The Classic Betrayer

Dungeon: Thousand Ends

“-and so you have sinned” said the pearl-laden emissary as the shutters crashed open and the royal court became a tumult of wind “You have trespassed my realm and plundered foreign lands, making me accessory to your slaughter”. The figure rose, throwing aside their moral guise and those assembled said it was as if the sky itself levelled an accusing finger at the sovereigns. “You sought riches, now you shall pay.”

The remnants of a great treasure fleet scuttled in an act of divine wrath, this palisade of masts and reef of broken keels has been collecting the vessels of the greedy and the wayward ever since. The locals got tired of warning folks about “the cliffs of a thousand ends”, so over time the name was worn away just as the sea has worn away at the surrounding land.

In addition to becoming a home for all manner of sealife that now nests within the shattered ships, a covey of sirens now roosts among the nearby cliffs, their songs carried by the wind to ensorcell the minds of sailors and navigators passing by and draw them off course. ( Blame @5ecardaday for the excellent monster)

Hooks:

Driven below deck by of rain while travelling from one port to another, the party have only a few days to notice that more and more of the crew are acting strangely as they fall prey to the sirens’ enchantment, becoming sluggish and uncoordinated as they each drift off into their own fantasy land. If they don’t figure it out they’ll end up crashing on the rocks and having to fight their way through the periphery of the dungeon and then to shore as the sirens pick off the sailors.

Piled high with the fruit of slave mines and plundered temples, the ships of the treasure fleet carried tribute to fuel an empire across the sea. More than just wealth, there are any number of cultural treasures up and down the coast that the party could return to their rightful owners for great renown. 

Even before they were sundered by the wrath of a seagod, there were damned souls aboard the fleet, the blunt instruments of imperial ambition all too used to bleeding people and entire nations for the sake of feeding the royal coffers. Now they haunt the depths protecting their gold from thieves, bound by greed or fanatical loyalty to a long-fallen crown. Should the party REALLY piss them off, they will band together animating the surrounding dredgewood and perusing them even back to their vessel.

Perhaps the only thing that could dissuade a group of adventurers from seeking out what might be a motherload of sunken treasure would be their inability to breathe underwater

Because this dungeon is so expansive and atypical of layout, consider using my system for running large scale dungeons with an abstract floorplan. It’ll be far easier than trying to map out dozens of vessels above and below the waterline.

I won't lie when I say I'm kinda disappointed in the quality of animation for this. It's just kinda "okay" lol, instead of being excellent like Astartes was or some of the trailers for new Warhammer+ content is. Like what was the point of hiring all those new incredible fan animators if you're gonna end up using animation that looks worse than Dawn of War 3 did, damn even Dawn of War 2. Feels like they just phoned this one in despite it being a HUGE launch.

Warhammer 40,000 New Edition Cinematic Trailer

Adventurous Locale - The City of Sunsets

Adventurous Locale - The City of Sunsets I came up with a sort of trade hub for the Upper Planes and wanted to get my thoughts written down somewhere - why not here? #ttrpg #dnd #planescape

I’m trying to get a few new ideas written out and somewhere visible for people to give me feedback. This is the first one. Somewhere close to one of the Upper Planes of existence sits a strange and unnamed demiplane – a world sandwiched between two impenetrable stone disks. Around its edges slowly pass falling reddish stars, giving the world a sunset glow at all times; once one star dips below…

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The Last Stand by David Ok

I've been thinking more recently about wishing I had a big sister, or a motherly person to guide me through all this trans girl stuff. Someone I legitimately trust and who cares about my development as a girl, but can also teach me about this stuff and mentor me in it. I don't know. It's not really something I can search for. Just gotta wait until someone finds me.

Drafting the Adventure: Dungeons Without Walls

I love the idea of dungeons, but there was a significant portion of my life as a DM where they didn’t feature in my games. While Pathfinder and 5e provided a great framework for character building and tactical skirmishes that I could build story on top of, neither was really great when it came time to detour into a  dungeon. My players tended to get confused when we headed out to plunder the local ruin or cave system, spending a lot more time figuring out where they were and what they should be doing than actually doing anything. 

The problem as it turned out was limited information.  I had a picture of the dungeon in my head/notes but I couldn’t telepathically infer that to the party, and the back and forth questions where they tried to orient themselves within my mental labyrinth ate up a lot of session time prevented us from attaining that snappy pace that every table needs to keep the players invested.

