Let’s Make a Hexcrawl Setting

[Electric Wizard]

Jar Town (16.20) (Inspired by this place.)

The weathered and cracked remnants of colossal stone jars litter this stretch of grassland. They range greatly in style and size - some resemble cauldrons, others tea kettles, others vials. The smallest has a 5' circumference, while the largest are easily a dozen times that size! Some appear to have defaced inscriptions, and most have detectable traces of arcane magic.

A few hundred halflings dwell in the broken jars. They tell their children and the occasional traveler that the landscape was the result of a domestic dispute between giants. The village elders know the truth. The jars once collected rainwater that a cult used to conduct profane summoning and drowning rituals. The halflings' seasonal festivals, which include ritualized dancing and song, are slowly hallowing the land and putting the spirits of the cult's victims to rest.

Hooks
-Guelf, a local malcontent, joined an expedition to the Black Ziggurat that passed through Jar Town. He staggered back into town a month later with an eye patch and a strange accent. He has abandoned his family and spends his days etching elaborate symbols on tree trunks. He always destroys his work in a violent fit at sunset, only to continue the next day. What's up with this guy?
-Last week, three heavily-armed trolls sauntered into Jar Town in broad daylight and demanded an annual tribute in exchange for their lord's protection. The locals threw a welcoming feast that ended in the trolls being hacked to death, burned with acid and immolated. The leader's still-living head is inside a box in the sheriff's office, undergoing interrogation. Patrols have increased in the west. The old cheerfully whistle war songs as they tend their sheep and gardens. The young spend their days honing their stone-throwing and archery skills in good-natured competitions. Offering an opinion on the progress of the stockade is a sure start to a lively conversation.

 

[Electric Wizard]

One more.

The Inverted Temple (20.20) Connected to 16.20

This flooded quarry looks innocuous, but adventurers who moor a boat at a certain crevasse on the southeastern face and step inside can explore a truly bizarre temple complex.

The Inverted Temple's altars, pews, idols and shrines are carved into the complex's high ceilings. Most of the floor is flooded in two to three feet of water. Some speculate that it was a sort of ecumenical temple because of the multitude of animal-headed idols. Jarringly, statues resembling the Green Lady, Tiamat or Alberon have been spotted among the strange gods. Animal and humanoid skeletons lie underwater. Sometimes moldering bits of bone poke through the murky surface. Enterprising delvers can pry bits of jewelry or handfuls of coin from the skeletons.

The temple's inhabitants, manta ray-like creatures that scuttle across the temple ceiling with their long clawed fingers, have deterred thorough explorations. They attack in great swarms, descending from above and impaling intruders with their poisonous barbed tails. Their flat faces have uncannily human features.

The manta creatures are the feral ancestors of the cult that once used the great stone jars in 16.20. Through use of the rain water rituals, the creatures were able to take human form and roam the world. Their predecessors did build this temple complex, but for reasons long forgotten.

Hooks
-What do the manta creatures eat, besides the occasional interloper?
-One of the most notorious tales from the complex involves a tangled mass of skeletons rising from the pool and chasing away a manta swarm. The witnesses fled too after it took one of their own.
-There are rumors that a library of esoteric lore exists in the complex. It is, of course, inverted.
-The remnants of the Foolish Sages (20.18) will pay to have the Inverted Temple mapped so that it may be properly explored when they have recovered from the Black Ziggurat fiasco.
-An ancient map suggests the Inverted Temple lies at the intersection of two elemental ley lines - water and earth, specifically. If the map is accurate, then there must be a point in the complex where a knowledgeable arcanist can tap into elemental secrets.

 

[Daztur]

D&D can never have enough manta people, I'll have to think of something that fits in with that along with writing up some ideas I have for paladins in this setting but for now:

The Workshop of Hazad Kaldun
Additional information about hex 29.14

Within the stone halls of the dwarven inhabitants of the City of Shuttered Windows, Hazad Kaldun is known as the greatest whitesmith and his jewelry is always in immense demand among the nobility of the city. However, he takes only a few orders and those are generally those that strike his fancy, not those with that come with the fattest commissions.

The work that he is engaged in now is a simple golden wire, one suitable to be worn as a necklace around a slender neck. However, as with much of what comes from the workshop of Hazad Kaldun, subtle enchantments have been woven into the gold. This one is especially potent and allows the simple necklace to grow ever finer. For when someone places their fingers around the golden filament they will be transformed into a jewel bead with the wire of gold running through it. What sort of jewel depends on the nature of the person who has been transformed.

