Heart of Darkling – Frog Tower (Patreon)

The Darkling River works its way through the underdark beneath the grey hills to depths unknown. Darklingtown is a trading community built into a series of claustrophobically low-ceilinged caverns on the banks of the Darkling and a number of its tributaries. Darklingtown (which in turn will be made of 9+ maps) is the seventeenth mapped location (and this the 25th map total) along the Darkling River and the Darkling Sea beyond.

Cut into the cave walls of East Frogsport is Frog Tower. This is an old duergar mine that worked a vertical vein of copper down from a cave at the upper end of their domain and eventually breached into the caverns of what is now Darklingtown where they stopped mining both because of the water flow and the vein running out. Cleaned up and converted into a “tower” with stairs around the central shaft, this has become a primary access point for surface folk heading down to Darklingtown and the underdark. The top of Frog Tower is only a mile from a surface cavern.

The tower levels are labeled from bottom to top – level 1 is the level in the East Frogsport map, and level 7 is the top of the tower where it accesses the old Duergar domain.

The tower is home to an uncommonly gregarious beholder. The beholder’s lair is a series of spherical chambers and is accessed via level 6 but is mostly on level 7 (there the beholder can escape to using their disintegration ray). The lair and the tower itself is built around vertical shafts that the beholder can easily navigate.

Levels 4, 5, and 6 contain remains of the old mines. Level 5 is worth mentioning because this part of the main tower shaft is only accessible by the central shaft or a secret door from the mines but is not connected to the stairs that circle it. This level has statues of four deities of the long-gone local duergar that the beholder maintains as keepsakes.

Levels 2 and 3 contain apartments associated with Frogsport dwellers, while level 4 has a small guildhall of the local “Independent Holistic Society for the Advancement of the Spellunking Arts” – a would-be adventurer’s guild with few members and an interesting collection of texts and diaries from old underdark expeditions in a variety of tongues.

The 1200 dpi versions of the map were drawn at a scale of 300 pixels per square and are 19,200 pixels (64 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 4,480 pixels wide or 8,960 pixels wide, respectively.

https://dysonlogos.blog/2022/01/08/heart-of-darkling-frog-tower/