1d8 Things In The Deep Places
Jenny asked me to write a table of trinkets in exchange for a tip on Ko-Fi. She left it up to me to pick a prompt, so I wrote things inspired by her game Drums In The Deep.
If you would like your own table of trinkets, drop me a tip on Ko-Fi!
- A broken skull, still attached to a gristly length of spinal column. Worms live in the eyes, and something dark and wet gleams beneath their writhing.
- Jagged shards of slate, each as long as a forearm and as wide as a blade. They have had strange symbols scraped into them, each one stained with a dark liquid that has dried into a flaking crust.
- A square wooden apothecary’s box, discarded. The lock is rusted and broken. Dusty bottles inside contain the dried remnants of unidentified potions and tinctures, long gone to ruin.
- A slim leather journal, water-logged and stained. It contains a half-drawn map that seems to resemble the tunnels you have been passing through, but with glaring differences. Notes on the page edges indicate that the cartographer had been struggling to pin down the geography of the place, whether through inexperience or for some other reason.
- A garland of flowers lying around the neck and chest of a long-dead corpse. They are somehow still in bloom, and their petals wave softly in a breeze nobody can feel.
- A small abacus wrapped in mouldering leather. The beads are made from an assortment of teeth and knuckle bones.
- The hilt of a sword, the blade broken off where it joins the cross-guard. The bearer’s hand is blackened and burned and is still wrapped around the hilt, the bones bonded permanently to the metal due to extreme heat.
- The chalk outline of a hastily-drawn protective circle, ringed with runes and sprinklings of powder. The circle has been broken by a long smear of blood that is long dry.
If you would like your own table of trinkets, drop me a tip on Ko-Fi!
Image Credit: An iron mine and miners working. Etching by J. Heath, 1813, after C.M. Metz. Credit: Wellcome Collection. Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0)