The Lonely Island: Map, Key Points, Random Encounters

 

Key Points

Symbol	Name	Description
F1	Farport	A large city of roughly 100,000 humans, founded about 130 years ago. The streets are paved with bricks and stones and the buildings are made out of single, magically produced pieces of wood that can be furnished and decorated as the residents see fit.
E2	Rusted Plains Town	The elf town of the Rusted Plains, the buildings are all constructed inside of artificial hills which are covered in irongrass with patches of bushes hiding the entrances.
E3	Bluesalt Marsh Town	The elf town of Bluesalt Marsh, the buildings are all disguised as thick patches of reeds, shrubs, and trees on drier portions of land surrounded by the moss, mud, and salty crust of the marsh proper.
E4	Crusty Mountains Town	The elf town of the Crusty Mountains, the buildings here are all either disguised as massive pine trees or built into natural caves in the immediate area.
E5	Bronze Woods Town	The elf town of the Bronze Woods, the buildings here are all disguised as massive bronzeleaf trees.
D6	Fleance the Dragon's Lair	A series of carefully excavated and decorated caves inside the peak of the tallest mountain on the Lonely Island, Mt. Fleance. Inside, not only does Fleance the dragon make his home, but he also keeps his massive collection of live medicinal plants and the many medicines he's made from them. Fleance is unwilling to share these wonders with anyone except fellow dragons, however, so anyone who wants some better be good at disguises.
B7	The Shovel Tusker's Meadow	The location where the Shoveltusker goes to sleep every night. The bronzeleaf trees surrounding this meadow are covered in deep gouges from the beast's teeth. These gouges are encrusted with dried bronzeleaf sap, a highly desirable ingredient in perfumes and incenses.
B8	The Terror of Farport's Nest	The nest where the Terror of Farport prefers to sleep. Aside from being well hidden in the reeds, this nest is full of the magical ropes the Terror of Farport makes out of bird feathers.
W9	Walled Garden Facility: Marine Research Station	A place where the mages of the Walled Garden were performing experiments on sea creatures, presumably to aid in an amphibious assault of the First Empire.
W10	Walled Garden Facility: Deadly Disease Nursery	Here, Walled Garden mages were attempting to manufacture contagious diseases with all sorts of terrible effects, all of which would ultimately end in death. Most of the labs and containers are still sealed off, however no one has checked for leaks in centuries.
W11	Walled Garden Facility: South Entrance to the Crusty Tunnel	The southern entrance to a tunnel which goes in a straight line from one side of the Crusty Mountains to the other in order to help the mages of the Walled Garden get around the Lonely Island more easily.
W12	Walled Garden Facility: North Entrance to the Crusty Tunnel	The northern entrance to a tunnel which goes in a straight line from one side of the Crusty Mountains to the other in order to help the mages of the Walled Garden get around the Lonely Island more easily.
W13	Walled Garden Facility: Weather Control Station	A facility at the top of a mountain where Walled Garden mages used the high altitude to aid in experiments with controlling the weather.
W14	Walled Garden Facility: Experimental Artillery Range	Here, mages of the Walled Garden not only fired experimental magic artillery, but built the shells. Today, the range is still a minefield of not only valuable materials but hazardous magical effects.
W15	Walled Garden Facility: Enchanted Sword Factory	The Walled Garden intended to manufacture weapons for their invasions here. While their vision never happened, the factory built a considerable stockpile of enchanted weapons before the elves revolted.
W16	Walled Garden Facility: Undetectable Poisons Lab	A lab where Walled Garden mages worked on poisons and chemical weapons that would be completely undetectable to all but the most sensitive magical tests. There are many valuable artifacts in here, it's just that one never knows when they're about to walk into something lethal.
S17	Magical Scar: Eternal Avalanche	A roiling, boiling mass of snow, ice, rocks, and debris that takes up an entire mountainside. The avalanche that started hundreds of years ago appears to still be moving with all the force of the day it began, yet never seems to move any further downhill. To enter the area is incredibly dangerous as the whirling masses of snow maintain all of their force, instantly pulling in whatever touches it and pummeling it to bits. However, it is said that one can get the occasional glimpse of an old Walled Garden facility in the middle of the avalanche, untouched and probably brimming with magical artifacts.
S18	Magical Scar: Giant Glowing Skeleton	The massive skeleton of what appears to have been a gigantic lizard. The bones glow a haunting green which is visible for miles at night. Getting close to the skeleton, living things begin to get sick, losing their hair and coughing up blood before death takes them. A small group of smaller glowing lizards lives among the bones and attacks anyone who gets too close, adding another reason not to get too close. In the center of the massive ribcage, however, sits a pristine, shining sword that any human could wield with ease.
