Built by Lord Halvyr with the Order of the Azure Pyre, the dungeon was carved out of ancient caves as home for the “soul kiln” where prisoners were fed to a massive sapphire machinery that burned with cold blue fire and screamed with the voices of the consumed.
Lord Halvyr joined the secret order after he survived the fire that killed the rest of the royal family by binding a demon of ash and sorrow into a sapphire lodged in his chest. He soon learned of the order who believe that sapphire gemstones are the crystallized tears of dead gods. For him, the creation of the soul kiln was a way to keep feeding souls to the demon to keep it quiet and to keep extending his unnatural life. For the Order, the machinery was meant to draw forth the thoughts and words of the dead gods who’s tears were used in its construction.
But then the machineries split open and shattered, releasing a blue conflagration of trapped souls that still roam the halls, hungering for new flesh. Lord Halvyr’s artificial sapphire heart broke free of his chest and shattered into three pieces. One of these three pieces is still somewhere in the dungeon (actually in the caves below the dungeon), burning with a cold blue flame. The burning sapphire is still bound to a demon, who whispers promises of power to those who dare approach it.
At the mid-point of the stairs leading down to the dungeon, there is an old metal grate over a deep pit to act as a sump, keeping the rest of the dungeon from flooding. The various parts of the dungeon are connected by small crawlways to provide air movement and to prevent flooding. These are now used by the giant rats that roam through both the dungeons and the caves. A small shrine where Lord Halvyr meditated is only accessible via these crawlways – he would get here by shape-shifting into a smaller form to negotiate the tight confines.
The second room on the right upon entering the dungeon is where the machinery of the soul kiln used to be, and the room still flickers with cold blue fire. The current home of the fragment of burning sapphire is in the hands of a warped and twisted old man who controls the rats here via the demonic powers of the gem. But he isn’t the true villain of this adventure, for the demon in the gem will abandon him as soon as it finds that he is fighting more capable foes that it can try to subvert instead.
The 1200 dpi versions of the map were drawn at a scale of 300 pixels per square and are 9,600 x 9,600 pixels (32 x 32 squares). To use this with a VTT you would need to resize the squares to either 100 pixels (for 5′ squares) or 200 pixels (for traditional 10‘ foot squares that this was designed with) – so resizing the image to 3,200 x 3,200 pixels or 6,400 x 6,400 pixels, respectively.
https://dysonlogos.blog/2026/10/20/dungeon-of-the-burning-sapphire/
