devoured the clerics and faithful of the cult in the shrine, but recoiled from leaving the old mines. Instead it formed copies of a pair of devoured pilgrims and sent them to the city to lure more people back here.

It took the paladins of the Order of the Iron Rose to finally contain the monster and seal it back in the tomb – but they could not slay it. During the battle the protean beast kept spawning perfect copies of the priests it had consumed and even a few members of the Order that it had struck in combat but not consumed. The fall of the Order the next year, betrayed from within, implies that at least one of these copies escaped the sanctum in the place of the knight it resembled.

The Sanctum today is still guarded by the last remnants of the fallen order – no longer proud paladins, the current guards have become minor robber-barons and common thugs. The tomb of the protean beast has been sealed – the door locked with a dozen locks and chains and massive iron bars hammered and welded into place.

But a sage’s research into the form of the blind protean beast implies that there is a way to control the copies it forms – to produce true simulacra with all the memories and morals of the original. And who better than the local heroes to tell about this research? The world could always use more heroes.

Unlike most of my maps, the majority of this piece was drawn with a black Sharpie marker, providing much bolder and thicker lines.

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.

1200 dpi copies of this map are available with and without grid on the Dodecahedron.

https://dysonlogos.blog/2020/10/12/sanctum-of-the-blind-protean/