Download these free desert DnD battlemaps & be ready to play in minutes! Many come with system-agnostic adventures written just for them. Perfect for VTTs.
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Desert Camel Walking Stronghold Free 60×40 DnD Battlemap, which was inspired by a Star Wars ATAT and the Camel Divine Beast from Zelda: BotW. VTT ready!
If you’d enjoy more DnD resources like this Desert Camel Walking Stronghold Free 60×40 DnD Battlemap, Luke and I have released our newest Hardcore GM’s bundle of 520 large, 40×30″ DnD battlemaps (double the size of those in the Quarantine Bundle) with 255 fantasy adventures for $39. It’s your chance to have a great deal on some of our most beautiful maps! We guarantee that is something here for every GM—no matter what setting you prefer, from large cities to underwater seascapes.
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After getting in trouble with the law and ending up in jail pending trial, whether guilty or not, you’re approached by a man wearing a suit and a bola hat while carrying a cane. If you’re perceptive you may be able to see a silver necklace around his neck with what looks like a broken key, missing its tip. He clearly holds some sway over the guardsmen, having them leave so you can speak in private. The man introduces himself as The Collector, before explaining that he understands that you’ve got yourself into a little spot of trouble and that he’s here to help, as a friend. The Collector goes on to explain that he can get you out of jail with a fully clean record, but he’ll need a little favor from you first. You see, he’s in need of some vital information from a man who was part of a group of raiders who attacked his caravans, and stole important artifacts from him. This man was captured and now resides within the hell-hole of a prison they call The Pit. The rest of his comrades however, are still on the loose, perhaps still with his artifacts. The prison guards tried to get the location of the raiding group’s hideout from the prisoner, but they had no luck and so The Collector has instead arranged a new plan. Removing his hat, The Collector solemnly informs you that he has had your criminal records changed to have you convicted of murder. Just a formality, he assures you, but he needs you to be sent to The Pit and to retrieve this information for him. He cares not for your methods, as long as you get the inmate to speak, whether through gaining his trust or… otherwise. Once you’ve gained this information, you’re simply to tell a guard you need to speak to The Collector and he says he will come to release you. He then gives you the general description of the man you must seek. If you ask about what happens if you don’t manage to get the information, The Collector laughs and says that but of course, then you’ll be staying in The Pit for a long time.
The next day you’re taken in an armored carriage, chained and blindfolded through the harsh desert. When you arrive at the prison you feel the harsh sun on your skin for only a few moments before you’re taken underground. The guards refuse to talk to you if you question them and soon enough your blindfold and chains are taken off, before you’re thrown into a cavern-like area full of other inmates. Cells line the walls of the cavern and a small stream runs through it, providing water to drink and bath in. Walking around the prison searching for the man you must seek, you’re soon confronted by a small group of men led by a bulky, dark skinned man who sees you as fresh meat. Unpersuaded by your talking, the men see only physical violence as a means to end disputes. No matter your choice, including killing the men, the guards do not intervene. They do, however, show up later to retrieve the bodies. Eventually you find the man you’re searching for, hiding off in a cell in the corner of the prison. He is a tanned, slender man in his late sixties but is not what you’d expect from a raider. When approached, you see the man has been beaten and covered in bruises and cuts. He shudders and pleas with you to not beat him more, but when he notices you’re not who he expected he calms down. If you ask him about who he was expecting, he introduces himself as Oran explaining that there’s a group of men in the prison led by a bulky dark-skinned man named Regar who have been hasling him since he arrived. If you killed Regar and his cronies (the group who attacked you earlier) and explain this to the man, he is incredibly thankful and much more willing to talk to you. If asked about the other raiders and the location of the hideout, Oran looks confused, asking about what raiders. If you explain further, he seems to have no idea what you’re talking about.
