One cool place from your campaign

Briefly describe one cool place from your campaign.

I'll offer the Temple of Echoes Souls, a training ground for monk/psions who specialize in sensing the powers of others, then echoing those powers to enhance themselves. When you fight a monk of the echoed soul, you will have to face your own powers, plus whatever skills the monk possesses.

The temple has shown up in three games. In the first, the party went in so they could create a soul for one PC who had had his soul destroyed. It was discovered that the PC had once been a member of the temple, and he had been punished for his evil acts by having his soul destroyed. The monks, however, let the party go into the temple to take its test, sort of like the Cloister of Trials from Final Fantasy X. Each PC contributed some memory or part of his soul to create the new soul, but the player (Hamid) got to decide what he used or did not use for his soul.

It just so happened he took all the evil bits, consciously crafting the most evil soul he could. The campaign came to a climax soon thereafter, and the group was fairly happy with what had occured.


In the next campaign, a new group of characters went to the temple to use its power to find an answer to a great mystery. They discovered that the temple had been sacked by one of its old students, who had become ineffably evil. With the aid of anti-psionic magic they were able to defeat him, and in the process they destroyed the temple.


In my latest campaign, the climax of the campaign was at the ruins of the temple, where all the uncontrolled psionic power had opened a rift to the elemental plane of dream. The group chased the villain into the rift, then fought him in mental combat, almost falling prey to a trick that made them think they had escaped when they actually were still stuck inside. When they finally did kill the villain, they left his soul to be tortured by a remnant of the soul of Hamid's old PC that was still lingering, and then they sealed the planar rift, leaving the villain to be tormented forever.


A lot of mileage out of one location.

My favorite location from the last homebrew I ran was the Sea of Graves.

Two decades ago, the gnolls poured forth from the Dragonspine Mountains to raid the fertile farmlands of Termana, the largest city-state on the continent. Termana raised a great army, and the two forces clashed in battle for months and months. Finally, desperate to destroy the humans at any cost, gnoll necromancers opened a portal to the Negative Energy Plane in an abandoned Termanan graveyard.

The resulting explosion of necromantic energy decimated a hundred-mile radius, turning it into a barren wasteland, fit only for the dead. Both armies were nearly destroyed, and the Termanans fled, allowing the gnolls to be torn apart by their own raised dead.

The Sea of Graves, as it was dubbed, was sort of a Mournland before Eberron, full of undead horrors, wandering savage tribes of gnolls, giant insects, various aberrations adapted to the barren terrain, and even a few normal animals tough enough to hang on (like goats and ravens).

The heroes were tasked by the seven patriarchs of Termana to venture across the Sea of Graves to find a gnomish necromancer who lived on its far side. A Termanan exile, the necromancer was teleporting organs out of the bodies of those who had wronged him years before, and was implanting them into a flesh golem which he was trying to make truly alive. There, they were attacked by all number of undead, had to negotiate with gnolls in order to pass through their territory, and met a mad druid who lived in the Sea and was studying the life that managed to find a way to hold on.

Demiurge out.

Hmmm....

The Rune Mountains. So named because the dwarves have carved enormous runes into every inch of them. There were nine of them, each dedicated to a separate dwarven art. They were connected by a magical rail system. The last mountain had been taken over by orcs, and that is where I inserted Mongoose's Skraag: The City of Orcs. The second to last mountain was a decimated battleground that was reclaimed by the PCs in the final adventure for one of my first 3e campaigns.

I liked the bit of snarkiness I added to the first mountain, the seat of government and trade; the gates to the mountain were ponderous spellbound doors. If the dwarves wanted to make the foreign diplomats/merchants wait, they neglected to mention that they had spells to open the gates in an instant.

The Sea of Stones.

On the edge of the frozen barren wastes that stretch further than the Emperor's reach, is a mountain range. On the edge of that range is the remains of an enourmous volcano that exploded and subsided eons ago. The former caldera is now a vast shallow inland sea prones to mists and dense fog due to the still-tepid waters. Pillars of stone, both natural and worked, rise from the water and tower into the air. Some are inhabited. The Sea is very difficult to navigate safely due to the unexpected 'reefs', some monsters, and warding spells. Only specially-trained navigators can go where they are needed quickly and without incident.

In the center is the secret heart of wizardry, a rogue guild set up in defiance of the Emperor's direct orders that no more than three mages should ever gather together. It is a house of peace and prosperity with vast tunneled halls filled with arcane lore.