S19	Magical Scar: Massive Iron Cube	A massive iron cube that takes up a cubic mile of volume. From the outside, the cube seems to be made of solid iron save for a single door in the center of each of the cube's faces. If one is strong enough to open one of these doors, they will discover that the cube is actually hollow and home to a replica of the surrounding environment made of pure iron. Plants and animals inside of the cube are also made of pure iron, however they seem to otherwise act like normal, albeit highly violent, versions of whatever they are shaped as. Floating in the exact center of the cube is a wand which apparently has the ability to produce this effect.
S20	Magical Scar: Lake of Molten Glass	A lake full of red-hot, molten glass in the middle of the plains. The source of the heat that keeps the glass melted is unclear, but there is an island in the middle of the perfectly circular lake with what seems to be a lit bonfire in its center. The bonfire never seems to go out, but no one has ever been able to survive the trip to the center of the lake to figure out what is going on.
S21	Magical Scar: Invisible Cloud of Poison Gas	A large area near the Undetectable Poisons Lab which contains an unmoving cloud of invisible, unscented, and flavorless gas which is instantly lethal to anything that breathes in the cloud. No matter how windy it is, the cloud stays put, however this does not prevent unwitting animals from walking into the cloud every day. Their bodies mark the edges of the cloud. As far as anyone is able to tell, the gas is being contained by some magical device inside the cloud, however no one is able to get far enough into the cloud to verify this.
S22	Magical Scar: Paused Explosion	A gigantic ball of purple energy that appears to be lodged in the side of a mountain. The energy ball does not move, change shape, or fluctuate in any way, however anything that touches it is vaporized on contact. This is the explosion which destroyed the Walled Garden facility that used to be in its center, however some magical effect seems to have stopped it before it could destroy much of the Lonely Island. No one knows how big the explosion would get before it ended if the magic pausing it were to be removed, so no one is too interested in messing with it.
S23	Magical Scar: Bottomless Pit	A pit in the ground which seems to go on forever, despite the fact that the planet Tero is roughly spherical and any such hole would logically punch through the other side after a certain point. This has not happened, for some reason, and nothing that has ever been sent into the pit has ever returned. According to elvish history, many highly valuable items and magical weapons ended up in here during their revolt, so anyone who figures out how to get those items back out would instantly become wealthy and powerful.
S24	Magical Scar: Place Where People Can Only Feel Fear	A region where the only emotion anyone is able to feel is fear. People tend to avoid this area as much as possible, but there are some who seem to think that is emotional field is hiding something.
S25	Magical Scar: Animate Tree That Attacks Everything	A large bronzeleaf tree which is able to whip its limbs around and attack any living thing that gets within range. It is said that the cause of this state is buried underneath the tree itself, and anyone who can obtain that item will not only be protected from the tree, but be able to make other trees like it.
L26	Ancient Lizard Folk Ruins: Statue of Lizardry	A massive bronze statue of a lizard person which is 200 feet tall and overlooks the ocean in the direction of the nearest land. The statue is clothed in a robe and seems to be holding a book in one arm and holding up a torch with the other. Within the hollow statue is a complex network of rooms, passages, stairs, and ladders which a band of pirates has taken up residence in. These pirates hide their boats on the shore nearby and opportunistically target lone merchant ships around the Lonely Island.
L27	Ancient Lizard Folk Ruins: Fish Market	An old fish market that the ancient lizard folk used to use. Some of the stalls even still have the remains of fish and butchering tools. Although the fish remains may not be very appealing, ancient lizard folk butchering tools can still be functional and highly valuable.
L28	Ancient Lizard Folk Ruins: Rusted City	The remains of an ancient lizardfolk city that was built entirely out of iron, and which is now mostly rust. Despite this, there are still many valuable items to be found in the ruins, although exploring the rusty, decaying ruins can be incredibly dangerous thanks to the corroded metal structures.
L29	Ancient Lizard Folk Ruins: Shrine to Fleance	An old shrine surrounded by a small temple where ancient lizard folk would leave offerings to Fleance the dragon. This shrine has not been maintained for a very long time, however, and only Fleance himself seems to visit it with any regularity. Fleance mostly just tidies up, but it seems like he has left many of the old offerings untouched. Although these have sentimental value to Fleance, explorers might be tempted by the wide array of valuables and enchanted items that were gifted to the dragon of the Lonely Island thousands of years ago.
L30	Ancient Lizard Folk Ruins: Last Holdout Village	The ruins of the last village of free lizard folk to hold out against the Arcane Order of the Walled Garden and their heinous experiments on the lizard folk of the Lonely Island. Within these old stone buildings, one can find a complete history of the Lonely Island lizard folk, written in ancient lizardfolk script and language, as well as several ancient lizard folk artifacts that had been hidden here under the assumption that the holdout lizardfolk would be able to escape the Walled Garden and reclaim their heirlooms.

