#flooded dungeon map

[demartinidesigns]

Discover what the murky depths of the temple have hidden away.

This set of flooded dungeon maps can be found on Roll20, my Patreon Store, and more like it through the Interactive Map Directory at demartinidesigns.com/map-directory/

Receive early Roll20 and full res files twice per month, for less than the price of one Roll20 listing.

| patreon.com/demartinidesigns |

[dicegrimorium]

Greetings!

The rain has been going on for a few days now and unfortunately for our group of heroes there's no settlement nearby where they can go to the inn and dry their boots.

Instead they have to fight this gloomy weather, a weather that has left the forest completely flooded and has made their travels that much more difficult.

Yet our party prevails despite the harsh conditions and their continue their adventure no matter the amount of water beneath their feet. Let's just hope that they're not surprised by any enemies that could take this opportunity to catch them off-guard.

Will they be able to see the end of this downpour?

You can see a preview of this map’s Patreon content by clicking here.

If you liked the map I’d be extremely thankful if you considered supporting me on my Patreon, rewards include higher resolution files, gridless versions, alternate versions, line versions, PSDs and more. Thank you!

[remma-demma]

Ffxvi asks the brave question: (big bad villain monologue)

What if Emet-Selch was yucky disgusting instead of hot old man.

[silvercompassmaps]

The Flooding Ravine

There is an entrance to a secret dungeon in the center of the map. Once the players set off a trap, then the ravine begins to flood with water. Can your players reach the entrance in time before the force of the water carries everyone away and seals off the entrance?

This map can also be played in reverse order. The players arrive to a flooded ravine and after solving a puzzle or defeating a monster, the ravine dries up and reveals the entrance to the temple.

All 7 phases of this map can be downloaded for free here.

If you want free maps mailed to you every month, sign up for my newsletter here.

[smallmariofindings]

Early maps for various Super Mario 64 locations were included in the November 1995 patent application for the Nintendo 64 (called the Ultra 64 in the patent itself). While almost all of them can be correlated to areas to the finished game, one map does not seem to resemble anything seen in the finished version.

This map, titled "Dungeon or Room", either depicts an area cut from the finished game entirely, or was drawn specifically for the patent without any relation to the game.

However, as pointed out by twitter.com user "Ed_GDQ", the area does slightly resemble the basement of Peach's Castle, particularly if the large area is supposed to be a simplification of the flooded hallway section. It is possible that this is an extremely early version of the basement map.

Main Blog | Twitter | Patreon | Small Findings | Source

[ganondoodle]

Oh man I saw your totk issues post and I agree 100%!! Those are all things that have really bothered me about playing totk, and things that made playing it not nearly as fun (the dungeons, the shrines, the building, etc).

Especially the map!! When I tell you I was so disappointed by the maps on totk, I was hoping for something new! It really just feels like a modded botw, not an official sequel.

I was wondering what your thoughts are on the concept of “what if they had sent link to the past instead”? So the surface map would feature huge differences in the land forms and buildings that exist, and we’d get to see more ganon whenever he visits Hyrule, or go out to the desert to see Gerudo town, etc.

If they really wanted no sheika tech, they could also just have it being newly built? And you could introduce the new characters and such, etc etc.

(I also think the past champions are such a missed opportunity? If botw is about grief and loneliness, and finding hope in the hopeless, and Totk is about coming together despite that, it could have been really interesting if Link had gone to the past! They could have used the past setting as an eerie reminder to what Link and Zelda had lost when the Calamity struck!)

THAT BEING SAID: I’m not as familiar with the legend of Zelda lore, and haven’t played totk very much! I wanted to know your thoughts on this because you seem to have a lot of story and game mechanic knowledge that could explain why this could be a bad/good idea!

(Plus, your discussions are always super interesting to read, as is your custom totk lore, so I’d love to know what you think🩷)

I’m sorry if you’ve already answered an ask like this! If that’s the case, feel free to point that out and I’ll go through your ask tag if you have one:) I hope you have a great day!⭐️

Hi!

im glad you enjoy my rants, i often feel like im being overly mean but tbh were else could i just rant as much as my heart desires without getting spammed by annoying people (certainly not on twitter lol)

i have talked alot, and i mean ALOT, about totk and my issues with it, both lore and gameplay wise, i dont claim to be an expert on any, though i am an old zelda fan and aspiring gamedev, i really only talk about what i feel about it, what i think about it, and by all means im biased as hell xD

if you dont know yet, the "ganondoodles rants" tag is where all my rants go, so if you are interested in reading more on my totk thoughts thats the way to search (given tumblrs search in blog works ..)

