Emerging from the mud, a partially excavated dome of terracotta bricks. All around, wooden walkways and support structures. At the top, near the broken remains of the roof lantern, a descending platform powered by a wheel pulley, guarded by 4 company men. Inside, various groups of explorers and adventurers are loitering and preparing for their next expedition. Stacked gear on the walls, lit torches and lanterns. This area has been thoroughly looted for a while now.
All around the walls huge arched windows offer a look at stratified clay.
At the NW, NE, SW, and SE corners, four alcoves open on long descending spiral stairs.
The ceiling has a faded and mud splattered mural depicting the four aspects of the Mother.
Descending platform: a wooden platform big enough for 4 people with backpacks to stand on. The pulley must be operated by two persons using the 2m tall dented wheel nearby.
Company men: stats as brigands. lightly armed and leather clad. Will let people with a Company contract in and out without questions. Can be bribed for entrance, but will refuse exit unless most of the loot finds a way in their pockets. 2-6 chance they will still denounce the trespassers afterward.
Stairs: all of the spiral stairs go down to the the “piano nobile”, and all of them have a semi-hidden door (forced open) halfway down to access the upper servants quarters. The NW stairs are collapsed after just a few steps.
Aspects of the Mother: the Child of Spring, the Maiden of Summer, the Lady of Autumn, and the Crone of Winter. The cult of the Mother and her Aspects is the main religion in the Wild Frontier.
A little thing about me that I have to disclose to put this post in the right light: I have ADHD. I am so very distractible. I have troubles with long term undertakings.
So, why oh why embark in a year long project that requires literal daily commitment?
Because it looks like a ton of fun, and because I need the kick in the butt to actually start working on a bunch of ideas that have been marinating in my brain for months, if not years.
But! I know myself. If I want this to go anywhere, I have to approach this with a carefully studied method. A procedure, if you will.
So, here we go.
General principles, in no particular order:
Make time for journaling. Early morning, lunch break, before bedtime. Be flexible. Cut something else out. Corollary: sleep is not something you can cut out, neither is family time. You know you would regret that later;
Plan ahead. Start working now. Ride the wave of inspiration and save some work for when the tide recedes. If you have it in you to write 2/3/4 rooms, just do it, publish one and keep the excess for a rainy day;
In a pinch, just go for an interesting empty room. Interesting being the keyword there. No broom closets and such;
Make notes. Lots of them. Always have some kind of medium on you to record new ideas;
Steal a lot. Novels, science and nature articles, #osr blog posts, everything;
Don't get lost in the weeds of mechanics and rules. Lots of time to flash those out later;
Don't be afraid to go back and update older rooms with new details as you go. Always mark those later changes;
Writing procedure:
If you have a flash of inspiration, use that. If not, check your notes for older ideas you have jotted down. On an empty tank, random generators are your friends.
Write down what's on your mind. You can make it pretty later. Or not;
Look at the other rooms on the level. Can you add interesting connections with the rest of the material? Have you got a new faction on your hands? Some kind of multi-room puzzle? Either expand or just store your ideas for later use;
Publish on the blog, seep good tea and congratulate yourself (note to self: add a step regarding the making of said tea somewhere);
Finally, a note on mapping and art: I am emphatically not an artist. I can barely draw circles and squares. My maps will therefore be composed of badly drawn circles and squares, and I will provide no other illustrations. Sorry! I promise I'll try to “paint the scene” with my words as much as my bad English allows me!
I had this vision of a palace submerged under an enormous mud slide, with just the top accessible from the outside. But not just any old palace… The magically sentient seat of power of a dreadful blood sorcerer of course!
Well, at least it was sentient, hundreds of years ago. Nowadays, most of its core crystals have been misplaced, looted, or just plain broken and dispersed. Its mind feel slow, its thoughts patchy, and it lost track of entire sections of itself. Also, strange things started living in its guts, and now bands of pillagers started to infiltrate and plunder the higher floors.
Direct inspirations:
– The Founders Trilogy (a specific part, but no spoilers here)
– Gradient Descent for inspiration about how to handle a sentient dungeon.
– The Dragon Prince for the inspiration on how Blood Magic works in my games.
P.S: what about that #WildFrontiers thing up there? Well, I haven't written anything about it yet, but that's my home-brew campaign world and system, mostly still WIP. In short, more about that later!
