Graxworm – Map 20 – The Tail

The Graxworm is a massive dead dragon of mythic scale, several miles long and large enough to contain a town in the mouth. Creatures have set up here to “mine” the massive corpse for its valuable materials – leather, scales, ichor, tendons, and more. Practically every bit has some value to someone, and in the long term, the expectation is that nothing will remain, not even the massive bones. Today’s map is more of an illustration in many ways. The first map is of the Graxworm Town gates in the maw of the great corpse atop the mountain, and today we have the other end of the Graxworm – the tail that is slowly being stripped of scales for now, but will eventually be completely salvaged too.

The last thousand feet of the Graxworm has no passages within it (except for the circulatory system, which is small enough at this end that it is only big enough for the smallest of the giant maggots to crawl through). The last passage towards the tail breaks out into the rough and broken foothills of the mountain just over a thousand feet from the bony tip of the cadaver’s tail (and is shown in the interior cutaway on the left. From here, a footpath leads down along the tail, and a ladder leads up onto the tail for the continued scavenging of parts from the beast. The ladder leads up to a walkway along the back of the wyrm; assembled for the harvest of scales along this area, although very little actual work has been done from that platform – most of the harvest has been from locations accessible to workers who use the path through the shattered foothills. The scales here are smaller and finer than on most of the beast, making them excellent for manufacturing finer items, but are also very well attached to the tail, making the harvesting difficult.

With all of the harvesting and mining taking place outdoors, the mining crews are all humanoids. This could be used as a point of entry for infiltrating the corpse for those who do not have the connections to slip in through the town in the mouth.

The Graxworm Megadungeon was proposed to me by Gallant Knight Games – a dungeon set within the corpse of a dragon some seven miles in length. If I were to map out the whole thing we’d be looking at a good 100+ maps, so instead we’ll be focusing on points of interest as a sort of “point crawl” megadungeon setting. We are finally approaching the end of this megaproject!

https://dysonlogos.blog/2025/05/23/graxworm-map-20-the-tail/