More encounters from the City of Spires: the uplands

Second in a series of three 1d10 encounter tables, one for each of the three biomes that my PCs have been most active in recently. This post covers the uplands. Feel free to roll on them next time you need to stock a random hex!

1: Wooded hills dotted with overgrown ruins. There are many springs and streams, here, but not all are safe to drink from: some ancient catastrophe seems to have poisoned many of the aquifers, and the area is shunned by travellers, who fear that drinking from the wrong stream could spell their death. These lands are inhabited by clans of hidden folk, who live in concealed settlements deep in the forests, and keep watch on outsiders from afar. They are the only ones who know where to find the ruined, poisoned cities that their ancestors once fled from, and of which they consider themselves the ancestral guardians. Today these ruins are roamed by ex-human monsters over whom the clans maintain a sorrowful watch, believing them to be all that remains of those who did not flee quickly enough when disaster came.

2: Uplands inhabited by furry, bestial abhumans, who roam the vallies by day and creep back to their lairs by night. They have learned how to make crude gunpowder using the nitrate pools in the foothills: it's vile stuff, coarse and smoky and impure, but the abhumans love their bombs and blunderbusses and use them fearlessly despite their tendency to explode in the faces of their wielders. By these means they carry on an ancestral feud with the human mountain clans (see 3), killing them when they can and nailing their turbans to the walls of their hillforts as trophies. Though brave in battle, they live in fear of the cruel ghosts said to haunt the mountains, who carry their victims off into the heights and leave them to perish in the snows. Their king dwells in a ruined clifftop castle, his armoury stuffed with prodigeous quantities of black powder. 

3: Mountains claimed by rival clans who live by herding and raiding from inaccessible villages hidden amidst the scree slopes, their independence guaranteed by the impassable nature of the terrain, which they navigate with the same agility as the mountain goats they herd. They are easily spotted afar off amidst the rocks and snow by the bright red fabric of their turbans, though these are grey withinside and are worn inside out when the mountain-men do not wish to be seen. They are great travellers, roaming far and wide across peaks that anyone else would regard as uncrossable, and serve an important role as traders and messengers between peoples whom the mountains would otherwise have severed utterly. Outsiders passing through their lands are usually seized and held prisoner for ransom, though the clans do this entirely without malice, regarding it simply as the immemorial custom of their people. 

4: These hills are infested with rebels, who raised their standards a few years back, dreaming of rallying the people and sweeping their king from his throne. That didn't happen, and the king's men drove them into the uplands - but then his armies were called away by troubles on the border, and the rebels have been here ever since, lurking in the forested valleys, unable to return home while they are regarded as enemies of the crown. Initially many of the local communities supported them, but with each year that passes the 'contributions' they level on the nearby villages looks more like simple theft, and they are well on their way to degenerating into a mere bandit gang with a fancy flag. Their leader is a charismatic aristocrat who has discovered, somewhat to her own surprise, that she much prefers her new life as a terrifying bandit queen to her old life as an admired and accomplished young noblewoman. Her spiritual advisor, a saintly healer-priest, is quite besotted with her, and continues to insist on the obvious righteousness of their cause even as their grand rebellion declines into mere brigandage. 

5: High in these hills stand isolated villages, whose inhabitants practise a syncretic faith that combines the local state religion with worship of their ancestors. Each family traces its lineage back to one of a set of founder-heroes, to whom they maintain household shrines - a practise that has repeatedly got them into trouble with the religious authorities, who regard them as borderline-heretical and mistreat them accordingly. Their men are famous for their courage in battle, claiming their bravery comes from the knowledge that their ancestors are watching over them. The most closely-held secret of these villages is that their ancestors really are watching over them, having gained a ghastly immortality from deals struck with a dark spirit of the desert: by day they sleep beneath their ancient burial mounds, but at night they squirm from the cracks of the ground to watch over their descendants from afar. After so many years the ancestors have become bestial and barely-human, with wild eyes, claw-like nails, and tough, fibrous flesh covered only by their black and matted hair. They are a mad and bloodthirsty bunch, but their descendants are fiercely devoted to the 'grandparents' who have protected and watched over them for so long. Only the elders of each community are entrusted with knowledge of the hidden burial grounds where the ancestors 'live', and are charged with keeping them supplied and placated with offerings of blood. 

6: These rocky, forested hills were once inhabited only by solitary trappers and hermits, but the lands upon which they border are now ruled by a cruel lord who overburdens his subjects with conscription and taxation. Driven to desperation, a growing number of people have simply abandoned their old lives and fled into the woods, joining fledgling communities nestled in remote valleys where they hope the lord's men will never find them. They have acquired a protector of sorts in the form of a malfunctioning clockwork warrior with bladed wings, who was unwisely revived from deactivation by another local ruler, and promptly mutinied when it was unable to match its current circumstances with the memories recorded in its fractured mechanical mind. Paranoid and unhinged, this automaton assumes any soldiers it sees have been sent to recapture it, and murders any who trespass into its domain - a fact which has so far stymied the local lord's efforts to reclaim his errant subjects. He is growing increasingly irate about this, and has offered large bounties for anyone capable of destroying this mysterious defender of the woods.

7: Officially these hills are the site of one of the local ruler's hunting lodges, and nothing else. Secretly, however, he also maintains a hidden prison here, in a low, mossy fort concealed by screens of trees. Here he stashes those inconvenient individuals whose disappearance he has deemed desirable, who are dragged to the prison by night and kept in ignorance of its location. They are watched over by snarling semi-human guards, who have been alchemically modified by the king's enchanters to ensure their ferocity and remove their ability to speak. Here many people are held who are generally believed to be dead, including high-status individuals implicated in a recent rebellion (see 4).

8: Half of an ancient castle clings to a mountainside, here - the other half lies smeared and tumbled across the slope below, having been toppled in an earthquake centuries before. Once the seat of some ancient tyrant, it is now the home of an exiled magician, banished from her homeland for dealings with unholy beings who promised her knowledge and power - an opportunity whose loss she still very much regrets. Since taking up residence here she's managed to refurbish the flying stone skull-throne that belonged to the castle's original owner, an airbourne symbol of power and terror that has allowed her to convince the inhabitants of the surrounding villages that she's a terrible witch whose wrath must be placated with offerings of food, herbs, and flowers. Although amoral in the pursuit of knowledge, she's otherwise a decent enough sort, and far from the fearful hag the villagers imagine her to be, even if her years of living in isolation are making her increasingly eccentric...

9: Long ago, this mountain was partially hollowed out by a now-fallen empire as the resting place of its most honoured dead. Whole sections of the complex have collapsed over the centuries: what remains is accessible only by clambering through ancient elevator shafts, and is still defended by zomborg guardians, who stand watch over endless rows of ancient, embalmed corpses in broken glass cases. Few were buried with much treasure, but the halls are an antiquarian's paradise, and the cumulative value of all those rings and earrings and belt buckles is considerable. In the uppermost part of the complex the embalmers themselves still rest in cryosleep, though various freezer malfunctions over the centuries has turned their brains to mush: if revived they will mostly come lurching from their chambers crazed and screaming, some of them brandishing still-dangerous cybernetic limbs. Only one of them, an apprentice embalmer wearing a protective amulet gifted to him by his sorcerer uncle, is really reviveable alive and sane, though he will be utterly distressed to learn that his civilisation has fallen while he slept. 

