Summary: An intro blurb about the setting and the first seven hexes of the challenge, feautiring a look at the mainland and the starting town, as well as a nearby island prison, a lighthouse, and some filler sea hexes.
A little late with this post, since I’ve been sabotaged by a severely delayed flight yesterday which ruined most of my plans, so there’s that. Not the most grandiose of openings!
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| "Snow Storm: Hannibal and his Army Crossing the Alps" by J.M.W. Turner |
They broke the world with their foul magic.
A petty feud between monarchs turned into a crusade, turned into a war, turned into a genocide, turned into an apocalypse…
Great armies marched and clashed, blood and tears drowning the good earth. Magic flared, burning the sky, skin, and bark. Conflicts erupted and died, but nothing was enough to stop the bloodshed permanently and satiate the monarchs.
Simply nothing was enough…
Their ignorance and constant lust for conflict pushed the wielders of magic to madness, bending the world to their will, slowly twisting it, time and space their playthings. Rituals forbidden eons ago were unleashed from dusty tomes and the world was not the same again.
The anathematic magic unleashed chaos. Time fractured, somewhere stopping, elsewhere accelerating the crumbling of empires. Whole regions displaced in time and space, pockets of non-Euclidean geometry staining the landscape. The earth twitched and cracked, a strange mist rising, The Pale Death, devouring men and making them insane, leaving them at the mercy of ancient beings who now freely roam the world.
It would never be enough…
We are some of the survivors, taking sanctuary at the Cape of Last Hope. Yet we cannot stay. While the rest of the mainland behind us lies in ruin, its doom crawls closer with every passing moment, pushing us to find salvation somewhere beyond the waves. Thus we go into the great unknown, puzzled by what lies ahead, hoping that the sea protected itself from the apocalypse.
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What the above failed poetic writing was trying to say was that, essentially, the mainland is pretty fucked. The Pale Death is outside the city gates, brooding and eager to penetrate the protective magic of the walls. Staring at the fog is a literal call of the void, as the mind drifts off wondering what horrors lie within the white misty cloak, a land once beautiful but now mutilated and infested with abominations unnamed, tempting the beholder into its pale embrace. The only hope is to voyage across the seas and pray that there are still some places untouched by the violent magic.
Also, I will call this monstrosity Reefts: the Island Crawl.
(I love shitty pun things sometimes)
Now, onto the hexes.
Hexes
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| "An Avalanche in the Alps" by Philip James De Loutherbourg |
*The Mainland (hex 0101)
The fog is thick, ever turbulent. It ebbs and flows, thrashing left and right, a leviathan hungry for unspoiled flesh of still sane men. A howl, a cry, a scream, a feasting sound… all could be heard at times, coming from within the Pale Death. Bleak shadows of its victims can sometimes be seen dragging themselves blindly through the whiteness. Stare into the void long enough… and you could swear that you heard wailing of a lost loved one somewhere in the distance.
On the horizon strange structures can be seen. A tower with impossible angles… a cathedral where once you prayed, surrounded by floating lumps of earth… a monolith phasing in and out of existence… fractal mountains looming downwards...
There is nothing for you here in this wretched land but madness.
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| For the lack of a proper painting, this one was generated thanks to our AI overlords |
*Cape of Last Hope, “The Cape” (hex 0102)
The port city known as the Cape of Last Hope is the only remaining bastion of sanity and unfractured time, on this side of the continent at least. Located on a peninsula surrounded by the sea on four sides and only a single valley connecting it to the mainland on the north-west, its walls are protected by clerical rituals, the only source of magic allowed within. The holy men have so far managed to stave off the crawl of the Pale Death, as it periodically ebbs and flows unto the walls. Their divine magics are strong, but their bodies grow tired from the efforts… How long will they endure is a question none dare to ask.
The Cape is not, and never was, a grand city. It stayed humble ever since its founding, beginning as a small fishing town, the sea rich with marine life and calm waters just off the coast. What little prominence it did acquire through recent years prior to the war was when one of the region’s noblemen decided to establish an outpost of his trading company in town. Over time the company itself drew in patrons and other clients bent on further exploration of the untamed seas, establishing a separate branch of its operations focused on shipbuilding. As a result, the local population and the town itself grew significantly, but nowhere close to match the numbers of other mainland cities of the continent.
