The Sporewarden’s Hollow

I’ve been experimenting a bit with five room dungeons again, this time annotating them as I draw them. The goal is to have a collection of quick dungeons in this format that I can grab-and-go and be ready to run with close to zero prep while also being completely system-independent. These more closely follow the classic Five Room Dungeon format regarding the five different “types” of rooms.

The first in the set is The Sporewarden’s Hollow – a set of small caves off the side of a larger cavern or portion of the underdark. The specifics of the Sporewarden are not provided – a servant of Zuggtmoy, a druid of the underdark, an elder myconid, or perhaps someone almost totally consumed by a strange fungal growth beyond their control?

The entrances into the Hollow are both through the fungal garden, a collection of massive mushrooms and smaller fungi that are spread around the descending passage into the hollow (and that conceal the smaller passage that leads to the western of the Hyphal Libraries). The passages are encrusted with dry fungi that emit hallucinatory spores when brushed against.

The Hyphal Libraries themselves are fungi that are “read” by inhaling their spores and reliving the contents of their stories. A few more traditional books are kept in the western library – mostly used to catalog what information is in which mushrooms. A gate of fine mycelial threads blocks passage to the area beyond the libraries – this living gate will open to anyone who has been brought into the collective spore-empowered psychic grouping of the Sporewarden and the library. Within the last cavern we find the Sporewarden as well as their treasure – a dessicated dryad sealed in a mycelial shell, asleep and hibernating, awaiting rebirth for untold ages.

The 1200 dpi versions of the map were drawn at a scale of 300 pixels per square and are 7,200 x 10,800 pixels (24 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 10′ squares) – so resizing it to either 1,680 x 2,520 or 3,360 x 5,040, respectively.

https://dysonlogos.blog/2025/08/18/the-sporewardens-hollow/