Heart of Darkling – The Darkling Galleries (Patreon)

The Darkling River works its way through the underdark beneath the grey hills to depths unknown. This is the twelfth mapped location along the Darkling River and the Darkling Lake beyond.

Here the Darkling River twists and turns through a series of galleries – caves cut out by the river when it ran higher, making caverns with multiple columns where harder stone survived the erosion of the rest of the caverns. The galleries were once home to a pair of medusae, and later inhabitants moved the many petrified bodies around as decoration and warning to keep travellers from seeking their shores. A number of obvious adventurers stand here for eternity, with a look of shock or anger etched into their faces. Each statue is also maimed in case someone should have the bright idea of returning them to flesh – missing arms, legs, or even hollowed-out torsos.

A pair of flightless achaierai live in the galleries and have reached a sort of entente with the mass of gibberlings that inhabit the structures that lead to “gibberling lake”. Only rarely do the achaierai attack and eat a gibberling, typically allowing them to run around in their bizarre screaming ways – the gibberlings in turn are terrified of the great fiendish birds and resort to eating fish from gibberling lake and hunting for those who would dare land in the galleries. Unless some means of pacifying the gibberlings is found, getting to gibberling lake will have to involve fighting through a hundred or so of these manic pale hunched humanoids.

The 1200 dpi versions of the map were drawn at a scale of 300 pixels per square and are 14,400 pixels (48 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 3,360 pixels wide or 6,720 pixels wide, respectively.

https://dysonlogos.blog/2021/06/08/heart-of-darkling-darkling-galleries-1/