10: Beneath this mountain lies a great vault, built to contain the egg of the Great Worm. At some point after the fall of the civilisation that built it, the egg hatched, giving birth to a vast, blind worm-god crawling endlessly around its prison. At some point after that a band of luckless refugees chose the wrong cave in which to seek shelter, and ended up being converted into worm cultists by the psychic radiation of the monster-god below. Now they and their worm-man followers labour endlessly to dig their way through the innumerable tons of rubble that lie between them and their buried god: already they have dug close enough that anyone descending into the lower workings will be enveloped in the dreams of the Great Worm, a hallucinatory dream-world of alien jungles that the Worm recalls through ancestral memory, but has never actually seen. The cultists have unearthed many relics of the ancient world in the course of their excavations, and will eagerly trade these for sturdy pickaxes and shovels if the opportunity arises. Vulnerable travellers who are unable or unwilling to hook them up with good shovel suppliers will be abducted and dragged down below instead, where the Great Worm's psychic radiation will progressively transform them into worm cultists as well. 

Condensation in Action 10: Wrath of the Righteous

Part 10 in an irregular series where I take bloated Pathfinder adventure paths and try to prune them into something more useful. Previous Condensation in Action posts can be found here:

Kingmaker

Rise of the Runelords

Curse of the Crimson Throne

Council of Thieves

Cults of the Sundered Kingdoms

Iron Gods

Skull and Shackles

Mummy's Mask

Carrion Crown

Wrath of the Righteous was Paizo's attempt to write a high-level campaign. Normally their adventure paths top out at level 15, but this one goes all the way up to level 20, as well as awarding the PCs additional power boosts in the form of 'mythic tiers' along the way. If you think this sounds like a recipe for disaster, you'd be right. D&D has always had three basic tiers - levels 1-3 for scrappy underdogs, levels 4-8 for tough, capable fantasy heroes, and levels 9-14 for epic heroes and domain level play - and has tended to really struggle to imagine what adventures are supposed to look like beyond that point. (Tellingly, most of the original classic module series like Dragonlance and Queen of the Spiders topped out at level 14.) What are you meant to do once you've outleveled the dragon at the bottom of the dungeon?

Most of Wrath of the Righteous is very boring: just standard-issue dungeon crawling with much, much higher numbers. The situations quickly start to get ridiculous: the PCs are strong enough to take on dungeons full of demons by book 2, so all that books 3-6 can do is fill their dungeons with ever-bigger demons. One late-campaign dungeon has guards who are fourteenth-level demonic clerics made of locusts riding ancient black dragons. In any other campaign, just one of these guys would be a terrifying end-boss whose dark schemes threaten entire nations. In this one whole groups of them just sit around like glorified security guards, keeping an eye out for intruders and waiting for the over-levelled PCs to wander past and kill them all. 

This hexcrawl is what I was able to salvage. About half of it comes from the appendices rather than the adventures proper!

Context: This adventure takes place on a militarised frontier zone, where a crusading military order maintains a string of fortified settlements along the edges of a demon-haunted region of deserts and jungles, blighted by the release of unholy energies a century ago. (The order was founded in response to this event, and has had the same leader, Queen Galfrey, ever since.) Recently, stories have been emerging from the jungles of some kind of magical and/or industrial undertaking by the region's most prominent demon-cult, the Templars of the Ivory Labyrinth. Armies fare poorly in the jungles, and Queen Galfrey is in the market for a team of disposable, deniable scouts willing to brave the warped lands of the south and work out what's going on before it's too late...

A Note on the Military Situation: The land north of the jungles is notionally controlled by Queen Galfrey, though the border is porous, and beasts and cultists from the south sometimes slip across. The jungles are inhabited mostly by monsters and cultists, too few in number to meet the crusaders on the field of battle, but amply capable of whittling down military expeditions who enter their territory. Over the last century the crusaders have several times advanced as far as the southern coast and claimed 'victory', but the jungles are impossible to hold and they have always ended up retreating, leaving nothing but abandoned forts and temples in their wake.

Hexes are 12 miles across.

