A while back I tried to run myself a solo D&D game using Mad Monks of Kwantoom and a playtest B/X D&D Psionics book from New Big Dragon. I drew a bunch of pretty pagodas, but didn’t document the game well and then forgot about it.

So I recently started a new one with a new party assembled in Kwantoom to explore the Pagodas (or just the city, whatever rocks their collective boats, right?)

• Carlen HearthWarden (Healer)
• Ersen the Younger (Elf Swordmage)
• Silent Brother (Willow Leaf Monk)
• Dorian Worldshaper (Mystic)
• Gurglesnot (Arcane Babbler Gibbering Mouther)
• Doomhammer (Fighter)

Day 1 – Gurglesnot’s spell is Charm Person

We begin in the district of Kuan Loon, carrying our gibbering mouther in a basket to keep it from freaking too many locals out. We are appraoched by Mo Shu-sai-chong who sees that we are outsiders and likely to be travelling to the Pogodas – his teenaged daughter sought to prove her bravery and has travelled to the Pagodas and he offers us 350gp to rescue her! With that kind of offer, we have no choice but to head to the Pagodas as soon as we check out the local shops, err, I mean right away! (She will be found in the 31st chamber or room we explore)

Shops Found:

• Caw’s Knotshop
• Koom-Pah Candlesticks (buy 10 firecrackers for 1sp)
• Lo’s Famous Chopsticks
• Mong’s Weapon Counter
• Palace of the Red Glove (promise to return to celebrate after our expedition!)
• The Shrine of Avalokiteshvara

Attempt to hire footmen, but they are wary of our screaming basket of eyeballs.

That evening, we embark on a boat to the 1001 Pagodas of Doom

Pagoda 1
1A – Door is ajar. Two demonic statues face off from opposite corners of the room.
1B – Another demonic statue watches over this room and the 26 Pa’Kua Kobolds that live here! That’s a lot of kobolds! With 26 of them there are two 2HD leaders. Each one can cast bless or curse 1/day. This is going to be trouble! Fortunately we surprised them. Immediately Ersen the Younger casts sleep and rolls a 14, taking out just over half of the kobolds. In a flurry of attacks, three more are slain and one of the leaders is charmed by Gurglesnot. With 17 down, and one trying to figure out what the fuck is going on, the remaining nine miraculously make their morale check.
Fortunately initiative is in the party’s favour and another four are slain, one slowly being consumed by gurglesnot (and holy crap, two attacks for the monk at level 1 is very powerful!). The remaining four immediately try to make a fighting retreat out the back door while one casts bless on their remaining forces and another bane on the party.
1C – Once through the door to the small dead-end chamber beyond, they rush to break open one of the strange wooden kegs found therein. 3 Kegs (full of mysterious amber jelly – acts like a potion of giant strength – 6 doses). With another won initiative, the party descends upon them and slaughters the remaining kobolds.
Hoard Class I x 26 = 364cp
Hoard Class XIII x 1 = 2000sp in two small coffers
1D – Octagonal chamber contains a larg e mirror – looking into the mirror triggers a glyph of fire dealing 4 damage to the elf. The healer casts her only Cure Minor Wounds spell, healing 3 of the damage.

We then find stairs leading down beneath the pagoda. At the bottom of the stairs, a thin laquer wood door blocks our path. Fortunately the monk spots the poison arrow trap peventing a calamity.

In the basement corridor we ran afoul of an ambush from behind by a pair of Sheng Men when we ran into a dead end. With surprise, they fell upon our back rank, striking Gurglesnot and paralyzing the screaming beast with foul poisons. Out of spells and with our back rank exposed in tight confines, the issue becomes trying to get someone with real fighting skills to the front. The mystic invokes his psionic invisibility to try to slip past the Sheng Men and the charmed kobold jumps into the fray. The kobold gets reduced to 3 hit points, but is not paralyzed. Finally able to maneuver Doomhammer to the back rank, he smashes one sheng man into a smear in the wall while the wounded kobold grabs at his injured side (rolled a 1 on his attack roll) and is finished off by the remaining sheng man. The monster then turns his attention to Doomhammer and a short back and forth ends with the predictable result of Doomhammer’s hammer of doom embedded in the sheng man’s head. Fortunately no one contracts the strange and deadly poison from the black blood of these foul creatures.

