#iccara

[orcartographer]

Powehii Streets

Been a while since I posted a map. Here's a recent one for an underground city.

[orcartographer]

Seremet

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 town’s inhabitants to disappear, it came without force or warning. They just...left.

[orcartographer]

Church of Ragvul

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.

I’ve 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. I’ve started creating more and more visual and audio assets for my sessions, and I’m really getting the hang of it.

[orcartographer]

Synia’s Tower

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.

I’m 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 couldn’t 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 eye’s laser blast, which targets the party as soon as they’re in the room (they’re 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.

There’s 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 “hear” the players and determine their location. Each statue has 50 hp, and the eye’s laser blast deals 10d6 fire damage on a failed Dex save (statues of course autofail Dex saves).

Floor 3: Pteryla’s Mourning

This floor resembles an old, withered garden. It’s 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, Pteryla’s 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 ‘round And sunk into the earth, If the autumn leaves rose And clothed the naked forest, Nature’s laws would be rewritten, But my Spell would remain unchanged.

If the players get stuck, a good hint would be that the word “spell” doesn’t mean what they think it means. The solution to the riddle is “noon,” 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.

[orcartographer]

Abandoned Windmill

So Governor Androniki is definitely hiding the stolen medicine in the abandoned windmill. We’re all agreed on that. But none of us can figure out how to open the hatch at the bottom. So what I’m 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. I’m actually very pleased with that puzzle, even if I wish I’d had more time to work on the map. It’s simple and fun and there’s a billion possible solutions.

[orcartographer]

Powehii, the City Below

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 there’s a portal to hell down there? There’s 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. Wasn’t 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 week’s encounter.

Anyway, Inkarnate rolled out these battlemap-assets recently for beta testing, so I gave ‘em a shot with this dungeon, and honestly? I really liked the result. It’s slowly becoming my favorite map-making program.

[aravhy]

Ayeem Astray for @iccara​! A wandering Xaela who has chosen to pursue the art of healing.

A companion piece to match the art I did for Brenna.

Happy birthday, Tara!

[orcartographer]

The Forgotten Sea

“These waters are my domain,” says the giant, her glowing white gaze boring into you. “You should not be here.” She reaches down, her massive knuckles mere inches above the bowsprit, and turns her blueish palm up to you expectantly. “Your memories, of what you’ve seen here. Give them to me.” You can tell by the look on her face that she probably wouldn’t 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.