• 0000: This broken-down old town is sinking into the swamps, and has been abandoned by all but its most misanthropic inhabitants, who are increasingly coming to resemble the toads that infest its rotting buildings. One among them is a master astrologer, an expert in predicting all kinds of ill-fortune, but the only thing he wants is to be left alone. If he could be persuaded to cooperate, his divinatory abilities would provide one way to navigate the ivory labyrinth at 0104.
• 0001: This shadowy, bat-haunted town is run with psychopathic violence by its despotic governor, who has reduced its people to a state of abject terror. In truth, she, in turn, is a mere pawn of the cabal of vampires who secretly run the town, using its cowed inhabitants as food stock. The vampires are no friends to the Templars, whose victory would ruin their comfortable living arrangement, and could be convinced to ally with the PCs if they were persuaded that the threat against them was serious enough. (Such an alliance would, however, obviously need to be kept secret from the crusaders.)
• 0002: In this tower lives a crazed cavalier, a defector from the crusades, who believes the victory of the demons is inevitable and hopes to win their favour and attention by committing random acts of pointless villainy. The townsfolk of 0001 hate and fear him, but their governor is in no hurry to apprehend him, as his depredations are a good excuse for all manner of restrictions and curfews.
• 0003: A succubus lairs in this desecrated chapel. She is served by a band of charmed warriors - mostly ex-crusaders - who believe her to be a holy goddess, and will gladly lay down their lives in her service.
• 0004: These mountains conceal a ruined and accursed city, among whose shattered buildings can be found an ancient library of stone tablets containing many secrets otherwise lost to the outside world, including maps of the Ivory Labyrinth at 0104 (which was built by the same vanished race who constructed this city). It has no guardians, but its curse afflicts all who discover it with psychotic and murderous jealousy, meaning that expeditions that stumble across it tend to self-destruct long before they bring word of it to the world beyond.
• 0005: This blasted ash waste is the origin-point of the demonic taint that afflicts these lands. The earth here trembles with magical energy, and the air is full of demonic whispers. Anyone remaining here too long will be tainted in body, mind, and soul. 
• 0006: The jungles here are roamed by a filth spirit who takes the form of a woman made of mud, rising from foul-smelling seepage of its rivers and caves. She is furious about the mining activities of the Templars in 0105, which are polluting 'her' waters with all kinds of weird magical run-offs, and will gladly assist in any efforts to shut them down. 
• 0100: These marshy hills are collectively known as the Moonbog. They are dotted with huddled settlements, who live in fear of the werebeasts who roam the moors by night.
• 0102: Hidden in these hills is a trap-filled dungeon of iron and stone - the stronghold of a cruel demon, the Razor Princess. She is served by a demonic murderer with the head of a stork, who abducts victims for her and drives them through her deathtrapped mazes so that their blood might lubricate her cruel machines.
• 0103: The jungle here is roamed by a flayed, headless angel, once an ally of the crusaders, now a victim of the Templars. It attacks intruders with its still-blazing sword, its body continuously spurting gouts of boiling, sulpherous blood over anyone who comes too close.
• 0104: Here stands the Ivory Labyrinth itself, a vast subterranean maze paved and walled with ancient bones. It is inhabited by primitive humanoids who have dwelt there for centuries, but who have recently been enslaved by the Templars, who have claimed the place as a site sacred to their demonic patron Baphomet. The labyrinth is very confusing, mostly due to the demonic magic that infuses it, and navigating it successfully is almost impossible without very good scouts (such as the Pitlings at 0401), magical aid (such as the Stalker's Crossbow from 0205 or the divinations of the astrologer at 0000), or a map (such as the one at 0004). The Templar leadership are all demoniacs, who willingly invite demonic spirits into their bodies, and spend most of their time in states of entranced spirit-possession. Their champion wields an enchanted golden scimitar, which once belonged to the wife of the antipaladin from 0404.
• 0105: Here, deep in the jungles, the Templars have begun mining enchanted crystals from the magic-saturated earth. Their mine labourers are demonic minotaurs, who use their immense strength to hack their way through the rock. The more of these crystals they mine, the more demonic spirits their leaders will be able to call down into their bodies. If left unchecked for too long, they will become powerful enough to sweep away the crusaders once Queen Galfrey finally meets her death. 
• 0107: Here a demonic sorcerer dwells with his herd of man-eating aurochs. He is notionally allied with the Templars, but is happy to turn a blind eye to visitors as long as they bring offerings of human flesh for his herd.
• 0201: This manor house is home to a noble family, supposedly subjects of Queen Galfrey, but secretly loyal to the Templars. Building a labyrinth in their own home was a bit impractical, so instead they settled for a hedge maze, consecrated by unholy stone bull's heads buried beneath its corners. Unbelievers who try to navigate it find themselves becoming confused, their bodies growing heavy, their skin scratched by branches and opening in hundreds of tiny wounds that never, ever stop bleeding. By the time they reach the centre of the maze, where the family wait for them, they're ripe for slaughter.
• 0204: This ruined temple is full of maggots that constantly squirm across its floor, spelling out heretical prayers with their writhing bodies. If intruders enter, the maggots twist themselves into the shape of unholy runes instead, blasting all those who gaze upon them. Beneath the temple are tunnels made from heaving, cancerous flesh, continuously fed upon by vermin. At their heart meditates an awful cleric made of locusts, the servant of an ancient demon lord of vermin. If he is still alive after the Templars are defeated, he will lay claim to their abandoned places of power and start calling forth horrible insect monsters, laying the foundations of a new demon-cult to replace them.
• 0205: This Templar stronghold is guarded by obese naked undead armed with scythes, who have the power to cause bloody wounds to open upon all those they gaze upon. Within dwell a nest of cultists who have amputated their own feet and replaced them with enchanted brazen hooves, the better to resemble their demonic master. If their stronghold is invaded they attack in a kicking, trampling mob. One of them wields the Stalker's Crossbow, whose wielder will always be able to find the last person wounded by it.
• 0302: This frontier camp is the current base of Queen Galfrey. Galfrey swore at the very start of the crusade to vanquish the demons or die trying: she is now over 100 years old, her life prolonged at crippling expense by alchemical means. Utterly weary of her life of endless warfare, she has developed a not-so-subtle death-wish, and has begun provoking new battles mostly in order to give herself a chance to die in them. (It hasn't worked yet because people with alchemically-enhanced bodies and a century of combat experience and are very difficult to kill.) Morale in the camp is low, as the soldiers resent being made to risk their lives in unnecessary battles. They have been secretly infiltrated by an agent of the Templars, Hosilla, who is here posing as a knight from a minor (and fictional) noble house. If the queen actually does manage to get herself killed, Hosilla will hasten back to the Ivory Labyrinth at 0104 and tell the Templars to call down as many demons as they can and strike as soon as possible, while the crusaders are still reeling from her loss. If the mine at 0105 has not been disabled yet, they will probably win. 
• 0304: The trees here exude a sticky sap into the poisonous, swampy waters below. Anyone who ascends into the canopy is set upon by monstrous bird-creatures, who attack in screeching flocks
• 0307: Here the jungle is torn open by vast rifts inhabited by warped and troglodytic humanoids, who roam ceaselessly searching for prey. 
• 0401: This massively fortified clifftop city is the stronghold of the crusaders. The cliffs beneath are riddled with caves and tunnels inhabited by the 'pitlings', deformed descendants of the original crusaders who found their children were born warped by the weird energies to which they had been exposed during their campaigns. The people of the city regard the pitlings with scorn, but the pitlings still revere their warrior ancestors, guarding the graves of their crusader forebears and nurturing a pathetic loyalty to the state that rejected them. They are hardy and stealthy and can see in the dark, making them perfect scouts for any attack on the Ivory Labyrinth at 0104.  
• 0404: The jungles here are inhabited by giant slugs and dire crocodiles. On its poisoned rivers floats an enchanted barge, pulled by a great skeletal serpent, and manned only by a freezing undead antipaladin as cold as his own frozen heart. He wields a terrible icy halberd, which freezes the blood of all those it wounds. He will curtly question all those who pass if they have seen his wife, who vanished into the Ivory Labyrinth years ago: anyone failing to give a useful answer will receive an icy death, instead. If touched or wounded by her scimitar (see 0104), his heart melts and all his unholy powers desert him.
• 0405: Deep in these jungles lies a hidden chasm, apparently bottomless, whose walls are lined by the immense fossilised bodies of dead demon kings from ages past.
• 0502: In this town, the people long ago started to adopt the talking animals that occasionally wandered from the forests, keeping them as pets and messengers. Unfortunately for them, the animals are demon-tainted and delight in defamation and slander, with the result that the whole town is now a tangle of feuds, scandals, and misplaced attempts at revenge. (In particular, everyone is convinced that their neighbours have something to do with all the children who have been going missing recently - in fact these have been taken by the inhabitants of the house at 0503, frequently with the connivance of the talking animals.) The people are highly resistant to the idea that their animal companions are anything other than loyal and adorable. 
• 0503: High in these gloomy mountains stands a huge house in which kidnapped children tend to a great clockwork mechanism of obscure significance, guarded by cloaked, silent figures and clanking automata who hunt down any who try to escape. What, if anything, the machine actually does is deeply unclear.
• 0504: A succubus inhabits this mansion, beset by besotted admirers longing for her favour or even acknowledgement. Most starve to death in her courtyards, or kill one another in desperate attempts to win her attention and prove their devotion. Only the most exceptional displays of talent or prowess will suffice to win an audience. 
• 0600: This steep mountain valley echoes with distant, half-heard songs. (These come from a tragic ghost who haunts its slopes, but finding her is extremely difficult.) It leads to a smug little town, bright with mirrors and loud with bells, whose vain inhabitants are notionally loyal to the crusade but actually care nothing for the outside world. It would be a good source of mirrors with which to torment the rat-demon at 0603.
• 0601: This town is a prison-colony, to which convicts are set from throughout Queen Galfrey's domain to work as slave labourers, mining gems from the hills. (These are the kingdom's most profitable export.) Because slaves are so much more profitable than corpses, many captured low-level demon cultists have been sent here, and their teachings are spreading covertly among the convicts. If the flow of gems from the mines was disrupted then the crusaders would soon be unable to afford Queen Galfrey's ruinously expensive life-extension potions, and she would wither and die within a year. 
• 0603: This ruined town was built by the crusaders during one of their expansionist phases, only to be abandoned when the tides of war turned. Now it is infested by flocks of fiendish vultures, and roamed by a ghastly knife-wielding rat demon that hates and fears its own reflection. A band of mad knights camps nearby, utterly unreconciled to the town's abandonment and determined to reclaim it regardless of what it may cost them (or anyone else). 
• 0604: This ruined shrine is inhabited by a deeply confused demon, who unwisely preyed upon a priestess of the goddess of dreams. The priestess linked their minds as she lay dying, and now the demon has a head full of someone else's emotions and memories and is having a massive identity crisis. She still has her demonic instincts towards cruelty, but her new human feelings mean that she feels revolted by them. If her newly human side was carefully nurtured she might be guided along a path of repentance, but any kind of severe stress will cause her to have a massive breakdown and start lashing out. 
• 0605: Here a boiling river pours out of the mountains and runs through the jungle to the sea, terminating at a beach of powdered bone.
• 0607: This graveyard island is surrounded by shipwrecks, driven upon its shores by the regular floods and hurricanes that beset it. It is the home of a powerful ghoul, the Coffin Groom, who feasts upon the drowned dead.
• 0701: This ghost town was abandoned when its well ran dry. By night it is haunted by the walking corpses of the parched and vengeful dead. 
• 0704: This desert is inhabited by gigantic scorpion-human hybrids, who know ancient spells capable of calling armies of mummified demons up from their crumbling tombs to do their bidding. They greatly predate the conflict between the crusaders and the Templars, but have been stirred up by the energies released at 0005. If the taint could be lifted from the land they would go back to sleep.