1E – Pushing our luck we check to the south, finding the small chamber of the Sheng Men, where two more of their kin are watched over by the statue of a much larger and more demonic version of these human-like creatures. Seeking revenge for our lost Kobold companion, we fell upon the Sheng Men with surprise, slaughtering them in seconds. On each side of the statue is a chest, the first containing 500gp, and the second three jars of extremely rare and vibrant purple dyes worth an astounding 900gp EACH. Retreating from the pagoda, we returned to Kwantoom to sell our loot and hopefully recruit a few henchmen.

Expedition Tally:
Rooms Explored: 5
Treasure: 3223 gp equivalent
Magic: 6 doses potion of giant strength
XP: 575 XP each (604 with 5% bonus) (633 with 10% bonus)

To the east of the Hematite Mines and south of the Dwarven Outpost we arrive at the Giant Citadel. Originally listed in the node maps as a single map, I realized I really wanted this node to be about “big” – so large halls, large chambers… and thus more than one map.

Giant Citadel – North (with grid)

I’ve also got a love for little caves and cracks in big areas, so I included to sets of passages that are entwined into the area – the caves that lead here from the dwarven outpost to the north. In this case one set (the ones where the strange fungus-born nightmare stalkers live) leads to the mines outside of the citadel, and the other passage (that the dwarves use on occasion) leads straight through the citadel and on to the next map. The highlight of this is the section almost in the middle of the page (above, not the picture below) where the dwarven tunnel is basically a big crack in the floor of a passage in the giant citadel – a way for sneaky dwarves (and adventurers) to see how terrifying the giant controlled node can be without having to directly interact with it.

This node is home to a large clan of stone giants and their assorted henchmen, lesser giants, and hangers-on. Most of the stone giants live in the southern portion of the citadel, and this area exists mostly for water access and the clothes washing room, as well as a guard room that looks out onto the dwarven mines beyond. The dwarves occasionally run through here in order to get to their alternate exit from the mountain, a small door in the southern part of the citadel that is not too far from the giants’ own great gate.

Giant Citadel – North (no grid)

I spent yesterday mapping with my isometric graphing paper that my lovely girlfriend bought me for Christmas (you’ll see why I had the pad out on Tuesday when I post the map I was working on yesterday). But in the process I drank a lot of caffeine.

Which is rough, because I pretty much cut caffeine out of my diet recently. So as night arrived, I still had the pad in front of me, and a pencil… and too much energy.

So this started to happen. Just a random collection of lines and buildings in a strictly isometric perspective, without thought as to gameability or whether it would turn into a functional map or just… something else.

And it started to grow… Sometime around 1:30 this morning I realized I had filled the page with pencil scribblings (and spent a fair chunk of time erasing and redrawing sections to prevent accidental M.C. Escher twists) and it really was time for bed.

A full letter-sized page of madness. Some strange city where law and chaos have collided into an explosion of straight lines, sharp angles, and bizarre byways.

This morning I started to ink the final piece from last night (using a Sakura Micron 03 pen) and it rapidly grew more… solid. Less sketchy… Like a solid heavy thing slowly emerging from the potential of the grid and penciled lines.

A quick hit with the eraser later, scan the mofo into Photoshop and a bit of digital editing to make it a little more apparent as to what is what and we finally get The House of Seven Larks.

The House of Seven Larks

If you manage to use this in a game, I would LOVE to hear about it!

Today we are taking a quick break from the MegaDelve to post up my most recent isomorphic dungeon map.

Temple of Greed (with grid)

I received four pads of isometric graph paper from my girlfriend for Christmas (three letter-sized and one ledger – which is too big for my scanner). Over the next few months I’ll be posting some of my various trials with the paper in question. One important trick I’ve learned though is to avoid “overlap” between the areas on the map, which generally means making sure that stuff on the upper left is at higher or equal elevations to areas on the lower right.

Also, adding a grid is not as simple as with my regular maps. In the end I had to take the original map, draw the grid directly onto the temple floors, and then rescan it to get the version above. This version (below) was from the original scan.

