The Cannibal Coast: Part 1
The first set of hexes for a new Antarctica Adventure Jam region. The keys are labelled "yyy-xxx" because I haven't decided on specific locations yet. You should do your own! The discord is here and there's a post by Idra talking about it here. Do it!
yyy-xxx Hurr Jackals
This stretch of tundra is scattered with thickets of spiny leafless shrubs and dusty animal burrows (to an expert, the dwellings of various lagomorphs). Shy exclamations ring out: yelps and cackles uttered by one who sounds embarrassed. These are the Hurr Jackals: ruddy-hided skinny things, more fox than dog. Their pelts bear strange circle-and-star geometric patterns and are worth a fair whack (50GP each).
(AC 8, HD 1, hp 2, #AT 1, D 1-4, ML 6, #Enc. 1-12)
yyy-xxx Sun Spire
The air is stifling. The ground is baked to sand, and nothing grows. One's view is hazy with heat. In the distance, the Sun Spire rises: an 800' tall pillar of soot-blackened marble in the Doric style. It is as wide as a grand redwood, and slightly leans to the east at it's tip. Atop, a ball of eye-watering flame that leaves spots on your eyes. At the fire's core, a thumbnail-sized fragment of the Sun.
No rest is possible within two hexes of the Sun Spire. Within one hex, unprotected skin is burnt. In the same hex, you begin to melt.
yyy-xxx Cuombajj Witches
A dome of red rock large enough to fit five elephants. It is surrounded by smaller boulders, each eroded into egg-like shapes. Nestled between two of these nubs, a ramshackle wooden door painted over with clay.
The Rock of Coumbajj was hollowed out by a pair of witches. Within, they lair in a maze of fine rugs and silk curtains and incense-smoke and random pieces of fine wood-and-brass furniture. Kaja the Frightful has ebony hair and alabaster skin. Foglia the Strange has porcelain hair and pitch-black skin. The former is 200, the latter 400, yet they are both beautiful in the manner of classical statuary. They are lesbians, and while they love each other very much, they often wile away the long hours with sarcasm and bickering. Thus, they love visitors they can meddle with.
Kaja has a blood-based skincare routine. She lasciviously beckons visitors with promise of teaching them the Evil Eye in exchange for filling a six-litre clay pot with blood. She prefers a mix of blood from 'donors' far and wide. A Bearer of the Evil Eye can inflict any curse on a target that has wronged them, though the victim must be verbally informed by the Bearer of their infraction and the punishment deemed. Further yet, as long as the Curse holds, it is inflicted also on the Bearer (who can choose to release the bane). The Eye can be used twice a week.
Foglia is simply a freak who likes freaking people out. She looms over visitors with wide, wild eyes, bargaining with them for the power of flight. She enjoys playing groups against each other by stating that she will only bestow The Gift upon one of them, attempting to drum up an auction. She is happy to go as low as "a embarrassing dance", but often silly adventurers work themselves up to a quite dear cost. The lucky recipient is bound with an invisible air-spirit that can yank them around as if they were caught with a lasso for up to an hour a day. It looks quite strange and painful, but is harmless to the one carried.
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yyy-xxx Limpet-Tortured Man
A sharp brackish smell on the air: that classic tide-pool smell, half salt and half slimy decay. Also on the air? Continuous desperate horrific screaming: the sounds you would make if a vice was being tightened on your fingers, forever, and somehow always getting worse.
Meet Lubb, a sun-tanned man who is covered from head to toe in limpets. He is tall, and starved, with a wiry black beard pushing from underneath the stuck-fast shells. He has been shackled to a rock with a green-rusted chain. During the day, the sun burns him. During the nights, he is drowned. And all the time, the barnacles bore into his flesh.
He was a horse-thief two hundred years ago. One fateful night, he stole from and killed a mother who was riding from Dar-ixkal's Landing to Xoth'umbra in order to seek medicine for a sick child. The woman's family sought him out and cursed him. The woman was called Jaliya. The child was called Dhana.
yyy-xxx Giant Pigs' Meadow
A herd of 17 giant pigs graze in a wild-flower meadow, snuffling around betwixt baby-blue hooded flowers and bright tulips, turning the soil with their snouts. They're three times the size of a normal swine and a bit hairy, with undulating curly mops of fur down their backs. They have no tusks. That's because they aren't boars, or hogs, but pigs: a clever sort might observe that these look like domesticated pigs that have turned wild again.
yyy-xxx The Homunculus Potter
A plume of coloured smoke rises high and dust stains the grass. Pastel tones: green, yellow, red, blue. This is the demesne of Old Lady Rhumini, the Homunculus Potter. She operates a workshop out of a ruined bathhouse. Canvas tarp-roofs sag down, strung loosely between the once-load-bearing pillars which still stand. Bits of unused clay have been swept into every corner, along with the white plaster which continually flakes from the crumbling walls. One of the smaller public-baths has been converted into a blackened pit-kiln.
Rhumini ties her long and greying hair back, revealing her dark eyes and sharp features. Her hands are spattered with dried clay up to the elbows. She absent-mindedly fiddles with a sculpting knife while lecturing her apprentice in a rather bookish, know-it-all way. Lewin is in her mid-twenties and has worked with her mistress for a few years now. She's rather butch, yet wears thin gloves to keep her hands soft. While she acts hard to most, she has softened into a pleasant romance with Rhumini.
These two create Homunculi on commission. These beings are sculpted in loose human forms, each from a single shade of coloured clay. Some are squat with spherical heads, some are bulky with unusual thick snouts, and so on. Each shape and colour informs the purpose and temperament of the life produced: red produces enthused and social sorts, yellow choleric and ambitious, green caring and kind, and blue introspective and creative. They can be made as either a 2HD Fighter or a 3HD Thief (+1 HD if paid double).
