A Few Orphaned Hexes
Hi all. Please enjoy a few hexes from a project I'm putting down for a while. I've put out a ridiculous amount of writing this year (I must be nearing a hundred thousand words) and I think I've burnt out a little bit.
The project is a riff on Time Spiral, which is about the land being torn apart by a temporal crisis. In my version a barony ruled by a council of Magi was getting torn apart by Experimentations Gone Wrong. Most of what I was doing with the hexes at this point was playing around with cute ideas of "wouldn't it be fucked up if this happened" and messing around with chronology etc. Like one of the regions was based around "this place is currently stuck juxtaposed between now and when the terrain was at the bottom of the ocean".
I was also testing out how much I can stick to Idraluna's Three Sentence Hexes as someone who is known for being overly verbose.
Anyway yes enjoy.
yyy-xxx Binturong "Family"
Three grizzled bear-cats lope around, their greying shaggy fur stained with ash. While equally ravenous and mean-looking, they vary in size: one the size of a binturong, one the size of a big sheep, and one the size of a lion. This is a single creature which has unknowingly made a family of itself across its lifespan: any wounds inflicted on the younger versions appear on the older versions too.
(AC 8/7/6; HD 2/4/6; hp 9/18/30; #AT 2; D 1-4/1-6/1-10, ML 10)
yyy-xxx Soapstone Carving Magi
A tusked magi, clad in naught but white rags and an eye-shroud, has picked a divot in a hillside for his anchorage, dusty red stone shaded by rock and an ailing spindle of a tree. From some distance away one can hear the metal tink-tink-tink of his only possession: a little chisel, with which he has crudely hewn thousands of little people that sit with him in haphazard piles. Nameless and aloof, he can be convinced to tell travellers about the Synchronome, the source of the land's plight.
yyy-xxx Hamsa
Collapsed sandstone ruins have been overgrown with kudzu, leaving eerie monoliths of green. This old wayshrine's altar is still consecrated in the name of the Sheltering Saint and is still watched by the Saint's Guardian Hand: a 5' tall terracotta construct that can either crush intruders with its huge clay fingers or blast beams of paralysing blue light from the Watchful Eye embedded within its palm. Incantations performed upon the altar can bless subjects with magical warding, halving the likelihood of being surprised by encounters for d3 weeks.
(AC 5; HD 6; hp 28; #AT 1 (slam/beam alternates each round); D 1-10 + 10' knockback (slam) or save vs paralysis (beam), ML 12)
yyy-xxx The Oldest Fish In the Brook
A relict riverbed, the earth riven with cracks like a dropped dinner-plate. Lying within is an impossibly old and wretched sturgeon, six feet from tip to tail, bone-dry, scales like sun-bleached shingles. It croaks and begs for water. It can talk of the lay of the land in this region.
yyy-xxx Marching Seaflax
Patches of swaying turquoise seagrass (Marching Flax; AAB) sweep through the sandy expanse. They impart a sulphurous haze to the wind. The patches appear to be shifting: on close inspection each thick and juicy blade resembles a tuning fork planted in the ground, legs that the grass can pivot on to locomote. This brimstone-spewing seaflax marches through this and all adjacent hexes, putting unlucky travellers to sleep for d4*4 hours as it attempts to grow over them and drain their delicious nutrients.
yyy-xxx Iceberg Whelk
An iceberg creeps along the seabed. It is 30' tall and drifts that far each day. Strange pale flesh appears to be trapped inside, pulsing. On closer inspection it becomes clear this is a Giant Ice Snail (AAB): those who meddle with it are maimed with frostbitten fingers.
yyy-xxx Echo Conch
The sand here and in all adjacent hexes crunches with beds of fist-sized jet-black mussels. Beware, and walk quietly, for these are Echo Conches (AAB): they magnify loud sounds to ten times their volume, deafening and stunning unlucky travellers. Their shells can be harvested to harness this alchemo-magical effect (though be careful, for each mollusc issues an echoing squeal when pried open).
yyy-xxx Draining Whelk
Hark! Magicians and priests steer clear, for this barren and rocky strand is the hunting ground of the Draining Whelk! A crimson conical shell as big as a pine tree swirls back and forth with the turbulent current. Red-blue tendrils and pulsing eye-bulbs spill from the open mouth of the shell, crackling with lightning.
The Draining Whelk hunts for intelligent prey, wrapping them in its stinging arms and devouring their potential. Woe betide any that cast a spell near it: it sucks up the magic and gains HD equal to the spell's level.
(AC 5; HD 7; hp 30; #AT 2; D 1-4/1-4 & grapple if both hit, draining 1d3 intelligence; ML 10)
yyy-xxx Chronozoa
A sandy basin stretches out, once the site of some ornate edifice but now filled only by rubble. Now the place is home to a blooming colony of huge multi-cellular amoeboid organisms. Each is the size of a dog and resembles a plastic bag covered in swaying tendrils filled with water, in which floats colourful orbs in primary colours. Some (1-in-10) tick like clocks and have visible clock-faces within them. The rest hum ominously like idle cars, or wasp-nests. There are currently d6*d6: at midnight each Chronozoa performs mitosis as the clock-keepers strike twelve. If a Chronozoa is killed with slashing damage it also has a 1-in-2 chance of splitting into two identical copies.