Random Encounter Tables

roll 2d6	Farport	The Rusted Plains	Bluesalt Marsh	Crusty Mountains	Bronze Woods	Big Bay
2	An angry mob has an alleged snake person and are performing "tests" to see if the person is actually a reptilian shape shifter, most of which involve causing harm to their victim to force them to shift to their natural form, assuming they actually are a snake person (50/50 chance)	The Armored Behemoth, grazing and ignoring everything around it	The Terror of Farport, chasing down a bird so it can pluck it and make rope from its feathers	The Elephant Bird, inhaling all vegetation in sight and plucking trees clean with its trunk	The Shovel Tusker, using its tusks to dig up bronzeleaf roots and eat them	Shepherd Jim, tending his herd of cold water manatees
3	One of the 5 priestly orders of the Church of the Island is holding a festival which completely blocks off the main roads in the city, people must use side streets to get around	A fresh trail of short-cropped irongrass which was left by the Armored Behemoth in the last day	A recently plucked bird shivering in the open marsh with tracks from the Terror leading back to its nest	A trail of bare trees left by the Elephant Bird within the last day	A trench dug by the Shovel Tusker within the last day	A recently killed and partially butchered cold water manatee from Shepherd Jim's flock on the nearest bit of shoreline
4	Someone in the party overhears someone talking about the most recent news of pirates on the west coast of the island	A giant plains chameleon tries to nab a random member of the party with its tongue	A large nesting ground which will take some time to walk around, but walking through risks angering the thousands of birds with eggs and chicks in the area	A resin possum chatters at the party and will fire resin bullets from its tube-like snout if anyone gets too close to its tree	A battery of artillery possums is bombarding a large hollow bronzeleaf tree where a pack of sabertooth ferrets is hiding after a failed hunt against the possums	The floating corpse of a shark bearing the signs of attack by Shepherd Jim, probably in response to the shark going after a manatee
5	A rat scurries into an alley	A stilted rat runs into a nearby thicket of bushes	A large stork gets spooked and flies away	A mountain rat runs and hides in a nearby bush	A pistol possum runs up a tree trunk and hides in the branches	A lone cold water manatee swims back to it's herd as fast as it can
6	A construction project blocks a single key instersection	A patch of wild rustroot, about 1/4 are ready to be harvested	A huge flock of birds flies overhead and briefly blocks out the sun	Some songbirds fly through the trees and chirp at the party	A bronze-billed woodpecker starts pecking at a tree, making a sustained metallic clanging noise	Seagulls fly overhead
7	nothing	nothing	nothing	nothing	nothing	nothing
8	Someone finds a gold coin on the ground	A pack of sabertooth ferrets about 100 feet away, they will attack the party if they get too close	A solitary sabertooth ferret about 100 feet away, it will run away if it spots anyone else	A pack of sabertooth ferrets about 100 feet away, they will attack the party if they get too close	A pack of sabertooth ferrets about 100 feet away, they will attack the party if they get too close	A pack of sabertooth ferrets can be seen on shore, watching the party
9	A recruiter for the Academy of Arcane Casting is shouting about the school from a soapbox on a street corner	A herd of metallic kangaroos hops past at maximum speed	A solitary sabertooth ferret about to raid a bird nest on the ground about 50 feet away	A pack of sabertooth ferrets chases a small group of mountain rats through the woods	A family of pistol possums is firing at a pack of sabertooth ferrets from the branches of a bronzeleaf tree to try to make the larger predators go away	A stilted rat swimming in the water
10	Fleance the dragon can be seen flying in the distance	Fleance the dragon can be seen flying in the distance	Fleance the dragon can be seen flying in the distance	Fleance the dragon can be seen flying in the distance	Fleance the dragon can be seen flying in the distance	Fleance the dragon can be seen flying in the distance
11	A pushy merchant, Janet of Many Blades, decides to follow the party and convince them to come visit her shop, she will go away if the party is firm with her, but if they follow, she will take them to a shop with every weapon anyone has ever heard of and lots of high quality armor	A group of farporters on expedition to gain a greater understanding of the Lonely Island and what it has to offer (1/10 chance of being members of the Thieves in the Garden, 1/100 chance of having recently encountered one of the unique creatures, an elf, or one of the magical scars)	A group of farporters on expedition to gain a greater understanding of the Lonely Island and what it has to offer (1/10 chance of being members of the Thieves in the Garden, 1/100 chance of having recently encountered one of the unique creatures, an elf, or one of the magical scars)	A group of farporters on expedition to gain a greater understanding of the Lonely Island and what it has to offer (1/10 chance of being members of the Thieves in the Garden, 1/100 chance of having recently encountered one of the unique creatures, an elf, or one of the magical scars)	A group of farporters on expedition to gain a greater understanding of the Lonely Island and what it has to offer (1/10 chance of being members of the Thieves in the Garden, 1/100 chance of having recently encountered one of the unique creatures, an elf, or one of the magical scars)	A group of farporters on expedition to gain a greater understanding of the Lonely Island and what it has to offer (1/10 chance of being members of the Thieves in the Garden, 1/100 chance of having recently encountered one of the unique creatures, an elf, or one of the magical scars)
12	The Duck Man, sitting at a market stall in a random alley somewhere with Mary Lou and his magic wagon directly behind him	An elf who runs away as soon as they notice the party	An elf who runs away as soon as they notice the party	An elf who runs away as soon as they notice the party	An elf who runs away as soon as they notice the party	The Duck Man riding on the driver's seat of his wagon as it floats on the water and is pulled along by Mary Lou, who is swimming