and to answers your question, i have touched on it briefly, sending link back in time before the shiekah tech existed would have been an easy way to excuse how they jsut got .. rid of it, bc they didnt, it literally didnt exist yet- and for reusing the map- though that argument falls a little flat bc ... they coud have already done that in present totk, like i brought up in one of said rants, things like flooding gerudo desert, collapsing death mountain, drying out zoras domain etc, and changing the location of the main populations would have already done alot without having to redo the map in its entirety;

the little changes to map itself really wouldnt that big of a deal if they didnt also send you to the EXACT same locations AND repeat the SAME LOCATIONS AGAIN but in the underground, like thats a fact i have talked about multiple times bc its so illogical in every way, anywhere theres a settlement on the surface theres a bigger mine below, its so stupid, the shrines conenct to a lightroot, the same, again, you dont need to explore bc theres nothing TO explore (its also extra weird bc theres one below taburasa (tarrey town) which .... link literally build with dumsda (hudson) a few years ago .. unless that got retconned too idk wth do i know anymore honestly- AND it makes the sonau extra weird bc why the hell do they have a bigass mine under every settlement ESPECIALLY UNDER GERUDO TOWN like, that just adds to my suspicions towards them)

anyway, link to the past was the point and yes, it could have solved a few issues (mainly shiekah tech and the whole "story" taking place AGAIN in the past completely disconnected from you the player) i personally am not so much a fan of it, but that mostly comes down to me just not liking time travel, i dont like going back in time, i want to play and do things in the here and now, i want to repair the damages of the calamity, find out its origins, maybe fix that too, i love to learn about past stuff too, but that more in text, no literal flashback (unless done well), i want to connect to the past but it also holds alot of mystery that maybe shouldnt be touched upon, some mysteries and unkowns are much more interesting when left as such, i want to THINK about things and come to conclusions that are logical and makes sense in hindsight even if it wasnt clear at the start, i dont want information and what to think about it told to my face over and over like im stupid

after botw i really didnt care much about the past, maybe about the acient hero who alot of people specualted to be of gerudo origin due to its red hair- which also got a monkeys paw curled bc in totk they do sth with but its so stupid and insulting that i do not accept it as canon, say what they want, there are no dog people anywhere in the past nor present botw/totk wtf is that i hate it- and its not even .. why is that the reward for that, it has literally NOTHING TO DO WITH TOTK ITSELF I COULD YELLLL AAAARGH

main point is that really, i wanted to explore the past .. in the present, i hoped to find broken old shiekah structures, old labs and maybe some left over damage and records from when the old king persecuted the shiekah for their tech, i wanted to know where the ancient energy the shiekah used was coming from, what the boss arena in the middle of hyrule castle really was- so many things just discarded and acted like they never happened or mattered; i dont want to travel into the past, i want to discover whats left of it, piece it together, discover dark secrets you can ask no one about bc all that knew about it are long gone- thats what intrigued me about botw, it felt like there was so much left to discover only for totk to throw it all away and just do its own thing .. but not commit to that hard enough either so its neither its own thing nor a sequel-

.. that wasnt really what you wanted to know was it? xD sorry i tend to ramble on if someone seems to give me permission to

to sum it up, i think it COULD work, sending link to the past instead, if done well, but so could canon totk have been, it could have been done well but wasnt for reasons i dont know and tbh even fear bc i worry its sets a dark future ahead of zelda; i personalyl am just not a fan of time travel so i dont have that much to say to it :O

[fallenangelofsalt]

Purple Gold 7

@styck-figure I finally finished it!

Masterpost

There are exactly 780 stars in the skybox. Unless you're counting the sun.

There is something in the caves.

Something beyond the simple mineshafts, bigger than the ravines, yet far more cramped than the dungeons. The wind blows nonsensically into dead ends and no matter how much you try to map those tunnels you always seem to take a wrong turn.

And you're pretty sure gold isn't meant to spawn so frequently, yet the scent of metal floods your senses until you need to stop to check you haven't bitten your tongue. Every wall seems to have exposed gold ore, as if begging you to take it home.

You march on instead. You came here for something else.

Mushrooms spawn seemingly at every turn, red and brown, red and brown. You swear you saw miscelium earlier, too.

Soon, you catch a glimpse of it.

Near a pool of lava, shining brightly is a cluster of diamond ore.

You walk carefully towards it, placing cobblestone over the lava for good measure. You don't want to fall again, and burning seems like a terrible way to go. But even standing so close to it, the cave still feels cold enough to numb your fingers.

You still take out your pickaxe though. Those diamonds won't mine themselves.

You press your fingers to the exposed blue, and jolt as the gem gives in like cold jello. It returns to original shape almost as soon as you pull away.

You take a deep breath ignore the shaking in your hands and swing your pickaxe.

_

The diamond itself isn't squishy, you find out.

