Pit of Despair – The Sump

“The Pit of Despair” is an excellent name for a prison. It drives the point home that this isn’t a place for rehabilitation. It is a sentence of its own – to be left here in the pit to work away your sentence in hard labour in the many tiers of the pit… or worse. The worst are taken all the way down to the bottom of the pit – to the sump. This is the floor of the old open pit mine, and multiple mine drifts used to extend from here, but they have all been collapsed.

The one good side of the lowest tier of the pit is that there is no forced labour down here. The guards only come down with new prisoners and return to the upper tiers where the hard work of the mine and workshops await. The elevator is a wide wooden platform with a winch at the top and heavy gearing at the bottom. Prisoners have learned not to mess with the elevator hardware – at one time a prisoner sabotaged it, and the elevator came crashing down, killing the guards and the new prisoner. A new elevator wasn’t installed for six months, and during that time the only food sent down was literal slops thrown from the top tier from a bucket.

This level is called the sump because the foul muddy floor is always wet, with a number of shafts to collect water and bodily wastes that are thrown down here. On the north side is a raised section of stone that is safe from the thrown slops and other offal tossed down into the pit. This was once where the scaffolding of the original mine came down to this level. This area is where whichever “gang” is currently in charge down here sleeps. Sometimes it is open to almost everyone in the sump, while other “rulers” of the sump use it as a reward for pleasing them by offering up food or clean water.

A month ago, a group of resourceful prisoners who were not in favour with the gang in charge noticed a foul miasma coming out of one of the old drift mines on the opposite side of the sump. It was foul, but it hinted at areas beyond the cave in that were still open. So they began to clear the way. Finally they admitted defeat to the other residents of the sump – there was no way forward. But over the next week, each of the four who were working there disappeared in the night. Everyone assumes that they did indeed find a way out, but the miasma is foul and the way seems completely blocked…

*The Pit of Despair is one of a set of seven maps that were drawn for an upcoming adventure. They will be released here over the next few months. I will also announce when that adventure is released and how to get it. The description above is not from the adventure, but is my own interpretation of how to use the map in question.*

*The 1200 dpi versions of the map were drawn at a scale of 300 pixels per square and are 10,200 pixels (34 squares) wide . To use this with most VTTs you would need to resize the squares to either 100 pixels (for 5′ squares) or 200 pixels (for 10‘ foot squares) – so resizing the image to 3,400 or 6,800 pixels wide, respectively.*

[https://dysonlogos.blog/2026/08/14/pit-of-despair-the-sump/](https://dysonlogos.blog/2026/08/14/pit-of-despair-the-sump/)