One of the weirder things to come out of AD&D was Spelljammer, Jeff Grubb’s idea of what space would look like in a universe powered by magic rather than science. I won’t get into all the details – I could go on for days about it, and you’d probably be better served by reading the Wikipedia entry on Spelljammer if you aren’t familiar with it – but trust me when I say that it was weird as hell. Oh, and fun as hell, too.

I always enjoyed the fact that so many of the ships were designed to resemble animals – particularly fish and birds. Lost Ships by Ed Greenwood has some really cool designs in it, and a lot of information that fueled many of my early D&D games. Today’s map is an homage to Spelljammer, and in particular that book.

[Click to enlarge]

The Anglership is a fighting vessel designed to play the long game. It lies in wait, its crew sustained on the supplies stored in two cargo bays, until its prey draws near. Once the lure has drawn in the fatally curious it lashes out, crippling the prey with lightning. With that done the lure can be whipped up and out of the way, both to protect the rear of the ship and to allow the jutting ‘jaws’ of the Anglership to ram their new conquest and crush any hope of escape.

Enjoyed this post? Leave a tip on Ko-Fi!

This was originally posted back in 2017, but the images were lost when I migrated sites. This re-post replaces those images, as well as correcting some typos and other issues with the post.

When I first began playing D&D in the early ’90s, I very quickly became obsessed with it. And as I got into my teens and started to have some money of my own, I of course spent a lot of said money on D&D products. One of my favourite places when I was younger was a used book shop in the local town. It was up a winding, cobbled alleyway (called The Wiend) at the end of a long row of terraced buildings, and at first glance appeared to be tiny; the door opened into a small, dark room absolutely packed to bursting with books – not just on the shelves, but spilling off them, stacked in heaps across the floor and on top of (and behind) the counter.

The shop wasn’t tiny, though. At the back of that first room, behind a bookcase that jutted out into what little space remained, was a doorway. A small passage – also lined with books – led to a staircase up to another similarly cluttered room, which itself had another staircase that led back up above the room downstairs. And once you got up there, things just got silly. The store filled the top floor of that row of shops, stretching out across all the other shops in a sequence of rooms with low ceilings, creaky floorboards, and barely any space that wasn’t filled with stacks upon stacks of books and magazines.

I spent hours upon hours of my formative years in that shop. One room in particular was almost entirely devoted to scifi and fantasy books – I discovered Terry Pratchett in that room, and Piers Anthony, and Brian Jacques, and too many other authors to list. But my favourite thing in that room was a low shelf tucked into a corner, which held binders absolutely packed to bursting with back issues of Dungeon and Dragon magazines. Every time I went to The Wiend I came home with one of those magazines – sometimes after spending hours sifting through them and picking one I liked, other times grabbing one at random.

To this day, one of my favourite issues of Dungeon is #37 (from September 1992).

As well as containing the incredible The Mud Sorcerer’s Tomb by Mike Shel – a spiritual successor to Tomb of Horrors – it contains an adventure by Chris Perkins called A Wizard’s Fate. I distinctly remember reading that adventure in the car on the way home the day I bought it, and grinning from ear to ear as I learned about the alchemist Elzid Natholin, his redemption from evil ways, and the cruel fate that fell upon him as a result of the actions of his imp familiar, Zotzpox. It’s a really fun adventure with some very memorable locations, and I thought that I’d draw one of those for today’s map.

So, here it is.

[Click to enlarge]

If you want the full details of the dungeon and the adventure as a whole, I’m afraid you’re going to have to track down a copy of Dungeon #37. It’s worth it, though.

Welcome back to Loot The Room! It’s been a while, but I’m back again with new content and a new schedule.

Each month will see me tackling a new theme, creating content that works together to enable you to run a really memorable adventure. The month is broken down into the following posts, all of which go live on Wednesdays:

• Maps, with lore and adventure hooks
• Treasure and trinkets
• Monsters and enemies
• Custom background music to use at your gaming table

In months where there are 5 Wednesdays (such as this month), I’ll either take the last week off or else revive and old post that needs some sprucing up.

This month’s theme is a horror classic – Cabin In The Woods. Today I’m bringing you maps of the home of Celli Dustgrasp, a gnomish wandmaker. Along with the maps you’re getting some adventure hooks and a small collection of trinkets. Next week sees more trinkets and some new magic items. On October 16th I’m bringing you stats for a new monster, the Stranglebloom, which has moved into Celli’s cabin. And finally, on October 23rd, you can tie it all together with some instrumental background music.

