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Showing posts from August, 2024

Stronghold of the Grey Beast

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180 years ago, the Zereti kingdom managed to expand south-west from their mountains, into these lands. A great general of the kingdom, known as "The Grey Beast" - his actual name lost to time - led a successful military campaign against the cultists who lived here, hoping to hatch larvae from an egg-sac lain by an ancient, dead and dark god. This fortress has been turned into a tomb for him. Since then, a plague has forced the Zereti to retreat back into their mountains, and their kingdom has fallen into decline, and the fortress was abandoned. In later years, the old magic that was placed here to protect the tomb of the Grey Beast has interacted in strange ways with the wildlife that entered the abandoned stronghold. The magical chants of the tomb's undead guardians caused a strange race of fungaloid creatures to form out of the enlarged mushrooms growing inside the ruins; wasps who made a nest in the ruins have grown to an alarming size; and a snake has been feeding on ...

Untamed Land Session #2 - Unexpected Dungeoneering

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 In my last Untamed Lands session, I ran into an expectedly unexpected turn of events: my players wandered off the path I had expected them to follow for the day, into hexes I had not yet finished detailing. That is to say, I knew what the hexes had in them roughly , but I hadn't finished fleshing them out.  Specifically, after yet another unsavory deal with the dust witch Majda (during which Majda got herself a vulture-headed creature to slay and use his organs for rituals; and the party got themselves an exploding potion of Sleep ), the party wandered into a border hex which, in truth, I didn't ever see my party entering. What reason have they to venture so far south, I wondered? I hadn't expected them to choose to follow a river downstream in hopes of finding a bridge, rather than simply crossing it by swimming (Note to self: when drawing rivers on your maps, consider where if at all, there are bridges to cross it). And so they happened onto a hex which had the following...