Orders can be placed for 500 to 1000G. The pair's creations are brought to life on the altar at Mount Berens under a full moon. The closer orders are placed to moon 'deadline', the more stressed the pair are. And plus, it's quite a trek: they have to use an ox-cart most of the time. But hey! What can you do? The Barbel-Beast moved into the old spot Rhumini used to use. They're currently behind on a specially-designed bodyguard for a merchant prince from The Tetrapolis: it's a big red top-heavy bloke with arms that reach down to its feet.
yyy-xxx Crescent Canyon, Lair of the Barbel-Beast
A slim and cruel gash curls across the tundra, three miles long, gently curving from south to north to north east. The crevasse slopes down from either end, reaching a hundred feet into the earth towards the middle: sunlight penetrates here only on the summer solstice, and moonlight on the converse.
This is the Crescent Canyon, a locus of solar and lunar magics. At the very heart of this place, a simple marble dais sits, signalling the spot where such rituals should be conducted.
This is also the lair of the Barbel-Beast. Mournful cries of "Hoooom... Hoooom..." echo from the darkness. Within the depths themselves, furtive sniffing and grunting reverberates sharply. The Beast is a pale hairless ape that walks on hands-and-knees. A pair of twitching catfish-whiskers droop from the corners of its lips. It is covered in old burns, opened and healed by the sun and moon. It is ten-feet-tall when stooped. It is also deaf-blind.
(AC 7, HD 6, hp 35, #AT 1, D 2-12, ML 10; disadvantage on attacks if sense of smell is confused)
yyy-xxx Cyclops Shepherds
Two heavily tanned Cyclopses, twenty-feet tall, sit amongst a herd of 79 pleasantly curly-haired Angora Goats. The giants are bare-chested, dressed only with woollen kilts (big enough to serve as tents for normal folk). They are evidently female. The younger, shaved bald, is braiding the elder's straw-like black hair into a ponytail. Each bears signs of a long life of outdoors labour.
Both women are cautious but friendly if trust can be established, primarily through a lack of shiftiness, subterfuge, and openly-carried weapons. The pair met ten years ago, and are both descended from the folk of Kalabot. Almyra, the elder, fled the Cyclops-City as a young woman shortly before it fell to plague 300 years ago. She has lived as a solitary pastoralist since then, occasionally plying her wards to villages up and down the continent. She speaks in received-pronounciation and often mutters poetry to herself: she privileges her heritage, and wishes to remain sharp. Kunyganda, the younger, is but 60 years old, and was born into slavery to captured parents. She worked as a quarry-porter for the first four decades of her life before she broke her chains and began wandering as an itinerant raider. Eventually, she met her soul-mate. She expresses her feeling poorly, and often falls silent for long periods, instead expressing herself through items braided from the tall-grass with her thick fingers: huge baskets and kites and decorative fetishes.
Almyra appreciates the company. Kunyganda does too, though she's always worried that she might one day face reprisal from one folk or another that she wronged when she was young. She is plagued by nightmares of being taken back into slavery, along with her partner.
yyy-xxx Crawling Clams
Every inch of this rocky coast is encrusted with clams. Some as small as a coin, some as big as a dining table. The largest carry hundreds of their smaller cousins upon their shells.
Be careful as you tread, for the Crawling Clams lurk here. Any specimen larger than a dinner plate may in fact be a mobile sort of mollusc, possessing three spindly legs that it prances around on while nipping at you (or taking off limbs, if a larger specimen). Each hour, there's a 1-in-3 chance of an ambush by a pack of 1d6 small ones, 1d3 medium ones, and - 50% of the time - a large one.
(AC 9/7/3, HD 1-1/2/3, hp 2/4/7, #AT 1, D 1-2/1-4/1-6, ML 8)
These clams are renowned by culinarians and conjurers both. The 'scutt' (the very bony flesh around the inner lips of each clam) in particular holds alchemical powers of steeliness and stickiness.
yyy-xxx Lamassu's Tell
Heaps of bricks and rubble and splintered wood, all weathered far beyond the point of rot. The decimated expanse blankets a wide and low flat-topped hill, a mile in span.
This grand wreck was once the city of Lamassu. Upon the flattened foundations of the city's centre-palace sits a sun-bleached marble statue of the city's namesake, the Stellar Tutor. He is 50' long and similarly tall. He has a man's head, because he is clever, a bull's body, because he is strong, and an eagle's wings, because he is free.
The statue awakens if one attempts to erect anything upon the city's ruins, leaping over and batting the structure away as a housecat would a house-of-cards. Even a tent angers the erstwhile genius-loci. If Lamassu is beseeched by name he, in his booming voice, attempts to extracts a pact. He can teach the way of navigation and truth-telling by the stars in exchange for the ability to construct things: "you lowly folks should know your station by now... What you were placed upon this Globe to practice... Walk . Observe. And Don't Despoil".
yyy-xxx Strange Flamingos
A flamboyance of colourful birds sways over a shallow and windy lagoon. The air scintillates with spray, casting a prismatic haze over the scene. Their pink feathers bristle in the wind. Their green scaly necks shimmer in the light. Their thin-black pupils reflect the clouds. Their fangs are concealed within their beaks.
These birds are venomous. Vilely so. A victim grows slow and lethargic over the course of thirty seconds before, in a single moment, expelling a pint of blood from the mouth and nose (1d6 damage), along with the venom. Luckily, these birds don't go after live prey: they are egg-snatchers and mollusc-priers.
There are a hundred of these birds. It's almost certain death to mess with these guys unless you wear specially-engineered armour, and even then it's risky.
(AC 8, HD 1, hp 3, #AT 1, D 1 & Venom, ML 7, #Enc. 100)