They say this is where it all began. The birthplace of objectivity, situated on the liminal borders of the fae wilds. We're still not sure how much of it is land and how much of it is metaphor.
The Book of Knowing sits open upon the pulpit. More than half the pages are blank, but as you turn to the last paragraph, you see ink manifesting on the page, describing your discovery of the book.
Iāve had these maps sitting around for a while! Plus, a loading screen. I use the same template for every loading screen, but I customize the text and upper-right image to pertain to the location the party is traveling through. Iāve started creating more and more visual and audio assets for my sessions, and Iām really getting the hang of it.
Sorry for how infrequent updates have been! Iām juggling college on top of two jobs AND still setting aside personal free time. Iāve got a lot of material to post though, as weāre nearing the 21st session of the campaign.
Iām also prepping for a Spooky Halloween Special Episode that my players requested. Itāll be space horror themed with the 5e system and Iām really looking forward to the challenge of running a horror session for the first time.
At some point, it became tradition for wizards to turn their towers into themed puzzle dungeons. Synia is a master alchemist, so of course her tower is potion-themed. On each floor, you get a wide array of Modifier Potions and Object Potions. You can combine a Modifier with an Object and use that to solve the puzzles. Or you can just chuck a potion of Explode Bees and see what happens.
Iām very proud of this particular dungeon. The space below each map is where I put all the potion tokens in roll20. Each potion can only be used once, so players will have to get more creative as they progress up the tower. More detailed descriptions of each floor under the cut:
This room is simple. There are tables all around the perimeter of the room, each displaying several colorful potions. At the far end of the room is a decrepit, rotting staircase leading up to the next floor. The staircase basically has two sections that are completely missing.
Floor 2: The Panopticon
This room is massive, so massive in fact that it couldnāt possibly fit in the tower without some spatial magic shenanigans. At the center of the room stands a 90-foot-tall pedestal, atop which a big glowing blue eyeball hovers, overlooking the whole chamber. Encircling the pedestal are eight 50-foot-tall statues. The party can take cover behind these to avoid getting blasted by the eyeās laser blast, which targets the party as soon as theyāre in the room (theyāre on the north side of the room when they arrive), prompting a Dex save. To their right is a treasure chest surrounded by shards of broken glass. To their left is the staircase leading to the next floor. On the far end of the room is a platform with a lever on top. If the lever is pulled, the cage above the eye drops, preventing the eye from blasting the party.
Thereās one more catch. Any time the party makes an unstealthy sound, such as a footstep, color-changing lights ripple out across the floor and walls from the point where the noise originated. The eye uses this to āhearā the players and determine their location. Each statue has 50 hp, and the eyeās laser blast deals 10d6 fire damage on a failed Dex save (statues of course autofail Dex saves).
Floor 3: Pterylaās Mourning
This floor resembles an old, withered garden. Itās all brown and dead, with clusters of thorny brown roots at various points. At the center of the garden stands a fountain with a sad angel statue in the middle, the tiniest trickle of water dripping from its eyes. The fountain is dried up, and a plaque on the front of the fountain identifies the angel as Pteryla, who is mourning because the garden is dead. The party must find a way to revive the garden. (A quick Investigation check reveals another Plants potion, and possibly an Evoke potion, if the party gets stuck here.) Ironically, using an Increase Plants potion (or the Plant Growth spell) actually feeds the thorny root growths, which suck up all the energy and grow even larger and begin thrashing about, requiring nearby party members to make Dex saves to avoid taking slashing/piercing damage. Killing the thorny growths must come first. The best solution is to burn everything and then use the plant growth stuff.
When the garden is revived, Pterylaās tears flow more freely, only now they are tears of joy, and the fountain fills with water and returns to its functional state once more. A tree behind the fountain then grows from the soil and forms an arboreal staircase to the next floor.
Floor 4: The Clockwork Room
This room is very tall and has a ton of gears and some ladders and metal struts protruding from the walls. At the center of the floor is a big glowing blue rune that casts Counterspell anytime someone casts a spell. At the center of the ceiling, about 120ft above the blue rune, is a small yellow rune.
