Gorgonmouth Mine

An abandoned copper pit mine in the Chalk Hills, Gorgonmouth turned out to be a lot less profitable than anticipated and recently hasn’t even been worth working for the miners in nearby Riverside Downs.

The mine is a closed pit mine built up around a small natural cave that had obvious copper veins in the walls. The cave has been expanded over the years and a significant amount of copper retreived before the veins essentially ran out.

Outside the pit is a small bunkhouse attached to a stone watch tower, and another small stone cottage / bunkhouse, surrounded by tailings piles from the mine. Up on the hill is a small wooden watch platform that isn’t quite as tall as the tower, but provides a second watch point.

This is all very handy to the group of bandits that have taken over the site, allowing them to watch for annoyances coming from the town. However, these bandits aren’t quite what they seem – unknown to the townfolk, the real reason Gorgonmouth was abandoned was because the miners found something tentacular and massive down below, something that strangled the last of the miners…

But it didn’t kill the bandit who went down to the bottom of the stinking mine hoping to score some easy copper… it reached out and put something inside them… and now they are in charge of the bandits and are attempting to capture enough prisoners to continue digging out whatever beast is below.

The entry to the mine itself is cut into the hillside at a moderate incline down to the old cave. The main pit is fairly large and contains a significant amount of wood structure and scaffolding to allow for the descent of miners into the depths and to work the walls of the old cavern. The pit itself is overlooked by a room that was converted from mining area to a “break room” with a table and desk and a pair of glassless windows.

The mid level of the pit mine digs deep into the wall where a good strike of copper was found, and a creepy and foul-smelling fog seems to almost try to climb over the railings here from the level below. The bottom level is mostly scaffolding and supports at first inspection, with the fog concealing the drift passage beyond where the tentacle resides. Scattered around it are the ruined bodies of those sent down to dig it out – sooner or later it loses patience and lashes out at the prisoners in pain and frustration…

The 1200 dpi versions of the map were drawn at a scale of 300 pixels per square and are 9,600 pixels (32 squares) wide. To use this with a VTT you would need to resize the squares to either 70 pixels (for 5′ squares) or 140 pixels (for my preferred 10′ squares) – so resizing it to either 2,240 pixels wide or 4,480 pixels wide, respectively.

https://dysonlogos.blog/2023/12/22/gorgonmouth-mine/