_

After you find that vein, your hunt suddently becomes a lot easier. Mushrooms seem to lead your way to exposed clusters and you even find some emeralds in the process.

After 5 hours or so you have over half a stack sitting in your inventory. You didn't even need that much, but weren't going to just ignore it.

But now it's late and the caves are cold, and the random redstone on the floor unnerves you.

(It's not ore and it looks way too much like blood placed on the ground like that. Why is it there why did it generate like that-

It was generated, right?

There isn't someone here with you, right?)

You stop in the middle of the gold-filled tunnel, staring at one of the walls.

You have way too much gold already.

...But for some reason, you feel bad just, leaving it there.

You hold in a sigh and take out your pickaxe once more.

When you strike it, the cracks that appear seem to pulse, bleeding liquid gold like open wounds, and you swear that when they become wide enough to glimpse its insides, you see something move.

_

The path to the surface seems just as nonsensical as the path downwards, and you swear those tunnels are only getting lower until sunlight peeks around the corner of your vision.

Finally, you feel dead on your feet.

You finally reach your bed, and your exaustion is so great you don't even squirm as you feel your braid being undone by unseen hands.

_

You have way too much gold.

After crafting your jukebox and enchanting table, you pause to consider what to do with all of it.

You have no need for powered minecarts currently, nor do you have a brewing stand to make use of glistening melon. You already have a clock. You have enough diamonds for a full toolset too.

And what on earth would you make with gold blocks?

The only other option would be...

(You slowly look at the food chest.)

...Ah.

You shouldn't do this.

(But golden apples would be a huge help in so many scenarios, and you have way too much gold already.)

You really shouldn't do this.

(But you're also curious.)

You know you shouldn't do this.

And yet.

You ignore every alarm going off in your head and slowly pick an apple, nine gold ingots, and a carrot.

(Why a carrot? There are no benefits to it but saturation and night vision potions, you don't even have a brewing stand what are you doing-)

Slowly, almost but not quite hesitantly, you place the apple at the center of the crafting table.

(The gold wraps around your fingers in exitement.)

You can't stop the shaking in your hands as you place in the gold.

(The world lights up in glee.)

You craft a golden apple.

You grasp it almost reverently, and gently lower it inside you treasure chest.

(You already have so many, why did you make another?)

Just in case, you tell yourself.

(You're a liar.)

You have no excuse for the carrot.

You craft it with the same sort of anticipation as the apple, but you don't place it in a chest.

You stare at it and-

You know you shouldn't do this.

And yet, you still reach for the carrot, your hand wraps around it and you notice how light it feels. When you squeeze slightly it gives in easily, your fingers sinking into marshmallow-like softness, the sticky surface begging not to be let go of.

You know you shouldn't do this.

And yet.

You still raise it to your lips, teeth grazing gold, and even if you hesitate, you still take a bite.

It tastes like-

A good morning and pancakes for breakfast. Pizza hawaii and a look of playful disgust met with a bright smile on your pineapple-filled mouth. A bedtime story after a long day.

It tastes like-

A birthday cake and a hand ruffling your hair, a soft smile and a near-gentle smirk. Delicate hands and flower crowns, games of tag and high expectations.

It tastes like-

A day in the park and corndogs. A goodnight kiss. A trip to the clothes store for a new dress. Pork ribs and rock salt.

It tastes like-

Bruises and pain, punches and kicks. Yelling and fear and anger and pain and disappointment and pain-

It tastes like-

Wilted flowers and loneliness, coughing and hospital visits. Silence and dread and grief and pain-

It tastes like-

Gentle hands holding you close, patching you up and kissing it better, arms cover you almost completely, shielding you from the world, you are so small, but he's not, and he will keep you safe, you are so warm, so safe, so loved-

It tastes like-

Oh

It melts in your mouth, bittersweet like dark chocolate and thick like honey, when you swallow it warms you from the inside out, and there is gold sticking to your lips and teeth and fingers so you lick them clean- you need more of-

It tastes just like-

Oh no

...It tastes like love.

There is nothing more to lick, so you lower your arms and stare at the ceiling as you try to process what just happened, what you just did.

You shouldn't have done it.

And yet.

You close you eyes and breathe. Pretend your eyes aren't wet and there aren't sobs stuck in your throat.

You pretend you aren't smiling.

Pandora's box has been opened, and you know you'll do it again.

...

You're glad you did it.

[brinefathomcaves]

Brinefathom Caves Level 3, Week 7

3.61: The Torture Chamber: Submerged, 25’ ceiling. Two stone slab doors have handprint locks (see 3.62 for details). Secret door opens/closes with button located under northern table. 20’ bubble of air attached to magic circle on floor. Air inside is extremely dry. A creature can enter bubble freely, but once fully inside, cannot escape without assistance from a creature outside. Empty

3.62: The Bathyan Cells

3.63: The Invisible Maze

3.64: The Debris Pit: Submerged. Floor slopes down 15’ into a bowl shape. Stone debris from 3.65, including some broken stone bones. Empty.

