The Black Tower | The Isle of Woe | The Pavilion | Bersak's Pit | Bucard's Wondrous Carpet
Welcome to the Sunday Supplement, Raging Swan Press’s weekly email for GMs. This week, we have one free download, one piece of legendry, one piece of lore and three miscellaneous campaign components for your game.
Should we develop any of these idea further? Comment below.
01: Dungeon Design Tips for Beginners
For any GM (particularly a new one), designing a dungeon is a daunting prospect. Fear not. If you follow the tips below, you’ll be well on the way to designing a fun, engaging dungeon for your friends!
02: the Black Tower
Ashlarian Legendry (Wizard’s Guild)
The Sagacious Masters of the Eldritch Nexus have their seat in the Black Tower—a huge and heavily fortified, vitrified tower-complex to the northeast of the city of Languard. As befits the pre-eminent wizard’s guild extant in Ashlar, the Black Tower is an eldritch and forbidding place. The tower rises high into the sky and is visible for many miles, and yet many superstitious folk refuse even to look in its general direction. Most travellers using the Ridgeway actively avoid the Black Tower; only those who have business with the wizards take the short spur leading to the tower. The Black Tower is not a place to be visited on a whim.
The Black Tower is of vast extent, and it is reputed to be the tallest building in all Ashlar—taller even than the spire of Languard’s Father’s Hall. (Although there is considerable debate and confusion about the Black Tower’s exact height.) In any event, the higher one rises among the Sagacious Masters, the higher one may ascend the tower. Only the most powerful wizards can access the tower’s uppermost levels; therein are held the most potent (and dangerous) objects of power and the like.
The Black Tower holds the greatest library of spellbooks, eldritch lore and the like in all Ashlar—greater even than the store of learning held in Languard’s Dreaming Spires. Thick walls of stone and earth ring the tower, and many chambers are buried deep in these walls; therein dwell the wizards’ many servants, guards and apprentices. Persistent rumours speak of the deep crypts buried beneath the Black Tower and of the innumerable long-dead wizards resting in its benighted hallways. Doubtless, much treasure also lies therein, but surpassingly few thieves are brave enough to dare such a magic-warded place. Even fewer are skilled enough to survive.
03: The Isle of Woe
Ashlarian Lore (Island)
The Isle of Woe is a remnant of a larger island that sank beneath the Bitter Sea’s troubled waves in the distant past. The island is aptly named. Reefs, dangerous shoals and other perils choke the surrounding waters, and the stretch of water between the isle and nearby Barrow Island to the north is surpassingly treacherous.
Of the explorers who have set foot on this rocky isle with the intent of exploring the crumbled, curiously proportioned ruins dotting the place, only a few have lived to tell the tale. Lurid rumours, whispered between mariners deep in their cups, speak of demons and devils dwelling in the ruins, of the gigantic creature of living bone coiled in the gaunt, night-blacked caverns below the ruins and of a curious keening sound that can be heard echoing across the turbulent waters on the darkest nights.
Few guess at the island’s terrible secret and of the almost unimaginable antiquity (and pre-human provenance) of the worn and time-gnawed ruins. Such is the isle’s aspect that most mariners—even including the pirates of the Picaroon Peninsula—give it a wide berth.
04: The Pavilion
Campaign Component (Indoor Market)
Once a pleasure palace built for a dead lord, the Pavilions, with its towering columns, ocean views and ostentatious architecture, is now a vast indoor market. Where once musicians played, concubines flirted, and the lord took his pleasure, now a great unwashed throng of commoners surges through the rough Palace’s many cavernous halls and shaded courtyards in search of their daily needs.
The Pavilion’s main chambers, laden with the faded grandeur of a fallen house, have been divided (and then subdivided) into an innumerable and dizzyingy collection of shops and booths. Here can be had virtually anything, if one has the coin (and the patience to find it).
But there is more to the Palace than meets the eye. A maze of tunnels and chambers—once the haunt of servants and the like—honeycomb the ground below the Pavilion. Here, congregate the city’s beggars and outcasts and, some whisper, the thieves’ guild.
Many among the city’s elite see the Pavilion as an eyesore and publicly agitate to have it torn down or sold to a “suitable party” at a vastly reduced price. Some such folk dream of evicting the stallholders and artisans doing business within and of returning the Pavilion to its rightful condition. Others, more steeped in local lore, greatly desire finding the long-dead lord’s strong vault and its reputed great hoard of wealth, said to be hidden somewhere beneath the main building.
05: Bersak’s Pit
Campaign Component (Diamond Mine)
Bersak’s Pit is a place both of great suffering and danger and a place of great wealth and beauty—Bersak’s Pit is a diamond mine.
Piercing the rugged bedrock of an island set amid the turbulent waters of a storm-wracked bay, Bersak’s Pit is also a prison from which few inmates return. Beyond its formidable natural defences, merciless and brutal half-orc warriors—prized for the ability to see in darkness and the strength of their brutish progenitors—guard the mine.
Just getting to Bersak’s Pit is dangerous. A flotilla of stout ocean-going barges services the mine’s needs, bringing supplies, guards and a steady stream of prisoners. In return, they carry precious, glimmering diamonds back to the mainland.
Most of the diamonds brought forth from the mine are of the standard colourless variety; valuable but unremarkable. Sometimes, though, miners toiling in the dark, cramped conditions of the deeper tunnels come across blue, yellow, pink, and even red diamonds. Persistent rumours also speak of the discovery of incredibly rare black diamonds in certain deep, flood-prone workings.
Escape from Bersak’s Pit is believed all but impossible. Strange things lurk in the unpredictable, stormy waters around the island, and it is generally believed that no prisoner has ever survived an escape attempt; to enter the water is to court death. Still, every now and then, prisoners disappear, and it is generally assumed that such folk—driven to desperation by the terrible conditions—attempt escape. Some veteran miners, though, who will do anything to avoid the pit’s lowest levels, speak of strange sounds, faint lights and monstrous, nefandous odours in the lowest workings. Persistent rumours also tell of a meandering series of flood-prone caverns that run from the mine under the bay to the mainland. Perhaps it is the search for this route that is the cause of so many prisoners’ disappearances…
06: Bucard’s Wondrous Carpet
Campaign Component (Magic Item)
The supple threads and weave of this centuries-old flying carpet are in pristine condition and as bright as the day they were first spun. It is a work of art, and its pattern beautifully depicts a tranquil blue sky studded with wisps of cloud.
This four-foot by six-foot carpet can carry aloft up to 600 lbs. and seat two human-sized individuals. Named for its most famous owner, the dashing bard and holy warrior Bucard, the carpet featured in some of his most memorable adventures.
Additional magics, beyond the ability to fly, have been woven into this carpet. The carpet has several command words: the first command word, *actava*, activates or deactivates the carpet, while the second command word, *destrona*, causes it to either roll or unroll. In its rolled form, the carpet shrinks to the size of a head scarf and can be worn as such. The carpet’s final command word, *tostra*, brings into being a bubble of protective energy akin to that of a *tiny hut*, but one that can only hold two individuals, atop the carpet. This final power can be used only once a week.
Ashlarian (proper noun) of Ashlar; Campaign (noun) a connected series of adventures; Component (noun) a constituent part; Legendry (noun) a collection or body of legends; Lore (noun) knowledge and stories about a subject
Thank you for reading the Sunday Supplement; I hope some of the above material makes it into your game or sparks your creativity.
Remember, Everything is Better with Tentacles!
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