As always, Patrons of Loot The Room get early access to all the content, plus extras like black and white maps, high quality downloads of the music, and more.

Enjoy!

“She’s lived up there for years. Nobody sees her much and nobody really goes near. She messes around with some weird stuff, right? T’ain’t safe to get too close. Only reason we know she’s still alive’s that she comes to town for Maker’s Market every Autumn. Dunno what she’s into or where she learned her craft, but there’s no doubting she makes some powerful stuff. Strange, and expensive, but powerful.”

[Click on maps to embiggen]

The Wandmaker’s Cottage is the home of Celli Dustgrasp, a gnomish mage-cum-druid who specialises in crafting wands, staves, and sceptres. She settled in a cabin deep in the woods centuries ago, choosing the spot for its proximity to several rare and useful species of tree that she utilises in her wandwork. She has also spent many years earning the trust of various magical creatures who dwell in the forest, who often allow her to take things from them to build her items – unicorn hair, Ettercap web, dryad tears and leaves from their trees, and the like.

The cabin itself is unremarkable – a low, crudely-constructed shack with a sloped roof and a small second storey at the back of the building. Small windows to either side of the front door are shuttered over from inside, and there are no windows on any other wall. The clearing it sits in appears natural – there is no sign that trees or other vegetation have been cleared to make way for the building – but the ground around the cabin is well-tended. 

There is a back entrance to the cabin, but from the outside the door is almost impossible to detect. The rear wall appears to be one solid piece to those who do not search carefully for the door.

Map Key

Ground Floor

Unless otherwise noted, all flooring inside the cabin is bare wooden boards.

1 – The Garden

This small garden area is fenced off from the surrounding forest. At first glance it appears overgrown and untended, but closer inspection reveals that the tall, waving grasses and flowers have been planted in distinct rows and sections. Many of the flowers here are strange, coloured in hues that shift and change depending on the angle that you view them from, and their petals twist and pulse without any real correlation to the wind or weather.

Opening the gate or otherwise crossing the fence triggers a magical alarm that alerts Celli to the presence of intruders, though only she hears it.

A path of large stones leads from the gate to the door of the cabin. This is the only safe route across the garden. The flowers and other plants in the garden are used in Celli’s work, but they also serve as a deterrent from intruders. Characters straying from the path may suffer the following consequences (or any others of your invention):

• A large flower with purple and yellow petals releases a cloud of fine red spores into the air, putting all who inhale them to sleep.
• The formerly solid ground beneath your feet turns to marsh, and a strong force begins pulling you down into the earth.
• Previously unseen creatures emerge from the foliage. They look like classic fairies – diminutive humanoids with gossamer wings – but their teeth and nails are razor sharp. They descend on the intruders in a swarm, attempting to drive you away from the cabin.

2 – The Living Area

The interior of the cabin is humble and orderly, with no real sign that anybody unusual lives here. To the left of the front door is a small living area – a sofa and an old (but well-kept) leather armchair – both sized for a gnome – sit in front of a narrow fireplace and mantlepiece on the west wall. A worn rug covers the floor between the seats and the mantlepiece. (Curiously, there is no visible chimney.) The top of the mantle is clustered with groups of half-burned candles.

On the north wall a ladder leads to an opening in the ceiling. 

A wooden staircase surrounded by a waist-height wooden wall sits in the middle of the room and descends to a basement below.

The eastern half of the room is a dining area, with a small round table set for one and a sideboard unit on the east wall. Its cupboards and drawers hold general household items – plates, bowls, cutlery, along with cleaning supplies, bedding, and the like. The top surface of the sideboard holds personal trinkets of little real value – a portrait of a gnomish man in a well-tailored three-piece suit; a set of porcelain statuettes of small forest animals; and a silver pocket watch that is missing the hour hand.

3 – Kitchen

This small kitchen has a two-foot high worktop running down the east wall with a small sink set in the middle of it. A small firepit sits in the middle of the room – well away from the walls- with a cast-iron pot suspended above it. A large butt of water sits in the northeast corner of the room. The west and south walls are covered in hooks and shelves holding standard kitchen implements – knives, pots, pans, cutting boards, and other utensils. Nothing is mounted higher up than around 4 feet.