Temple of Greed (no grid)

This Friday we return to the Mega Delve with the second half of the Giant Citadel before we start exploring the depths of the necropolis and crypts on the opposite side of the mountain.

I drew Owen’s Mine sometime around June of 2011.

Wait… 2011? I’ve been blogging here for a while, eh?

Anyways, yeah, Owen’s Mine. It was inspired by a game of How to Host a Dungeon that I played where the kobolds had their base of operations just beside the human mines, without any actual connection between the two.

Owen’s Mine

What’s exceptionally cool is that Vance Atkins then used the map to write up a set-piece encounter / adventure. Then another, and another, and one more!

So over on his blog (Leicester’s Ramble) you can read up on and download all four variations on Owen’s Mine, each with a different concept – at least one of which will probably mesh with what’s going on in your game. :)

The Mega Delve is nearing completion, but some people are already taking the pieces of it and adapting them to their own games.

Hadramkath Player’s Map

Look at this piece of beauty put together from two of the maps of the Dwarven City by the Riotous GM over on his blog. This is the final version he gave to his players, but he’s also posted a clean B&W copy on his blog for anyone else wanting to do the same thing.

It fills my heart with joy when I see awesome stuff like this. I can’t wait to finish the whole Mega Delve and have all these maps ready for use!

Giant Citadel – South (with grid)

Today we return to (and complete) the Giant Citadel. There’s a valley in the mountains that is avoided by sensible people and even adventurers (who are notoriously not in the sensible category most of the time) because it is home to a Stone Giant warlock of immense girth and supposedly immense power. Regular trade caravans run here however in order to meet his appetite for food and drink to complement his own herding operations that provide him with most of his meat. After all, keeping him fed and getting coin for it is a lot more appealing to most than having a kingdom of stone giants and assorted kin trampling around the area looking for free food.

These halls are where the stone warlock holds court. His throne room and feasting hall are immense and impressive and designed to accent his already incredible size compared to his petitioners. He surrounds himself with ettins and also employs gnoll and flind herders to maintain and protect his bison herds.

Giant Citadel – South (no grid)

Recently he has gained a flight of gargoyles who have pledged allegiance to his kingdom. They now lurk in various nooks and crannies about the area as quiet and often unseen guardians. One of these gargoyles has discovered the comings and goings of verminous dwarves from the northern pantry attached to the kitchen and has killed and eaten one such intruder and now waits silently to figure out exactly how they are entering the pantry…

These bi-weekly map posts are brought to you by the many awesome patrons who keep the site and maps coming thanks to their pledges to the Dodecahedron Patreon Campaign. If you like these maps and would like to see more of them and have the money to spare, please check out the campaign that keeps these free maps flowing to everyone.

We head back to the top-left side of the Dyson Mega Delve node map for the next three maps (although the last of the three may be delayed by a week or two as I post commercial-licensed maps at the beginning of March – see below for more information).

The Crypts (with grid)

The Crypts are carved out of old mines under the necropolis of Bryn Mynnyd. Many niches and alcoves have been dug into the walls of the old mines to house the many dead here. The whole expanse smells of dampness and death, with old bones occasionally underfoot as likely as old stones from the mining.

Exits from this map lead to the Lost River Node to the right, the necropolis of Bryn Mynnyd to the left, and the death cultists to the north.

The Crypts (no grid)

There are a few tombs in the catacombs, but none harbour the undead that adventurers would likely expect. These tombs are quiet and still, appropriate resting places for those who have passed on into forgotten history.

The real threats down here are corpse-rot, a few traps, some strange oozes, and strange humanoids who seem to feed off the darkness itself… Only should someone be foolish enough to raise the ire of the death cultists north of this area will the dead rise under their command – even they respect the dead enough to not bring them to the mockery of life that is undeath except in times of true need.

These bi-weekly map posts are brought to you by the many awesome patrons like David Magill, Michael Galle, Duane Sibilly, and Sasha Bilton who keep the site and maps coming thanks to their pledges to the Dodecahedron Patreon Campaign. If you like these maps and would like to see more of them and have the money to spare, please check out the campaign that keeps these free maps flowing to everyone.