Hooks:
-Who has commissioned this necklace? What use do they have in mind for it?
-What else has Hazad Kaldun made?

 

[chutup]

(Note: The Waker Worms are supposed to be on the other fork of the river, so they don't pollute the waters of the city. But right now they're at 25.20 which is right upstream of the city. Daztur, do you think you could move them to 25.19, which would make more sense?

The Glutinous Mudplain (25.18)

Downstream of the Pit of the Waker Worms there lies a putrid stretch of river where all the land for several miles on either side has been turned into a filthy, barren mudplain. Those who dare to enter these badlands attest that the mud is very unusual, being not just wet but also sticky and stringy, as if composed of an enormous quantity of phlegm. The only people who live here are wild-haired savages whose bodies produce a similar substance. They will use this to stick themselves to the undersides of boats that travel down the river, lying in wait for an ambush.

The most common reason for outsiders to visit this place is if they are necromancers engaged in foul arts. For it is known that from the banks of the river a certain glue can be harvested which is called corpse-slather. When corpse-slather is applied to two or more bodies of the dead or undead, they become fused tightly together as one abominable being. If this doesn't sound like a good idea to you, then clearly you are not a necromancer.

One such necromancer was Yaegha Six-Kidneys, at one time a great enemy to Severard of the Seven Chins. She was famous for destroying an entire troop of Thringish warriors and fusing them into an enormous skeleton-bundle which she rode into battle. However, after she and Severard made peace and signed the Compact of Sorcery, she turned her attention towards research. In the last years of her life, she became very interested in the relics of Jar Town (16.20) and then made an expedition to the Inverted Temple (20.20). There she was slain, and there her body rests, still guarded by her faithful skeleton-melange.

Hooks:
- What causes the glutinousness of the mudplain? Is it the waker worms, the gluey locals, or something else?
- How and why did Yaegha have six kidneys?
- Tell me about the battles between Yaegha and Severard.
- What is the Compact of Sorcery? Does it still have any relevance now that Severard and Yaegha are both (presumed) dead?
- What would a necromancer want with the stone jars, considering that they were apparently used to transform manta-people into humans?
- How did such a powerful sorceress die in the midst of a dungeon crawl? Did the manta-people get her, or was it something else?

 

[Sanglorian]

I've updated the appendices! Thanks for the reminders of the vegetation. I've also included a new section on ley lines.

 

[Daztur]

After reading some discussion about the 5ed paladin article, I thought I’d take a stab about incorporating paladins into this setting.

The Graves of Heroes
Hex 15.19

Here lie the simple tombstones of Sir Waine and his squire Tycel, some of the bravest paladins ever to raise sword in the service of Duke and Lady. The graves are heavily marked by hammer and chisel for the knights of Thring hold it to be lucky to place a fragment of the two stones on either side of their sword pommels, but they still stand together as the two did in life.

All know the story of how Sir Waine rescued his beloved squire from the clutches of the Whispering Sisters, his armor blackened so they would not see him as he floated down out of the night sky with sword in one hand and feather talisman in the other to attack their fortress (32.22). And all know how at the end the pair died bravely here along the border of Thring, their forms wreathed in alchemical vapors so that their enemies could not coordinate against them and make unfair use of their superior numbers. But there are few that know that Sir Waine wielded the great sword Caledbrand (15.15), if only for a day.

Like all paladins of Thring, Sir Waine swore to touch no mortal woman with lust in his heart. Like Duke Ulthar the Love, the first Duke of Thring, they are married to the Green Lady and serve her just as they serve as the voice of the Duke in the wild corners of the Duchy were there are no lords.

The dedication of the paladins of Thring brings hope to these lands where men seem to swing wildly between the evils of cynicism and fanaticism, forgetting the purity of chivalry. Many sons of the lords of Thring seek desperately to be taken on by a paladin as squire but few succeed. Sir Waine himself turned away many highborn and plucked a graceful lad from among a travelling band of troubadours to serve as his squire and none now can fault the wisdom of his choice.