Bundles of herbs and vegetables hang from the ceiling, low enough for Celli to reach them. This means that characters of average human height or taller must push them aside or duck under them to move through the room.

4 – Celli’s Library

The walls in this small passageway leading up to the back door are lined with bookcases that reach to the ceiling. Each wall has a ladder mounted on casters and fixed to a bar running along the ceiling above the bookcases. The shelves are tightly packed, with books stacked two-deep in places and with books lying flat atop the other books that are placed normally on the shelves.

The vast majority of the books deal with topics like alchemy, herbology, and enchantment, as well as several volumes on ancient history of various far-flung regions of the world. They are written in a variety of languages, and most appear to have been copied in the same tightly-rendered cursive. (Celli spent a large portion of her life studying and travelling to libraries across the world, and these books are her own transcriptions of the works that she studied).

The following are a small number of notable titles that characters searching the library may discover:

• A Treatise on the Wand-lore of the Far Western Reaches by Folre Oriris. Around 300 pages, bound in deep red leather, with a gold ribbon bookmark attached to the spine.
• Tending The Groves by Nȁonnir. Bound in elder tree bark with pages made from leaves that have been pulped and turned into a crude paper, this book is written in druidic and is a journal kept by the druid Nȁonnir over some 200 years of her life.
• A Moon-Shaped Pool, author unknown. A small, slim volume bound in unremarkable brown cloth, containing music and lyrics for a selection of ancient songs. They are quite haunting if performed.

The end of the library hallway holds the back door of the cottage, which is kept locked at all times. The key is located in Celli’s bedchamber on the upper floor.

5 – Celli’s Workshop

This is the space where Celli creates her wands and sceptres. The middle of the room is dominated by a long, wide table that, unlike the other surfaces in the cabin, is of normal height for a human. A set of portable steps sits on the floor beside it, which Celli stands on to reach her work surface. The top of the table is strewn with scraps of parchment containing Celli’s sketches and notes for her current work-in-progress, strips of wood and lengths of branch that have been shaved and whittled smooth, and a set of very sharp knives of varying sizes.

In one of the corners of Celli’s worktable is a large leatherbound book that is generally left lying open to the last page Celli was reading. Like the other volumes in the cabin it is hand-written by Celli, but this is written in a code of her own devising and gives exact details about her work. This is Celli’s most valuable posession.

A large wooden crate with an open top sits beneath the table. It is filled with lengths of wood, branches, and vines, none of which have yet been treated in any way. This is Celli’s store of wandwood, and she selects pieces from it based on the requirements of whatever she is creating.

The east wall is an extension of the library in 4, with floor-to-ceiling bookcases stuffed to bursting and another ladder set to roll along them. The other walls are covered in shelving that holds numerous jars, bottles, bags, and boxes, each of them packed with specific ingredients and tools that Celli needs in her work.

Upper Floor

6 – Celli’s Bedroom

The ladder in 2 emerges into Celli’s sleeping quarters. This room is very low – around 6 feet tall in the centre, with the roof sloping down to just over 4 feet at the walls. Exposed joists run across the room from the walls, meaning characters taller than 4 feet have to crouch to move past them.

Celli’s small bed sits in the northeast corner of the room. A small chest at its foot holds spare bedding – a couple of extra pillows, a few worn old blankets, fresh sheets, and a thick duvet. There is a small wardrobe and chest of drawers against the west wall, containing Celli’s day-to-day clothes and a few thick cloaks and coats for travelling.

A bedside table holds a candle, another portrait of the same man pictured on the sideboard in 2, and a slim leatherbound journal that Celli writes in before bed. This is written in a code of her own devising, and contains both details of the minutiae of her day, her hopes, dreams, and worries, and thoughts on her works in progress. The latter are generally transcribed in more detail into the larger volume that can be found in 5.

The Basement

7 – Main Cellar

The cellar of Celli’s cabin is very low – the ceiling is barely higher than 5 feet. This larger main chamber is where Celli stores her food, along with supplies for her work that she can’t fit in her workshop. The floor is cluttered with crates and barrels packed with food, water, wine, brandy, and – of course – plenty of wood. Nothing is labelled and there seems to be no method to how it is organised. Celli has been on her own long enough that she simply knows where everything is.