City of Spires part 2: The city as hexcrawl

As I mentioned in my last post, one of my objectives for 'City of Spires' was to create a version of ATWC with a lower barrier to entry, suitable for running with new players with minimal introduction. 'You're in an animistic Early Modern Central Asian clockpunk setting' was never going to fly. It would have required hours of explanation - and whenever I'm gaming with new players, I always feel that I've failed unless we can be actually playing within about ten minutes of sitting down at the table. 

So I resorted to my standard level 0 opening gambit: 'you're displaced peasants who have been forced to leave your community for the first time in your lives'. This set-up ensures that the ignorance of the players is matched by the ignorance of the characters, allowing them to learn about the setting together, through exploration rather than exposition. (Always show. Never tell.) This, in turn, changed their relationship with the city, which for them became an unknown zone to be explored, hexcrawl-style, one district at a time. In the first session they wandered in through the ruins of the southern suburbs and just started looking around. They've never really stopped. 

The current player-facing version of the city map. Note that even after a full year's play, large areas remain unexplored.

Hexcrawls and cities make for a somewhat awkward combination. Hexcrawling in, say, a forest makes perfect sense: anything could be in there, and the only way you'll be able to find out what's where is to walk in and start looking around. But urban geography is purposive, designed to channel people towards the key landmarks and areas of economic activity. Only flâneurs and lost tourists just wander around a city block by block to see what they will find, but to experience a city in the way it's designed to be experienced means losing the 'one thing at a time' quality that makes hexcrawls so useful as a way of introducing players to settings. 

My solution was, essentially, to make the outer city into a wilderness. Only the inner northern segment with the market and the palace was still densely populated enough to function like an actual city: the rest was ruins, rubble, scavengers, survivors, outlaws, lunatics, and monsters, and had to be hexcrawled in exactly the same way as any other dangerous wilderness area. (In ATWC terms, I combined the Streets with the Rubble and stretched them out right around the city.) But everything in the outer city was still connected with things in the inner city, whether through trade, enmity, vassalage, or simple shared history. As a result, as the PCs bounced around the southern ruins interacting with its various weird and wonderful inhabitants, they learned more and more about their relationships with each other and with the still semi-functional city on the other side of the river. By the time they reached the city proper they came not as total outsiders who needed to have a whole setting's worth of information thrown at them at once, but as people who already understood most of what was going on there through seeing the effects it had had on the communities beyond. 

The most crucial bit of design I had to do in writing up the city was to make sure that everything connects, using a version of this method, thus ensuring that encounters with one group led naturally to learning about (and often meeting with) others. The stockade-dwellers pay tribute to the city's rulers, and resent it. They also want to drive the devil-worshipping bandits out of a nearby temple. The bandits seek the magic hidden in the seclusium. The seclusium contains a resurrected thief who wants to take over the nearby slaver gang. The slavers make their money selling slaves to the city's rulers. The power of the city's rulers depends on their control of a giant iron serpent. The pit the serpent rose out of is inhabited by subterranean rot farmers. The rot farmers are upset about losing control of part of their territory to some kind of worm cult. The worm cult came from a distant necropolis. The true mistress of the seclusium, trapped in suspended animation, originally resurrected the thief in the hope of robbing that same necropolis. And so on, and so forth... it didn't matter where the PCs started, because everything ultimately led to everything else. In consequence, one year on they are ludicrously networked, and able to deal fluently (and often manipulatively) with a range of NPCs and factions which would have been simply overwhelming if presented to them all at once. 

This might sound like a lot of work, but it really wasn't, because all the complexity is emergent rather than scripted. Each faction could be summed up by a few lines: who they are, what they have, what they want, who leads them, how they relate to other groups, maybe 1-2 extra NPCs, and a few bits of key imagery that will ensure the PCs remember them. (This last bit is crucial. One of my players has yet to remember a single NPC name, but he remembers 'the electric skeletons' or 'the girl with all the feral peacocks' easily enough.) And I think it's a methodology that could potentially have wider application. You start with your Fancy Complicated Location, the one you've been wanting to use for ages but never do because you know your players would get lost in all the infodumps. Then you put it in the middle of a hexcrawl, full of groups that relate to various different aspects of it and each other, and you start the PCs off right at the edge of the map. By the time their drunkard's walk through the surrounding hexcrawl finally brings them to the central location, your PCs will have picked up an understanding of it by osmosis, and should be ready to fully engage with it in all its over-complicated glory. 

Just don't overstock the hexcrawl. That was my mistake. Thank God for extremely patient players.