3.65: The Excavation

3.66: The Salvage

3.67: The Spiked Current

3.68: The Stinging Tendrils: Submerged. Every foot or so, a tendril taken from a giant jellyfish is attached to the floor and ceiling. Each time a creature touches a tendril, they must make a Constitution save. Upon each of the first two failed saves, the creature gains a level of exhaustion. On the third, they are paralyzed for 4d6 hours. A paralyzed bathyan lies on the floor (marked by asterisk); she has 4 hours before she recovers.

3.69: The Sleeping Serpent: Roughly humanoid statues, large eyes carved on walls. Statues’ faces and eyes’ pupils have been clawed off. Permanent image of a huge sleeping sea serpent curled up in front of the passage to 3.70, controlled by Ghuspalkrun. Empty.

3.70: The Lair of the Eye

(Non-key rambling under cut)

As you can see, I made the map a bit differently this week. Loops work fine for individual bodies of water, but when whole levels are flooded, they just become visually confusing, so going forward, I'm just going to color water areas in gray. It's a bit more work, but I think it looks a lot better.

I've already made my peace with the fact that if I ever want to compile this dungeon into publishable form, I'll need to redraw the whole thing (maybe digitally? Who can say at this point), so the fact that past areas are now wrong is no big deal.

[theresattrpgforthat]

Heyo, I run a lot of sandbox hexcrawl campaigns, and I was wondering if there was any setting-neutral fantasy generators I could use to help build them on the fly - especially ones that can add settlements and the like as people explore?

THEME: Hexcrawl Generators

Hello friend. When it comes to hex crawls, I understand that pre-written worlds are different from hex-crawl generators. Pre-written hex crawls can be modular, but the setting usually pretty pre-established. On the other hand, there’s plenty of world-generating games that can be pretty setting-agnostic and rather focus on providing oracles to make discovery exciting and somewhat unpredictable. So let’s tackle some of each piece of your list, and maybe we’ll find something that works!

The Undying Sands and Bottled Sea, by Games Omnivorous.

The Undying Sands is a weird desert setting in a weird format. Heavily inspired by Antiquity  and sprinkled with sci-fi elements from Mad Max and Jodorowsky’s Dune, the Undying Sands is a lost decaying civilization. Its glorious past long gone, the Sands are now a wasteland of sorts, dotted with crumbling ruins, antiquated temples, lost technology, and pristine natural wonders beyond the reach of most.

The Bottled Sea is an alternate dimension, where ships and sailors from across history are sucked inadvertently into, through strange wormholes and foul circumstance. Locked in a timeless state, the Sea is a flooded realm of buoyant wastes, coral-reefs of multiversal debris, floating wrecks, and makeshift technology, littered with sunken vestiges of a world that was or could yet be. Four factions with competing agendas vie for control over the Harborage, a suspended port city of rubble and ruin in the very centre of the endless waters.

Both of these games are modular hex tiles, so the lore is pre-written, but because the tiles are drawn randomly, nobody knows where they’ll be heading next until they get there! The games come with a GM screen full of helpful tips and information, and there will be special dungeons and encounters on certain tiles. The designers also have expansions for both of these games available in pamphlet form on their website. This can provide the random generation you’re looking for, as long as you are excited about the setting provided.

Hexcrawl Tool, by Horoscope Zine.

This is a simple tool to help you hexcrawl.

When it comes to finding something that is truly setting-agnostic, this tool is probably what you’re looking for. The tool provides two different ways to determine what lies in the next hex, and uses a simple oracle to tell you what kinds of terrain you’ll be walking into. You can use ideas from other world building games to flesh it out, or even hack it using oracles such as the Hey What’s That Planet oracle from junkgolem, or point-crawl adventures such as The Gardens of Ynn, by Dying Stylishly games. 

The creator has a number of their own system-neutral sandboxes and dungeons, so you can also browse their shop for ideas!

Gen:Hex by marchcrow.

Gen:Hex is a two-page sheet that has several tables to help you generate exotic locales, storied cities, fascinating NPCs and more - on the go! Fits nicely in the back of an A5 journal. Can be used for solo RPG play or collaborative. The parts aren't interlocking so you can use what helps you propel your story forward. 

This is perhaps the best-fitting oracle for some of the above hex map generators, allowing you to fill in the gaps that you’ll find with some of the other generators on this list. It’s two pages of tables with lists of encounters, landscapes, features, troubles and more. 

Hex Kit, by Cone of Negative Energy.