This challenge is more player-vs-player, as whoever reaches the top and touches the yellow rune first gets gold as a reward. And once the yellow rune is touched, the blue rune conjures a translucent blue magical staircase that goes all the way up to the top and into the next floor.
Floor 5: The Sundial
A half-sundial, half-clock apparatus ticks away on the stained glass floor of the room. The walls display illusory grass and trees and clouds, as though the party were standing in the middle of a grassland. It appears to be autumn, with brown and red and yellow leaves falling from the branches of the trees. The display is on a 24-hour loop, where all the leaves have fallen at 11:59:59, and all the leaves are on the trees at 00:00:01. The large hands of the clock can be pushed manually to accelerate or reverse the time displayed in the room. When they let go of the hands, the hands glow blue for a moment, and then resume ticking.
There is a plaque that reads:
If the sun turned āround
And sunk into the earth,
If the autumn leaves rose
And clothed the naked forest,
Natureās laws would be rewritten,
But my Spell would remain unchanged.
If the players get stuck, a good hint would be that the word āspellā doesnāt mean what they think it means. The solution to the riddle is ānoon,ā an anagram whose Spelling remains unchanged even if you read it backwards. If the players move the clock hands to noon and then let go, allowing the hands to glow for a moment, this unlocks the final staircase to the top of the tower, where Synia awaits.
Side note: When they first entered this room, I had a combat encounter set up here before they got to the puzzle, because I wanted to see how they would use the potions in a fight. They used Rend Eyes which was absolutely horrific. We loved it.
The wind whistles through the cracks in the windows. The dishes arranged on the tables, the clothes neatly arranged in the closets, and the books lain half-open on well-made beds suggest that whatever caused the townās inhabitants to disappear, it came without force or warning. They just...left.
So Governor Androniki is definitely hiding the stolen medicine in the abandoned windmill. Weāre all agreed on that. But none of us can figure out how to open the hatch at the bottom. So what Iām suggesting -- and go with me here -- is we just burn the whole thing down and leave.
The windmill puzzle is, you open the secret hatch at the bottom by unlocking the sails, and then getting creative to make the sails spin on a windless day. Iām actually very pleased with that puzzle, even if I wish Iād had more time to work on the map. Itās simple and fun and thereās a billion possible solutions.
āThese waters are my domain,ā says the giant, her glowing white gaze boring into you. āYou should not be here.ā She reaches down, her massive knuckles mere inches above the bowsprit, and turns her blueish palm up to you expectantly. āYour memories, of what youāve seen here. Give them to me.ā You can tell by the look on her face that she probably wouldnāt receive objections well.
I threw these together in about 30 minutes today on Inkarnate, nothing too fancy. Party got to fight their mirror-selves in a raging maelstrom, tricked the god of the sea (and of forgetting), met a traveling merchant with bizarre magic items, and they had a muffin fight. All in all, a super fun night.
The whole building shudders, and you hear a loud crash, followed by a hissing noise, and you look down to see lava rapidly spreading across the floor, engulfing some structures, knocking over others, and setting ablaze others still. You feel the heat rushing up to greet you, and you wince as the sulfuric scent hits your nostrils. You glance over at the exit at the far end of the room, and then down at the molten rock, and then at each other, and think...This is it. This is what you trained for, back when you were just toddlers. The floor is lava.
This is the challenge I was looking forward from the moment the party set foot on a volcanic island. Iāve been trying to get more whimsical with my dungeon challenge designs, and this one was super fun. Incidentally, one of my players informed me that thereās apparently a game show about this, so I gotta watch that sometime.
Anyway the challenge is pretty simple. They gotta get from the bottom-left building all the way to the stairs up at the top. If someone fails a roll jumping from one place to the next, they take 1d6 fire damage. If they fail by 6 or more, they take 2d6. Over time, some structures become unstable and the DC increases.
My players had a lot of really creative ideas, including shooting ice arrows at the lava to create a temporarily safe place to land, and using the crane to help swing everyone to safety. The wizard cast Enlarge on the stone hand statue to shorten some of the distance, and then they realized at the very end they could just conjure little platforms and walk across. I let āem roll Arcana for that one. They critted, of course. It was dope.
