D&D General #Dungeon23

[Eyes of Nine]

Oooookay. How's everyone doing?

I went on a 2 week camping/backpacking/canoeing trip. Decided not to bring my book with me on my canoe trip (Water would kill it!).

Have been back for a week now, and just this morning got back into the groove.

One thing being on vacation with my book made me realize is that boy I'd HATE to lose that book. To some degree, posting my pages here was also a form of archive for the book. So I'm going to go later today/this week and post my pages since my last page update (whenever that was)

 

[gorice]

True to my word, here's there second half of July. This level is pretty gruesome (that seems to be a theme with this dungeon of mine, doesn't it?), but after this it's all smooth sailing with very little body horror, I promise. The upper levels will be weird in completely different ways.

17: Trenches: Heart

• A vast bulbous thing, joined to huge black tubes.
• (??) It’s a lot like a heart; a pump system.
• (?) The heart operates the transporter system. All the canals join this chamber.

18: Transporter Canals

• (there are several of these, marked on the map and serving to connect the sublevels and provide shortcuts. Each is a pair, sending material from one location to another. They are all one-way, though you can ‘cheat’ by breaking the walls, which also renders the canal ineffective.)
• Irising portal of hard translucent panels. Opens when touched, spilling a residue of clear, viscous fluid that smells like blood. Floor and ceiling have closed portals that look similar. Grey walls have the texture of fingernails.
• (!?) The transporter begins to operate automatically a few seconds after some one steps in. The door slowly irises closed, then the chamber fills with fluid, the other doors open, and the contents of the chamber are flushed through arterial canals to the destination.

20: Staff Rooms

• Gloomy room filled with scattered old bones and ruined furniture. The wall screens are long rotted away.

21: Massage Rooms

• Lit by skylights. Tables and divider screens are falling apart.
• (??) Room C has a skeleton with a gold ring, earrings, and necklace worth 10 coins each.

22: Courtyard Stair

• (!) Lair of a Typhon Demon, dozing on a bed of skulls at the foot of the staircase. One of its seven heads is always awake, whispering to itself.
• Dead trees, natural light from high windows. Whispering fountain foaming blood.

(upper level)

23: Sun Room

• (!) Lair of a shrike demon brood. Roll:
  • 1-2 = 50% home, sleeping
  • 3-4 = all home, squabbling over a messy goat carcass
  • 5-6 = all away, but may return via the balcony with fresh prey at any moment.
• Wrecked chairs, tables, and lounges. Whispers of the typhon downstairs. Heavy shutters to the balcony are wide open. Floor smeared with black feathers and bloodstains.
• (?) Shutters can be barred from the inside.
• (??) Traymobile against one wall, miraculously intact, with a silver platter (5 coins) and crystal decanter (5 coins).

24: Balcony

• A great view of the city and gardens. Marble is scored with talon marks. Directly below (30’) is the picnic area of the gardens.

25: Library

• Locked with the gold key.
• Weirdly untouched. A musty little room that may have the book you need.

26: Hall of Vapours

• Connects to ventilation shaft. A pleasant breeze from below that smells like iron.
• (!) Filled with ripe egg sacs, ready to burst with leaper demons.

27: Office of the Keybearer

• Stately office with furniture of oily hardwood. The Keybearer sits the the desk in his armour, keys on a gold chain around his neck, sword on the table.
• (!) The keybearer is gilt armour filled with demonic mutation and gore. It may or may not be lucid enough to parley, or fly into a destructive rage.
• (?) They gold key opens every door in the level except the imperial stair.

28: Refectory

• Kitchen and dining area, ruined and replete with throbbing shrike demon eggs.
• (!) You know the drill with demon eggs.

29: Upper Foyer

• Two locked doors that lead to higher levels.
  • (A) Marble lion door. Stairwell to the ziggurat city. Locked (gold key).
  • (B) Granite dragon door. Elevator to the highest. Locked and magically sealed (purple key).