Recently though I had an epiphany about overhauling exploration in d&d, and wrote up a whole post detailing how you could build and run wilderness adventures the same way you could a heist or a murder mystery. Because I was already writing a series about dungeon design it didn’t take long for me to realize that this exploration overhaul was 100% applicable, and could solve a lot of the delay and confusion my players usually faced on their next trip underground.  Spoilers: it worked amazingly.

 The key to this overhaul was giving my players enough information to see the dungeon as a sort of abstract checklist, and then giving them the power to investigate and check things off that list in whatever order they wished, when they enter a new level of the dungeon they get a new checklist to fill out which still keeps that sense of exploration. Folk love checking things off lists, and I as a dungeonmaster love it when players engage with the content I’ve spent so much energy creating even if it’s only poking their head in the door to realize they want to run away as fast as possible. Likewise, designing the dungeon this way let me tackle much larger concepts without having to sweat the details of filling up every little room as I would have to in map-centric design.

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Dungeon: Enlanis’ie, Kingdom of the Aurora The Stolen Kingdom

“And so did she travel into the north, to the lands unbeloved by her god of flower and field, to the kingdom of Elanis’ie, where the sky colors dance and the elderlings dwelt, where she scaled the parapets of ever-ice and sought out her mother, who had been born to the kingdom upon her shield, carried from the great battle of the age to seek healing in those immortal halls”

`The Ziiriad, transcription of oratory performance. 

Setup: There are places only spoken of in legend, destinations that can only be reached by heroes after suffering through a long road of trials and proving to both history and the gods above that they are worthy to behold those wonders.

Enlanis’ie was one if those places, a mythical kingdom of the farthest north built off aurora light and glacial ice, which existed only during the depths of polar night. Though it had appeared in innumerable tales over the centuries of its existance, it is most often thought of as a place of healing, where miraculous cures may be sought, or where figures of legend seek their long deserved rest. 

Seeking the expertise of an ancient hero, or perhaps an act of healing far beyond the skill of any mortal, the party traveled weeks into the polar expanse following the path of the auroras in the sky till they catch sight of the Enlanis’ie, or atleast it’s imposing glacial walls. Tall as any fortress but barren of any of the ephemeral spires that feature in so many stories of the impossible kingdom, the party will have to find a way through this foreboding ring of ice and explore the place where the kingdom once stood, 

Adventure Hooks: 

The party’s exploration of these great icy battlements is made no easier by the fact that a blizard has just rolled in, leaving the party no viable shelter besides the surrounding dungeon. Fending off polar beasts and those fey and arcane entities that once fed on the bountiful magic of the eternal aurora. 

Bypassing the walls leads the party to a vast exapnse somewhere between a snow covered quarry and a bombed out capital city, with eerie avenues of hollowed out foundations extending maybe two or three stories in the air before simply ending, stiarways projecting out into the open air connecting to nothing. Among these desolate structures the party will encounter loremaster Anisidora, a venerable elven hermit who wanders the remnants of her home with nothing but a lantern full of captured aurora light to guide her way. Immortal in the way of the most ancient elves, Anisidora is frostbitten and half feral from hunger, but an offer of food and a place by the fire might allow the party to discover the story of what exactly happened. 

To hear the loremaster tell it, this disastrous disappearance is the fault of one Siretiil Glassbinder, A covetous historian who grew tired of living in a technicolor dreamscape and endeavored to preserve the kingdom’s most magical sights in a medium that could not be distorted by the vagaries of the fey magic that gifted the city with all its miraculous properties . Driven by a love of her home that left no room for the opinions of others, Siretiil moved from simply recording and reproducing the wonders of Elanis’ie to outright catching them in prisms, eventually trapping the entire kingdom in a fractal gem that she still carries with her in a jealous madness. If the party presses, Anisidora will confess that Siretiil was her daughter and onetime apprentice, who broke with her mother over the same ideology that drove her to begin glassing sections of the city. Apparently Anisidora was the one thing about Enlanis’ie that she didn’t want to take with her.  Glassbinder could be anywhere in the feywild or material plane by this point, which means that the party will need to add several extra steps to finishing their quest. 

Adonael of the Blood Angels Legion, by @marsskop!

I taught my boyfriend how to play Magic The Gathering and Ive never beaten him :(( I'm not even good at my alternative gratification activity anymore!!!!!!!!

sure, that transfem might not be very good at sex, but she can totally beat your ass at yugioh, and those two activities are practically synonymous for her at this point.

i know we're all sick of self-care being a marketing tactic now, but i don't think a lot of us have any other concept of self-care beyond what companies have tried to sell us, so i thought i'd share my favorite self-care hand out

brought to you by how mad i just got at a Target ad