Cursed Fantasy RPG

 Hello, over the past few weeks, I have written and edited my own TTRPG system. Basically, the goal was to make my ideal system, taking into account all of the weird preferences and tastes that I have. It is called Cursed Fantasy RPG and it can be bought at any price (including free) at this website: https://cursed-gm.itch.io/cursed-fantasy-rpg

To go along with this, I have also compiled the Immortal Naturalist's Guide series of posts into a single document. Most of the entries have been revised and edited to justify putting them up for sale, and all of the art that was posted along with the series is included in the document. Pick it up for any price you want here: https://cursed-gm.itch.io/the-immortal-naturalists-guide-to-cryptic-creatures

For the rest of the year, I hope to focus on getting caught up on the Old Gritville Mine, both in making more rooms and posting more completed levels here, so be on the lookout for that.

FOR THE LOVE OF ALL THAT IS GOOD, DO NOT PUNISH YOUR PLAYERS!

     First, in case anyone happens to follow this blog and was worried about the long time since the last post, I am okay. I moved, changed jobs, got started on new health insurance, made appointments with new doctors who take that insurance, and I started selling art at local pop-up markets. Things have been busy on my end.

    Second, this post is a radical departure from what I have posted up until now. While it does not constitute a permanent change in the types of posts I will be making from now on, I might make more in the future as various things bother me. So without further ado, I'll get to the main topic at hand.

    Something I have noticed on TTRPG advice forums is that there are way more people than I am comfortable with who believe that the correct way to address poor player behavior with in-game punishments. To clarify, I mean when a GM or player makes a post complaining about another player in their group using their character to sabotage the party, harm other player characters, or otherwise work against the goals of the group, I will inevitably see more than one response suggesting that the GM respond to this behavior by harming the offending player's character or even having that character removed from the story somehow. While this kind of advice is rarely the most popular response, I also do not tend to see much opposition to it . I believe this shows that the idea of punishing players with in-game consequences is considered broadly acceptable, and I have to say that I think it is bad advice. My stance is that any issues that the GM or other players have with one player ought to be dealt with outside of the game, in the form of a respectful discussion between friends and equals.