8 – Wand Storage

The room as the back of the cellar is where Celli stores her creations, whether that is for her own personal use or else in preparation for the Marker’s Market in town each Autumn. In contrast to the clutter and seeming chaos of the main cellar, this room is neat and orderly. Racks and stands holding larger staves and sceptres line the walls, while the middle of the room holds a set of free-standing drawers that each contain an individual wand or rod. 

There is no door on this room, but it is not unprotected. The open doorway is magically guarded. Anybody other than Celli who crosses the threshold must succeed on a Wisdom Saving Throw (with a DC appropriate to the level of your characters) or else be Stunned.

As with the main cellar, nothing in here is labelled. It is left to the GM to decide what properties the items in this room contain, though physical descriptions of some of Celli’s creations follow (with more specific details to come in this month’s Treasure and Trinkets post on Wednesday 10th October).

Investigators might find the following items here:

• A five-foot stave made from three lengths of different woods – ash, elder, and rowan. The ends of each length twist into one another, creating an almost seamless transition between materials. A fist-sized ball of amber is set in the head of the stave, which is the ash end.
• A short, fat wand, barely five inches in length. It is made of a dark, almost black wood and is uniformly thick with no taper at either end. One half is knurled in a diamond pattern to improve grip. The other half is perfectly smooth. A small gold disc is set into the smooth end like a cap.
• A two-foot long twisted glass rod. The glass appears to be naturally formed, the result of lightning striking sand. There is no obvious place to hold it. Strands of some gossamer blue substance are streaked through the inside of the glass.

Adventure Hooks

Characters need a reason to visit Celli’s cabin. If you cannot find a use for the wandmaker and her home yourself, you might use one of the following adventure hooks.

• The Maker’s Market has come to town but Celli has not arrived with it. Locals want to go and check that she isn’t hurt or in trouble, but the creatures who inhabit the forest near her home are not friendly to intruders. They offer the party a reward for their assistance.
• A mage has come to town seeking Celli, and he is not happy. He bought one of her wands several years ago and it has begun to malfunction, injuring him gravely. He went to her cottage to confront her about it, but when he returned he was bloody, ashen-faced, and refused to speak to anybody. He has been holed up in the inn for the past week, and nobody knows what happened. The party are approached to find out what is going on, and to determine whether Celli is unharmed.
• During one of their adventures the party encounters another band of adventurers in dire straits. Mortally wounded, the would-be heroes are no longer able to continue their quest. They tell the party that they had been employed by Celli to obtain the horn of a powerful demon, and that they were on the way to deliver it to her when they met their fate. They ask the party to transport it to the gnome, with a warning that the demon may well be coming to take it back.
• The party have come into possession of a letter written by a wizened old gnome on his deathbed. He asks that they deliver it to Celli, who he says was once his wife. The letter speaks of his enduring love for her, and his regret they that parted ways on such harsh terms.

Download the maps below! If you liked this post, drop me a tip on Ko-Fi.

April’s Best of DMs Guild post never materialised. At the moment I’m still reading material for it, and I may simply roll it into the end of May roundup and do one bumper post then with two months’ worth of content.

For now, here’s the map that was meant to appear during Book Week!

[Click to embiggen]

The Octal Stacks is a large library that contains an enormous collection of tomes on all kinds of niche and esoteric subjects. The wide foyer – dominated by a large brass desk manned at all times by a pair of the Stacks’ librarians – gives way to a series of rooms holding towering shelves packed with books of all shapes, sizes, and contents. There is only one floor (aside from the basement), but the roof rises 30 feet above the ground and the stacks rise right to the top of each room.

The west basement holds a small shrine to the Goddess of Knowledge, and a double-locked room containing the Octal’s private collections – rare, powerful, or dangerous works and artifacts that are kept locked away from the general public. The east basement also contains the only entrance to the southern reading room, which is reserved for VIPs and which contains some of the more unusual and valuable works in the library (though nothing like the treasures to be found in the private collections). The southern reading room also holds a pair of sturdy display cases on the northern and southern walls that hold a collection of unusual (and, in many cases, magical) trinkets, ornaments, and items of historical note.

The eastern basement is a storage room, holding yet more books that are yet to be catalogued, sorted, and shelved, along with various crates and packages containing new acquisitions.

[No lables – click to embiggen]

Long time readers of Loot The Room might remember this post from February last year. I posted a small set of hexagonal geomorphs that I’d begun working on, and promised more soon.

