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Depths of the Ashen Throne
🕑 Added 2025-07-18 14:15:46 +0000 UTCThe Ashen Throne is a dungeon near the Cindermaw – an ancient volcanic caldera. A geothermally heated subterranean river carves through winding corridors, pooling in eerie grottoes that glow with phosphorescent fungi. Scattered throughout are crystalline veins and a lone, pulsing amethyst shard rumored to guide or mislead those who seek it.
Centuries ago, an elementalist named Vaerush carved the labyrinth to tap the earth’s ley lines and amplify their divinatory magic. After Vaerush vanished, a cult of echo-sprinters – spirits bound to the structure’s resonant geometry – claimed the site as their sanctum. Over time, kobold miners tunnelled in, drawn by whispers of untold wealth – reshaping passages and trapping unwary intruders.
Recently the Ashen Throne became home to a half dozen small groups of kobolds led by “Compass-Claw” Skik, who hoards sparkling gemstones; echo-sprinter spirits that replay sounds from the labyrinth’s past; a water weird named Currifold who is jealous of any who dirty its subterranean river; and a set of crystal living statues that guard the massive amethyst shard.
Now a renowned cartographer is hiring adventurers – they have heard that there are a series of maps that lead to the amethyst chamber in the Ashen Throne… but they are carved into the ruins of several structures around the Cindermaw. The cartographer wants copies of these maps, and for the adventurers to follow said maps to retrieve the amethyst shard (not realizing exactly how big that shard is).
The actual design of this map was purely an exercise to fill a 16 x 9 inch page – the same ratio as a standard TV or monitor. Why? WALLPAPER! I currently use “The Halls of Geryon” as my desktop, but it gets cut off on the right and left sides. So I drew this (and another one I’m posting later this month) as potential replacements. As a display piece, it has a few “easter eggs”, the most obvious one being the compass rose appearing as an actual part of the structure.
I've attached both 1080p and 4k versions of the map to this post (as well as the usual 1200 dpi versions).
The 1200 dpi versions of the map were drawn at a scale of 300 pixels per square and are 19,200 x 10,800 pixels in size (64 x 36 squares). To use this with a VTT you would need to resize the squares to either 70 pixels (for 5′ squares) or 140 pixels (for the recommended 10′ squares) – so resizing it to either 4,480 x 2,520 or 8,960 x 5,040 respectively.
https://dysonlogos.blog/2025/07/18/depths-of-the-ashen-throne/
Comments
ViggenCA
Oh, now there's an idea I'd not thought of .. having the map as desktop background - always accessible when online.