Oran explains that he is an elder from a tribe of nomadic people who were themselves attacked during a ceremonial festival of his people. He explains that every decade all four of the tribes of the sand, which includes his tribe, come together for a festival so the elders of each tribe may discuss important matters with each other. However, during the night they were attacked, and he was captured along with some others by the unknown assailants, only waking to find himself in this hell-hole. If pressed further, he surmises in a hush voice that the attackers seemed to know them, calling to them by name before attacking. The man thinks that perhaps they were after the key to the desert that their tribes have protected for millennia, as it is the only thing of value his people keep. If you ask about the key, Oran explains that it is a magical artifact with the power to control the dunes and the dust storms that pervade the desert. Long ago it was broken into four pieces and each given to one of the tribes, so that no tribe would have dominion over the desert. But, on that night, he saw as his attackers killed one of the elders right in front of him before taking the elder’s key piece. Oran continues that, as keeper of the key for his tribe, his piece was also taken, but it seems like at least one of the other elders got away with their piece as he has been tortured by the guards to try and uncover the location of where his remaining people may have fled. He, of course, did not give this information up, a mostly toothless grin appearing on his face. If you ask more about this location, Oran explains that his people have a sacred oasis that they may go to in time of need, and his people would most likely have fled there for safety but he refuses to give you directions. He does however say that whoever the attackers of their tribes were, they cannot be allowed to gain all the key pieces as holding such power over the desert has only led to bloodshed in the past. GM’s Notes: The Collector is behind the attacks on the tribes people of the desert and the torture of Oran. He wears three out of four pieces of the key to the desert around his neck, and wishes to collect the remaining key fragment so that he may rule the desert.
The players may call The Collector to inform him of the information they gained from Oran regarding the sacred Oasis, and although it takes him a longer time his people will manage to find it and recover the final key fragment; giving him the ability to rule over the desert as he desired.
Other ways to resolve this quest may be to talk to other inmates, some of whom have been planning an escape via a tunnel they’ve been digging and bribe or otherwise convince them to let you come along, perhaps even bringing Oran with you. In addition, the players may be able to directly betray The Collector, calling him to the prison only to confront him instead, with the intent of getting the other three key fragments back. In this case, the guards will come to defend him as well as his two bodyguards. If Oran is presented with the other three key fragments to return to his people, he thanks you profusely explaining that you’re always welcome among his people, as well as you given directions to the sacred oasis so that if you ever need, you may seek shelter there.
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While staying at a desert town you find a notice board with a selection of jobs including one from a grieving woman looking to hire someone to investigate the disappearance of their husband.
Upon meeting the woman, who has two young children, she explains that her husband, a merchant traveling the desert roads, vanished a month ago. Unfortunately, she lacks substantial information but mentions he was last seen heading towards a nearby town through an unused shortcut, passing an abandoned desert toll station. She provides additional details, describing her husband’s caravan engraved with the words “The Merry” and a necklace medallion he always carried.
Heading to the Toll station you travel on a desert road which now due to the toll station being abandoned has deteriorated. The toll station is four days away by horseback and when you arrive you find it abandoned just as the wife described.
Inside the Palisade you find a broken caravan matching the description the wife gave you next to an opening in the palisade which harbors strange claw marks which make it look like the outpost was perhaps attacked at some point. Inside the outpost you find little but for rubble, wood and tattered cloth.
Eventually you find a staircase that leads into natural caverns below the outpost, it’s unnaturally silent and exploring the many caverns you begin to find what looks to be the remains of humans, stripped completely of all flesh with gnawing marks on their bones.
Near the bodies you find a leatherbound journal written by one of the guards from the outpost explaining that he has been spending more time down in the many caverns under the outpost as he believes they can be put to good use for storage but that they unsettle him. He thinks he’s seen some old symbols carved into the stone but they look quite worn and he’s not a scholar so hell if he knows what they mean. He continues that he intends to map out the entire cavern network but will bring some of the others next time as the place kinda creeps him out.
Later in the journal the guard claims to be hearing voices when in the caverns and has chosen to avoid them because of it. He says the other guards who have spent time in the caverns are also acting erratically. He doesn’t know what is going on but he intends on leaving the outpost when his contract is up as it just doesn’t feel right being here.
Most of the other pages of the journal are missing or torn but what you can make out is the words, hunger repeated, until the language shifts and appears to begin being written in the same symbols as on the walls of the caverns. If you understand the language of undead you note that the motif of hunger continues repeating in this language.
Searching the other caverns you hear sound up ahead before spotting what looks like a pale emaciated man in tattered guards clothes hunched over in the corner of the cavern, the sound of crunching can be heard as if he was eating something.