Hex Kit is a multi-platform desktop application for building hex maps to be used with table top role playing games. Rather than being bogged down by features and complications, Hex Kit is built to be intuitive and quick to use with an emphasis on art.

This is an application, rather than a game, so it’s probably more useful for making your hex look uniform in some way after you generate it. The application comes with a number of basic tools, but the creator’s storefront has a number of additional tiles that you can import, and you can get additional hexes from other creators, such as the HPS Cartography Kit, and The Tiles of Xark, by Highland Paranormal Society.

These tools don’t come with oracles for the hexes - it’s up to you to decide what each hex means. If you want to see something that makes use of this application (and you want some random tables), you can check out Hexception, a mega-hexcrawl by kumada1.

If you bought the Bundle for Racial Justice and Equality back in 2020, you already own Hex Kit and HPS Cartography Kit!

Games I’ve Recommended in the Past

Wonderfall, by Catscratcher Studio. (Technically solo but has great generators for locations, encounters, people and quests.)

[rpgsandbox]

So this appeared on twitter the other day, a challenge for 2023.

A blog post fleshed out the idea a bit more:

#Dungeon23

A dungeon room a day for all of 2023.

The other day I posted on twitter about a cool little project I’m working on for 2023. Essentially, I’m doing a dungeon room a day, every day, and keeping track of it in a little weekly calendar.

Why?

Well, I love dungeons and megadungeon play, but writing a megadungeon is difficult! It takes a lot of energy and it’s hard to know when to work on it and for how long. This simplifies things.

A dungeon room a day, every day, for 2023. That’s 365 rooms. I’ll do a level a month, so 12 levels. Every week is a little area of 7 rooms, so I can keep my focus small.

I’m using the amazing Hobonichi Weeks which if you don’t know is a great little notebook designed by the writer of the Earthbound/Mother game series. It’s got great paper, and the Weeks version is the smaller more portable notebook. Essentially on a single spread you’ve got seven days on the left and then an open piece of graph paper on the right. That’s perfect for a key of seven rooms and a map. Here’s another one that ship’s from the US. Got a worldbuilder’s notebook you’ve been dying to use? Now’s the time.

You don’t have to use this notebook, don’t get hung up on the details here. Any old notebook will do. I just happen to have an addiction to Japanese stationery and no real need to journal, so this is what I’m doing, dungeon as journal.

There’s some great things you can do here too: instead of room numbers, you can number them with the date. This makes rooms pretty easy to find and reference within your notebook. Don’t need a megadungeon? Try twelve small dungeons! The point is to do a little bit of writing a day. Some tips:

Don’t overthink it. Don’t make a grand plan, just sit down each day and focus on writing a good dungeon room.

Generators are your friend. The point isn’t to get stuck writing the perfect room, the point is to write a room. Randomize the monster, treasure, whatever items you need. Use “Tricks, Traps, and Empty Rooms,” by Courtney Campbell. There’s a billion d100 lists on Elfmaids & Octopi. Take rooms from dungeons you love. Just get the rooms down on paper.

If you can’t think of what to write that day just write “Empty Room,” see how easy that is?

365 rooms written like “3 orcs, 25 gold pieces.” is better than 5 rooms written like “In this beautiful hand carved obsidian room sit 3 orcs arguing over a dice game. 25gp sit on the table, each of them…” See what I’m getting at? The goal is the finish line. Just get to the finish line. Trust me.

If you want to keep up with my progress on Twitter, mastodon, or cohost, use the hashtag #dungeon23. Post your results too! Post a room a day on twitter so other people can steal it and put it in their journals! Become a collector of rooms, you don’t have to be the well.

The greatest creative advice I ever got was “have something to show for your time.” I’ve found a lot of success on always shipping projects every year. This is one of those projects, once you realize you can create a dungeon of this magnitude, your whole world opens up with what you can do. And it’s insanely fun too!

#dungeon23, I’ll see you on the other side.

P.S.

Need a weekly prompt to carry you through? Here’s 52 prompts to keep you motivated:

Ancient

Death

Sunken

Love

Empire

Heavy

Rural

Darkness

Bloom

Rust

Noise

Childhood

Time

Excess

Decay

City

Factory

Flood

Sleep

Cold

Ash

Touch

Meat

Solitude

Growth

Greed

Luck

Fall

Pit

Chaos

Laughter

Smoke

Forgotten

Library

Ocean

Song

Roots

Bones

Hangman

Blood

Prophet

Idol

Door

Light

Stars

Bridge

Mask

Cut

Sacrifice

Incense

Rise

Gold

[sorenblr]

Rate the final dungeons of megaten games you've played on stream so far. iirc you've played SMTIV, IV:A, Raidou 1, DDS1 and SMT1. If I missed any I apologize, those were all I could remember off of the top of my head.

