The Sultan’s Basement (Patreon)

“Deep in the desert of endless sands rests a grove of rocky outcroppings overlooking a landlocked sea that shrinks each year. Its water is briny to the point that no life exists on or between its shores. But this Salted Sea stretches far across the endless sands and those who sail upon it can fast reach the jungle lands beyond. Because of the strategic value in shortening the trips between the City of Splendours to the north and the Great Library in the City of Mud to the south, there exists a city nestled in the rocky groves overlooking the shore of the Salted Sea. This is the City of Tears, sustained by a single water source.“

– Zzarchov Kowolski’s “City of Tears”

Within the abandoned city itself is the church built upon the ruins of the Sultan’s Palace… and beneath that is the Sultan’s Basement. The lone priest at the church heard strange and ominous noises from the basement and stacked many stone bricks upon the trap door leading down into the old cellars. This trap door, if opened, leads to the stairs near the lower left side of the map.

The structures down here include a mix of narrow and wide hallways. The narrow halls provide a modicum of safety from the most dangerous of the wandering encounters down here – a mighty cyclops of immense size who wanders these towering passages.

There are three access ways from the Sultan’s Basement to the Imperial Sewers below – which I will post next week.

This map was drawn to replace the map I drew for Zzarchov’s “The City of Tears” published in the summer of 2018.

The 1200 dpi versions of the map were drawn at a scale of 300 pixels per square and are 15,000 pixels (50 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 3,500 pixels wide or 7,000 pixels wide, respectively.

https://dysonlogos.blog/2022/08/26/the-sultans-basement/