Speaking of the Patreon Campaign, while this Friday’s Map will be of the Death Cult map to the north of this one, we’ll then have a week or two break from the Mega Delve when March rolls around. The campaign reached the target goal of $300 this month, and that means at least one of the March maps (likely two or three) will be released under a free commercial license. So instead of sticking publishers who want free maps from me with partial areas from the Mega Delve, we’ll be posting some other cool maps in early March before posting the last two maps of the Mega Delve (the necropolis and the harpy tower) later in the month.

This is an awesome flashback / forward for me.

Back in the late 70’s TSR put out a lovely four-page character “folder” for AD&D. The style was very similar to the famous “goldenrod” character sheets except these were printed on thicker white paper stock, with blue ink on two sheets and black on the other two, and the border extends all around the sheet instead of on three of four sides.

In fact, they looked a lot like this:

But this is actually a Fifth Edition Dungeons & Dragons character sheet done up in that same style by Paul Longino (who goes by the name of MexicanTappingWhale on Reddit). When I first saw them on Reddit I immediately reposted them to my google+ feed where they got a crap-ton of positive feedback (and where a lot of people mistook the white permanent folders for the more memorable goldenrod character sheets)

Thus I am very excited to be able to host these sheets for anyone who wants them – they are actually five pages instead of four, but you can pick and choose between the two different spell sheets as the third page.

You can download the character sheet by clicking on this link.

Death Cult (with grid)

Buried in the crypts and tombs under the ruins of Bryn Mynnyd is the Church of Silence (known be the few outsiders who know it exists as the Death Cult of Bryn Mynnyd or the Assassin’s Cult of Bryn Mynnyd). This group isn’t a “Mwah ha ha ha, look at my undead minions!” type cult, but are more the “heh heh heh… Murder, murder and murder, my pretties” type of cult.

Ensconced in a massive tomb in the crypts, the assassin-priests of the cult have trained most of the creatures that live down here to keep their distance from them, using alchemically-treated blue torches to remind them to stay clear. Priests of blood and murder, they prefer their corpses on the truly dead side and do not surround themselves with zombies and other undead as many necromantic cults do… but that doesn’t mean they don’t have the means to raise the dead when the shit hits the fan.

Death Cult (no grid)

In fact, should someone make a concerted effort to eliminate the church, odds are they would find themselves surrounded by hundreds of skeletons and zombies crawling out of the many niches in this node. Both the high priest and his right hand man know how to use the dark heart in their temple to unleash a wave of animating force through the complex to awaken the many corpses they have prepared over the decades.

This map is provided for your personal use by the many awesome patrons who support this website through my Patreon Campaign. In fact, support has been so awesome that we’ll be taking a break from the Mega Delve for a week (or maybe two) in order to post some maps that are being released under a full free commercial license starting on Tuesday. We’ll have more information on how many maps will be released under this license once March begins and we can see the totals for March funding. Once these commercial maps are all posted, we’ll get back to the Mega Delve and post the last two remaining maps (the Necropolis under ruined Bryn Mynnyd and the Harpy Tower)!

Sometime back in November I figured I would finish off 2014 with a small megadungeon styled map. So I pulled out a post-it note and drew a basic node map for said. In time, that node map would evolve as I added additional maps and subdivided the various nodes (but in the end, the final node map is still recognizably pretty much the same as the post-it)

Node Map (click to enlarge)

All that is needed now is the last two maps to be drawn (The Necropolis and the Harpy Tower) – which we’ll get to in a few weeks. I’m holding off on these last two maps because the first few maps in March will be released under a free commercial license thanks to the awesome funding of my Patreon Campaign patrons, and I don’t want to stick the potential commercial users with partial maps from the MegaDelve. To see how the whole Dyson Mega Delve comes together in a more tangible format than the node map above, here’s a pseudo-isometric blow-apart projection of the 29 maps used so far:

The Whole Mega Delve (click for huge graphic)

This graphic is a bit big and unwieldy (roughly 4000 x 4000 pixels in size), but it gets the structures of the existing maps across in a visual manner and shows off a few of my mistakes along the way. I seriously miscalculated the location of the Lost River and the section of it on the lowest level actually runs directly underneath the section of it on the upper level. I’m going to have to add a big corkscrew to it if I want the rivers to match up at all, or give up on it being the same river. There were a few other glitches along the way, but nothing huge besides that one. When the whole thing is finally done I’ll keep working on map descriptions and the wandering monster dice drop tables and get this massive monstrosity to publication. My goal is to have it go to publication this summer. Fingers Crossed!