Well, soon didn’t happen as soon as I would have liked, but I finally got there. I’m happy to announce that I’ve just released my first set of hexagonal geomorphs on DriveThruRPG. They’re available for $4.95, and you can use them to create tons of dungeons like the map I’m giving you today.

[Click to embiggen]

[The benefit of making these tiles myself is I can hide all the orphan corridors once the tiles are combined. Also, this embiggens.]

The first set of Geomorphs contains 6 hexagonal geomorph tiles, plus an Entrance tile and a Final Chamber tile. All of them are printable with a 1 inch grid, as well as being provided in gridded and gridless forms for VTT use. Oh, and you get a blank hex template so you can draw your own ‘morphs that work with mine.

Grab Geomorphs: Caverns & Caves 1 from DTRPG here.

I’d love to hear what you think of these, so let me know in the comments!

Last time I said that this post would arrive on Thursday, but as with most projects I take on it ended up taking a little longer to complete than I had expected. Still, we’re here now and that’s all that matters!

Today I want to return to Shadepoint with a short encounter set in Ravenwall Village. This encounter is provided here for free thanks to the generosity of my supporters on Patreon.

If you would prefer to have this encounter as a PDF – or if you want the map without any text or logos on it – you can grab it from itch.io for $1.

Terror At Tightwillow Pond

A Shadepoint encounter for 6th level heroes

[click to embiggen]

“Tightwillow’s always been dodgy. The spicers and tar-eaters moved in there years ago, camped up on the island burning tar and doing gods know what. Nobody with half a brain goes there any more.

“It’s changing, though. Every day it gets worse, and even the spicers are avoiding it. They say there’s something evil on the shores of the pond, something twisted and vindictive that hunts in that little scrap of wasteland. Sounds like the ravings of people too stoned to know what day it is to me, but I still say you’d do well to stay away from that shithole.”

Using This Encounter

Terror At TIghtwillow Pond is not a complete adventure, and is not intended to provide you with a full session of play. Instead it serves as a single encounter that you can drop into your games. A number of hooks are provided for getting the players to Tightwillow, and some of the items found in the area may guide the party towards future adventures.

Tightwillow is designed primarily for use with the free supplement Cities: Shadepoint, and is located in the area of that city known as Ravenwall Village. If you aren’t using Shadepoint, you can place the pond in a public park or green space in whichever setting you prefer to use.

Background

Tightwillow Pond is all that remains of a public works project that aimed to build public parks within the city. The project was short-lived, shut down when the Treasurer at the time objected to spending money in the most deprived areas of the city rather than areas that he deemed to be more worthy of attention. Tightwillow is filled with brackish water, and this small green space is surrounded by collapsed buildings and grimy streets.

Tightwillow has long been a congregating point for the growing homeless population in the city. The large central island on the pond used to house a sizeable tent village, and was plagued by violence and drug abuse. Recently, though, more dead bodies have begun appearing on the shores of the pond, and many of the people who used to live on the island have sought out new pastures within the city. Those who have fled tell of a curse that has settled on Tightwillow, turning the trees themselves against any who dare to set foot near the pond.

In reality there is no curse. A mandragorgon has chosen the pond as its new hunting ground, and is making short work of the prey it finds there. Soon that prey will dry up, and the mandragorgon will seek fresh meat in the city itself.

Adventure Hooks

• The PCs camp up beside the pond for the night, unable to find accommodations elsewhere in the city. Sensing new prey, the mandragorgon puts in an appearance.
• The deaths of drug addicts and homeless people have gone unnoticed for weeks, but the recent discovery of the body of a local business owner on the shores of Tightwillow has kicked the city guard into action. The guard aren’t generally welcome in Ravenwall Village, so the party are hired to investigate and bring the killer to justice.
• The waters of Tightwillow Pond are rancid, but a small shrine on the northern side of the pond holds a fountain containing waters with potent healing properties. The party are recruited by the mother of a terminally ill young girl, who offers them a family heirloom (an amulent of second chances) in exchange for them braving the dangers of Tightwillow to bring her a vial of the fountain’s water.

Tightwillow Pond

The ambient noise of the city fades away as you step beneath the trees surrounding Tightwillow Pond. The air is uncomfortably warm and still, disturbed only by the buzz of mosquitos and the occasional distant hoot of an unseen owl. You can already smell the stagnant water, sour and salty and not at all pleasant. Now that you are here it is easy to see why people might claim the place is cursed.