Next: crungon walo wide...

Condensation in Action 7: Skull and Shackles

Someone requested this at some point. Skull and Shackles is a pirate-themed campaign, which, like most Pathfinder APs, combines some good ideas and compelling imagery with heinous railroading, endless trash fights, filler dungeons, and miscellaneous bloat. I've tried to condense it down to something short and open enough to be useful. Previous 'Condensation in Action' posts can be found here:

Kingmaker
Rise of the Runelords
Curse of the Crimson Throne
Council of Thieves
Cults of the Sundered Kingdoms
Iron Gods

All Pathfinder adventure paths are railroads, but this one is ridiculous. At one point the PCs have to persuade a bunch of pirates to make them Free Captains - but if they fail, then the pirate king appoints them anyway, because The Plot Must Go On. At another point they have to win a race against another pirate ship - but if they lose then the other ship is disqualified, so they win by default, because The Plot Must Go On. Sometimes the adventure just outright tells you not to let your PCs do things, as with this gem:

'Although Caulky knows where the Wormwood is berthed, you should discourage the PCs from visiting their former ship, as both Harrigan and the Wormwood have more roles to play, both later in this adventure and in the Adventure Path.'

'Discourage' them? How, exactly? By having rocks fall on them every time they approach the ship? By just informing them point-blank that they're not allowed to interact with the Wormwood until later in the adventure, because otherwise it might derail The Plot? 'You've all been press-ganged into serving on a pirate ship' is a great way to start a campaign, but from that point on everything is on rails. You will lead a mutiny and take over your ship, you will use that ship to become pirate captains, you will take over an old fort to use as a base, you will find and follow a treasure map, and so on. The idea that the PCs might want to do something else - anything else - is given very short shrift indeed.

So, in line with the principles laid out here, I've ditched all that, and just turned it into raw materials for a pirate-themed sandbox. Enjoy.

(NB: This map is not to scale: it's just intended to give a sense of the relative bearings of each location. The islands are much smaller than this, and the seas between them are much, much bigger.)

Background: This hexcrawl describes a remote archipelago of lawless islands, long a haven to pirates, who sail out from its hidden harbours to prey upon shipping in the sea lanes beyond. The islands are rugged and heavily forested, and the surrounding seas are full of treacherous reefs, which has so far prevented the isles from being scoured clear of pirates by the fleets of the surrounding nations. The pirates often fight among themselves, but recognise the notional authority of their elected chief, the 'Hurricane King', and will rally behind him in the face of a real emergency. A nearby seafaring nation has become sick of all this piracy, and has sent spies and agents (see 0603 and 0605) to soften them up for a naval attack (see 1009).

The Hurricane King is appointed by a council of leading pirates, the Free Captains. In theory, once appointed, the decisions of the Hurricane King are final, with the Free Captains merely serving as his advisers. In practise, a Hurricane King who loses the support of the Free Captains is unlikely to reign much longer.

The current Hurricane King is Kerdak Bonefist (see 0407). The current Free Captains are Isabella Locke (0109), Milksop Morton (0806), The Master of the Gales (0708), Avimar Sorrinash (0605), Barracuda Aiger (0605), Arronax Endymion (0605), and Barnabas Harrigan (0603). Membership of the council is much more a matter of de facto power than de jure legitimacy, so any PC who owns their own ship and performs suitably piratical feats of daring-do is likely to be raised to the status of Free Captain sooner or later.

Hook: If this is the start of a new campaign, then you could have the PCs begin as unfortunates press-ganged into service aboard the Wormwood (see 0505), who would then have to plot escape or mutiny. Alternatively, just begin with the PCs arriving at Port Peril (0605) looking for adventure. There's plenty of it about.

0102: Sinew-twined, scrimshawed skeletons are erected at intervals along the shoreline, here, as a warning to all who approach. In these flooded caves dwell a tribe of grindylows, shark-toothed aquatic goblins who have a mass of writhing octopus tentacles instead of legs. The grindylows steal sailors from the decks of passing ships by night, dragging them down into their caves to drown and eat. Their caverns are full of masses of choking seaweed concealing lines of hidden, floating riphooks. Their queen spends most of her time doting on her blooded son, the Whale, a gigantic grindylow who has never stopped growing, and is now much too large to leave the cavern which serves as his mother's throne room. She has accumulated considerable treasure over the years.

A grindylow.

0103: Amidst these rocks the lone survivor from the shipwreck at 0202 eked out many lonely years, before finally contracting ghoul fever from the mosquitoes. He hanged himself when he felt himself starting to transform, but this did not stop his corpse from animating as a ghoul. Now he dangles, apparently dead and inanimate, from the roof of his ruined stockade, but his corpse will come to life and lash out savagely at anyone who comes within swinging distance. During his life he made many hunting expeditions against the ghouls who were once his shipmates, and his stockade is ringed with a circle of rotting ghoul heads on stakes - these are all filled with flies and mosquitoes infected with ghoul fever, which will burst out of them in stinging swarms if disturbed. He also managed to salvage most of the valuables from the shipwreck, which now lie buried beneath the dirt floor of his stockade.

0106: These seas are haunted by the ghost of Whalebone Pilk, a cruel whaler who led his crew to their deaths at sea. Ships that pass through this region often glimpse a ghostly ship that emerges from the sea, sailing against the wind, or hear the tolling of a ship's bell. Those that linger too long are attacked by Pilk himself: his ship rises straight out of the water beside the unfortunate vessel, and brine zombies come lurching aboard under the cover of darkness, seeking to grab the living, drag them onto their own vessel, strip them down for blubber, and behead them in front of their ship's bell. (The skulls of hundreds of previous victims litter the hold.) Pilk himself can suck the air from the lungs of his victims from several feet away. The ship's bell tolls continuously throughout these assaults: it is the locus of the haunting, and destroying it ends the curse and sends Pilk and his crew instantly back into the depths from which they came. Otherwise the curse will never end until the zombie crew have claimed their thousandth skull, at which point they will turn on Pilk, render his fat into oil, and sail their ship straight down to hell. Currently they're on six hundred and forty-three. Pilk is an infamous terror of the seas, and anyone who can prove that they have set him to rest will win great prestige with the pirates of Port Peril (0605).

0109: This island is surrounded by vast expanses of open sea, making it very difficult to locate without a map. Here, concealed in a secluded harbour, can often be found the Thresher, the ship of Isabella 'Inkskin' Locke, a pirate captain of some renown. Isabella suffered horribly at the hands of the ship's previous captain, a cruel man who knocked the teeth from her head and disfigured her body with crude tattoos. When the map to a legendary pirate treasure fell into his hands, he had a copy of it tattooed between her shoulders; but when he tried to follow the map, however, he ended up being killed by the sahuagin at 0209. Glad to be rid of her tormentor, Isabella entered into an alliance with the sahuagin king, and now acts as his eyes among the humans. She even had a new set of fanged false teeth made in imitation of theirs.