Oh wait, there's was V's final dungeon but that game's final dungeon is mega ultra titanogigahuge ASS!

This is a topic that I haven't given a ton of thought, really. Lemme see:

SMTIV: Lucifer's Palace and Purgatorium are both built around replacement-level teleport maze design, but visually and aurally they're the highlights of the game. I would rate these somewhere between "not bad" and "pretty good".

SMTIVA: Conceptually, there's a lot you could do with the idea of this chasmically empty and expansive space, but I don't think it's in service of anything interesting here. Feels more like an overcorrection to the very slight dungeon design in IV. Bad.

SMTV: I mentioned this on stream, but The Temple of Eternity is like, a third or fourth dungeon you would go through in a modern Tales game. Too obviously perfunctory. The rows of Adramalech(s) are pretty funny.

Raidou 1: Visually arresting but introduces too much fodder for embarrassing timeline shit to the fray. Mixed.

DDS1: Generally a good balance of sprawl and reasonable design. Fun boss gauntlet. The outer facade is really gorgeous. Thanks, KUSANAGI web!

SMT1: Hard to judge. The iconic sprawling final dungeon, and the schema for half the others on this list. The most striking thing about the Great Cathedral is the way it acts as the catalyst for the flooding of the rest of the map. It's an oasis but imbued with bitter finality, which is fascinating. And irreplicable, since modern game design would forbid the world-state from being irreversibly wiped out like that. So: good.

TMS: I don't remember anything about this dungeon except that we died to the final boss at the very end of the fight, and having to go through the entire thing again on stream made me want to destroy myself.

Persona: I also remember very little about this one, but the dungeons in P1 are all fairly breezy, even in the original release. Seems like they saved all the grueling design for the SQQ. I guess this one is just "okay".

Dungeons: they go crazy, but sometimes, less so.

[christiansorrell]

Play-By-Blog #21: The Isle by Luke Gearing

Welcome to my ongoing play-by-blog of The Isle by Luke Gearing! We are playing this adventure with its original system, The Vanilla Game (adjusted somewhat to fit the format). You can check out the Play-By-Blog Repository to get all caught up if you wish.

How Play-By-Blog works:

I write up the situation, NPCs, and more, just like a DM.

You vote in the poll to help decide the character's course of action.

I roll the dice, resolve actions, and write them up next week.

So on and so forth for the rest of the adventure!

Notation:

[Text in brackets is out-of-character/GM text!] "Non-italicized quotes denote text from the original adventure!" "Italicized quotations denotes NPC dialogue."

Our character: Medon Girou - Magic Cutpurse

Our maps: The Isle, Floor 2, Floor 3

[You can use the links above to find Medon's Character Sheet and map of the Isle and the so far uncovered portions below the surface. On the Dungeon map, you are currently in Floor 3, Room 2.]

Now, back to the adventure!

You look to the strange door and the wheeled mechanism before it. You've seen enough dangers in this place to no longer fear a door alone. You grab the wheel and twist with all your might. [Strength Check (1d20): 11 - Success!]

The mechanism twists silently as the door slides open. In the low glow of your amulet, you can see the opening beyond the door stretch off into a sizeable chamber, some of which falls beyond the reach of your light.

Before you [in Floor 3, Room 3] stand sixteen Legionaries, strange undead in banded armour, bull-horned helms, porcelain wolf masks and a heavy gold medallion imprinted with a man's face in profile. At their sides, they hold short swords and large, rectangular shields. They are immobile, statuesque in their too still stance.

Among the Legionaries are six sea-things, mutilated corpses of once cadaverous, spiny creatures filled with bioluminescent blood now scattered atop the resting water surrounding the feet of the Legionaries. A shiver runs down your spine.

To the north, a stone passage leads off into the dark. To the south, a hall leads into a partially flooded room. Before you though, stand the Legionaries.

[Sorry for the lengthy delay! I started a new full time gig here locally after our move, then I got COVID, then my wife got COVID, then I worked like 6 days in a row, and here we are now. I'm (mostly) healthy and back at it. Apologies for the delay! - Christian]

PBB #22 is live now!

[krimsonkatt]

Karakal (Chronicles: The Lost Page)

A creature also known as the "paradox beast" that emerged from another dimension in order to cause havoc across the timestream. It was summoned by Nyako, embodiment of primordial chaos, to destroy the Satori Family Line and send the timeline into eternal darkness. In intervention, the seraphim Kairos, guardian of time, emerged to grand his blessing to Treck Satori, ancestor of Koros Satori, in order to defeat the paradox beast and save the timeline.