(AC 9, HD 1; hp 1; #AT 1; D 1 (Acid Spurt); ML 12)
The colony will soon smother the world. Only one knows what to do (Hex - Gossamer Phantom). If no one deals with the issue by the time there are a million, an unknown Red Magi sacrifices her soul and body to incinerate the entire colony (and everything within two hexes) in a devastating blast.
yyy-xxx Phantasmal Magi
This poor being was once Fostera, the head-practitioner of a laboratory dedicated to creating artificial life until the Cataclysm. Now, their soul and body obliterated, they float as a humanoid-shaped amoeba, a wrinkled bag of cytoplasm and globules and mitochondria covered in undulating flagella.
They have hidden themselves in a shaded crack in the seabed: their body is so fragile as to be eroded even by perception. Yet, they call out gently, for they need to warn people: the Chronozoa (Hex) are bound to a spiral of endless growth! The only way to neutralise them is to spear the polyergatogynes (the time-keeping specimens) through their nuclei (the yellow orbs) with a sharp implement, so that the rest of the colony knows not when to split.
(AC 10; HD 1; hp 1; AT 0; D 0; ML 5)
The Blue Magi can cast three spells a day. They know Sleep, ESP, Phantasm, and Illusory Terrain.
yyy-xxx Cold Earth
A chill breeze utters from the earth surrounding a grave-marker of slate, bone-cold to the touch. It reads: "THE FORBIDDEN PATH BEGINS WITH ICE MAGIC". Those who supplicate themselves with sacrificial fervour (or better yet, demonstrate potential in such sorcery) are imparted with knowledge by the spectre of the Ice Magi: a pallid visage, all icicles and frostbitten skin, frozen optical-fluid seeping from under an eye shroud, their mouth set like glacial ice in a monstrous smile.
Those marked by the Ice Magi can spend their spell slots to deal X*2d4 cold damage to a target and reducing their speed by X/4 (where X is the slot level). One with this Gift can never again find sympathy for weakness.
yyy-xxx Sun Monster
The sun peeks from behind a rock, hazy and bold. Wait, that's not right. It shouldn't be there. This monster has a spindly humanoid body topped with a flat facsimile of the sun for a head. It maintains cover while you investigate before lunging out and lashing at you with razor-thin fingers. Upon death it vomits buckets of black bile (far more than could be contained within its twig-like torso) which attracts hundreds of flies and rats and vermin.
(AC 7; HD 4; hp 20; #AT 2 (claw); D 1-6; ML 10)
yyy-xxx Meteor Lake
A huge ball of fire hangs 1000' in the air above a 3 mile wide lake (the ball is visible from 6 hexes away and resembles a second sun). This is called Sikitel Lake by hunters and fishers: up above is the meteor and down below is the crater. The meteor drifts back and forth in the sky like a bully's fist: it will take 2d6 weeks to impact, whereupon it will instantly vaporise the pleasant symbiotic colony of parasite-plucking dentist-ibises and giant carp in the lake (as well as everything within two hexes).
yyy-xxx Lost Magi
Blood-eagle streaks of torn red streak follow the stumbling figure of the Red Magi. Her raiments are in tatters, as is her mind. She gazes at you through cracked eyeglasses and mutters nasally: "what is this? the business has been brought to naught... have we considered all angles? we cannot afford to be squeamish...". If intimidated she growls like a dog and blasts lightning bolts from her fingertip at several nearby peaks, exploding them.
(AC 9; HD 5; hp 14; AT 1; D 1-4; ML 7)
The Red Magi can cast three spells a day. She knows Lightning Bolt, Pyrotechnics, Fire Shield, and Move Earth.
yyy-xxx Hunter & Boar
A man kneels below a tree clutching at his chest, his keen face curdled pale in shock. He is still and dead. The corpse is wearing a silk head-sash and a rough hessian shirt, as is typical of hunters, and a shortbow and quiver are slung over its shoulders. An arrowhead protrudes from the man's chest, as if shot from behind
A boar lies before the hunter: the beast's white-dappled coat is pierced with an arrow and stained with blood.
Another boar, live, laps at the pool of blood around the two dead: it is identical to the one dead on the floor.
If the arrow in the boar and the arrow in the hunter are brought together they begin to vibrate like magnets before somehow clipping together into one with a whispered thunderclap (a +3 Arrow).
yyy-xxx Ashcoat Bear
A great old grizzly bear, 10' tall, coat stained and heavy with ash it raises its head towards prey and, eyes full of desperate hunger, slowly but doggedly pursues. The ash flows and pulses in the air as it trudges onwards, continually drawn in and out. Each minute there is a 1-in-6 chance that it shudders back and forth in time, suddenly catching up or falling behind. In combat, this is a 1-in-6 chance each round, with it swiping in double-motion with emaciated claws or un-developing a grievous arrow-wound in its bony ribcage.
(AC 7; HD 6; hp 24; #AT 2 (claw) & 1 (bite); D 1-4/1-8, ML 11)
yyy-xxx Pugilist Ants
Dozens of huge spires of porous pale-peach sandstone rise up amongst the trees. Each is 30-50' high and flared like the bell of a trumpet. Smoke drifts from the peak of each. They teem with tens of thousand of ants the size of one's fist. These spires are hyper-evolved ant-nests: they have developed (written & sign) language, ceramics, rudimentary metal-smithing for tool-heads, and most importantly, martial arts. Those who meddle with the replete workers, bodies swollen with nourishing and valuable nectar (2d6 seen each minute, carrying a pint each; 100gp), are assailed by 3d6 Pugilist Ants (AAB).