I like the idea of "The Far Realm" from one of the later Drag. mags. I will probably put them through a bit of that soon.

I dig the sanity-blasting Far Realm, too. I never really took notice of it in previous editions, but the recent Dragon as well as the 3e MotP have really brought it into focus.

palleomortis said:

I like the idea of "The Far Realm" from one of the later Drag. mags. I will probably put them through a bit of that soon.

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Ssyriss - city of coils

In the homebrew I am working on medusas possess an incredible life span, some of the most ancient living upwards of 2,000 years. In a vast swamp there lies a city that is ruled over by the medusa race. In fact, the ruler of this city was featured in BlackDirge's suped up monster thread - Madam Tangle. Although in that article her background was changed to match the Forgotten Realms campaign, I use Madam Tangle as the ruler of Ssyriss.

Ssyriss is one of the oldest cities in my campaign world. It started out in the plains but was swallowed by the swamp centuries ago. It's isolated location keeps it off the radar of the kingdoms, privacy breeding safety.

In Ssyriss, medusas rule. While they must wear masks or sunglasses in public to avoid petrification, the threat still keeps the slaves in line. While medusas rule, they are out numbered 10-1 by various slave races. Nagas act as thier generals/assistants, trolls and ogres are used for manual labor, lizard folk make up the majority of the grunts and yuan-ti roam around the city on various errands.

Such a long lived race accumulates much knowledge - so anyone who can make it through the swamp, find the city, win the medusa's trust, and offer them something worth while could find a vast amount of knowledge, if they survive.

The city of Loereth was a beautiful construction of black and white marble. Towering spires and elegant, protective walls defined a structure that slowly spiralled up towards the highest tower in the royal palace. Beautiful statues of strange metal stood guard before each of the city gates.

On a critical day in the campaign, the King of Loereth called for the entire kingdom's populace (not that big) to attend a royal announcement - and then, as ancient bells rang from hidden towers, the walls and spires slid into new configurations, sealing the people within the city's confines.

At the climactic moment, the great necromantic engine that was the city of Loereth drew forth the living energies of every creature within its boundaries, and fired off a massive bolt of death-magic that utterly destroyed the city of Navaril, the most powerful magical kingdom on the continent.

Two-thirds of the population of Loereth died that day.

Two-thirds of the population of Loereth rose again that night as undead.

The PCs had less than twelve hours to evacuate the city of the remaining survivors before the undead consumed them all.

The crescent-shaped island of Reefshoal.
Imperial explorers stumbled upon this lush tropical paradise, and discovered the wealth that lay in the crystal blue lagoon in the form of pearl beds.
An Imperial military outpost was established on the western "horn" of the lagoon, while the state sponsored Temple of Pelor built a mission on the western "horn".
The Empire sent their prisoners and "politically inconvenient" to Reefshoal to work in the pearl beds, and the Temple worked hard to convert these heathens into upright members of society.
Add in a few murders and attacks by the natives ... and the fact that the island was the "playground of the gods" and we got a great start to our campaign on this little island.

The Ruins of Irongate Keep

Irongate Keep. Once the prison of the Tharian Empire. Bringing together political prisinors with all manner of creatures which were deemed a threat to public saftey, but too valuable or knowledgable to destroy. It was the base of the Tenth Tharian Legion, the Black Rooks.
At its height, it was a place of infamy, known as both a pleasure resort for nobles who had commited crimes, and a place of foulest torture. But in time all things pass.

The ancient Tharian Empire had long ago fallen to rebelion and internal corruption. The lands that where once protected by the Tharian Legions fallen away into other kingdoms, or petty baronies. Irongate Keep still remained, too large to crumble away in the winds of time.. Seldom under the complete control of any one group for long, petty robber barons often held a portion of the keep against others - even others who held other portions of the Keep itself.

All that changed during the Moonfall.

A terrible celestial tragedy shattered the moon, and fragments showered the lands of the former Tharian Empire. Strange energies were released as well as unearthly elements fell from the sky. What was once a political and social wasteland became an actual wasteland, with the Ruins of Irongate Keep at its heart. Deep beneth the ruins, dark things still dwell behind failing protections, both magical and mundane. The surrounding lands became known as "The Blasted Lands", areas where people feared to tread due to the hulking insectoid aberations that stalked the barren land.