30: Imperial Infirmary (womb of monsters)

• Stately marble hall lit by high windows.
• (!) The young prince of the blood, a gigantic bloated child with biomechanical cables connecting his body to the walls. Scores of demon grubs hang from his body. His limbs are bound to the walls with black fleshy lashes.
  • The prince moans and cries, or thrashes and screams when agitated in any way. This will attract the ire of nearby demons.
  • He cannot move unless his restraints are cut.
  • The prince has the mind of a traumatised child, and remembers only pain and that is parents left him here to cure his illness. He is seldom lucid and may become violent.
  • He is kept alive with a constant supply of human sacrifices to the spa’s machinery of immortality. Stopping the supply or cutting him loose will kill him. The demons feed and spawn from his immortal flesh, and want him where he is.
  • The caterpillar demon visits him sometimes, telling him stories and feeding him milk.

 

[Eyes of Nine]

Oooh, my most recent room/area has a huge Undead Gibbering Aberration, inspired by the maw-mouths in the Scholomance novels. Having fun again!

 

[M_Natas]

After a longer break, I'm back. Between work and my toddler going to bed later and later I was just to exhausted to continue. But here it goes:

Day 177 to 186. This time a small Thieves' Hideout in my spelljammer town of Plankstadt. I will continue Dungeon23, but more slowly from now in:

Under the docks in the harbor of Plankstadt, when you cross the gravity plane and get to the bottom, you can climb further "down" (or back up) to get to the hiding place of the small thieves' guild of Plankstadt.

-----------------
And the following is just something extra I wanted to share from the campaign where I'm a player in (and I don'tknow where else tomput it): An Inquisition Cage.

My DM allowed me to build this homebrew Item.
You need to be able to cast speak with dead and a healing spell to build this cage. It also costs like a 100 Gold.
While building it you connect the head of a recently killed creature in it. After initial activation, it works like the spell Speak with death but with an additional 1d4 Questions. Like, you get 5 + 1d4 charges and can use one charge to ask a question like with Speak with Death.
To recharge, you have to feed the severed head your blood. When you recharge it the first time, you loose 1 HP and get 1 Charge. Each additional recharge costs 1 HP more. So if you feed it the second d time it costs 2 HP, the third time 3 HP and so on.
My character used it on a slain Lieutenant of a crime syndicat to get more information like where she has assets they can steal and stuff.

 

[Eyes of Nine]

As @M_Natas above, after a long break, I'm back

My project has been more writing all along so some of these pages are walls of text, apologies...

I decided to end creating more hexes, and instead decided to "solve" the mystery for myself, and decide who created and was in charge of this huge tower.

Spoiler

It was a group of Phaerimm. However, they reached to far, and broke into the world of the dead - maybe the domain of the Raven Queen? Or perhaps Vecna? Either way, there's been an ongoing war at the top of the tower

So because of that, I decided to build out the top of the tower and the palace that's there. I'll detail that in a follow up post.

First up, the final branch off the final level (so far). I think I got up to 12 hex levels, the 12th one of which had 2 branches. Branch 1 I detailed back in week 16 - some time in mid/late April probably

This branch, I think I over rode my typical rolls, and just said "I want floating volcanoes on a sea of magma". Living there are a group of giff miners; agrarian zebranaurs; and blue dragonborn in airship cities.

Hex 2 of this branch is one of glaciers. I haven't figured out why there aren't typhoon level winds between the intense cold of hex 2 and the intense heat coming off the magma sea - a problem to solve for future me (probably Magic, because fantasy). I do know that I rolled this one up - but it also happens to be quite easy to draw glacial terrain

At the tip of Hex 2, it has broken to the outside world. Since this branch is roughly 12 miles up, the air here is both incredibly cold, as well as a bit thin. However, 6 clans of whitespawn hunters call this area their domain. It's a world of brutality - any group of PCs would be hard pressed to survive...

Questions:

1. Does anyone come in through the entrance at the tip?
2. What are the sky cities/blue dragonborn doing with all that lightning?
3. Are the whitespawn in thrall to any greater powers?
4. Who do the Giff serve - and why?

 

[Eyes of Nine]

More recent work:

The top of the Tower. This post discusses who I decided who was in charge of this Tower. I assume no one cares about spoilers, but if so, I'd stop reading now.

