The Mines of Ironhollow Delve

**The Mines of Ironhollow Delve**

The bloomeries and ironworks in the City of Copper Bowls have been supplied by a hundred mines in the Corft Hills. A huge variety of mines support the city, from open pits to deep shaft mines requiring extensive ventilation and water pumps. Ironhollow is a drift mine that follows an almost horizontal vein of iron – the whole mine has a slight pitch downwards to the northeast, making it a chore to move ore carts up the tracks, so the mine also used mules to help.

The iron vein proved to be fairly short, ending at the north end of the map where the mine breached into a small cave that glittered with precious stones (the cave north of area 6). With the ore exhausted and the miners now well off from their gem find, the whole place was abandoned in record time. A few dwarves and one of the human foremen remained living here in areas 1 and 2 and converted one of the last drifts in the mine into a shrine to the dwarven god of mining (area 5).

A perfect place for a desperate group of goblins escaped from the Giants Hearth. A swarm of goblins descended upon the old mine and took over the place in the middle of the night. And no one except the previous tenants really noticed – the goblins kept to themselves and a pair of goblins who spoke common would come into town to purchase supplies using small bits of gemstones. They would visit with their kin at the Drunken Gobbo and then return to the mines. The people of the City of Copper Bowls just assumed they were from the clan that runs the small brewery.

But recently that changed. Some of the mutant goblins in the crew, blue-skinned and frail, felt a psionic resonance in some of the crystals that were left in the cave – semi-precious stones at best, fractured and flawed. They pried them out and embedded them into their own skulls. These goblins can sense thoughts in a 60-foot radius and thus coordinate ambushes with eerie precision. They spend most of their time in the old shrine, which they call “the thinking place,” where they meditate and seem to be growing stronger. These Vein-Seers have taken over the leadership of the tribe and now seek out other, better gems to adorn themselves with.

*This map was an experiment in using two different scales for a dungeon map – one for the overview and small cutouts of the points of interest. For this map, the scale difference is only double, but I like the effect, and I’m going to try it again soon but with a more significant change in scale between the two elements.*

*The 1200 dpi versions of the map were drawn at a scale of 300 pixels per square and are 10,800 x 16,200 pixels (36 x 54 squares). To use this with a VTT you would need to resize the squares to either 100 pixels (for 5′ squares making some of the drifts very claustrophobic) or 200 pixels (for the 10‘ foot squares that work with the furnishings as shown) – so resizing the image to 3,600 x 5,400 pixels or 7,200 x 10,800 pixels, respectively.*

[https://dysonlogos.blog/2026/08/12/the-mines-of-ironhollow-delve/](https://dysonlogos.blog/2026/08/12/the-mines-of-ironhollow-delve/)