Four Riddles

Lots of inspiration made me want to write this post for a long time. Riddles take time for me to write! The answers, of course, are hidden as white text on a white background: highlight them and they shall appear!

Players in my games, don't spoil these riddles for yourselves! I promise you'll encounter them all eventually ;)


As long as my jailors live, so do I
If they choose to set me free, then I die
a secret

I dream of the day I'm so tall

I tower over the world

All winter I slumber

In lightless cell curled

a seed

I am a painter

Although my fingers are stiff as daggers

Strong enough to break rock

I paint delicately

Soft enough to trace a dandelion clock

So quiet I can paint your whole house

Without you hearing the swish of my brush.

But be quick if you want to see my work!
A jealous rival scours it all away.

Ice, frost (jack frost)

I am a dancer,

Getting faster and faster

My partner doesn't move her feet

She sashays so sweet

Her dress is of colours bright as the day

But my suit is grey

I strive to get close to her

Although her touch is the finisher

of both myself and my dance

A moth and a candle

Random Backstory Tables: Barbarian, Bard & Cleric

The tables in Xanathar's Guide to Everything are great, but they're way, way too short! Happily that makes them an excellent subject for a blog post. Here are the first three classes: Barbarian, Bard, and Cleric.

The barbarian 'tattoos' table is a bit longer cuz I got carried away.

BARBARIANS

Personal Totem

Tattoos

1- a grinning shark-like maw extending on either side of your mouth and up your cheeks

2- A series of protecting runes encircling your throat and covering your heart

3- Red geometric lines, like blood streaming from the corners of your mouth

4- A random-seeming phrase in a language you don't know. To you, all writing has powerful magic potential, and when you 'liberated' this bit of script from some scholar you inscribed what you thought must be the most important bit of text onto your skin, to absorb it's magic.

5- The entire sleeve of one arm, inked a solid black.

6- The phases of the moon (or one of the moons) inked across your knuckles.

7- The name of a lover who broke your heart. Seeing it causes you great pain and anger, but you're too stubborn to get it removed or covered up.

8- A map to a secret location. Work with the DM to determine where this might be. You don't trust paper or writing, so you had this tattooed on you, and had the map itself destroyed.

9- A face tattooed on your but. The idea is that you can move your buttcheeks and make the face kind of look like it's talking. At your option, the face may be that of a famous political or historical figure, a scowling demon or dragon, or a badly rendered replica of your own face.

10- A to-do list. You didn't have a pen handy, but you did have a tattooing needle...

11- Knuckle tatts that read 'RAGE' across one hand and 'KILL' 'HATE' 'LOVE' 'DEAD' 'SMRT' 'FUCK' or some other four-letter word across the other hand.

12- Traced white lines, as if scarred by lightning.

13- A keyhole shape, around your eye, and a key on your hand.

14- A series of hatched lines; you add a new one for each worthy foe you slay in battle.
15- "MOTH" inside a heart

16- An anchor. You're a traditionalist.

Superstitions

1 - Never let an ally become entirely obscured from view during a fight or in a dungeon, or you will be suspicious of them until they reprove their trust. One way of restoring trust is by asking "what goes up a chimney?" And the other responding "smoke."

2-  birds are unlucky, especially pictures of birds. You will never tolerate having a picture of a bird in a house, and if you can destroy the picture that's ideal

3- the last person to arrive for drinking has to quaff a whole drink, as a penalty. When drinking, alcohol must be poured for all present, altho they are not required to drink

4- it is bad luck to give or receive a weapon or any kind of blade as a gift. This may be avoided by exchanging a token amount, such as one silver piece, since an uneven trade is not a gift. 

5- wizard's magic is weak to silver - their magic may ward off a knife, but silver will cut through. 

6- things always come in threes. So if you have fallen into a hole twice, or found gold twice, you're bound to have it happen a third time

7- Someone who dies will need their weapons after their dead. Don't loot that sword off your friend, as he may be fighting ghosts with it in the afterlife. Replicas or substitutions may be acceptable. 

8- money is cursed, and you will never touch it with your hands if you can help it. 

BARDS

Defining Works

1- 'the Tain of Greenmere' A rambling saga - chant that recalls every river, hill and dell of a long journey across your homeland, now lost under the sea

2- an extremely experimental work, filled with invented words and seemingly stream of consciousness verses that in fact you poured inordinate amount of time into getting just right

3- a catchy hit song that you're famous for performing as part of a band of five nearly identical-looking young singers

4- its a cover of someone else's song, but your version was so defining that even the original artist has basically given it to you, going so far as to say they'd hesitate to perform it themselves without your blessing

5- 'Misummer Knights' a bawdy tale about the queen of the fairies, her clone, and a lot of nudity, chaos, fighting, and mistaken identity. 