The top of the Tower widens a bit, and is topped with a translucent dome. It is a huge labyrinth (not maze) with one track in and one track out. The walls of the labyrinth are actually giant tall buyildings. Height of buildings not yet calculated! The buildings are different styles, and there is one main road/thoroughfare that's the path of the labyrinth. Are there ways to short cut through the buildings? Maybe!

Living in the buildings are two cultures - the Owlin Parliament and the Regnis Moot.

The Moot are humans who were once the thralls/slaves of the Phaerimm who have been released from their mind control, but not knowing anything or anyone else, they have settled throughout this hex in the lower 5 floors of the buildings. The Moot is made up of 19 tribes of roughly 30-50 members each

The Parliament is made up of 9 tribes of roughly 50-70 people each (total of around ~500 Owlin here) who live in the upper 5 floors of various buildings. There's a no-person zone of around 10 floors between the humans and the owlin. Is there tension? Who knows?

In the center of the labyrinth is a huge domed structure, the Apogee Court. There are tall walls (50 feet/16m) high, above which is a translucent dome. It now appears mostly dark and quiet, with vegetation growing up against the dome. Every once in a while if one stares long enough, you can see movement. The Apogee Court is also the name for this faction of Phaerimm who brought this Tower here to this plane. Other Phaerimm in competition with this one are the Exalted Court, the Ascendant Court, etc etc

The purpose of this tower was to harvest subtly the psychic energy of everyone in the Tower while at the same time building a gateway to the land of the Gods; to enter the land of the Gods and subvert them to the Phaerimm's will. While this may seem quite audacious, in the past they had subverted so many powerful beings, it seemed the next likely step. They called the gateway the Apex Portal.

However, sometimes even very powerful cultures can overstep their abilities. In this case, the Apex Portal pierced the land of... (I created a table, then rolled on it - I rolled a 9, and still need a #10)

1. Demon Incursion
2. Elder Gods - Cthulhu-esque
3. Mind Flayer War - Elder Brains x 10, plus all that entails
4. Exiled Infernal Court (Malebolgia? Hag Queen?)
5. Far Future human techno-arcane warrior caste
6. Angelic Host
7. Dragons - the Chromatic Union
8. Modron March
9. Lich Queen's Horde
10. ????

I call them The Arrayed Forces of the Consort of Death. Whoops, sorry Phaerimm (not sorry)

So anyway, from here on out it'll be a bunch of undead and Phaerimm in battle posture. An enterprising PC party could find some way to perhaps play each group off each other?

Anyway, the flower petal zone is called the "Zenith Demesne" and is the outer gardens. I'm in the middle of detailing that now, and will share in a future post, I hope.

 

[gorice]

Slowly catching up! Here's the first week of August. I've included my notes about the level this time. I usually make these, but I have no idea whether they are of interest to anyone. The basic idea behind the these little prefaces is to outline the sorts of threats and locations invovled, but also to work out the story the place tells, inspired by Jesse Burneko's 'Dungeons and Dilemmas'.

Anyway, here it is.

Ziggurat Plaza, Week 1

Was: central locus for the city. Forum, luxury markets, townhouses, stores, courtyards, guard towers, shrine, freight elevator, crucifixion mast, homes, slave barracks, temple entrances. Guarded by mechanical Invigilators of various types, and death beams from the towers. A demonstration of wealth and power to the world below.

Intruder: wyvern lives in the broken guard tower

Synthesis & Fallout: silent city of traps and lost treasures. The wyvern soars across the countryside, plucking victims and leaving them on the crucifixion mast. The invigilators have gone berserk, trying and failing to destroy the wyvern.

By design, this is not an emotionally strong level (a break from the spa), but there is resonance in the juxtaposition of brutal imperial order and the chaotic violence of the current denizens.


1: Plaza Door

• The great basalt lion doors are slightly ajar.
• (?) Joins to the stair in the Forest Garden.
• (!) The Peacock Knight stands just outside, with his back to the gate.

2: Courtyard of Ashes

• Ringed by a peristyle with half its tiles missing. Flagstones raked with burn marks and ashes. Old guard tower looms over marble statues, trickling fountain, scraggly trees bursting from the stone.
• (!) The tower has a death ray and will target anyone who leaves the peristyle without the correct insignia. It only looks down, not up.
• (??) The tower has a crystal eye, much like the one in the outer walls of the city below.