    Now this is not to say that player characters should never suffer negative consequences for their actions in the game, that would make for pretty boring games. If a character's actions are not bothering the other players at the table, GM included, and they have natural negative consequences, then play ought to proceed like normal. The whole point of this hobby is to have fun, and I am by no means saying that a fun time should be stopped just because it could be seen as a punishment. What I am talking about is when a player is playing their character in a way that is making it harder for other players to have a good time. A person's right to do whatever they want and have fun with the game ends the moment they impact someone else's ability to have a good time, and as GM there are many ways to help make sure no player takes away from another player's good time. In-game consequences for the player's character are not one of these tools. I have seen several people seriously suggest the best way to deal with problematic player behavior is to have their character removed from the narrative and then either force the player to make a new character, or hand them a premade character. I think this kind of response is ultimately going to do more to harm the game than help it, and I have a few reasons why I think that.

    One reason, and I think this one is the most obvious, is that removing a player's character from the game and forcing the player to use a new character is a fairly extreme punishment that is more likely to kill that player's investment in the game than correct their behavior. While they may have been using that character to bother and frustrate other people, that is also the character that player brought to the table and wanted to play. Respectfully talking to the player out of game and asking them to change the way they play their character avoids this issue entirely since the player inherently gets to keep using whatever cool character they came up with. This ties into the more important reason not to take a player's character away from them, which is that removing their character and forcing them to play a new one is disrespectful to that player as a person. When you take their character away, you are robbing them of their agency as a real person to take constructive criticism and change their behavior. Using the GM's power over the game world in such a way is vindictive, and doesn't address the human being behind the character in any meaningful way. By talking to the real person sitting at the table with you about how their behavior, even if it is through a game character, is harming the other people at the table, you give them the chance to change. Odds are also pretty good that the player in question was unaware of the way they were making other people feel, and once they are told, will want to change for the sake of not wanting to upset the people they are playing the game with. Of course, some people may choose to continue their harmful behavior. Those people ought to be kicked from the group once it becomes clear that they are unwilling or unable to change. While this can be difficult, it is often for the best.

    Now, with all of that out of that way, I would like to go over some strategies that I have successfully used in the past to prevent real-world issues from arising from game-world actions. The most important strategy I have to do this is to always set certain expectations about how people treat each other at the game table and what things are off limits for player characters to do to each other. I always make sure to use part of session zero to explain that I expect the players to control their characters in a way that is generally helpful to the overall group goals and not obstructive to any other player's individual goals. Furthermore, at my tables, I do not generally allow players to roll against other players. There are, of course, exceptions for situations involving mutual consent and non-harmful competitions between player characters, but usually such situations can be handled through roleplaying and the dice don't need to come out. This basically results in a game where the player characters only ever interact with each other in ways that all players involved agree to, and supports the generally cooperative style of play I like to cultivate.

     Another important strategy I have for maintaining healthy player interactions is that I, as GM, reserve the right to hold or even veto any given player action. This power is inherent to being the GM and running the setting, really, but I think it helps to explain to the players in session zero that I do, in fact, have that power and that I will, in fact, use it to protect the good times and the feelings of any player at the table. Holds on player actions are primarily used to explain something their character would know that they don't which might change the action they want to make. Usually this is just because someone declared an action before I was done describing a room, but occasionally I use it to explain that what that player wants to do will have an impact on the other players as well. Vetoes usually come in the form of a reminder about the house rule against player vs player dice rolls, since that's the main type of action that I would want to veto, but it also tends to come up for blatantly suicidal or antisocial actions. Luckily, by setting expectations early on, these types of situations don't come up very often and are rarely much of a disturbance when they do. I find that the people I play with are understanding, and no one I have ever played with has ever felt so entitled to ruining other people's fun that I have had to kick them from the group. Perhaps I'm lucky in that regard, but I like to think that if I ever did encounter such a problematic player, I would be able to handle them.

    So to sum all of this up, I think that the proper response to a player who uses their character to negatively impact the experiences of the other players at the table is to nip the problem in the bud by setting firm expectations of how players will act towards each other before the game even starts, these expectations backed up by rules that everyone agrees to follow. Failing that, the best response is to talk to the player causing the issue outside of the game, explain what it is that they are doing, that it is making it harder for others to enjoy the game, and that they need to stop or risk not being asked to return to the group. While I don't think anyone trying to solve a player's behavior with in-game punishments is a bad person, or bad at TTRPGs, or anything like that, I do think they need to take a step back and think about their reasons for using an in-game punishment over an out-of-game conversation. In many cases, the people giving such punishment-oriented advice give it casually and act as if such a punishment is used without much thought or warning in their games. I think this is sad, and I would ask these people to put a bit more thought into their actions and how they might be making other people feel.