6- a conceptual art piece consisting of precisely measured long intervals of silence, interspersed by a few single notes. 

Instrument

1- musical saw stolen from loggers trying to clearcut a dryad's grove

2- Balalaika, engraved with images of a polar bear grappling a moosetaur

3- Crwth made of scrimshawed whalebone 

4- Aulos won from a satyr in a drinking contest

5- Nyckelharpa made by a famous firbolg crafter 

6- Digeridoo fashioned from a mastodon horn

7- Ocarina with a built in watch ⌚ 

8- Xaphoon bound in red gold and inscribed with the sigil of your house

9- Lur with a matching helmet with decorative horns

10- A hurdy-gurdy engraved with eldritch prophecies of doom in an ancient tongue

Embarrassments

1 - Having read far more words than you've heard spoken, you frequently mispronounce rarely-used words.

2 - You completely forgot the Duke's name in the middle of the season's premiere social gathering

3 - It was discovered you'd used illusions to fill out the audience of your play 'Qouth the Zondervoze.' 

4 - Interupting the production of the play 'the King in Yellow,' you wrecked the set and burned the only copies of the script before the actors could learn any of their lines. You are mocked for it, but you swear there was something deeply sinister about that writing.

5 - One does not need to explain the depth of this faux pas: You wore white after the harvest festival, but before the beginning of spring.  

6 - Challenged to a rhyming duel, threw up before getting on stage- ruining your chances and your favourite sweater. 

Clerics

Temple

1 - A black, basalt column sprouting from a seaweed and barnacle encrusted rock in the middle of a storm-tossed sea

2 - an idyllic grove, ringed around the hill with ancient henges of stone and wood, where wine and food is always on offer

3 - a hospital in the slum of a war-ravaged city, dedicated to administering aid to the sick and wounded.

4 - A hidden safehouse, tucked in a blind alley, impossible to find unless you know where to look, and with half a dozen secret escape routes

5 - a barn, converted into a church by the rustic folk of the village, decorated with homespun 'tapestries' and colourful murals. 

6 - a sprawling, bureaucratic edifice, a brutalist building filled with clerks and auditors, filing everything in triplicate.

Keepsake

1 - A feather of ever-shifting iridescent hues

2 - A teapot, painted with one of the symbols of your faith

3 - A bedraggled doll, given to you by a child whose life you saved to keep you safe when you were headed into danger.

4 - A bottle of wine you acquired during a frankly somewhat hedonistic evening in the big city.

5 - This pocket-sized holy book still bears the scar of the arrow that would have pierced your heart.

6 - A set of manacles, which you wore during your imprisonment for the crime of following your faith.

7 - A finely crafted pen, taken from the seminary where you underwent your training.

8 - Flint and tinder- a reminder that there can be light in even the darkest places.

Secret

1 - What's the harm in making a little money performing magic on the side? Surely the gods wouldn't have given you these gifts if they didn't intend for you to use them.

2 - Whether sentimental or superstitious, you keep an icon of the spirituality of your childhood, from before you converted.

3 - Although sworn to avoid all worldly attachment, you have a secret spouse- an important figure within the government.

4 - If the gods don't grant you the miracles you need, you're not above faking them.

5 - You are writing your own treatise on religion, one you hope will eventually supplant the existing orthodoxy of your faith.

6 - A parent forced you into the clergy to avoid an inheritance complication. You never wanted to be a priest, but to everyone's surprise you manifested the gift of divine power!

Harpy Tree

I'm liking making maps! It's just very chill, especially with all the greenery. I'm just sitting here plonking down moss, how delightful.

This is a continuation of my previous map of the owlbear den. I wanted to see what I could do for the tree above.

click for big version

Once again, it's designed to be open ended, for all your 'big tree in a forest clearing' battlemap needs. Once again, however, I'm also providing some notes! This should help especially with how to describe and interpret the map- extreme elevation is tricky to show in two dimensions.

now with numbers!

1. Owlbear den entrance. See description from the previous map. Climbing up the bluffs should be a pretty easy check, if they're climbing the roots or a low area of the bluff, but could still be a hindrance if rushed by combat. The bluffs are also steep enough to provide some cover for creatures cowering right at the base, against any attacks from the branches of the trees, but the harpies would be able to fly up to gain vision of anyone hiding there.