As you approach however, the creature turns to face you revealing a deformed humanoid creature with elongated limbs, pale milky eyes, a drooping jaw covered in blood and viscera and the remains of a rat in its hand. He attacks you on sight, hunger in its eyes as if it had not eaten in weeks.
Searching further you encounter more of these creatures, and begin seeing the cryptic symbols on the walls of the cavern mentioned in the journal. Once again if you understand the language of undead you may decipher their meaning which details this site as a place of unholy worship, where grand sacrifices were made to dark gods and where the cultists of this place ate the forbidden flesh.
Eventually you find a creature not like the others, more human. When you approach this one you find him resembling the description of the merchant but beginning to become deformed, with a bloody drooping jaw, one milky white eye and his right arm and leg becoming longer.
He’s confused and doesn’t know where he is or who you are but after some talking he calms down. If you ask what happened, explaining who you are, he explains he stopped at the toll station ruins for the night but was awoken by the sounds of scraping on the walls, he ignored it at first but decided to go check it out when the noise didn’t stop, he encountered creatures much like he is now within the toll station and he fled from them eventually ending up in the caverns beneath.
He found a hiding spot within a crack and can’t remember much since then but for flashes of eating meat and the sun being too bright to be in so he stayed in the caves. The man begs you to end his misery as he looks down upon his deformed body and to take his medallion necklace back to his wife, to tell her it appears there was an attack on the outpost by bandits and he was killed, don’t tell her the horror of what he has become, he begs you.
GM’s Notes: Hundred of years ago a cult used these caverns for its horrible rituals involving the consumption of human flesh which eventually caused them, as well as the caverns to become corrupted, changing them into horrible monstrosities. Eventually they were dealt with by a group of heroic adventurers but over the centuries this information was lost.
When a new road was set to be built across the dry landscape of the desert, this location was chosen due to its proximity to the rare creek which runs through the chasm below the toll station. Unbeknownst to the builders of the toll station the caverns were a corrupting influence on any who spent too much time down there. Over the years, the guards lost to madness and then began to eat the flesh of other humans who attempted to pass through the toll station. The more flesh they ate the faster they changed.
As so many people kept going missing in the region eventually the toll station was abandoned, leaving the now deformed and monstrous guards to roam the caverns.
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While visiting a desert town by a great river, you stop by a tavern named the Sable Oryx. Stepping inside, you see the giant head of an oryx mounted on the far wall, high above a fire pit with spit-roasting meat turned by a young, shy boy. After sitting down at one of the sumptuous rug and pillow covered eating areas, a young man in his late teens approaches, asking if you’re mercenaries open to hire.
The man has caramel coloured skin with black hair and dark eyes, he introduces himself as Riyad. Though he wears the colorful tasseled garb of the locals, he explains he isn’t from here originally, but from a no-longer existent desert settlement further upstream. He explains his adopted mother and father found him floating in a moses basket in the river, washed up against some reeds, and took him in as one of their own. He’s had a good childhood, with 7 other brothers and sisters, but he longs to know what happened to his people.
You see, when his parents found him, there was blood on his blankets. So the first thing his adopted father did was rally the local fighters and ride out to the upstream village he must have drifted down from, but the fighting party was too late. Everyone in his birth village was already dead. Massacred. It appeared that a giant sand worm had come through and slaughtered everyone, which is a terrible sign of displeasing the gods. The fighters didn’t hang around long enough to find out what his birth village did to cause the beast’s ire, fearing the great worm would return and wreak vengeance upon them too.
Though he loves his family, he needs to know what exactly happened to his birth parents. If they were evil and displeased the gods, like he’s feared, or if it was something else. He’s never gone back to the remains of the village, as the area is considered cursed and dangerous. Everyone avoids it. His mother won’t permit him to go alone, so he needs to hire you for protection before going to the site of the massacre and seeing what he can find. If you help him, he can pay you in the carved amethyst animals and idols that his village specializes in making.
Should you agree, the next day you head out on horses to the location of the decimated village, following the muddy river upstream into harsher desert lands for the better part of a day, before you reach the opening of a canyon. Riyad explains that from what he’s learned his people were nomadic, only settling in one place for a few weeks or a month before moving on. They would live in tents, shepherding sheep and selling thick cloths woven from animal hair, white messenger doves, or trained hunting falcons. Apparently, many of the nomads were distant cousins to the people of his adopted village, which is why they rode out to protect them–they still felt some kinship, especially against unknown enemies.
