Hex Crawl 23 #112: Accursed Oasis

Three hexes south, three southwest of Alakran.

 

The shimmering black stalks of palms prick the horizon like upright clove-buds in the heat. You get closer; it's no mirage, and a green verge blooms above the undulating flats. The palms show their slatted fronds, and you see they stand evenly spaced around the greenery, almost as if planted.

Once inside the ring of trunks, dropped dates squelching underfoot, you struggle through bushes heavy with red, wrinkled wolfberries, and thorny shrubs hung with the small green globes of hanza fruit. Soon you reach the rocky lip of a spring that slowly spills its water among thick growths of reeds and vines. The stones, you see, are carved; are those the faces of a god, the ancient sacred writing? Was a temple once erected here, thrown down to border a welcome well?

If you drink here... You feel fine, but you start making excuses not to leave the oasis. Your quests and cares melt away, you see there is sufficient food to eat; how many who are not kings can say they are as well provisioned? As your companions or your conscience remind you that you might be a little bit enchanted, you seem to remember a golden glint you saw in the water. A cup perhaps, or a lamp. You become convinced that this is the key, the way, the artifact that will break the curse. You dive deep, and the waters claim you, or perhaps what is under the water does.

If you eat of the fruit here, be it brown, or green, or red ... The same thing happens, and you are convinced that the half-buried stones that you now see scattered under the shrubs hold the key to your release from the curse of an ancient temple. You dig, you delve, but the soil is sandy and treacherous with the buried megaliths, and the stone topples, the sand swallows.

If you sleep here ... You dream of leaving, but you never do. The well, the plants, the soil obliterate any trace of your existence over the years.

Apply saving throws to taste; if there is no save, then the adventurer's friends will have to do.

Note: The cursed oasis is a feature seed that arose by chance in my homebrewed content generator, and also stands as quite the classic desert venture peril. Having heard tales of a Chatty Genie PlayTester newly unleashed upon the world, your devoted author prompted this Aien Djinn to see what it could spit out as a legend of this place. I will recount its own mirages at a suitable empty spot in the crawl, and how these in some small way came to reflect the reality of this place.

Hex Crawl 23 #77: Piezo Phenomena

 Five hexes due south of Alakran.

 

Sand, sand, sand. To alleviate the boredom, we can apply technology to the magic of nature, taking advantage of piezoelectricity -- which is simply the conversion of mechanical energy to electrical energy by applying pressure to a crystal. Fantasy worlds are constituted differently, so that giants can stand and dragons can fly, and in Mittellus the particular confluence of energy and elements deep underneath a sand dune can create a so-called "crackling layer" -- which may have something to do with the strange voices and sounds that sometimes sigh from under the dunes.

Digging into the deep dune sand has a 5% chance of attracting a mild nonlethal shock (d4 shocking damage that cannot reduce hp below 1) for every 5' dug, and the sand lies 1d12' deep below greound level, with typical dunes being 1d12' high. Blue dragons in particular like to burrow in this layer, which adds +2 to recharging their breath weapon and heals them 2d4 hp a turn. Sandwalker druids, too, have a version of the call lightning spell which summons a bolt, not from the blue, but from the crackling layer underfoot.

One Page Dungeon 2021: The Paper Nest of Gabbro Grove

Last week was the OPD deadline again, and Paolo convinced me to do some kind of riff on the "giant beehive" adventure I am currently running my fifth editioneers through. Next door to bees are wasps, so paper nest -> paper treasures -> paper wizard suggested itself, with the giant petrified tree as gratuitous weirdness.

I really do suggest that adventure runners and writers do some research on any real animals, plants, or minerals they are using or adapting via monsters. In the current campaign this has led to such gems as the armadillo-folk being able to swim, but only after spending some time gulping air to increase their buoyancy, creating, um, gassy problems down the road. For this adventure I drew on traits of a number of species for such things as the wasp brewery, fig connection, and help from mites.

Freely licensed fonts used: Wood Stamp (titles), Bahnschrift (main text), Merienda (scroll text).

A Strange Class of People ... The Druids

Thinking it over, there's one more core class I want to add to my system. The Druid. Here's how they fit into the evolving scheme of classes in my game. The bold ones are the core classes, for now, and the others are expansions.

A work in progress...

If I was trying to be super-parsimonious with this scheme, I would put druids as midway between clerics (prophets) and wizards - where witches are. But I see druids as deserving of their own slot. They're alterna-clerics, serving an older religion, more tied to nature. They also use charisma as their prime stat, unlike any other class and further distinguishing them from prophets.

How to make them more than just an outdoorsy Aquaman-type? Give them stuff they can take underground, and things they can do, and hook them up quickly with the primal elements. If they can speak to plants, why not to slime molds?

All right, so here's the basic class with a couple of variants. Basically, they can restore hit points as a cleric does (a kind of morale boost for PCs) but can't use magic to heal actual injuries at 0 hp or less.

And they get nature powers:

 This follows the trend of divine-type powers not being spells, but per-day or at-will in other ways. One principle I maybe need to make more clear is that "speak with plants" is not some all-consuming intelligence spell; although plants have a longer memory than earth, their senses are also restricted to touch. They might tell you someone ate their berries five hours ago or a lot of heavy feet passed by yesterday, but that's about it.

I'm not including these in the 52 Pages of my system just yet (the Basic-level document), but have developed them because one of our elf characters acquired an elf henchman and I was looking for ways to make this wood elf a little different in play. Hence, the powers and the classes.

Next: Two popular class/race-types I didn't put in the diagram and why not.