2. Base of the tree is littered with roots, creating difficult terrain in some areas. Climbing onto the large roots should be very easy and likely not take an action, climbing up the trunk of the tree slightly harder and takes extra time/movement. Darker area on the ground delineates the full extent of the upper canopy, not all

3. Large flat fungus shelf forms a handy platform. 20ft off the ground, 15 from roots. Can support people's weight no problem, but anyone falling on it from a height will snap it off, releasing yellow mold-like spores. This is the reason the harpies havent' removed it, despite it making access to their nests noticeably easier.

4. Large, high branch 40 ft off the ground. While very sturdy, not going to break anytime soon, it is a bit bouncy, and sways under movement. Acrobatics type checks to stay balanced, unless you sit down and scoot along on your butt at a greatly reduced speed. 

5. Harpy nests, 50 ft high. On a wooden platform securely fastened to the tree. Sharpened stakes on underside of platform make it difficult to climb directly up, high difficulty to avoid and failure means you take damage and don't progress. There are no spikes above the platform, so a creature could climb higher up the tree and then descend to avoid the spikes. Treasure: There are shiny baubles visible glinting in the sun! Mostly glass and beads, but a few genuinely valuable gemstones mixed in with the harpy poop.

6. Climbing higher than the nest grants partial cover from ranged attacks and flying creatures, as the branches become more dense. The absolute crown of the tree is 130 ft high, and climbable up until the last 15 feet. The apex is partly bare, with giant spikes of wood sticking up out of the foliage like a crown. The tree is the tallest in the vicinity, and from this height players should be able to see some cool points of interest in neighbouring hexes/areas close by.

7. Path leading west. Who's been using the track? Clearly not harpies (they fly) or things that would be eaten by harpies (they prefer to avoid being eaten).

8. Deep well (actually the shaft of a buried tower.) Vines growing makes climbing possible but not easy. Possible vines break, guaranteed if the character is loaded with gear and encumbered. Deep, deep drop- this and the 'path leading west' are also bookends for if I want to make more maps and keep adding on. 

I hope I placed the well far enough out of the way so that it doesn't overlap with where the owlbear den ought to be! But I think it's in the dead zone.

P.S. This map should probably have more treasure. And like... scenarios, and character motivations, and plot hooks. That's all up to you though, I'm not making a dungeon here, I'm just making a map with some supplemental notes! All you have to do is find a place for a giant tree with a nest in it and everything should be fine.

Owlbear Lair

 As part of my continuing roll20 DMing I've been making a few battlemaps. 

click for big!

An owlbear lair!

My intention was to make this fairly generic, so it's basically usable as an extension of a random encounter type situation. However, it occurs to me that a few features might benefit from some explanation, so I'll include a quick key:

1. Path leading to nest is well worn- owlbears don't care much about being tracked, because who would be dumb enough to mess with an owlbear in their lair? I included this for the non-zero chance that the players will try to lure the owlbear out or ambush it, in which case the entire rest of the map might be redundant. Oh well!

2. Entrance set between some enormous tree roots. Entrance is wide but low to the ground, and a bit steep, requiring an easy climb check to descend- which is fine when you can take your time, but if you're, say, being chased by an owlbear it's a lot harder. If I wanted to add on to this map, I would build the bluff above the entrance, and the branches of the enormous tree. What could live up in the tree that would happily coexist with an owlbear? Maybe some scavenging harpies? Harpies sound fun.

3. Mud-trough entrance. Owlbear doesn't get impeded, but humanoid characters slip and fall in the mud easily (as a Grease spell)

4. Owlbears like fresh food, especially to feed newly-hatched chicks (owlbears supplement their lactation with drip-fed blood). This owlbear has broken the legs of an unfortunate peasant and stuffed them in this hole- if he hears anyone he calls for help, possibly alerting the owlbear.

5. Passageway north partly blocked by roots. Acrobatics to wiggle through, Athletics to lift out of the way. Roots are infested with numerous small poisonous owlbear mites.

6. Dead end passageway, fresh claw marks on the wall. Owlbear has been working on a new passageway. Lots of roots, some glowing mushrooms- magic! If anyone know any good magic mushroom tables let me know. Elfmaids & Octopi probably does, right?

7. The owlbear's vomitorium. Numerous owlbear pellets in differing stages of decomposition. Each 10 minutes spent searching, character can roll to find something random. Successful check find an at-least-somewhat-useful magic item, failure roll on the Random Junk table. Make sure to describe the junk in an owlbear-themed way!

I do love rot grubs, so feel free to sprinkle some in here. This variety of rot grub doesn't infest owlbears, naturally (or maybe they do, just not fatally, so owlbear flesh is notoriously worm-ridden).

Wall to the south is very thin, can be broken through, either by an adventurer or an owlbear. Owlbear uses this as an escape route, although it's unlikely to flee from puny humans. It only cares about bigger owlbears, or dragons.  