    So yeah, those are my thoughts on using in-game punishments, the role of the GM in maintaining the group's fun, and how such problems can be avoided in the first place through solid rules and expectations. I hope anyone who reads this finds it useful, or at the very least considers it sound advice. I use these strategies at my table and everyone tends to have a good time, so I figure I'm doing something right.

Slime City

After the events of the campaign that I made this post about, I introduced a new antagonist in the form of the Lady of Slime City and the agents of her authoritarian government which was expanding its influence to other settlements in the area. Much of the sessions that followed involved going to places and talking to people inside the city, and while I will post the maps and stuff from the adventures outside of the city, I am presenting pretty much everything I have made to detail Slime City here. I took a long time to post all of this stuff partially because I was working on other things but also because I couldn't really figure out a good way to present all of this without rewriting everything into a spreadsheet, which I don't feel like doing at this time.

This is the Banner of Slime City, a golden snail on a field of purple. Allied towns are expected to fly this banner and pay a 50% tax on all exports to the Lady of Slime City in exchange for protection from her army.

This is the version of the map I made to hand out to players. Slime City and Slimeburg used to be smaller, but they both grew into each other over time.

This is the GM version of the map I originally made with less of an eye appearance.

Some more detail on the various neighborhoods of the city, to give them flavor.

Two pages describing all of the important buildings and landmarks. This would've been a spreadsheet for sure if I wasn't running this location in a place with limited wi-fi.

I also made a series of charts showing who is in charge of each major faction in the city and who is loyal to them. These turned out kind of hard to read but I managed to run the game with them just fine.

I made a quick chart to come up with quests for the various people on the org charts to give out. I didn't end up using this because the group managed to come to people with goals and quests already in mind, but I had this ready in case they ever walked up to someone without doing any preparation and wanted to know how to get on their good side.

This is a random encounter table I came up with for when the group traveled between neighborhoods. It honestly created some pretty fun scenes, but that might just be a result of my group being a bunch of solid role-players.

Ultimately, the party wanted to overthrow the government and liberate the people under Slime City's control, so I made a list of things they can do to make that happen. They ended up doing a few things that weren't on the list, but those were events that got a lot of public attention and made the government look bad.

I only ever needed to develop the Lady of Slime City's Court and the training grounds for her army as individual maps for combat and exploration, as far as locations in the city go. The court is where the Lady Herself hears petitions from her citizens and has a lot of information the party might want while also being where criminals are held before their sentencing. The training grounds commander tries to keep everything going on inside a secret, so getting in and causing some chaos is a great way to bother the government of Slime City.

The group I ran this for had never tried a city-based adventure before and wasn't super used to having such a large sandbox to play in, but they managed to figure it out in time. Their adventure here ended with the entire city getting destroyed by one of the player characters, setting that character up as the next villain, but I wouldn't mind running this setting as a starting place for a group of characters, even. Maybe all of this stuff will only make sense to me since I made it in the first place, but I think it's a solid take on a fantasy city.

The Old Gritville Mine: Noxious Cemetery

This post is part of my take on the dungeon 23 challenge, the Old Gritville Mine. The premise and explanation for everything can be found in this post and this post, but those should be the only required reading to figure out what's going on here.

Introduction: This week's section turned out to also be undead-themed, but in a much more conventional way. The hardest part about the concept of a noxious cemetery was coming up with which of the many sources of bad smells in a cemetery to focus on. Overall I am enjoying this room-a-day thing so far, especially if the random word generators continue to give me solid concepts like this.

