Jörðgarð Map of Week #87 - Dwarven Highway Bridge

MarkOliva

With the 87th Map of the Week we continue in the borderlands town of Óðinn's House in the Kingdom of Slovania. This week we take a look at the pit area and broken bridge of the subterranean Dwarven Highwy extension.

Key to the pit and broken bridge (Highway Location No. 7)

The Northern Circle also is uncertain what happened here. Its members have two differrent speculative theories about the origin of the pit and the bridge. A minority thinks that all of this was a dwarven trap. The majority disagrees. The construction work on the bridge is too crude to be dwarvish, they argue. Instead, they think the pit is of unknown origin and that ogres, who are mutated dwaves, probably built it in the service of orcs who had enslaved them.

Whatever the case may be, there are some other riddlesome aspects to this scenario. The pit is 20 feet/6 m deep, but anyone who looks down into it with sufficient illumination will notice without a check that it once was deeper and that it was refilled partially. The area around the pit is loose gravel. Anyone who thinks about trying to circumvent both pit and bridge by walking through the gravel also will conclude that the likelihood of starting a gravel slide and falling into the pit is great. The game master knows that the fall is almost unavoidable. Only with a successful dexterity check against DL 25 in a Dungeons Daring™ campaign or DC 30 in an OGL 3.5 campaign can one succeed in getting back on the road without falling.

1. Highway extension.

2. The pit. Pure soil and gravel, 20 feet/6 m deep.

3. Filled area. Looking downward, one easily sees that the depths of the pit have been refilled with soil and gravel.

4. The broken bridge. For each character who comes within one square (5 feet/150 cm) of the edge of the break, there is a 10 % chance (1-2 auf d20) that the square upon which the character is standing also will break off and cave in. One can jump back onto safer cobblestones with a successful dexterity check against DL 15 in a Dungeons Daring™ campaign or DC 20 in an OGL 3.5 campaign.

The map above is reduced in size. You can get the full-sized scenario in two versions:

1. The Fractal Mapper (TM) 8 map in FMP format, fully editable, from our Jörðgarð web page (4.5 MB).

2. As a JPG flat map of 1360 Pixels x 850 Pixels (480 KB), available from the NBOS website at:

http://www.nbos.com/nox/download.php?id=476

Both versions are released for personal and commercial use under the Open Game License Version 1.0a, which you can read on the Jörðgarð website at:

http://www.vintyri.org/joerdhgardh/joerdhgardh.htm

Next week: Óðinn's Fortress - The Dwarven Highway's Exit Area and Great Gate