There is a stout tower along the Akkedis Trail that is decorated with massive white chunks of stone along its battlements. To those who pass through its shadow on the trail it has become known as either the Crown of Teeth, or the Titan’s Teeth.

Titan’s Teeth (with grid)

It is said that the “teeth” were pulled from the ancient corpse of a primordial titan of wind and sight. The same tales would claim that the teeth confer some of the titan’s powers to those who stand atop the tower, granting the ability to see incredible distances and to accurately shoot at twice or three times the normal range of a longbow.

Titan’s Teeth (no grid)

The Titan’s Teeth has four levels above ground (plus the battlements) one level half underground and a final “dungeon” level underground that contains a secret passage to the surface some distance away.

This is the first map released on the blog under a fully free commercial license. This map is posted as a PNG format file (instead of my usual JPG) so you can download it and use it at home or in any personal or commercial project. You can use, reuse, remix and/or modify the maps that are being published under the commercial license on a royalty-free basis as long as they include attribution (“Cartography by Dyson Logos” or “Maps by Dyson Logos”).

For those that want/need a Creative Commons license, it would look something like this:

Cartography by Dyson Logos is licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

Again, this shouldn’t need repeating, but this only applies to these two maps in this post!

This free license to use and abuse this map is courtesy of the many awesome patrons who have supported the Dodecahedron through my Patreon Campaign. This past month we saw a surge in patrons that brought the campaign over the $300 mark. Awesome people like James, Josh (who has his own Patreon campaign here), Barry Fujii, Brandon Kern, Phill Everson, Ryan Stoughton and Pablo “Hersho” Domínguez have all contributed to making this map not just free for your personal use, but for anyone’s commercial use also. Not to mention paying my rent and putting food on my table.

Even better, the more we bring in each month, the more maps will be released under this free commercial license!

So, once again, click on those maps, download them, and have fun remixing, reusing, abusing, stocking and doing whatever it is you want with them. These maps are yours now – I have sent them out into the wilds and look forward to seeing them again.

While there will always be wizards who are popular due to their fireworks and other magical manifestations, there are others who find no solace in civilized society. Necromancers, demonologists, witches and practitioners of foul arts.

The Summoner’s Lair (with grid)

This small hillside excavation is the lair of such a wizard, witch or warlock. One who keeps generally to themselves, along with perhaps an apprentice or a skilled swordsman along with a few additional toughs who can handle most problems should they arise.

The Summoner’s Lair (no grid)

This map was drawn using Sakura Micron pens (a 03 for the walls, a 01 for doors and crosshatching and such, and a 005 for fine detail work) in an A6 wiro-bound gamer’s notebook from Squarehex (a really lovely and tough notebook perfect for carrying around and drawing in while at meetings, in waiting rooms and so on).

This map is made available for your free use thanks to the patrons of the Dodecahedron Patreon Campaign that keeps me fed and sheltered while I draw these fancy doodads for your enjoyment.

One step further – because of the incredible generosity of my patrons, I’m able to make this map free for commercial use also. Each month while funding is over the $300 mark, each map that achieves the $300+ funding level will be released under this free commercial license. You can use, reuse, remix and/or modify the maps that are being published under the commercial license on a royalty-free basis as long as they include attribution (“Cartography by Dyson Logos” or “Maps by Dyson Logos”).

For those that want/need a Creative Commons license, it would look something like this:

Cartography by Dyson Logos is licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

Again, this shouldn’t need repeating, but this only applies to these two maps in this post!

So enjoy! This map is yours to do with as you please, personally or commercially!

In a serious bid to increase my “Old School Cred”, I’ve joined a classic 1975 Empire of the Petal Throne campaign being run by Grognardia’s James Maliszewski.

Ok, that’s just a bit of hyperbole about the whole Old School Cred, but the rest is true. I’ve started playing an EPT campaign being run by James along with a cool crew, most of whom seem to know a bit more about the setting than I do. But it is great learning it as we go.

