Heart of Darkling – The Cold Caves (Patreon)

The Darkling River works its way through the underdark beneath the grey hills to depths unknown. This is part of the thirteenth mapped location (and 16th map total) along the Darkling River and the Darkling Lake beyond.

There is a sealed door in the ghoulish village at The Drop which leads to a series of unpleasantly cold caverns before continuing deeper into the underdark. At the centre of the cold caverns is a massive chamber about 140 feet across that descends in a series of three tiers. At the bottom of this is a blue-tinted stone covered in frost that emits the aura of magical cold that keeps these caves chill. And the cold is definitely magical, because nothing could keep the caves at just above freezing over such a large area without the source of the cold being frozen solid and accumulating frost and ice – but the stone here seems to absorb the frost nearly as fast as it is formed.

The central chamber is the only part of the cold caves that is well below freezing, with the mid level of the chamber clouded with icy mist, but the lowest portion clear of the mist as it freezes to the stone itself.

The cold caves are home to a small number of ice mephits living in the left-hand cavern and the tiered dead-end cave on the upper right – but the true menace of this area are the white puddings that live primarily in and directly around the central chamber.

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/2021/07/08/heart-of-darkling-the-cold-caves/