1 – The Shrine

Two broken statues of white onyx are nestled beneath the trees in this small clearing. One appears the be the head of a raven, while the other has been so badly damaged that it is impossible to tell what it might once have been. A wide, shallow onyx bowl about two feet in diameter is embedded in a low plinth between the statues, though any liquid it may have once held has long since dried up.

The bowl in the ground is what locals refer to as “the fountain”, though it contains no water. A successful DC 16 Intelligence (Investigation) check reveals that the bowl is coated with a fine crystalline powder that can be collected into a vial or pouch of some kind, providing enough dust of restoration for one use.

2 – The Island

If the area around the pond felt lifeless, this island feels drained of life. The ground here is broken and uneven, full of loose rocks and exposed roots. The foliage is limp and browning, and the leaves on the trees that loom over you are spotted with disease. All around you are signs of recent human habitation; tattered tents and blankets, cold campfires, broken glass, scraps of rotting food, and even excrement litter the area.

This island was, until recently, the site of the encampment that made Tightwillow Pond such an unsavoury area. This is where the mandragorgon has been doing the majority of its hunting, and is where the creature is most likely to be encountered by the party.

Two wooden bridges stretch from the north and south shores of the pond to the island. They have no handrails or ropes, and their boards are broken and rotting.

Tightwillow Island Finds & Trinkets

1. A small leather satchel containing a broken piece of mirror, a razorblade, and a small paper wrap with a pinch of coarse red powder inside.
2. A long-cold campfire with a rusted metal tin thrust into the ashes. The thick brown sludge in the bottom of the tin was food, once.
3. A ragged stuffed bear with one eye. A tear on its leg has stuffing spilling out of it, and investigating closer reveals a single electrum piece shoved into the lining.
4. The body of a halfling boy who appears to have died fairly recently. His upper body is coated with a thick yellow powder that is clogging his eyes and nose. The powder appears natural in origin, possibly coming from a plant of some kind.
5. A small bundle of twigs and reeds that has been formed into a roughly humanoid shape. A slip of parchment is pinned to the front of its head with large thorns. It has a smiling face drawn on it in charcoal.
6. A small wooden bucket filled to the brim with chestnuts. Those at the bottom are crushed and beginning to rot, but those nearer the top still seem fine.

3 – The Boathouse

This long shed is only walled on three sides. The fourth side is open to the pond, and two wooden jetties extend out onto the water. A small rowboat is moored inside the boathouse, though it is partially sunk and has a number of holes in the hull.

4 – The Gazebo

The gazebo that stands on this large flat rock has seen better days. The white paint has flaked away in large strips, revealing the dark swollen wood beneath. Two benches sit beneath the canopy. A man in a long, moth-eaten coat is be slumped over one of them, though he is not moving.

The man is very dead. His head has been torn from his body, and close inspection reveals that it appears to have been twisted off. His upper torso is covered in a fine purple powder. This powder came from the mandragorgon’s paralysis ability, though it has no effect on characters who simply touch it.

Characters who search the man’s body find a pouch containing 8 copper pieces, a small piece of soapstone shaped like a raven’s head, and a note written in common from a person named Efril asking someone to meet them at the gazebo at sunrise.

Any characters who touch the man’s body must succeed on a DC 15 Constitution saving throw against disease or become poisoned until the disease is cured. Every 24 hours that elapse, the creature must repeat the saving throw, reducing its hit point maximum by 5 (1d10) on a failure. The disease is cured on a success. The creature dies if the disease reduces its hit point maximum to 0. This reduction to the target’s hit point maximum lasts until the disease is cured.

New Magic Items

Amulet of Second Chances

Wondrous item, uncommon (requires attunement)

While attuned to this item you may choose to reroll a saving throw, keeping the higher result. You may choose to use this ability after you roll, but before the result is known. Once used, this item cannot be used again until you complete a long rest.

Dust of Restoration

Wondrous item, rare

This fine powder shimmers like oil on water. You can use an action to sprinkle the dust on a creature. The affected creature then gains the effect of the greater restoration spell.

New Monster – Mandragorgon

A mandragorgon is an evil, ambulatory plant creature. It looks like a humanoid creature that stands some 10 feet tall, with a thick central trunk and branch-like limbs. The lower half is a dense, tangled root system that extends beneath the earth. Its ‘face’ is a flat oval of bark; some have eye-like markings, though many are featureless.