Empire of the Petal Throne

One of the cooler aspects is that James is currently producing and selling an EPT ‘zine (The Excellent Travelling Volume, issues 1 & 2 on the left) and the second issue gives rough details of the city where our game is being held along with a wonderful city map by Simon Forster.

But the one thing missing from my Tekumel experience was a decent character sheet. And my quests for one on the internet met with terrible failure. In the end I threw together this sheet in a couple of hours, and I kind of hate it. It lacks what I feel is one of the most important elements of a sheet (the character sketch), and it is far more utilitarian than pretty. But it will do for now.

Empire of the Petal Throne Character Sheet

So, if you find yourself looking for a quick and dirty Empire of the Petal Throne sheet, feel free to download, edit, remix and mess around with this one. It is yours for the taking.

[Download PDF]

Every now and again when I’m in the midst of drawing something, I get the urge to draw something completely different.

Fortunately for me, yesterday that urge was easily contained into something reasonably small and quick. I grabbed a sheet of hex paper from Incompetech (.2 inch hexes) and started doodling a vignette…

Half an hour of doodling resulted in the following piece:

Hex Map Vignette

Another 10 minutes in Photoshop and this alternate version appeared:

Hex Map Vignette (with screens)

I really like them. They’ll look awesome as a footer for a page (or a chapter) of an RPG book. Just stick the page number in that big empty hex in the middle.

This morning I got up to a new Patreon post from Simon Forster – an Owlbear lair. This immediately reminded me of one of my favourite RPGs of all time. Around nine years ago, Jason Morningstar ran an RPG challenge where all entries had to involve Owlbears and either Mark Twain or Beekeeping. There were a variety of entries. But one of them I immediately printed out and have kept ever since.

This is an RPG that I keep around in my “Best ideas for an RPG ever” bin. It totally influenced every element of my work on the not-quite-award-winning “A Flask Full of Gasoline” RPG. It is a piece of genius. I place it next to Sea Dracula in my collection of brilliant stuff I wish I had written.

It is OWLBEARS.

So with today’s reminder, I opened up the PDF again and was chuckling as I read it when I checked out the Properties tab… and discovered that the author is none other than fellow Canadian superstar of the OSR – Stuart Robertson of Strange Magic & Robertson Games.

I HAVE CHALLENGED SIR ROBERTSON THAT WE MUST MEET. WE MUST DRESS IN GARBAGE BAGS, TAPE OWL MASKS TO OUR FACES AND DUEL WITH BEEHIVES AND HOCKEY STICKS.

AND IT WILL BE AWESOME!

WE

WILL

BE

OWLBEARS!

(You can get your own copy of Owlbears from this link or by clicking on the Owl mask)

The Prismatic Fortress (with grid)

I have sent many adventurers to the Prismatic Fortress, supposed home of the Archmagus Mekeri.

While some have returned, even bearing the partially completed map shown below, none can even explain the contents of even the first chamber of their explorations… It is as if the fortress defends itself not with traps or guards, but by attacking the minds and memories of those who breach its walls.

I drew this map just as I was finishing up the various dwarven city maps for the Dyson Mega Delve. I was in a deep need for something to rebel against the heavy square grid-based architecture of those levels, so I pulled out a compass and started working on this map.

I envision it as a series of strange bubbles of shiny crystalline stone. Not quite perfectly spherical, as if it was grown or bubbled up from the ground instead of having been constructed in more traditional means.

The Prismatic Fortress (no grid)

In the end it did not satisfy my need to break away from my dwarven architecture as it remained too regular, too solid, too hard. That said, I really like it – but it definitely didn’t scratch the itch I was feeling. You can see it if you examine the structure – it just barely breaks away from the mold of the dwarven city by being circular, and yet isn’t very circular once you get inside. As an escape it fails utterly, but as a strange fortress map for a psychedelic archmage, I like to think it still succeeds.

This map is available to you for free for personal and commercial use thanks to the awesome patrons of the Dodecahedron Patreon Campaign. The awesome outpouring of support from Michael French, Josh Mannon, Keith Nelson, Nathanael Cole, Corey Messer aka TiredOrangeCat and over 200 other amazing patrons keeps these maps flowing for your use.

