Heart of Darkling – Darklingtown – Vorpal District North (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 11 maps) is the seventeenth mapped location (and this the 29th map total) along the Darkling River and the Darkling Sea beyond.

It has been four years since I last posted a map in the Heart of Darkling series. The plan is to release this one and one final map for Darklingtown and then I can resume drawing for the overall set again.

The Vorpal District is the main residential district of Darklingtown. Each tier here is about 16 feet above the previous tier, so all the houses built here look down upon the Sword River as it flows past on its way to join the Darkling. No real boat traffic comes down the Sword as much of it prior to entering these caves is completely submerged with no air flow above it – instead a few aquatic species use the Sword to get to Darklingtown and conduct trade in Darklingtown and Frogsport.

The cave along the river to the north connects to East Frogsport and the passage to the left connects to the Spillways district.

The Sword river contains a single island on the northern side of the district which has been turned into a fungal park withe benches and a path through the massive glowing fungi.

There aren’t a lot of businesses in the Vorpal district, with most of the buildings being residential. To increase the density, you can easily add a second floor to most of the buildings that can be reached either by a ladder or stairs on the ground floor, or through a door on the upper tier making the upper level a fully separate residence (maybe I’ll draw a second floor map to go along with this one – but if I do it will be after I’ve drawn the southern section of the Vorpal District – the Vorpal Gate.)

The 1200 dpi versions of the map were drawn at a scale of 300 pixels per square and are 19,200 x 14,700 pixels (64 x 49 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 3,430 or 8,960 x 6,860, respectively.

https://dysonlogos.blog/2026/01/07/heart-of-darkling-darklingtown-vorpal-district-north/