As you enter the mouth of the cavern, Riyad quietens and notes that this is where the village was meant to have been. If you’re not careful where you walk, you hear the crack of dried bones breaking beneath your footsteps, and looking down you see they’re human.
There doesn’t seem to be any danger, so Riyad begins inspecting the remains of the village. The whole canyon floor is strewn with human bones. Amongst them, partially buried by the sands, are the tattered rags left over from the tents they used to live in, rugs, or pillows. Riyad checks the walls of the canyon for engravings, searches the floor for books or scrolls, but finds nothing illuminating. Any scrolls that he finds are so brittle they turn to dust when he touches them.
Just as Riyad sighs in defeat and is ready to leave, you feel a rumbling in the sands beneath your feet. A giant sandworm emerges from the desert floor–but its mummified flesh hangs loosely around an undead, skeletal frame and cruciform jaws.
The undead worm attacks with ferocious bites as well as its undulating tail. After you get a few hits in, it backs off and regurgitates undead skeletons which rise to attack you, before the worm leaping into the fray again.
Once defeated, the worm almost breathes a giant sigh of relief as it dies. Then the purple ethereal form of a very old man glimmers to light over its dead body. He wears robes and a headscarf, and looks to Riyad. “Thank you for freeing me, grandson,” the ghost says. He explains, a hitch in his voice, that he was once the chief of this tribe, but he feared death. Seeking immortality, he cast his soul into the body of this great worm, but in so doing was driven mad. To his horror, he killed those who had once been his family; the entire tribe.
He has learned his lesson from such a terrible fate, the man continues, and can only hope to try to make amends. He says that he will bring the dead tribe back to life and undo the evils that he, in his ignorance, wrought. With a wave of his hand and a few guttural words, the dead in the canyon begin to rise. For a moment the ghost seems proud of himself, before he notices the unholy purple light shining from their eyes.
The ghost gulps and stutters, saying oh my, well then, as I said thank you grandson for freeing me from my torment! It’s high time I move onto the afterlife. Blessings upon you! With that, the ghost glimmers out, leaving you alone with the undead tribe as they stagger towards you.
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Click image to download this free TTRPG battlemap of Alkali’s Ruined Temple, then keep scrolling for the detailed adventure prompt written for it.
You have been paid by some mercenaries to assist them in ousting a group of western soldiers from an ancient temple emplacement on behalf of the King of the Eastern Kingdoms. Only, when you arrive, you don’t see the armed military outpost you were expecting. Instead, you find the ruins of a temple, filled with improvised tents and dirty men, women and children.
If you talk to them, you learn that they’re not rebels, and that this place is known as Alkali’s refuge. Alkali is a cleric who started healing those of either side of the war; both western and eastern soldiers, as well as peasants. They claim it’s a neutral zone, and that their only mission is peace.
WHAT’S HAPPENING? Before this war started the Western King and the Eastern King had arranged their children to marry. But upon meeting the Western King’s son, the Eastern King decided that he was too weak and overly-sentimental to marry his daughter and called the marriage off.
Slighted, the Western King declared war. But now the Eastern King is winning, and peasants in both kingdoms are suffering. The Western Prince, abhorred by the violence and grief the war was bringing, founded this refuge; using his gifts as a cleric to heal soldiers and peasants on either side of the conflict.
The Eastern Princess, unlike her father, fell in love with the Western Prince upon meeting him, and secretly fled to the refuge to join him. Unfortunately, because of this, the Eastern King now believes that the Western King’s forces have kidnapped his daughter.
If you don’t kill the inhabitants of the refuge, the Prince and Princess will go to their parents and beg to be married, for they truly love each other. The Kings, doting on their children, will agree that the war is now needless and taking a toll on their people. As such, they will allow the marriage to go through with their blessing, returning peace to their kingdoms.
Should you choose to kill everyone in the refuge and succeed, however, Alkali will miraculously survive through making a pact on his deathbed with an evil god. He may return later as a necromancer, with his fallen love risen as a banshee.
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