Hooks:
-Do the chips of tombstone do anything concrete?
-What has kept the enemies of Thring from desecrating these graves?
-If Sir Waine floated down on the Whispering Sisters with a talisman than granted him feather fall, how did he get up in the sky in the first place?
-How did Sir Waine get his hands on alchemical materials?
-How did Sir Waine get Caledbrand out of the sepulchre (15.15), even if it was only for a day?
-Presumably the marriage between the paladins and the Green Lady was symbolic, but was it real in the case of Duke Ulthar? Is she his children's mother?

 

[Electric Wizard]

Grotto of Uriza the Solemn (15. 24) Connected to hex 29.14, 26.20.

Uriza abused one of Hazad Kaldun's most potent creations in an attempt to rise to the top of Blind Midshotgatepool's criminal hierarchy. But her ambition blinded her and her sins caught up to her. She has spent close to forty years in this tiny grotto near a spring, eating roots and praying for penance for herself and dozens of others.

Uriza is the third daughter of a petty Shuttered noble. She somehow acquired Hazad Kaldun's Diadem of the Third Eye, a piece of jewelry designed for a high priest of Alberon. The diadem is activated when its center jewel is dipped in someone's blood. The diadem's wearer sees the most grievous sin of whomever's blood the jewelry was last soaked in.

For a short time, Uriza used the diadem's power to blackmail her way into the ranks of Midshotgatepool's thieves' guild. But one of her rivals, Mousey, learned her secret and exploited it. He spent a year collecting the blood of 101 of the city's worst sinners. When he finished, he mixed them into a single bowl. He kidnapped Uriza with the help of some loyal followers, submerged the diadem into the bowl and forced her to wear it. The knowledge of their sins drove her insane, and she fled into the wilderness.

In the last six months, Uriza has provided reluctant aid to adventurers bound for the Black Ziggurat. Persistent guests may learn a few things about the surrounding lands.

Few remember Uriza's dark past. Those who do know her consider her a very holy woman.

Hooks
-Where is the Diadem of the Third Eye now?
-Whose sins does Uriza know about?
-What will it take to make Uriza divulge her unique knowledge?

 

[Daztur]

I've mentioned Rolang's brilliant blog a couple times as a source of inspiration for some of my posts. Well Rolang had one post ("Bring It") in which he asked his readers to post their ideas for blog posts and a while ago I added in: "How about five hexes that can be placed around a large strange city in a hexcrawl. Stuff in a city and stuff in a wilderness I can do but the suburbs have got me stumped" hoping to use what he wrote for the suburbs of Shuttered since I thought it was sad that the city had so much white space next to it. Well, Rolang has come through with this post:

Suburban Adventures | Rolang's Creeping Doom

It includes a number of hexes and links in to a large number of his previous posts, so there's a huge trove of content here. His blog is under a CC license so we can yoink stuff with attribution and stick it into the Shrouded Lands. Now the question is, where to put these hexes?

I'm thinking that they'd fit better around Tarengael (the castle of the Duke of Thring) than anywhere else. The way its described there aren't anywhere near enough people for it to be the area surrounding Shuttered and I don't think it would fit that well into Hyvalls or Blind Midshotgatepool or anywhere else we've established.

The fortress of Tarengael itself has previously been described as being on an island in the river so some quasi-urban areas have built up on either side of the river near the ends of the bridges. The local Innsmouth-ish fisherfolk could be the original villages that were there before Duke Ulthar had Tarangael built and still fish in the river and trade with the castle and the villages on either bank of the river.

Targengael castle would tax river and bridge traffic (it would be a chief source of the Duke wealth since he'd forbid other people taxing "his" river as far upstream and downstream as he can enfoce it) and the local fisherfolk would do a good bit of smuggling to get around those taxes. The various other islands can be stuck into the river with ease.

The road on the northeast hex could travel northeast to meet up with the Welt Road and the White Road. That's easy enough. We should stick a market town somewhere along the SW edge of the Kingswood where traders from Shuttered, Thring, the Freeholds and people lugging stuff south from the western terminus of the Welt Road can meet.

The city of "Jahur" can be stuck on the southern edge of the map or have it be one of the Twelve Nations. The swampy stuff can be along the Thring/Gore border.

The ruins on Pantari could be the ancient grand temple of the Earth Whisperers, now given over to ruins.

The bit about the rising sun perhaps indicates some link between the Green Lady and the King/Lion in Splendor. Hmmm....

For the Ettin, it could be one of the first ettin's sons who ran off after a fight with his dad and I'm sure we could fit in the medusa somehow as well.

