Secrets Under the Shire
Map creator
dysonlogosDescription
**Secrets under the Shire.**
There is always good gossip to be found in any halfling community – stories are told around meals and often grow with each telling. Tales of grand adventures and even grander treasures collected and hidden away. Among the local halflings, one particular home is the centre of these rumours and gossip – the home of old Bill Burrowes. Everyone knows that Bill has more money than his family did before him – tales spread of dragon’s gold, bewitched coin purses, and a massive underground hoard that Bill discovered under his own home, built by ancestors unknown. Turns out, there is some truth to this – the secret dungeons exist, built generations ago and then hidden away.
Underneath the secret pantry in the back of Bill Burrowes’ home is an even more secret storage area. The secret hatch in the secret pantry leads down to the 3 x 5 room fourth up from the lower left side of the map (where there is a ladder down to a platform and then stairs down to the chamber proper. The rooms to the immediate north and south of this are used for storage, with two smaller rooms on the north side being further down som stairs and used for cold storage. But if you push further into the depths, the structure stops looking like the basement of the Burrowes Burrow – the masonry here is old and precise, not the brickwork of the immediate basement area, and the chambers don’t make sense as storage space on their own. There are massive stone shelves built into some walls, odd mezzanines and sunken areas, and spaces that feel like they should be built for crypts or shrines but that contain the accoutrements of neither.
Besides the entrance under old Bill Burrowes’ house, there are two other ways into these strange catacombs under the Shire. There is an escape tunnel on the lower right side that extends for half a mile before ending at a secret door that opens into the root cellar under an old barn belonging to the Greenhand branch of the Cottons family. One section of the understructures has collapsed in the northeast side, and a brave young halfling can climb down into that darkened chamber through a small sinkhole between some large rocks on that side of the hill that hosts the Burrowes Burrow. The accessway there is very small and is unknown to old Bill (who doesn’t really spend much time in these chambers), but it has allowed several other things to slip into these chambers unobserved.
*This map (and the hobbit hole above) was drawn for James Michael Spahn, our very own hobbit in the OSR. There is specifically no scale to this map, but if you want it to be consistent with the home above it, 3-foot squares would be recommended, making the passages narrow and claustrophobic to most human-sized creatures.*
*The 1200 dpi versions of the map were drawn at a scale of 300 pixels per square and are 9,600 x 12,000 pixels (32 x 40 squares) at 3 feet per square, as suits a nice little halfling home. The strange angles of the substructures will make them a bit of a challenge if using a VTT with a set grid, however.*
[https://dysonlogos.blog/2026/05/25/secrets-under-the-shire/](https://dysonlogos.blog/2026/05/25/secrets-under-the-shire/)
There is always good gossip to be found in any halfling community – stories are told around meals and often grow with each telling. Tales of grand adventures and even grander treasures collected and hidden away. Among the local halflings, one particular home is the centre of these rumours and gossip – the home of old Bill Burrowes. Everyone knows that Bill has more money than his family did before him – tales spread of dragon’s gold, bewitched coin purses, and a massive underground hoard that Bill discovered under his own home, built by ancestors unknown. Turns out, there is some truth to this – the secret dungeons exist, built generations ago and then hidden away.
Underneath the secret pantry in the back of Bill Burrowes’ home is an even more secret storage area. The secret hatch in the secret pantry leads down to the 3 x 5 room fourth up from the lower left side of the map (where there is a ladder down to a platform and then stairs down to the chamber proper. The rooms to the immediate north and south of this are used for storage, with two smaller rooms on the north side being further down som stairs and used for cold storage. But if you push further into the depths, the structure stops looking like the basement of the Burrowes Burrow – the masonry here is old and precise, not the brickwork of the immediate basement area, and the chambers don’t make sense as storage space on their own. There are massive stone shelves built into some walls, odd mezzanines and sunken areas, and spaces that feel like they should be built for crypts or shrines but that contain the accoutrements of neither.
Besides the entrance under old Bill Burrowes’ house, there are two other ways into these strange catacombs under the Shire. There is an escape tunnel on the lower right side that extends for half a mile before ending at a secret door that opens into the root cellar under an old barn belonging to the Greenhand branch of the Cottons family. One section of the understructures has collapsed in the northeast side, and a brave young halfling can climb down into that darkened chamber through a small sinkhole between some large rocks on that side of the hill that hosts the Burrowes Burrow. The accessway there is very small and is unknown to old Bill (who doesn’t really spend much time in these chambers), but it has allowed several other things to slip into these chambers unobserved.
*This map (and the hobbit hole above) was drawn for James Michael Spahn, our very own hobbit in the OSR. There is specifically no scale to this map, but if you want it to be consistent with the home above it, 3-foot squares would be recommended, making the passages narrow and claustrophobic to most human-sized creatures.*
*The 1200 dpi versions of the map were drawn at a scale of 300 pixels per square and are 9,600 x 12,000 pixels (32 x 40 squares) at 3 feet per square, as suits a nice little halfling home. The strange angles of the substructures will make them a bit of a challenge if using a VTT with a set grid, however.*
[https://dysonlogos.blog/2026/05/25/secrets-under-the-shire/](https://dysonlogos.blog/2026/05/25/secrets-under-the-shire/)