You can use, reuse, remix and/or modify the maps that are being published under the commercial license on a royalty-free basis as long as they include attribution (“Cartography by Dyson Logos” or “Maps by Dyson Logos”).

For those that want/need a Creative Commons license, it would look something like this:

Cartography by Dyson Logos is licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

Again, this shouldn’t need repeating, but this only applies to these two maps in this post!

If you do find a use for one of these maps in your games, I would love to hear about it!

Jebbal’s Tor (with grid)

The nomad tribes are rarely united and even more rarely build anything resembling permanent constructions. The trade city at Leaping Falls, for instance, was entirely made of tents prior to foreign investment and construction in order to maintain trade alliances with the various tribes.

Thus Jebbal’s Tor stands out on the plains, a small stone tower attached to a stone recreation of a traditional round house, both sitting on a low hill, squatting over miles of flat herdlands.

Jebbal’s Tor (no grid)

Jebbal’s Tor was traditionally used when the soothsayers and priests of the tribes needed to confer on matters of great spiritual import for their peoples. Gatherings were recorded here after the starfall in the Year of Mad Horses, and when the priests gathered together to usurp the power of Dorreth the Demon Caller who was intimidating the tribal leaders into line with his foul sorceries.

Today most of the political power of the priests and soothsayers has been replaced by the economic power of the herders and mercenary captains of the tribes. It has been at least four generations since they have gathered here, and the structure is beginning to collapse.

But it retains significant meaning in the hearts of the tribes, especially within the huts of the shamans, priests and their ilk. And now there is talk that a descendant of the Demon Caller is raising forces and planning to take the Tor as his own…

This map is available to you for free for personal use thanks to the awesome patrons of the Dodecahedron Patreon Campaign. The awesome outpouring of support from Edgar D. Johnson III, Mark Knights, Leonard Pierce, James Maliszewski, Riley Vann and over 200 other amazing patrons keeps these maps flowing for your use.

If you do find a use for one of these maps in your games, I would love to hear about it!

As I mentioned last week, I’m now taking part in an Empire of the Petal Throne campaign being run by James Maliszewski. This has involved finally reading that venerable RPG book from the very early days of gaming (published in 1975, four years before I discovered D&D).

One nice thing with this edition is the ease of making a copy of the book in question. OneBookShelf sells an excellent official scan of the original book in PDF format. Unless your printer has exceptionally small margins if you print it WITHOUT using the “shrink to fit” option the print job will not include the watermarks at the bottoms of the pages.

(Although note that page 97 has been duplicated and appears as both the 101st and 102nd pages of the PDF. If you want your pagination to stay true when double-sided printing, skip one of those or remove it from the file for best results.)

I printed mine off on lovely 32lb bright white paper with a pseudo-parchment cardstock cover and then brought the printout to Staples to get it spiral bound before taking that photo up there.

Reading Empire of the Petal Throne from cover to cover for the first time I was struck repeatedly by how much I keep picturing it being run by Alejandro Jodorowsky and illustrated by Jean Gireaud.

I totally see an Incal-style setting here. From the Petal Throne, the isolation of the Emperor, the various factions in the Tsolyani empire, the aliens around the edges… I totally want to run a game that focuses on the weird decadence of the Empire.

I’m also struck by the whole “too weird and detailed to be playable” thing. The material in the EPT book is definitely no weirder than anything Jodo has written (and there’s an RPG of that), and definitely less detailed than anything published for the Forgotten Realms. It feels incredibly accessible to me, and the very familiar yet slightly weird mechanics just make it more appealing.

I think the fear of its weirdness is an artifact of the era of its release. When it was released the common frame of reference was Conan and Middle Earth and everyone was fairly comfortable with the tech level and cultural framework of those settings and all you had to do was infer various things and the rest was handled by the mass knowledge base. This setting was different. And different is scary.

Today, we have tons of “different” settings and games out there. If we can embrace transhumanist themes in our sci-fi and play games that cross over into lucid dreaming and fairy tales on a regular basis, we can definitely cope with a bit of alien detail like Tékumel.

The presentation in the 1975 EPT is far from dense. It lays out a foundation sketch of the setting that is way less dense than say the descriptions of the various nations and regions in the Forgotten Realms 3e hardcover.

