Black Plume Crater (Patreon)

A foul, dark haze rises out of small vents in the rock at the base of Black Plume Crater. Mildly poisonous, noxious smelling, deeply humid, and thoroughly unpleasant. These dark vapours bubble up from toxic muds below the crater floor. In the crater wall there is an ornately carved entrance leading down to the toxic sludge below. It resembles the face of a massive unpleasant imp with an open mouth through which to enter – and when seen from closer, it is in turn made up of carvings of many lewd and vile smaller imps.

There is a small complex below at the end of which is a sealed treasure vault. But of course a portion of the complex is the bubbling toxic mud itself, filling the whole environment with a foul miasma that promises illness and eventually death to those who explore this place unprotected. Swimming within this toxic mud are a pair of ancient kopru and a small legion of horrid little mephits that are both their servants and their food source.

With the right masks and aromatic herbal filters, one can survive the toxic mist for some time. And with the right motivation – say a treasure map to the vault and indications that an ancient rune blade is hidden within – one could probably be convinced to assemble such gear and enter the bubbling death trap. The real risk is of course the mud-dwelling kopru who would love to send adventurers back to the world under their control armed with a few fresh tools from the vaults… if they are strong enough to survive the other dangers down here.

From the name and the map it is pretty obvious that part of this dungeon was inspired by White Plume Mountain (the room with the suspended wooden platforms across a chamber of bubbling mud) and Isle of Dread (kopru living within the pools). Obviously some other adventurers have been here in the past and managed to lay down some wooden planking between the first batch of stone pillars in the mud chamber (which in turn is inspired by our own antics in a DCC game where the wizard was accompanied by an animated “transformer” style wooden wagon which disassembled itself to produce bridges for us in a similar environment).

The 1200 dpi versions of the map were drawn at a scale of 300 pixels per square and are 13,200 pixels (44 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 3,080 pixels wide or 6,160 pixels wide, respectively.

https://dysonlogos.blog/2021/05/15/black-plume-crater/