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The Forgotten Hermitage
🕑 Added 2025-08-15 15:26:58 +0000 UTCNestled into ancient ruins in overgrown woods, this ramshackle structure could be home to a druid, a hermit with forbidden knowledge, or a portal to the mythic underworld attended to by a crone ancient beyond years.
Running with the Mythic Underworld theme we get something like this:
Deep in a forest that the locals avoid (not out of fear, but out of instinct), paths twist unnaturally, birds never sing, and the air is thick with memory. Crumbling stone ruins half-swallowed by moss and roots hide a smaller ramshackle house carved with odd symbols that shift and change when not observed, all overlooked by a statue that weeps water down ancient stairs.
The forest has its own strange inhabitants as one draws closer to the ruins. The Pale Fox appears only at dusk and leads travellers in circles unless they speak the forgotten words to it. The Hollow Eyed Owl watches those who travel the byways – its gaze inducing dreams of places that don’t exist. And finally the Antlered Thing – a stag-like creature with too many joints who mimics voices of the dead.
The house itself is tucked into cyclopean ruins and is home to the crone Mother Ylsa (although she claims no name is truly hers) – a hunched figure wrapped in bark and bone. Her eyes are milky white, and yet she sees things others cannot. She is the guardian of the door to the mythic underworld – but she does not protect it, she tends it like a gardener tending a grave. She offers tea brewed from dreams, and asks that you bury something outside the house before you enter the mythic underworld.
The door itself is always the opposite door to the building. If one enters from the south, exiting to the north leads not to her small garden, but instead into other places. The entrance to this portion of the mythic underworld has its own rules, of course. Torches here flicker with scenes from your past, lanterns reveal things that aren’t there…
The 1200 dpi versions of the map were drawn at a scale of 300 pixels per square and are 8,400 x 8,400 pixels in size (28 x 28 squares). To use this with a VTT you would need to resize the squares to either 70 pixels (for the recommended 5′ squares) or 140 pixels (for 10′ squares) – so resizing it to either 1,960 x 1,960 or 3,920 x 3,920 respectively.
https://dysonlogos.blog/2025/08/15/the-forgotten-hermitage/
Comments
ViggenCA
Oh, perfect - going to use this for the next game. Using Shadowdark, set in your Autumn Lands maps, and need something for the players to discover on their way to the nearby "big" city.
Simon 'Landmine'
Nice. Both the map and the concept.