Room Descriptions

• 1/9- Stinking burial Ground
• Smells of sulfur coming from the Volcanic Crematorium
• Smells of rotting flesh from the Cursed Charnel House
• The writing on the headstones is too faded to read
• Next to the Volcanic Crematorium is a stone statue of a dancing skeleton
• Door to Undertaker's Shack is made of wood and locked
• 1/10- Volcanic Crematorium
• Smells strongly of sulfur, is very warm, and the back wall glows red with heat, far too hot to touch
• One of the cremation chambers is actually a secret tunnel to the Gilded Graveyard
• A lever disguised as the mechanism to turn on the cremation chambers will actually lower the red-hot wall, releasing a wave of lava
• 1/11- Undertaker's Shack
• Smells like rotting food
• Underneath the rotting corpse of the undertaker is the Undertaker's Shovel, a worn shovel with magic runes on the handle
• The pantry is full of rotten food and a flesh-eating slime, which jumps out at whoever opens up the pantry
• The wooden doors to the shack are both locked
• 1/12- Cursed Charnel House
• The key to the Undertaker's Shack is hidden under the bone pile
• Smells of rotting flesh even though there is none present
• The bones fly around the room if anyone disturbs the bone pile, battering anyone inside
• 1/13- Undertaker's Equipment Shed
• A bunch of shovels sitting on a wooden rack
• A wooden wheelbarrow
• 1/14- Gilded Graveyard
• Tombstones here are gold-plated
• Guarded by 12 golden skeletons which attack anyone who enters the area but will not follow outside of the Gilded Graveyard, each skeleton is made of pure gold and is worth quite a bit after being dispatched
• 1/15- Overgrown Graves
• A large orange tree has grown out of one of the graves, its shallow roots covering up all of the other graves and tombstones in the area, the oranges from the tree are edible and just as nutritious as regular oranges, they just reek of rotting flesh once they have been peeled

Magic Items

• The Undertaker's Shovel
• Digs a 3ftx6ft hole that is 6 feet deep with perfect edges with a single scoop in the ground and almost no effort from the digger
• Looks like a worn shovel with a steel blade, wooden handle, and magic runes carved into the handle

The Old Gritville Mine: Broken Cafeteria

This post is part of my take on the dungeon 23 challenge, the Old Gritville Mine. The premise and explanation for everything can be found in this post and this post, but those should be the only required reading to figure out what's going on here.

Introduction: So this was the first reality bubble for this project, and the random generator ended up giving me Broken Cafeteria, which I took in the direction of undead. The idea is that because the people are dead and don't need food, the endless cycle of mimicking lunch time comes off as broken to me. I don't know, maybe it's a reach. Whatever.

Room Descriptions

• 1/2- Skeletal Cafeteria Hall
• Several long folding tables with benches attached to the sides
• 10 human skeletons that continuously get in line for food, get served nothing, sit down, pretend to eat for a bit, and then return their dishes to do it all over again
• Door to the Garbage Pit is solid steel and locked
• 1/3- Haunted Kitchen
• Pots, pans, knives, plates, and silverware moving around as if being used, they will attack anyone who interferes or gets in the way of them pretending to cook and clean
• The freezer door is frozen over with a foot of ice
• Door to the Garbage Pit is solid steel and locked
• Door to Secret Cleaning Supply Closet hidden behind shelves of clean dishes
• 50 steel lunch trays
• 1/4- Way Too Cold Walk-in Fridge
• Everything is frozen over, making the floor slippery and difficult to traverse
• The freezer door is frozen over with a foot of ice
• 1/5- Empty Pantry
• Many empty shelves
• One skeleton with particularly thick bones and twice the toughness of a regular skeleton that attacks as soon as it sees anyone, trying to bite them
• 1/6- Necromantic Garbage Pit
• Used magic circle with a single massive skeleton in the middle, touching it causes the skeletons in the cafeteria to become violent and attack everything
• There is a hole blown in the wall that acts as an exit to the reality bubble
• The Ring of Rending Flesh is on the giant skeleton's finger
• Door to the Garbage Pit is solid steel and locked
• 1/7- Deadly Walk-in Freezer
• The Garbage Pit key on a string around the neck of a single skeleton in the middle of the room which attacks when touched, all of its attacks deal extra damage from the skeleton being so cold
• Both doors are frozen over with a foot of ice
• It is so cold inside the freezer that it hurts to spend more than a minute inside of it
• 1/8- Secret Cleaning Supply Closet
• Door is hidden behind the clean dishes shelf in the Haunted Kitchen
• Contains all sorts of cleaning supplies
• The Sinister Arm sits on a shelf for anyone to grab

Magic Items

• The Ring of Rending Flesh
• Instantly removes all flesh from a skeleton
• Can be used as often as the wearer wants
• Cannot be used on living things
• A golden band with a small ruby carved into a skull on it
• The Sinister Arm
• Anyone can replace their own left arm with this item in order to gain the power to permanently animate one skeleton under their control per day, as well as cause living things to flee by magically inducing a sense of terror at any moment they please
• The articulated bones from an adult human left arm, blackened by fire and covered in glowing cracks