This changed drastically as the war began reaching its apocalyptic proportions. Thousands of displaced people fled the chaos, flooding the city en masse. The city itself was barely able to accommodate such an unexpected influx of bodies which inevitably resulted in poor living conditions. Taking into consideration that the actual physical surface of the city was relatively small, there was no other choice than to expand “upwards”, resulting in slums forming above and below, makeshift living quarters built on houses built on taverns built on warehouses built on more houses, etc.…
In game terms, the city should offer all the things that any other “functional” city would offer, such as merchants, lodging, a temple, etc. Some form of ad hoc ruling body is established, but it is on very thin legs. Naturally, all the chaos and overall hysteria and despair would also result in certain people wanting to profit off of such primordial human emotions, so the presence of gangs and black markets in the slums is more than expected. The shipbuilding business never truly took off, as the shipyard construction was finished only recently. There is only a handful of operational vessels in the port that have completed charters under their belt and current numbers of actual experienced seamen that survived up to this point is disputable.
*Île de Notre-Dame de la Pénitence (hex 0103)
The Isle of Our Lady of Penitence is located some 20 or so miles to the south of The Cape, an island covered almost completely by a prison complex built centuries ago.
Cage Island (Île-Cage), as it is mostly referred to by the mainland folk, is not so easily accessible as one might presume. There is no functional port and its shoreline is surrounded by scattered points of shallow water, making it impossible for larger vessels to approach. Navigation via small rowboat is possible but requires care, as even the waters of the Sérénité in this area can be a bit treacherous.
The prison itself is made of bleached stone and is rather blinding to look at under a fully bright and sunlit day. It is manned by around a hundred or so guards, whose housing is actually the visible, above-ground, part of the complex. Being a prison guard on The Cage is a life long job, as new recruits arrive only if it is absolutely necessary to increase manpower or if a previous guard passed away. Once you set foot on the island you either never return or they return you in a coffin.
The number of inmates, vile captives who performed the most wretched of crimes back on the mainland, is unknown to anyone other than the wardens themselves. Similarly, not a lot is known of their fate, aside of the fact that they are kept in cells underground. Anything else is pure speculation.
Rumor table (or just inspirational bits) for the Isle of Our Lady of Penitence:
- Death row inmates are killed by being cast into a well at the lowest level of the prison
- There are multiple levels of the prison, the lower you go, the more heinous the crime
- Our Lady of Penitence is an actual angelic being dwelling in the complex, trying to make the inmates truly repent for their deeds… those redeemed become the new guards
- All the inmates are just thrown into the maw of a creature known as the Lady of Penitence
- The underground of Cage Island contains a staircase to hell itself
- One of the prisoners is an important POW from the apocalyptic conflict
- There is an entire nightmarish civilization in the prison catacombs, built by centuries of inmates being left to fend for themselves in the underground
- With no light and no food save vermin and human meat, the inmates are all blind, insane, and disfigured
*Serenity Sea (hexes 0201, 0202, 0203)
Sérénité, as the sailors refer to it, is the sea surrounding The Cape and other nearby subcontinental masses of land. The kind and graceful name is well earned, since this region is famous for calm waters and fair winds. This has not changed since the war broke out and chaos seeped into the world, a glimmer of hope that not all things have been corrupted or destroyed by the misuse of magic.
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| "Smeaton's Eddystone Lighthouse" by John Lynn |
*Candle Rock Lighthouse (hex 0303)
The lighthouse pierces the horizon in the distance like a white fang rising from the waters around it. Whoever embarked on a voyage across the Sérénité knows the Candle Rock as a sign of home, its vigilant rays of lumen guiding vessels into safety.
The years of war largely stopped almost all trading and seafaring, so the lighthouse equally stopped seeing use and has lost its significance. The lighthouse itself isn’t operational at the moment, but can be restored with time and resources. If restored and maintained somehow, I’d grant a mechanical boon of some sorts, perhaps the surrounding sea hexes don’t trigger a random encounter roll.
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Final thoughts:
I realize that this might be too much content for a simple hexcrawl, but I just intend to write however much or little I feel like per given week. Doubt anyone but me will ever even use any of this, so I’ll simply do whatever since I kinda like this weekly worldbuilding process. Will probably also revisit and expand some mentioned concepts at a later stage.
I’m also well aware that I am currently missing an actual hexmap. I’ve started drawing one without really caring how it looks, but I’m still not 100% sure how I want to share it in these posts (either drawing or using something like HexKit or maybe something third). Deciding this will probably be on the chopping block for next week.
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