The Blights of Spring. A mandragorgon’s head is crowned with a large frond of leaves that unfurl to reveal several large flowers. Each of these is capable of releasing a thick cloud of pollen that engulfed nearby creatures. The pollen of each individual flower has a unique – though equally horrible – effect. These flowers can be severed and rendered useless, but doing so is rarely easy.

Aberrant Flora. Little is known about the origins of the mandragorgons, but it is believed that they are the result of strange, twisted magics from the twisted places far beyond the Material Plane that have mingled with the essence of the fae realms. They are rarely encountered on the Material Plane, though they have been known to appear there.

[Click to embiggen]

Happy new year! It’s January 1st, and that means Loot The Room’s new schedule is kicking into gear. Welcome to the relaunch, and 2018’s first post.

Back in November I posted some books and their contents. One of those books was A Bestiary of The Blasted Lands. I liked the names of some of those monsters enough that I wanted to stat them up – but first, I wanted to know more about the place they inhabited. Welcome to the Blasted Lands.

(If you’d prefer, you can download this post as a PDF here.)

Inside the Blasted Lands

The Blasted Lands are a lightly-detailed sandbox area designed to be dropped into your tabletop roleplaying game of choice. Although it is designed with 5th edition in mind, there is no crunch here (although a future post will detail some of the monsters of the Blasted Lands, with appropriate stats).

What Is Known

The Blasted Lands is known to the outside world through stories and myths, and the (probably exaggerated) tales of those few adventurers who have ventured into the lands and returned to tell the tale. Most people know only a few solid facts about the place: that it is bordered by an enormous steel wall, and that the lands beyond that wall are tainted by the weird touch of the fey.

The Blasted Lands were once a dense, primeval forest. Some six centuries ago a great war was fought within the woodlands there – a war between the elves who made that forest their home, and an invading fey army. The war raged for decades, and the great magics summoned during the fighting tore a rift between the Prime Material Plane and the Feywild. The blast of arcane force that this produced scorched the land, transforming it from verdant forest to a harsh, blasted wasteland filled with weird, fey-twisted creatures and strange geography.

The wall was constructed half a millennium ago, a great expanse of steel a hundred feet high that runs along the outer edge of the Blasted Lands. The wall has not been particularly well maintained; it is coated in a patina of rust, and has begun to be reclaimed by nature. There are no gates or passages through the wall, and despite the neglect it has suffered there are not yet any known openings in it. But it is a wall, and no matter how tall it is, it can always be bypassed by a taller ladder.

Once over the wall there is a short transition from grassy scrubland that butts up against the base of the wall to the Blasted Lands proper, which is a barren desert of rock and not much else. Tall, jagged mountains ring the land to the west, giving way to flat plateaus of onyx that loom over the rocky desert – the Onyx Steppes. Strange, twisted plants that resemble shimmering crystalline structures dot the desert itself, along with the occasional grove of skeletal trees that have been transformed into obsidian sculptures.

The area is usually still and silent, and time seems to stand still. Day and night do not occur naturally in the Blasted Lands; it is always noon, the sun always directly overhead. Night falls in small localised patches, seemingly at random; the sun vanishes from the sky like a torch being extinguished, and the temperature plummets to far below the freezing point of water in a matter of seconds. These patches of night can be seen from outside, appearing as dark blotches on the horizon.

Navigating the Blasted Lands

The map is presented as a hex map, comprised of 1 mile hexes. Since there is no overall campaign or adventure arc presented here, you should feel free to use the map and locations as you see fit. The keyed locations described below are the most immediately obvious (or well-known) to those traversing the Blasted Lands, but there is undoubtedly plenty more to be found out in the wilderness.

Locations of Note

Amethyst Hills

Just beyond the Onyx Steppes lie the Amethyst Hills, an expanse of rolling foothills that have somehow been transformed into huge clusters of amethyst. Their glittering purple glow acts as a beacon on the horizon for travellers crossing the wastelands to the north. These hills, and the jagged peaks of the mountains to the west (which are also formed of huge outcroppings of amethyst) are the source of the River of Dust.

Dusklake

As the land dips down from the foothills of the Amethyst Hills, it forms itself into a miles-wide valley where the ‘waters’ of the River of Dust feed into this wide lake, before continuing on to the Everbright Gorge and the Shadowfall.

The dusklake is just shy of half a mile deep at its centre. Its waters are dark and murky, comprised of the same shadow waters as the River of Dust. The surface is covered in a thick layer of ash that coats the skin of anybody foolish enough to venture into the water.