When it's not here at harbour, the Thresher roams far and wide, serving the increasingly mad objectives of the sahuagin. (A band of them always swim alongside it in secret, and aid Isabella in her attacks on merchant ships and other targets.) In particular, it's only a matter of time before it participates in an attack on the fort at 0802. Her ship is also a regular visitor to Port Peril (0605). The chart tattooed between Isabella's shoulders is now the only surviving map that shows the location of this island, so defeating, tricking, or befriending her is likely to be the only way of locating it.

Isabella Locke.

0202: Years ago, a ship was wrecked here, carrying a pack of captive ghouls in a cage in the hold. The crash broke open the cage, and the ghouls proceeded to infect and kill all the surviving crewmen except one, who escaped into the uplands. (See 0103.) These ghouls now live in a large, rotting tent in the swamps, painted with lurid faces, and creep forth at night in their tattered finery in search of prey. Half-eaten human body parts dangle from the surrounding trees. The local mosquitoes have also become carriers of ghoul fever, making this swamp an extremely dangerous place in which to spend any length of time.

0204: On this forlorn island stands a lone black tower, sacred to Dagon, demon lord of the seas. Years ago, it served as the stronghold of a terrible cult, until a coalition of pirate captains banded together to destroy them. The cultists retreated into the tower, the pirates pursued them, and no-one on either side ever came out. Everyone has avoided the place ever since.

The tower's ground floor is flooded, and infested with flesh-eating eels. On the upper levels, ivory statues of drowned men vomit up rivers of cursed water to drown intruders, and roaming beasts like great masses of animate intestines prowl mindlessly, searching for victims. Unintelligible whispers arise from holes in the black rock. The last survivor of the cult, now transformed into a grotesque and bloated monster, lurks at the bottom of the tower, surrounded by the bones of her victims and treasures carved from coral and whalebone. The most valuable treasure of all here is a powerful magical sword, Aiger's Kiss, which was wielded by one of the pirates who came to destroy the cultists, and still lies clutched in her bony hand today. Her son, 'Barracuda' Aiger (see 0506) would very much like it back, but has never been brave enough to come looking for it himself.

0207: Here, beneath the waves, lies the wreck of a legendary pirate ship, the Brine Banshee. Famous for its speed, it outran every ship that tried to catch it, only to finally sink when an angry dragon turtle attacked it from below. There is nothing to mark its resting place, and PCs are extremely unlikely to find it without the Ring of the Iron Skull (see 0806) and the shinbone of its captain, Vargus Brack (see 0708). They will also obviously need some way of travelling beneath the water.

Near the wreck lives an eccentric merman outcast named Ormandar, who will come with his brood of pet sharks to investigate any attempt to locate or disturb the shipwreck. If the PCs can ally with him, he could be persuaded to explore the wreck on their behalf, perhaps in exchange for sufficient quantities of fresh meat for himself and his sharks. If antagonised, he will unleash his pets on any divers.

The broken wreck itself lies on the seabed. Brack went down with his ship, and his skeleton, easily recognisable from its wooden leg, is still lashed to the wheel. There's not much treasure in the hold, but the ship's wheel itself bears a powerful enchantment, which greatly increases the speed and manoeuvrability of any ship to which it is attached. (This was the secret of the Brine Banshee's success.)

0209: This island is extremely remote, and almost impossible to find without the aid of the map tattooed on Isabella Locke's back. (See 0109.) As well as giving the location of the island, the map also shows a skull with a golden tooth, and what might be either a rising or a setting sun. When seen from the south by the light of dawn, the rocky coast of this part of the island does look a bit like a skull, and a heap of iron pyrite in a cave even gives it the look of having a gold tooth. This cave is where a legendary pirate once buried his treasure - but it's not there any more, because it was seized by a tribe of sahuagin when they claimed these caverns as their lair. They also found an ancient stone throne, built ages before by the same cyclopses who built the city at 0501, which their chief, Krell-Ort, claimed as his own. Unfortunately for them (and a lot of other people), the ancient magics of the throne warped his mind, filling him with messianic self-belief and dreams of conquest. Now his minions roam the archipelago, sinking ships and attacking settlements as the first stage in his (completely impractical) plan to claim all these islands as his own. In this he is aided by Isabella Locke (see 0109), who scouts out potential targets for him, and sometimes even joins in his attacks.

The king's current objective is claiming the necklace in the fort at 0802 - the twin of the one he found in the buried treasure - which he has coveted ever since Isabella told him about it. He believes that if he can obtain it, it will be an omen that his conquests are fated to succeed.

The treasure that was buried in these caves, and subsequently claimed by the sahuagin, is legendary among the pirates of the archipelago, and finding it would bring great renown (and, of course, great wealth) to its discoverers.

0401: On this shore stands the crumbling ruins of an ancient castle, built on a superhuman scale by cyclopses in ages past. (See 0501.) It shows signs of recent renovation and even more recent destruction. A few years back a pirate mage named Bikendi Otongu seized it for use as his base camp, from which he hoped to sally out and obtain the enchanted crystal at 0501, but he and his men had barely got the place fitted up when the cyclopses attacked and killed them all. Now their ghosts haunt the fort, reenacting the events of their death each night. The one survivor was Bikendi's disappointing apprentice Ederleigh Baines, who still cowers within the ruin, too scared of the cyclopses to leave. Being haunted by his dead master and comrades has driven him quite insane with trauma, fear, and guilt, and he is now a paranoid wreck, his hideaway ringed with improvised magical traps. If coaxed back into a semblance of reason he can describe the crystal that his dead master sought, and express the (correct) belief that Bikendi's ghost will never rest until it has the crystal. He will also mention that Bikendi discovered the location of some kind of sunken treasure nearby, but revealed it to no-one before his death.

If the crystal from 0501 is brought to the fort after dark and presented to Bikendi's ghost, he and his men will seize it and carry it away into the afterlife, ending the haunting. As payment, the departing ghost will flip over a loose paving stone, beneath which is hidden a detailed map showing the location of the sunken shrine at 0402.

Bikendi's ghost.

0402: This was once part of the same island as 0401, tipped into the sea by a great earthquake thousands of years in the past. When Bikendi Otongu (see 0401) came to the island he detected powerful magic beneath the water, and soon located a sunken temple beneath the waves, although the giant shark that now inhabits it dissuaded him from investigating further. PCs might locate the temple either with Bikendi's map (see 0401), or just by randomly casting Detect Magic spells, as it's only about 100' underwater. If the shark can somehow be killed or evaded, a small fortune in ancient gold and gems can be looted from the flooded ruins.

0407: On this rocky island stands the fortress of Kerdak Bonefist, the Hurricane King. (The castle comes with the job.) Always paranoid about a potential coup, Kerdak paid a wizard to build a cannon golem to protect him: an iron golem with cannons for arms, which is always on watch for attacking ships. His lieutenants are secretly weresharks. The only person he truly trusts is Powderkeg, his loyal powder monkey, who throws bombs with remarkable accuracy and will defend his master to the last.