Karakal is the final boss of the game "Chronicles: The Lost Page", a spin-off of the Chronicles of Chronicles series set 980 years before Chronicles Meteorfall and 15 years after Chronicles Calamity. It was the first game in the series finished and released in a completed state. TLP went through many different, vastly different versions through it's development. Originally in the 1.0 release, Treck was the ONLY party member, leading to incredibly difficult gameplay especially for the bosses. Most of the armors and weapons and many of the maps including the entire western area of the desert weren't even made yet! 1.1 was mainly just bugfixes and some dialogue changes, while 1.2 was a SIGNIFICANT update added in Izzy, Treck's companion, as a second party member straight from the bat as well as a secret third party member with Vivian. It also added in a huge amount of new weapons and armors for the new members as well as many new areas including Uran Oasis, Desert of Desolation - West, and "Skull Cavern" an optional dungeon. Version 1.3 drastically rebalanced the game on a massive scale while fixing some bugs present in 1.2, and Version 1.4 was yet another rework, specifically for the final boss Karakal who was made more difficult with brand-new moves and a new custom-made design. 1.5 was the next update which fixed a large slew of spelling and grammar errors, and updated Karakal's design once more to what you see now with shading and eye lasers created using visual effects. 1.6, the absolute FINAL update, is planned in the near future which will fix the last few bugs, change some dialogue, change enemy placement, rework the Chimera Den dungeon, add in new equipment, and add in a new post-game bonus dungeon along with its new superboss.

To properly fight Karakal you must have the "Kairos Ring" equipped to Treck before engaging Karakal in battle. Otherwise, Treck will become petrified at the beginning of the fight, and you will be locked into the bad ending, kicking you back in time to the moment you last entered the final dungeon. To obtain the Crystal Ring, you must help the old lady after she gets kidnapped by the Chimera Ants, which requires you to head north off the beaten path into the semi-optional (not really) Chimera Den mini-dungeon.

In battle Karakal uses various arts representative of his different colored eyes. These include "Violet Gravitron", "Flood Ray", "Empty Rosae", "Orche Curse", "Verdant Force", and "Amber Emperor". He can also use "Destruction Ray" and "Crawling Curaka" under certain conditions. Here's what each of these arts do.

Violet Gravitron: Deal gravity damage to all foes equal to 25% of their current HP.

Flood Ray: Deal severe water damage to one foe x4. Empty Rosae: Deal severe dark damage to all foes while lowering their BP by one. 10% dread chance.

Orchre Curse: Lower all stats for all foes.

Verdant Force: Deal severe force damage to all foes x2. 100% poison chance.

Amber Emperor: Raise all stats for the user.

Destruction Ray: Deal colossal almighty damage to all foes. Damage blocked by guard.

Crawling Curaka: Heals 9999 HP for the user.

Karakal will only use Destruction Ray every 5 turns, and he will only use Crawling Curaka while on the bad ending route. (in order to prevent you from killing him before you die due to petrify) Karakal will always use "The Eye Consumes" at the beginning of Turn 1 to attempt to inflict petrify on Treck. If he succeeds due to the Kairos Ring not being equipped, you are locked into the bad ending.

[goodmode]

who or what was your biggest art inspiration? :0c

woof, difficult question!!! i never know how to answer this because my inspirations are wild and varied and not always very "coherent" but. i'll give it a go

i got my start drawing silly anime furries like a lot of people. i was massively inspired by the art of Furcadia, specifically the older stuff. back then it felt magical and specialised and more niche than i might see it anywhere else. it was really beautiful - dated now, considering the tendency towards furry art having bigger, more human eyes and more emphasised details (which i do lean into myself) but i'll let it speak for itself.

as a little 10-13 year old, this was formative. (thank you talzemir, and everyone else who created art (pixel and otherwise) for this game, including custom patch artists. there is not enough space in a tumblr post to go into how enamored i was with the visual worldbuilding and bright early-Windows colours and level of detail, especially leaving out the maps and items and walksprites, but i became who i was with Furcadia's support and the art still guides me a little. i still want to make species recogniseable, i don't want to draw everything like a slightly narrower or blunter puppy. you feel me. i want my art to be BROAD and i want species to look like their species. this is why.

(special mention goes to the community, but this isn't a post about that. just know that without Furc people to lean on, i might not be me today!!!)

