Ruined Desert Outpost Fortress Free 40×30 Multi-Level Battlemap & Adventure

Those Who Dwell Below the Sands

While staying at a desert town you find a notice board with a selection of jobs including one from a grieving woman looking to hire someone to investigate the disappearance of their husband.

Upon meeting the woman, who has two young children, she explains that her husband, a merchant traveling the desert roads, vanished a month ago. Unfortunately, she lacks substantial information but mentions he was last seen heading towards a nearby town through an unused shortcut, passing an abandoned desert toll station. She provides additional details, describing her husband’s caravan engraved with the words “The Merry” and a necklace medallion he always carried.

Heading to the Toll station you travel on a desert road which now due to the toll station being abandoned has deteriorated. The toll station is four days away by horseback and when you arrive you find it abandoned just as the wife described.

Inside the Palisade you find a broken caravan matching the description the wife gave you next to an opening in the palisade which harbors strange claw marks which make it look like the outpost was perhaps attacked at some point. Inside the outpost you find little but for rubble, wood and tattered cloth.

Eventually you find a staircase that leads into natural caverns below the outpost, it’s unnaturally silent and exploring the many caverns you begin to find what looks to be the remains of humans, stripped completely of all flesh with gnawing marks on their bones.

Near the bodies you find a leatherbound journal written by one of the guards from the outpost explaining that he has been spending more time down in the many caverns under the outpost as he believes they can be put to good use for storage but that they unsettle him. He thinks he’s seen some old symbols carved into the stone but they look quite worn and he’s not a scholar so hell if he knows what they mean.  He continues that he intends to map out the entire cavern network but will bring some of the others next time as the place kinda creeps him out.

Later in the journal the guard claims to be hearing voices when in the caverns and has chosen to avoid them because of it. He says the other guards who have spent time in the caverns are also acting erratically. He doesn’t know what is going on but he intends on leaving the outpost when his contract is up as it just doesn’t feel right being here.

Most of the other pages of the journal are missing or torn but what you can make out is the words, hunger repeated, until the language shifts and appears to begin being written in the same symbols as on the walls of the caverns. If you understand the language of undead you note that the motif of hunger continues repeating in this language.

Searching the other caverns you hear sound up ahead before spotting what looks like a pale emaciated man in tattered guards clothes hunched over in the corner of the cavern, the sound of crunching can be heard as if he was eating something.

As you approach however, the creature turns to face you revealing a deformed humanoid creature with elongated limbs, pale milky eyes, a drooping jaw covered in blood and viscera and the remains of a rat in its hand. He attacks you on sight, hunger in its eyes as if it had not eaten in weeks.

Searching further you encounter more of these creatures, and begin seeing the cryptic symbols on the walls of the cavern mentioned in the journal. Once again if you understand the language of undead you may decipher their meaning which details this site as a place of unholy worship, where grand sacrifices were made to dark gods and where the cultists of this place ate the forbidden flesh.

Eventually you find a creature not like the others, more human. When you approach this one you find him resembling the description of the merchant but beginning to become deformed, with a bloody drooping jaw, one milky white eye and his right arm and leg becoming longer.

He’s confused and doesn’t know where he is or who you are but after some talking he calms down. If you ask what happened, explaining who you are, he explains he stopped at the toll station ruins for the night but was awoken by the sounds of scraping on the walls, he ignored it at first but decided to go check it out when the noise didn’t stop, he encountered creatures much like he is now within the toll station and he fled from them eventually ending up in the caverns beneath.

He found a hiding spot within a crack and can’t remember much since then but for flashes of eating meat and the sun being too bright to be in so he stayed in the caves. The man begs you to end his misery as he looks down upon his deformed body and to take his medallion necklace back to his wife, to tell her it appears there was an attack on the outpost by bandits and he was killed, don’t tell her the horror of what he has become, he begs you.

GM’s Notes: Hundred of years ago a cult used these caverns for its horrible rituals involving the consumption of human flesh which eventually caused them, as well as the caverns to become corrupted, changing them into horrible monstrosities. Eventually they were dealt with by a group of heroic adventurers but over the centuries this information was lost.

When a new road was set to be built across the dry landscape of the desert, this location was chosen due to its proximity to the rare creek which runs through the chasm below the toll station. Unbeknownst to the builders of the toll station the caverns were a corrupting influence on any who spent too much time down there. Over the years, the guards lost to madness and then began to eat the flesh of other humans who attempted to pass through the toll station. The more flesh they ate the faster they changed.

As so many people kept going missing in the region eventually the toll station was abandoned, leaving the now deformed and monstrous guards to roam the caverns.

If you’d enjoy more TTRPG resources like this Ruined Desert Outpost Fortress Free 40×30 Multi-Level Battlemap & Adventure, Luke and I have released our newest Hardcore GM’s bundle of 520 large, 40×30″ battlemaps (double the size of those in the Quarantine Bundle) with 255 fantasy adventures for $39. It’s your chance to have a great deal on some of our most beautiful maps! We guarantee that is something here for every GM—no matter what setting you prefer, from large cities to underwater seascapes.

Paying just $39 rather than full price saves you over 98%! Take a look at all the extra maps you can download with one click in the Hardcore GM’s Bundle here.