0408: In this cave lies an enormous heap of bloody bones, resembling those of a slaughtered whale. In fact these are the bones of a dragon slain by a previous Hurricane King, and bound to obey whomever currently holds the title. If the bones are disturbed, or the castle attacked, then this skeleton dragon will rise, wreathed in crackling electricity, to fight again. It cannot fly, but it can swim, filling the water around it with electrical death.

0410: This island is the home of a miserable band of shipwrecked mariners, survivors of attacks by the vampires at 0510. Corpses bob face-down in the water around the coast: these are actually ghouls, who attack if anyone comes too close. The ghouls would have eaten all the survivors long ago were it not for the power of an enchanted spring up in the hills, which keeps the undead at bay. Unable to safely travel more than a mile from the spring, the survivors are desperate for rescue, and will light signal fires to alert any passing ships to their presence.

0501: Huge steps are carved into the side of these hills, ascending to the shattered ruins of a city built on a gigantic scale. Here, among the broken relics of their ancestors, live most of the remaining cyclopses who inhabit this island, their attention now wholly devoted to the pressing problem of finding enough food to ward off famine. Their most sacred site is a mostly-intact temple, in which an ancient undead cyclops still stands in eternal vigilance over an enchanted crystal of great value and power, the Immortal Dreamstone. The cyclopses will fight frantically to protect this crystal, but might be persuaded to exchange it for some kind of permanent solution to their food supply problems.

0502: Along the coast here stand huge one-eyed statues, carved from ancient stone. Their eye sockets are empty: once they held jewels, but these were all looted long ago, giving the isle its current name of The Island of Empty Eyes. An advanced race of cyclopses once dwelt here, and the shattered remnants of their population still inhabit the island, though they have depleted its ecology so severely over the centuries that even the small number who remain are now on the brink of famine. They live by herding and butchering herbivorous dinosaurs, and by sailing out in crude ships for fishing and whaling. They have ample experience of people arriving to try to pillage what little remains of their heritage, and view outsiders with intense mistrust.

0505: Here the good ship Wormwood rides at anchor, looking for unfortunate souls to press-gang. Its thuggish master, Mr Plugg, is a minion of the pirate lord Barnabas Harrigan (see 0603): his crew was depleted in a recent battle, and he needs more hands before he can resume his raiding. Among his recent victims is Sandara Quinn, a self-appointed priestess of the sea goddess who maintains a ramshackle shrine on the harbourfront at Port Peril (see 0605): she's popular with the locals, who believe that her blessing brings them good luck at sea, and returning her would win the PCs a lot of goodwill. Plugg keeps order with the help of his 'pet', a simple-minded brute named Owlbear Hartshorn, who is mostly kept imprisoned below decks. Hartshorn is a lumbering giant of a man, rendered brutal by years of mistreatment, but easily won over by any kind of kindness or sympathy.

Sandara Quinn.

0506: Here stands a temple of surprising size and grandeur, sacred to the goddess of the sea. The local pirates are a superstitious bunch, and the priests aren't picky about where all these bloodstained doubloons are coming from, as long as the donations keep flowing in. Recently they ordered a particularly lavish golden idol, but it never arrived, much to their distress. (It was stolen by the wreckers at 1004.) They can provide a description of the route that the ship carrying it was supposed to take, and will offer both money and information in exchange for its return.

0510: This remote island is plagued by a feral band of aquatic vampires, who waylay ships, turn their crews into ghouls, break their masts, and drag them into a vast cavern as floating trophies. This cavern is now crammed with floating wrecks, and contains all kinds of long-lost ships and forgotten treasures.

0603: On this island stands the fort of Barnabas Harrigan, a pirate captain famous for his brutality. His island is guarded by a trained sea serpent, and a band of sea trolls serve him as shock troops provided he keeps them well fed. In the blood-stained dungeons of his fort a band of masked cultists have taken up residence at his invitation: they revere a horrible god of pain, and keep their victims inside coffin-shaped cages, wound around with hooked chains. (Anyone liberated from this awful place will be desperately, pathetically loyal to their deliverers.) Harrigan chafes under the rule of the Hurricane King, and is secretly in league with Druvalia Thrune (see 1009): he has promised to help her conquer the isles by sending pilots to help her fleet steer through the reefs, and by murdering the Master of the Gales (see 0708) just before her attack, thus robbing the pirates of their two greatest advantages. In return, she has sworn to make him governor of the isles, and to permit him to rule them as he sees fit (i.e. horribly). Unless his treachery is detected before Druvalia makes her move, this plan will probably succeed.

Barnabas Harrigan. Yarr.

0605: Here, guarded by treacherous reefs and rocks, lies the pirate stronghold of Port Peril. Three Free Captains currently make this lawless town their home: Avimar Sorrinash, 'Barracuda' Aiger, and Arronax Endymion. Avimar is a werewolf, whose raids are notable for their savage ferocity. Arronax is a disgraced nobleman, hailing from the same nation as Druvalia Thrune (see 1009), who still maintains a pretence of aristocratic gentility despite the violence of his trade. Aiger is a successful pirate in his own right, but lives in the shadow of his legendary mother, who vanished in the assault on the black tower years ago. (See 0204.) He dresses in lavish and flamboyant fashions as though attempting to persuade everyone that he really is the kind of pirate lord he so desperately wants to be. He longs to reclaim his mother's legendary sword, but has never been brave enough to enter the black tower in search of it. If the PCs obtain it, he will try anything - bribes, threats, theft, violence - to get it from them.

All the Free Captains are frequent visitors to Port Peril, as is the Hurricane King himself. They and their crews are fiercely competitive, and are forever getting involved in brawls, gambling matches, drinking contests, and similar. (The exception is the Master of Gales from 0708, who holds himself soggily and morosely aloof.) The most serious escalation is for one captain to challenge another to a race around the island, as trying to navigate its rocks and reefs at speed can easily result in sinking ships and drowning men.

Port Peril is currently in a state of high alert, as word has reached the pirates that Druvalia Thrune and her fleet will be sailing to crush them any day now. As the port relies on its reefs for defence, there is much anxiety about the possibility of spies and traitors in their midst who might be willing to lead Druvalia's fleet to their doorstep. Given his nationality, Arronax Endymion and his crew are particular targets for mistrust - a mistrust that the real traitor, Barnabas Harrigan, does everything he can to foster. (See 0603.)

Druvalia does indeed have a spy network in the town, which is organised by an alchemist named Zarskia Galembar, who is tasked with informing Druvalia and Harrigan when the time is right to strike. The priests in 0506 have noticed Zarskia engaging in some pretty suspicious meetings on their temple grounds, but she's a major donor of theirs so they won't mention this unless the PCs have already earned their trust by, say, bringing them the idol at 1004. Jaymiss Keft (see 0708) also has his suspicions about her, as she's repeatedly come to Drenchport asking questions about the movements of the Master of the Gales, but he's so terrified of her that he will share this information only in exchange for something he truly values, like more of Vargus Brack's bones. (See 0207.) If cornered, Zarskia will gulp down a bottle of mutagen, hulk out, and try to rampage her way to freedom. PCs who can expose her and her spy network, probably incriminating Barnabas Harrigan in the process, will earn the gratitude of the Hurricane King.