3: East Guard Tower (lower)

• (!) An invigilator robot with grimy lenses sleeps in its alcove. If it senses intruders, it wakes up and attempts to apprehend them. The robot is mostly blind.
• (?) A tight spiral stair leads to the top.

4: East Guard Tower (upper)

• (!) The death ray lens, like the beam of a lighthouse. The lens can’t actually focus on anything in the room, but will attempt to track and destroy targets outside.
• A hardwood bureau and chair. Drawer is filled with moths.

5: Temple Stair

• The next section of the ziggurat stair climbs to colossal brass doors shaped like upheld human hands.
• (?) The doors are unlocked, but heavy, and groan when shifted. It smells like incense inside. The path leads to the Temple of All Gods (level 9).

6: Fountain

• White marble spout in the shape of a satyr’s mouth. The flow is a trickle, dribbling down its chin.
• (?) The water is clean and good.

7: Courtyard of Bones

• (!) The wyvern lairs in the broken guard tower that overlooks this courtyard.
• Flagstones scattered with bones of all kinds, under scraggly lemon trees that just from gaps in the stones.
• (?) The lemons are small and tough, but good.

 

[M_Natas]

Days 187-188 - The Port of Skullhaven

A dock in the harbour of the ruins of Skullhaven has been crudely restored by pirates.

In a rickety, dilapidated warehouse, the loot is stored to be sold on.

The enslaved prisoners, on the other hand, are led further into the interior of the asteroid.

 

[gorice]

Week two of August!

8: West Guard Tower, Lower

• Wreckage of a bulbous invigilator, spilled across the room.
• (??) Random mechanical wreckage – lenses, gold wire, a weird crystal – worth a few coins. Maybe something useful for a tinker?

9: West Guard Tower, Upper

• Musky and strange air.
• (!) Lair of the Wyvern, Gyezlakur
  • 50% chance to be home. If away, test for return each tick of the clock.
  • mien: venomous, playful; a flying housecat-scorpion
  • wants: entertainment
  • needs: fresh meat
  • fears: the demons in the spa – they compete for food, and it can’t fight them all at once
  • knows: the everything that happens in the open below
  • treasure: a pile of worthless sentimental baubles; beneath which, an antigravity harness, still on the skeleton of the unfortunate victim, along with their gilt dagger.

10: Great Stair Arcade

• Tiles mostly intact. Marble columns wrapped with gods and beasts, carved in relief.
• (?) The arcade provides a covered path between the two courtyards, so that people can pass from the plaza door to the temple stair with only a small chance of being spotted by the guard towers.

11: Anatomical Theatre

• A small theatre or stadium with a stone table in its centre.
• (?) Old surgical instruments.

12: Food Market

• Airy vaulted hall, lit by the courtyard.
• (?) Smashed amphorae.
• (??) Two intact amphorae are filled with dates and saffron, respectively.

13: Crippled Invigilator

• (!) A rotund robotic invigilator with broken legs. Its death ray still works.
  • Mien: it’s a robot cop
  • Wants: to destroy intruders
  • Needs: repairs to its legs
  • Fears: the wyvern
  • Knows: everything about this level

14: Arms Market

• Short vaulted hall. Brass gates are held with a huge padlock. 4 large hardwood chests lie beyond.
• (?) The lock is rusted and can probably be broken or cut.
• (?) The chests are locked, and have classic poison needle traps laced with blood poison.
  • chest #1 = an antigravity harness, leather straps with shining metal globes and a brass dial on the belt to adjust the gravity.
  • chest #2 = masterwork suit of custom plate armour, polished to a mirror finish, engraved with amaranth leaves, lined with crimson velvet. ⅙ chance of fitting you without alterations.
  • chest #3 = a stack of 6 vicious-looking daggers
  • chest #4 = an energy rifle with silver and mother-of-pearl casing.

 

[Eyes of Nine]

8: West Guard Tower, Lower

• Wreckage of a bulbous invigilator, spilled across the room.

What is an invigilator?

*edited to add: TIL What the word "invigilator" means