**Darklingtown – Vorpal Gate District**

The Darkling River works its way through the underdark beneath the grey hills to depths unknown. Darklingtown is a trading community built into a series of claustrophobically low-ceilinged caverns on the banks of the Darkling and a number of its tributaries. Darklingtown (which in turn is made up of 11 maps, this being the final one in the set) is the seventeenth mapped location (and this the 30th map total) along the Darkling River and the Darkling Sea beyond.

The Vorpal District is the main residential district of Darklingtown. Each tier here is about 16 feet above the previous tier, so all the houses built here look down upon the Sword River as it flows past on its way to join the Darkling. The gate district is where the sword emerges from beneath the rocks and begins cutting through the deep-cut caves of the Vorpal District. No real boat traffic comes along the Sword as much of it prior to entering these caves is completely submerged with no air flow above it – instead a few aquatic species use the Sword to get to Darklingtown and conduct trade in Darklingtown and Frogsport – showing up at the Vorpal Gate with their wares attached to giant shrimp used as pack animals.

This district map is only connected to via caves and tunnels to the Vorpal North district directly north of it and has no other connections to other parts of Darklingtown. A passage to the east leads down to a throughway used by drow slave caravans – this access way is well secured because of a few slaver incursions back when Darklingtown was still being established.

There are very few businesses in the Vorpal districts – the vast majority of the structures are homes. To further increase the density of the housing, you could add a second floor to every building that can be reached either by a ladder or stairs on the ground floor, or through a door on the upper tier making the upper level a fully separate residence, perhaps with walkways between them. I might even try to map this out myself at some point in the future, but in the meantime this is the final map to finish off the whole Darklingtown project and now I can go back to drawing other locations along the Darkling.

*The 1200 dpi versions of the map were drawn at a scale of 300 pixels per square and are 19,200 x 14,400 pixels (64 x 48 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 the recommended 10′ squares) – so resizing it to either 4,480 x 3,360 or 8,960 x 6,720, respectively.*

[**https://dysonlogos.blog/2026/03/06/heart-of-darkling-darklingtown-vorpal-gate/**](https://dysonlogos.blog/2026/03/06/heart-of-darkling-darklingtown-vorpal-gate/)