8. This low part of the cave is filled with slick, deep, grey mud. Enough to drown in, but if you find a rock to stand on and balance carefully you can keep your head above the mud. The owlbear is too big to fall in (the ceiling is quite low), but it will happily punt an intruder into the mud- although not if there's only one intruder, because then it wouldn't have a nice snack for when the fight is over.

9. Owlbear has a cozy, dry sleeping nest made of leaves and sticks, and a round incubating nest with eggs. Nest is packed with manure, which the owlbear carefully adds and subtracts from to maintain the correct amount of heat. 

Battlemap: The Kraken's Eye

 Betcha thought this was a derelict blog huh? Maybe. We'll see if this is one of those 'do one post after a long dry spell in a last ditch attempt to revive it which promptly fails' posts. Wouldn't be the first time a project has gone that way!

What have I been up to? This pandemic moved all my games online, of course. So most of my D&D energy has been dedicated to learning how to run that. Roll20 is a learning curve I tell you, and I went down a bit of a rabbit hole where I decided every NPC and monster needed their own stat blocks typed in by hand. 

But now that I've got a handle on that, I've been turning a bit more to art, creating stuff to add to my games. So we'll see if that's a new element which can help me revive my passions for this blog. At any rate, I'm happy with the content I have for this post!

Behold, the Kraken's Eye, an new, cool, squamous-eldritch-horror battlemap for your roll20 (or other) needs: 

Click to Embiggen, ofc
15x17 in case you're wondering

This is ostensibly for the adventure 'Kraken Corpse Delve' (thanks to the estimable Bryce for his excellent review of the module). But really, what game doesn't call for a tense encounter perched on the eyeball of some lovecraftian horror? If you can't use this at SOME point in your game, well I don't want to tell you you're running your game wrong, but you may be running your game wrong.

Now the one problem with that module is the lack of maps. I know, 'theatre of the mind,' but for online games in particular I find an evocative map or illustration is a good way to focus the group's attention. In addition, the very same weird nature of the geography that would make a traditional dungeon map very hard to draw makes the use of a battle map potentially even more important. If I have no idea if a character is above, below, behind, or entirely distant from, another character, how can players be expected to keep track? This are narrow, asymmetrical spaces. I do like the claustrophobia and confusion a purely imagined space helps evoke, and for the majority of this adventure I'll stick to descriptions... but for certain key locations, a map adds a nice touch.

So here's the first, and the first one that caught my attention: a great eye, from which eye-monsters burst. The eye also functions as a kind of 'hatch,' and after it's ruptured or pried loose the players can climb down through the socket to access the next level of the 'dungeon.' I will be following it up (hopefully, if I don't get distracted and never return to this blog again) with a few other maps: the gills I think were one, and the portal room inside what I think is the kraken's brain? And maybe a few other mini-maps. I am intrigued by the idea of illustrating the section of the creatures claws 'jumbled together like lions' or something, even though I'm not sure any fights take place there. You'll have to add one of your own.

A few notes:
- the initial 'entrance' is intended to be via climbing down the long pink tentacle. However clambering over the large orange leg, rappling from the ceiling, or even clambering out of the pit, are all options depending on how you use the map.

- I hope I successfully conveyed height and distance. It's clear to ME, but I already know what it all means. In brief, the broken bits of shell are intended to be platforms, at least 5-10 feet off the 'ground, and the bottom right section features a set of rough, broken 'stair's that leads down to the green tendril-tentacle. The orange legs are either catwalks or 'ladders' to clamber around on. The shadowy area to the right is a chasm and is intended to be pretty deep (and full of weird spines and tentacles and glowing lights). the brown wall to the left, and the rock wall at the top, are intended to be, well, walls- maybe a little sloping, but really hard to actually STAND on. The jutting rock in the bottom right corner is intended as another kind of platform.
- the green-yellow tentacles should probably try to sting you if you step on them. 
- there's a lot of 'difficult terrain' on this map, but in general the large purplish area of skin is pretty clear and easy to move across. Use your discretion in other areas, and of course clearly communicate to players what challenges they might face moving around the space.
- I didn't put as much shadow in as I normally would, as over-shaded maps are a pet peeve of mine in roll20. Because you can set up light sources in the browser, having lighting too 'baked in' to the illustration itself sort of breaks immersion or limits flexibility. I'd place some light sources coming from the eyes, the glowing tentacles, or just some ambient light from the ceiling (fungus of course). However, I would be interested what other people's thoughts are on the matter. More shadows??

Let me know if you use it, how it works for ya, and if you use it for any games that aren't part of the 'kraken corpse' module! 

Ok see ya, and fingers crossed for the next post ;)