0608: Amidst these miserable swamps stands a flooded crypt, the grave of four pirate captains who mutinied against the first Hurricane King. Their barnacled corpses will rise to attack anyone who intrudes within it. The locals give the place an extremely wide berth.

0708: On this soggy island stands the town of Drenchport, which is ruled by mysterious and ancient druid, the Master of the Gales. (It's not clear whether the constant storms attracted him, or whether he's the one who brought all the storms, but either way it rains all the damn time.) His animal companion is a giant squid, which prowls the waters around the island. The Master is a very hands-off ruler, who cares very little about what is done by the people of Drenchport provided they leave him alone. He is allied with the pirates of Port Peril (0605), because their presence ensures that these islands remain largely unsettled and beyond the reach of the law, which is just the way he prefers them. If Port Peril was seriously threatened he would summon winds and storms to throw its enemies into disarray.

Until about a decade ago, Drenchport was the home of a legendary one-legged pirate captain named Vargus Brack, whose ship, the Brine Banshee, was famous for its uncanny speed. Brack's exploits, and his mysterious disappearance several years ago, are still a frequent topic of conversation in the town. An eccentric scrimshaw artist called Jaymiss Keft owns Brack's scrimshawed tibia bone, which he is extremely proud of. With the aid of the the Ring of the Iron Skull (see 0806), this bone could be used to discover the wreck of the Brine Banshee at 0207.

0802: On this island stands a small fort, once the stronghold of a now-dead captain, and now maintained by his widow, 'Lady' Agasta Smythe. A small fishing village has grown up around it. Agasta wears a necklace of tinted platinum, gifted to her by her dead husband: it caught the eye of Isabella Locke (see 0109) on her last visit to the island, as it is the twin of another such necklace in Krell-Ort's treasure horde (see 0209). Krell-Ort is determined to obtain it, believing it to be a sacred treasure of the deep, and his sahuagin agents are currently prowling around the island. Already they have been responsible for several dissapearences, which have thrown the locals into a state of panic, and it's only a matter of time before they and Isabella assault the fort in earnest.

0806: This island serves as the base of the infamous pirate captain 'Milksop' Morton and his ship, the Screaming Satyr. The ship is so named because of its huge, outsized figurehead, carved in the shape of a screaming satyr holding a ballista-sized crossbow. Morton is a wizard, who has enchanted this figurehead to allow it to animate. When he attacks a ship, the figurehead comes to life, shoots a massive bolt with a chain attached into the side of the target vessel, and then reels it in with its massive wooden arms. Morton demands a toll from all he meets in exchange for allowing them to pass unmolested. He is an amoral opportunist, and is not above attacking his fellow pirates if he thinks he can get away with it.

Among Morton's possessions is the Ring of the Iron Skull, which bears a unique enchantment: anyone who holds part of a dead body while wearing it will always be aware of the location of the rest of the body. Morton uses it as a navigational aid: he has bones taken from cemeteries in various different ports, and uses the ring to ensure that he always knows where his ship is in relation to each of them. In combination with the shinbone of Vargus Brack (see 0708), the ring could be used to locate the wreck of the Brine Banshee (see 0207).

1004: This island lies on the edge of the sea lanes, and is sometimes resorted to by ships seeking to refresh their stocks of food and water. It has recently become the lair of a gang of ruthless wreckers led by a cruel illusionist, who uses illusion magic to conceal the treacherous rocks beyond the bay, causing ships to founder and their crews to drown in the surf. Among their recent victims was a ship carrying a golden idol to the temple at 0506, which would very much like to get it back.

1009: At this port the fleet of Druvalia Thrune rides at anchor, ready to sail forth to subdue the pirates of the archipelago as soon as Zarskia gives the word. (See 0605.) Druvalia is an admiral from a kingdom that has long suffered from the depredations of the pirates: she has staked her reputation on crushing Port Peril, and has no intention of returning home empty-handed. However, she is aware that the rocks and reefs - not to mention the storms of the Master of the Gales (0708) - give the pirates a major advantage in defending their homes, and she thus hopes to take the islands by treachery, with the aid of Barnabas Harrigan (see 0603) and Zarskia Galembar. If these plans fall through, however, she will just attack Port Peril and hope for the best. Her fleet is greatly superior in size and strength to anything that the pirates can scrape together, but the rocks and reefs and winds are likely to be more than capable of evening the odds.

Druvalia Thrune.

The Hexcrawl of Hexcrawls: an Epic (for Trojan Points)

Back in March, Trojan Points set me a challenge in the comments to this post: to put all the good encounters from several different Pathfinder adventure paths onto a single, nation-sized hexmap. 'Can you distil 4000 pages to 20 something?', he asked. I replied:

I've just opened up Hexographer and played around with combining all my hexcrawls into a single map, and then adding the necessary geography for my three non-hexcrawl condensations, and it *almost* works. All it's missing is some kind of big central power in the middle of the map, to be the nation which is currently occupying Westcrown, notionally in charge of the Sundered Kingdoms, able to task the PCs with clearing the forests in Kingmaker, and so on. (Neither Magnimar nor Korvosa really fits the bill.) Condensing one more AP should do the trick.

Last month I wrote a condensation of Iron Gods, and after a bit of reflection I concluded that the Technic League made as good a 'central power' as any other. So I plugged the geography from Iron Gods into my map from March, copy-pasted all the text from my condensations and hexcrawls into a single document, rekeyed them to the new, combined map, and modified them to remove all the implicit and explicit time limits, in order to make them friendlier to hexcrawl-style play. I can't claim to have distilled 4000 pages into 20, but I did get 3500 pages and a 70-hour computer game into 47.

It's a very rough and ready job. The Great Machine material has been rescaled from 10-mile hexes to 6-mile hexes, meaning that everything is improbably tiny and close together. The areas that were written as hexcrawls (the south-western, north-eastern, and south-eastern corners of the map) have things going on in almost every hex, whereas the other areas have large blank spaces. The areas that weren't written as hexcrawls usually have enormously greater amounts of stuff going on in each location: the worst offender is the city of Westcrown, which has an entire adventure path's worth of content crammed into a single hex. If I was doing this from the ground up I'd have extensively rewritten all the material to sprawl more, so as to cover the territory more evenly, while also reformatting the whole thing and adding hyperlinks to make it much more user-friendly - but that sounds like a lot of work. Maybe Trojan Points would like to do it.

Anyway. I've done it now. If you've ever wanted to randomly wander between a whole bunch of different adventure paths, then this is your chance. You can download the damn thing here:

Rise of the Curse of the Council of the Shadow of the Cult of the Crimson Runelords of the Sundered Thrones of the God-Thieves of the Great Kingmaker’s Machine-Kingdoms: A Hexcrawl

Map

Hex keys