Inkwell Ideas' Geomorph Contest #3 - Dwarven Shrine

This time around Inkwell Ideas' Geomorph Contest has the theme of "a shrine."

I decided to do a dwarven shrine. I really liked Brutus Motor's geomorph #004, which was supposed to be a large open room with distinctive dwarven style. I also have my dwarves carve their passages and rooms large and and with technologically-advanced architecture -- fan vaults, parabolic arches, and the like -- showing how advanced they are in stonework.

I thought about how to apply this to a dwarven shrine. I also have my dwarves paranoid and suspicious of non-dwarves. As a result, the open part of the shrine just scratches the surface of this area.


I put a raised dais in the shrine proper, with two statues in niches (most likely, a couple of dwarven gods, although this could also be a pair of ancestors.) I put statues in the two corner rooms, which could be animated guardians or decorative flourishes depicting ancient dwarvish history through stonework. I put a lamp in each of the hallway-rooms, and several in the shrine itself; in my games, important dwarvish areas are lit with petroleum, piped in to specialized lamps -- thus they are everburning so long as the bounty of the earth holds out. There is a secret closet in the northwest quadrant (perhaps storage, maybe for guardians), a secret stair in the south west quadrant (my thought was that this leads to a hidden outlet on the surface), and two secret entrances in niches in the shrine proper, which lead to a cave, mine, or other unworked tunnels.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Fantasy Friday: Old School Essentials Advanced Fantasy Races (OSE)

Image
 So, one of the many games I've backed on Kickstarter is Old School Essentials , which is a cleaned-up, streamlined, and corrected version of the B/X version of Basic Dungeons & Dragons (Moldvay/Cook) rules. Gavin Norman (who posts as Necrotic Gnome) does an incredible job editing and collating info into a super-easy-to-read format. One of the modifications to the B/X rules introduced in the OSE Advanced Fantasy book is separating race from class. In original B/X, the races are represented as classes, with the idea that, if you're playing an elf, that should be special enough in-and-of-itself. If you allowed non-human races to take classes, then players will play the non-humans because their innate abilities make them better than equal-leveled human characters. Separating race from class, the default introduced in AD&D, caused huge flamewars and continues to do so today. The Advanced Fantasy book has reasonable versions of the races so that, if it's your preferen...
Read more

Eberron 5E: Race -- Shifter

With shifters, the problem is the new edition's focus on simplicity. Shifting changed your characteristics, and if you wanted your shifting to become really good, you had to take a tree of shifter feats. There were builds focusing entirely on maximizing your shifter advantages. The new edition doesn't really do temporary ability score changes in the same way -- the barbarian's rage, for example, gives a boost to damage and hit points, but doesn't require recalculating your character's abilities. Similarly, the gauntlets of ogre power / amulet of health / headband of intellect change the impacted ability score to a flat 19 -- a +5 bonus that's easy to plug in, and lasts indefinitely as long as you leave the item on. So I decided that 5E shifters should get their +1 stat bump from their trait, and tried to make the traits (which I had to rename "legacies" because "trait" in 5E is a very specific thing) almost as powerful as a feat, ...
Read more

Monstrous Monday: Blink Wooly Mammoth (D&D5E)

Image
Another creature adapted from Dragon issue #156, "Not Necessarily the Monstrous Compendium" -- the feared Blink Wooly Mammoth! It probably would have been even more thematically appropriate to have worked up the werelagomorph (were-hare) but I only thought of that last night. Ancient people, accompanied by the first domesticated dogs, hunted mammoths during the Endless Winter at the beginning of the world. Some mammoths developed a strange magical ability to escape their pursuers – the ability to teleport short distances. While the vast herds of mammoths were eventually greatly reduced through hunting, these blink wooly mammoths proved tricky and many herds survive at the outskirts of civilization, especially in areas that border frozen climates. Some sages believe that some ancient hunters may have bred their dogs in an attempt to create a hunting companion that was a match for these mammoths; these sages believe that this is the origin of the blink dog species. Blink Wooly ...
Read more