You come upon a wide stretch of road with rotting wooden carts and broken barrels and crates sitting at the foot of the stalls and buildings that flank the street. The air is thick with the smell of dust and sulfur, and visible particles of dust drift lazily through the halo of your torchlight. An old clock, still ticking, stand about twelve feet high on its single leg of steel, its hands busy, its face overlooking the area. This, you surmise, is the old marketplace.
What if Pompeii, but you could walk around in it, and also thereās a portal to hell down there? Thereās so much to talk about from last session, but suffice to say, I gave my players a really fun minigame of The Floor Is Lava, after which they immediately proceeded to dunk my Really Cool Big Boss into the fucking garbage can. I have never seen so many crit successes in a single encounter. Wasnāt what I was going for, but the dice had spoken, and more importantly, my players felt super accomplished. Kinda makes up for the near-TPK from last weekās encounter.
Anyway, Inkarnate rolled out these battlemap-assets recently for beta testing, so I gave āem a shot with this dungeon, and honestly? I really liked the result. Itās slowly becoming my favorite map-making program.
The channels were a great idea, donāt get me wrong. Keeps the lava from spilling onto the streets. But at some point theyāre gonna overflow, right? Like surely this canāt be a permanent solution.
So this was the town map for this last weekās session. The island of Rakau actually has three major cities, each built around one of the three volcanoes that form Rakau. Thereās also a preserved city just below this one, but thereās monster crawling around down there. Up top all you gotta worry about is the volcano. Also I tried putting the labels below objects, as if they were part of the street, and the effect isā¦ decent.
The channels were a great idea, donāt get me wrong. Keeps the lava from spilling onto the streets. But at some point theyāre gonna overflow, right? Like surely this canāt be a permanent solution.
So this was the town map for this last weekās session. The island of Rakau actually has three major cities, each built around one of the three volcanoes that form Rakau. Thereās also a preserved city just below this one, but thereās monster crawling around down there. Up top all you gotta worry about is the volcano. Also I tried putting the labels below objects, as if they were part of the street, and the effect is... decent.
Itās only fair to warn you, itās about to get rowdy, thanks to those three mercenaries there. Why? Because something of theirs was stolen. What was stolen? Why, these fine bracers Iām wearing...Up here. On the balcony. Pleasure to meet yāall. Nameās Jessop.
We lost a player for the foreseeable future, so we took in another, and heās a telepathic halfling rogue, so earlier today we came up with a fun way to introduce him -- having him steal from a powerful NPC and ask the party to back him up. This map came out a little empty, on account of me losing the original an hour before the session and having to start over with much less time, but once youāre in an intense scene, the details arenāt too important.
The Genua Tribeās greatest strength has always been shelter. When the Auwhulii Tribe fell to the colonists, Genua took them in as though theyād already planned for that. In fact, they probably had. Come to think of it, maybe their greatest strength is paranoia.
My players made some unexpected choices and now theyāve ended up in a town that I described as āvery largeā and āsure to contain all the things you said you hoped the next town would have.ā I said this like some sort of fool, or court jester. So today I spent all my free time making four maps of the very large town.
Itās run by orcs, and it has absorbed multiple tribes over the course of the past century. A lot of the names are in orcish, specifically my homebrew orcish language, which is still a work in progress. I really love making language a significant feature of my campaigns.
A little port with a big history. Of colonialism, mostly. None of the buildings here are older than 120 years, because when the Sanctus Empire came, they burned everything to the ground and built their homes on the ashes.
Recently started a new dnd campaign with complete strangers who pay me. This is their starting town, both day and night versions! Itās not much, but weāre still finding our sea legs, so to speak. I love the art style of Inkarnate, so Iām probably going to keep using it for town/city maps.
Homebrew graviturgy spells! My warforged wizard has a vested interest in learning how to pull at the fabric of space, so I made some spells to fit his purposes. Heāll never be able to learn 9th level spells, but I figured while I was already making gravity spells, I might as well have a little fun with it.
stormborns
areudirty
izzy806