i was also heavily influenced by peers on DeviantART. i won't post their old art and embarrass them here, but shoutout to my friends who i grew up with drawing pokemon OCs, pokemon mystery dungeon story comics (PMD also a huge influence), anime, invader zim, yet more furries, and the rest. i branched out into a lot of different silly cartoon and anime styles back then and without looking at what those peers were doing i might never have experimented at all. i can only imagine how narrow my scope would be without them. (hopefully those still in touch know who they are!! special shoutout to those i no longer speak with, i haven't forgotten them either. hope they're doing well. also hello Black Scythe Pack circa my Authenti era)

i also need to credit @zarla-s because i think literally everything on ashido.com and NPLU and especially-especially-especially seeing the Slalomicide music video Flash animation when i was a wee bairn did something to my brain. i'm not who i was before i watched that animation. i remember downloading and listening to the MP3 to-and-from school and self-inserting my own furry OC. i remember watching all of the other flash animations on ashido.com with a mad appetite, regardless of whether i understood or was aware of the source material for the fanworks. i remember my dad-and-his-friend-pirate-combo bootlegging Adobe Flash MX 2004 for me and becoming a monster who experimented all day in their room with animations because someday i wanted to tell a story like that with my furry, and it made me want to know movement and expression and camera angles. i cannot move on without bowing low at the Zarla shrine. to know Zarla is still going is to know there are unicorns yet. (i remember clicking the thin lines of the play button, because you didn't flood-fill and the outlines were the only pixels clickable to start the animation. I REMEMBER. and it was formative.)

um. Homestuck! the fanart and the contributing artists, too, but also just - the shortform simple shapes, the stylisation, the bright colours and stark contrast and silly levels. and the sort of wet "blotchy ink-splatter" pixel brushwork of that and Problem Sleuth.

all of this made me want to create something dynamic and silly. i wanted to be able to make something where people could attach to the characters no matter how silly they looked at first glance, and to make something big and wild and expressionistic(???) while simplifying things enough that my then-undiagnosed-ADHD brain could play with them and still have fun without it being work.

and then there's Justice League International (1987)(?)(onward).

believe me when i say i was wheezing on reading these. and wildly invested! i am still trying to push and push and push my art to be anything like the power-combo trio of Giffen, DeMatteis, and Maguire. everything from the composition and planning to the sketching to the beautiful inks made every single panel an absolute joy. for the first time reading comics, i wanted to slow down. i wanted to pick out every silly background detail in group shots, see where the inks emphasised shadow, notice why negative space was left and where and why. i wanted to do expressions this fucking funny.

i also give credit to the Blue Beetle comics from 2006/2009. i loved them, i studied them, i learned the alien language.

honestly my comics era was insane for my art development. i learned how limbs work back-and-forth from the camera, the basics of foreshortening, dynamic lighting, composition, contrast, inks, emphasis, i'm still trying to learn simplification and typesetting and speech bubbles and negative space and inked shadow.

plus credit to Batman: The Animated Series. obviously. and to the Batman Adventures comics where i learned the riddler was desperately gay. and shoutout to Ghibli. and to the artists behind movies like The Lion King. (i will not credit Disney as a company.)

and... now i'm somewhere very strange, i think! and i am having fun. and i like my art. so.

thank you to everybody, i guess!

[paxesoterica]

Archived link to web enhancements for select issues of Dungeon Magazine produced by Paizo (all of which were written for Dungeons & Dragons, 3rd edition).

In 2003, Paizo began experimenting with web enhancements for Dungeon Magazine, with the first two being additional material for Life's Bazaar and Flood Season, the first two adventures in the Shackled City adventure path, and most of the rest offering offering illustrations, NPC portraits, and maps as potential handouts, as well as conversion notes for running select adventures in the Forgotten Realms and Eberron.

These were all available for free, but the regular link on the website doesn't seem to be working anymore, so I obtained this archival link from the Internet Archive in case I, or anyone who happens to be interested, would like access to this material in the future.

[slugdragoon]

I love dungeon crawlers. I'm making one inspired mainly by Shin Megami Tensei, and I've been posting about Dragon Quest (will eventually do other games), but I'm also into D&D, and always pour over the dungeon maps whenever I get a new sourcebook, and like exploring old issues of Dungeon magazine.

I remembered recently a core childhood memory that probably explains why I appreciate the art of the dungeon itself, and it's this issue of Nintendo Power (#121, June 1999):

I probably picked this up at a Blockbuster Video off the rack, as at that age Pokemon was everything and everywhere. Right around the time they had those kiosks where you could print photos you took in Pokemon Snap. But, as I found an archived copy of this issue, and the memories came flooding back (I remembered all the old articles and ads, and the fan art other kids sent in still stuck out to me as something I forgot I remembered), another thing jumped out at me - the guide to Conker's Pocket Tales, a game I did own. But, the game itself had less of an impact on me than these pages:

Sprawling mazes with spike traps, bottomless pits, bats, slimes, puzzles, animated statues, secret passages, and evil wizards? Forget it, this was my version of the Tomb of Horrors as a kid. I spend hours looking at these pages, imagining a little guy running around, tracing my way through the dungeon, and that pattern has burned it's way into my brain permanently as I play dungeon crawlers, browse D&D adventure modules, and look at game maps online.

I think I'm going to make some dungeon appreciation posts occasionally.