This packs in a whooooooole lot of stuff, probably more than six six-mile hexes and really hold. What I'm thinking of doing is digest this massive trove of awesome and spread it out over the central bit of Thring, clustered especially around Tarengael but not exclusively there (since there's just too much awesome for our small hexes warrant). However, before I start adapting all of this over (including all of the linked stuff), I'd like to hear any thoughts form you guys about to stick this stuff into our setting.

Edit:

Compilation work update, work on the compilation continues (slowly) with the current version of the compilation weighing in at 57K words (up from the last version which was 43K words). It includes the Kingswood and a bunch of new hexes. Once I finish adding in a even more new hexes it should stand at a good bit over 60K words. Meanwhile the file I have of hexes that have not yet been added to the compilation stands at 45K words, which is the shortest its ever been despite a bunch of new hexes that have been added. So right now all Shrouded Lands content, including Sanglorian's appendix but not the Rolang stuff stands at 104,179 words or a big longer than Ender's Game and closing in on Wuthering Heights. Wow.

 

[chutup]

The Village of the Daz (16.15)

North of Castle Tarengael is a somewhat swampy stretch of river inhabited by a clan of degenerate villagers known as the Daz. They are among the last remnants of a race that dwelled in these lands before the formation of Thring. It is said that the older they grow, the more the Daz take on a curiously flat appearance. Their necks fuse into their shoulders, they grow gills, and a poisonous stinger emerges painfully from their tailbone. Those who live to a great age will eventually leap into the water and never be heard from again, having transformed into river-mantas. To the most erudite of sages, it is clear that the Daz share some sort of connection to the manta-people of the Inverted Temple (20.20).

More than once the Dukes of Thring have attempted to drive the Daz away from lands so close to Castle Tarengael, but the villagers have always proved tenacious. At one time, almost a century ago now, they were successfully resettled further upriver. Soon after, the waters around Castle Tarengael began to swarm with vile water snakes, whose population had grown out of control without the Daz and the river-mantas to prey upon them. The Duke reluctantly allowed the degenerates to return to their ancestral dwelling-place.

Though it is rarely spoken of in Thring, the truth is that the Daz and other pre-Thringish tribes were the originators of the tradition now known as paladinhood. In their ancient tongue it is called palladhyu, and represents a marriage between a eunuch warrior and the goddess Melgerez, The Sleeper in the Riverbed. The eunuch would apparently swim down to the bottom of the river, holding his breath to prove his worth, where Melgerez would attach a squamous sign of her devotion to the place where his manhood had been. Thereafter, the palladhyu would posess supernatural powers including the ability to paralyze with a glance.

Ulthar the Loved took this savage tradition and turned it into the modern concept of the paladin; the grotesque union with Melgerez was replaced by the chaste marriage to the Green Lady. Nevertheless, today's paladins ultimately draw on the same source of ancient pagan power that is bound into the land of Thring.

Hooks:
- What's the connection between the manta-people and the Daz? Are they both different degenerations of the same antediluvian race?
- What happens to the Daz when they disappear into the river? Is there an Innsmouth-style colony beneath the waters?
- Where were the Daz temporarily resettled, and what's there now?
- Are there any palladhyu still around today?
- Who or what was Melgerez? Was she really a goddess or some sort of lake-dwelling abomination?

(I'm thinking the 'ancient power of the land' could be linked to the whole Fisher King angle and the idea of 'the king and the land are one'. Then again, what would that mean for Thring, where the king no longer exists?)

 

[Sanglorian]

However, before I start adapting all of this over (including all of the linked stuff), I'd like to hear any thoughts form you guys about to stick this stuff into our setting.

Well, my first and most important note is that the CC licence Rolang uses—CC BY-NC-SA—is incompatible with our CC BY-SA licence. We might be able to convince him to license that post under CC BY-SA as well or, even better, relicense his entire blog as CC BY-SA.

The locations for his works that you suggested sound good. However, I think six six-mile hexes could easily hold everything he's described. That's roughly eighteen miles by twelve miles, which would cover a large chunk of most modern cities.

Having said that, this hexcrawl has a practice—at least at the moment—of usually detailing only one location per hex and we might want to stick with that method, at least while we still have 900 hexes to fill.

Perhaps how we could incorporate Rolang's material is to grab a part of it that interests us and massage it into the setting. Eventually, it'll all be incorporated.

Great to see the Kingswood in the compilation!