 

Shadow Waters

The River of Dust and the Dusklake do not contain water. Instead, their substance is composed of shadows that have been given physical form. They flow like water but have the texture of very fine sand – a texture which is experienced in the brain but that seems to bypass the skin entirely. Nobody is sure of the exact origin of the shadow water, but the consensus is that there can be no shadow without the existence of something to cast the shadow. Some believe the waters are the shadow of an ancient elder god, and that the waters provide a means of communicating with this entity. Being in contact with the waters results in negative side effects that grow worse over time. The table that follows gives the effects of being in the shadow water. Whether these effects are reversible is left to the GM’s discretion. Time Submerged Effect 1 minute Your skin takes on a grey pallor, and all food tastes like ash. 2 minutes You become sensitive to sunlight, though your ability to see in the dark is heightened. 3 minutes You heal less effectively than normal, recovering only half your normal amount of health when resting. 4 minutes You become resistant to the effects of magical healing. 5 minutes Your physical form begins to unravel, as your body begins to transform itself into shadow.

Everbright Gorge

Carving a jagged line across the wasteland, the Everbright Gorge is a mile-wide canyon some 800 feet deep. It is so named because night never falls at any point in the gorge; indeed, no shadows are cast in the gorge at all. It is believed that they are drawn towards the darkness of the shadowfall and somehow consumed by it.

Lantern Dunes

The lantern dunes are an expanse of deep, shifting sands that cover the northeast of the Blasted Lands. Some explorers have reported sighting lanterns drifting unaided among the dunes. They seemed to be somewhat intelligent, reacting to the presence of travellers and attempting to lure them off-course into the sand. It is not known whether these are a natural phenomenon or some kind of fey creature (or, as some suspect, a form of will o wisp). Whatever they are, the dunes are named after them.

The lantern dunes are also home to the dangerous entities known as Living Dunes, enormous predators that live among the sands and hunt anything with a pulse and meat on its bones.

Onyx Steppes

Remnants of the magical blasts that broke the land, the Onyx Steppes are huge ledges of solid stone jutting up out of the foothills of the mountains to the west of them. At their highest the cliffs are around 300 feet tall. The steppes are the nesting grounds of vulgores, the strange horned birds that drift over the desert in search of carrion.

River of Dust

Stretching from the Amethyst Hills to the Everbright Gorge by way of the Dusklake, the River of Dust is a waterway of liquid shadow. Nothing lives in it, and nothing grows along its banks. Those who spend time near the river begin to hear whispered voices emanating from its depths, chattering nonsense in a multitude of languages.

The Shadowfall

At the eastern end of the river of dust is the Shadowfall, an 800 foot tall ‘waterfall’ that crashes into the Everbright Gorge. The shadowfall is the only portion of darkness inside the gorge. Where it meets the ground of the gorge, a small pool of shadow slowly dissipates into nothingness as it is extinguished by the eternal brightness of the gorge.

Hazards & Encounters

The following are some examples of the kinds of encounters adventurers might come across in the Blasted Lands. This is by no means an exhaustive list; the Blasted Lands are a weird place imbued with fey magic, and there are all sorts of strange and dangerous things to be discovered here.

• Deep in the central wastelands, where magic is at its most frayed, some adventurers have reported witnessing the sand forming itself into crude copies of them and their groups and attacking with brutal ferocity. These creatures – if they are creatures – have become known as doppelsanders.
• A broken road stretches out into the dunes for miles, straight as an arrow and lined with tattered banners that flap in an unseen breeze. Then, as suddenly as it started, the road vanishes beneath the sand again.
• The flowering oasis is the first waypoint for anybody hoping to cross the Blasted Lands – a pool of pure, clear water ringed by lush vegetation that (usually) follows a normal day-night cycle. It’s the perfect place to rest up and prepare for the next leg of your journey. First, though, you have to convince the cactus-folk who control the area to let you in, and their price is always high.
• Crossing the Onyx Steppes is fraught with danger – not least because of the pools of shadowsand that dot the area. Indistinguishable from the black onyx ground, these patches of shadow water have drowned many an unwary adventurer.

Download this post as a PDF.

Credits

Special thanks to JP Bradley, Alex Clippinger, Matt Sanders, and all my patrons.

Compass rose by Deven Rue.