Heart of Darkling – Darklingtown Cavern District & Spillways (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 27th map total) along the Darkling River and the Darkling Sea beyond.

Sitting south of Frogsport is a large mostly open cavern that has become the “cavern district” of Darklingtown in recent years – mostly built up around a pair of larger homes that were built here in the earlier days of the community. Even though the Darkling river doesn’t come into the Cavern district, the caverns remain very humid sitting just south of Frogsport – and this gets worse when the spillways are running.

West of the cavern itself are the spillways – a pair of caves that are used to handle overflowing water should the Darkling flow go up drastically or should someone downstream attempt to flood out Darklingtown by barricading the Darkling itself (which has happened on a few occasions). The upper spillway is secured by a pair of gates that swing open when under pressure – so if the river starts to overflow its banks. The lower spillway leads into a massive chimney that goes to a much deeper portion of the underdark but the flow into this spillway is held back by a 9 foot tall stone mass that is opened using a stone shape spell when the spillway is needed. This spillway is opened for one day out of every ten as part of a decades-old deal Darklingtown struck with the servants of a deep aboleth who lives somewhere downstream of the spillway chimney in question.

The left-hand entrances and exits from this map are the Darkling River (flowing from the left side of the top of the map to the top side of the left of the map) and the gated spillway. A wide cavern at the top of the map leads to Frogsport, while the right-hand gated passage leads down a cavern to the (not yet drawn) Vorpal District.

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/2022/02/06/heart-of-darkling-darklingtown-cavern-district-spillways/