If anything, it’s this sketchiness that I like. It (like the best settings I’ve read) gives you enough information to run on and to make up your own games from without burying you in data.

- – -

Unlike D&D, EPT uses percentiles for ability scores, like a lot of other TSR games of the era. Unlike Top Secret and similar games, however, you roll the dice and take the results. While our game is using the rules as written, it can lead to odd characters like my warrior with 99 Strength and 02 Constitution (I figure he’s still got part of the spear jammed through his chest that mustered him out of the military with a collapsed lung, kidney and liver damage, and a bit of brain damage to boot). James Maliszewski touches on this in the first issue of his “The Excellent Travelling Volume“, bringing over the stat rolling rules from the aforementioned Top Secret (where if you roll really low, you get a bonus, and if you roll really high you don’t – changing the stat range from 1-100 with an average of 50.5 to 26-100 with an average of 63.5 – but significantly changing the lower end of the spectrum. While I remain a 3d6-in-order kind of guy, this system appeals to me because it starts to curve the results of the d100 roll – I like 3d6 because it keeps extreme numbers in check, whereas the single d100 roll has an equal chance of any number along the spectrum.

There are a lot of other mechanics in the game that I find really interesting and look forward to seeing them in play. Spells exist only in three levels (well, four if you include the number of magical “professional skills” that priests and magic-users get). Skills are learned at chargen and you gain an additional one when you level up from your professional skill list. The whole book is joyfully “young” in the RPG era and looks at things quite differently than D&D does, considering its direct roots linking the two games.

Empire of the Petal Throne

In fact, in addition to the stat mechanics listed above, I’ve found that “The Excellent Travelling Volume” is a wonderful zine for someone first breaking into Empire of the Petal Throne. It is friendly, well layed out and well written (with excellent artwork). James understands the benefits of simple descriptions that open up possibilities instead of going into extensive texts that seem to rub away the sense of the imaginary and the triggers to launch your own imagination along new routes as you read. The zine is only available in print, and is available directly from James here.

One of the first maps I posted to the blog was the Lair of the Frogs. Unfortunately I have long ago lost the original drawing of the map, as well as the hard drive that had the only high resolution scan of it (back then I was posting low resolution scans to the blog with the eventual hope of publishing a book with the high resolution versions).

Lair of the Frogs

So I elected to take another stab at the map and see what could be done in an isometric perspective. The end result isn’t great, but at least it is in a higher resolution, right?

After a clumsy and abortive failure at destroying the Temple of the Frog in old Blackmoor that ended in a near TPK and the one survivor leaving the region to find work as a short-order cook (seriously!), the frog-like humanoids and their giant frog companions became something of a nuissance critter in one campaign.

The Lair of the Frogs was a low-level adventure to launch a new campaign for those same players that flubbed the Temple of the Frog. It’s an old hill fortress and temple that has been long abandonned and now taken over by the frogs. The upper level is mostly abandonned, even by the frogs, except as a guard post (most of the guards end up being more concerned with catching flies and entertaining themselves than actually watching for people approaching the main entrance to the temple.

The main level of the temple is lived in by the lowest-ranking of the frogs. It’s the lower level, accessible through the main level or through the secret entrance in the roots of a rotted-out tree in the swamp that contains a majority of the frogs. The lower level is very damp and nasty, and the doors have either rotted away or are stuck so firmly that the frogs can’t be bothered to open them.

In the original adventure here, the frogs were keeping their prisoners on the ground level of the temple (near the well room in the North West corner of that level), so the party didn’t have to go into the heart of the frog-infested basement.

Lair of the Frogs 2

The side view of the first version of the map is still important to make full sense out of this version of the map, and I realize that I should have reproduced it in the new version.

In the end, I’m not all that happy with this remake. I think the lesson in this for me is to not go back to maps I’ve already drawn and try to remake them, but instead to keep striving forward.

This map is available to you for free for personal use thanks to the awesome patrons of the Dodecahedron Patreon Campaign. The awesome outpouring of support from Kyle Maxwell, Jeff, Jesse Butler, Wayne’s Books and over 200 other amazing patrons keeps these maps flowing for your use.

If you do find a use for one of these maps in your games, I would love to hear about it!