The Ruined Tower of Zenopus Campaign: The Portmaster's Garden Palace

In my ongoing campaign centered on The Ruined Tower of Zenopus, Portown is called Bandar Arzoo in the local language. Ruling over the town is the Portmaster, Lord Atesh. His palace is more garden than not. The PCs have been called into Lord Atesh's office several times, but this time it occurred to me that I might need a map, in case they, oh, say, needed to fight their way out.

Most of this map is taken directly from Dyson Logos' The Palace Market, which had the open look I wanted, adjusted and edited to suit my purposes.

The white areas are typical interior spaces, and probably contain offices, kitchens, storage, and other things I feel confident I can make up on the spot. There are a few rooms at the top of the map that are the Palace Guards' station, which can be accessed directly from the street. The big room with 9 columns is the ballroom, and the smaller space invader-shaped room with 4 columns is the Portmaster's office and suite.

Everything else is perfumed botanicals and burbling water features for the Portmaster's delecation. Most are open to the air, or artfully framed by arches and cupolas. The doors with X's on them can be barred from either side. Typically they are barred on one side to keep people out, but, occasionally barred on the other side for when the Portmaster isn't quite ready to let his guests depart.

That's weird. Why would the Portmaster want to lock guests in with him? Hmm. I'm sure it would be rude to enquire.

Comments

Knave 2e Alternate Attributes

Sometimes, I'm exactly in the mood for the classic simplicity of defining characters entirely by D&D's six attributes, as Knave does. But sometimes, I want the players have have just a little smidge more to fiddle with.

Lasers & Feelings, RetroRocket

Necro-Cavaliers of the Astral Galaxy reminded me of just how much fun John Harper's Lasers and Feelings is. So I made a hack. Like so many others have. There's no new titular dichotomy for my hack, even though lasers aren't so much a part of the 30's era, Buck Rogers-style, planetary romances I wanted to emulate. Something like "Rockets & Romance" would have been entirely genre appropriate, but there's no improving on the geek poetry of declaring "I rolled LaserFeelings!" Anyway, I hope you like it. Let me know if you play it! LASERS & FEELINGS, RETROROCKET (pdf) Here's some of my previous noodlings along the same retro-futuristic lines: Ray Guns Food Pills Strange Powers An Exaltation of Rockets

Knaves, fancypants

I've prepared a new layout document of Ben Milton's Knaves . Knaves is a great, light rules set that has an extremely elegant core mechanic while retaining total compatibility with OSR material. It's pretty much the rpg of my dreams. This document contains the complete rules, plus a bunch of useful hacks from the community, plus a few of my invention, plus some useful resources from Ben Milton's previous effort, Maze Rats . EDIT: I've updated the layout to fix errata and make a few tweaks. Further, I've made 3 variations: KNAVES TABLET LAYOUT The Tablet Layout is meant for scrolling on screens, and contains hyperlinks. KNAVES SPREAD LAYOUT The Spread Layout is set up to print on Letter-sized paper. KNAVES A4 LAYOUT The A4 Layout is set up to print on A4 paper, and is probably the most elegant of the three versions. This is presented with generous permission from Ben Milton, and should in no way be an excuse for not purchasing a copy of Knav...

An Abominable Fancy

Search This Blog