Month: November 2019

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The Silent Vaults – A Prison for the Magically Adept

 

When a person of great magical power breaks the rules, you can’t just throw them in the pokey with the cattle rustlers and meth dealers. Imprisoning someone with the ability to fly, teleport, and otherwise bend the rules of reality takes a place like the Silent Vaults.

Enclosed in an antimagic ward generated by a powerful device (in the dungeon, left side), the Vaults nullify the abilities of those contained within. The facility also has a guard barracks, warden’s residence and a chapel that is definitely not dedicated to Mystra.

Floating above the prison is a tiny island with a heavily-warded containment vault, designed to hold a person or entity of incredible arcane power. If you need to make a demon or an archlich sit and think about what they’ve done, this is the place to do it.

There’s an annotated version of this map and DM notes available to patrons.

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Brazenthrone – The Noble Quarter – Ground Level

Here’s the non-annotated version, just to get that out of the way.

The clanhalls are the family estates of Brazenthrone‘s high clans. High clans are basically the nobility of the Kingdom of the Twelve Mountains. You can read more about them here, if you’re interested.

Clans are just extended families. Some clans only have a few members, while others have over a thousand. The clanhall is where the clan’s patriarch or matriarch lives with their immediate family. Some of these are grand manors, while a few are barely bigger than the average commoner’s home.

Regardless, the Noble Quarter is a pretty nice place to live. Unlike most of the city, it’s built in a large, beautiful, natural cavern. The waterfall on the north end makes the air a bit more humid than other parts of the city, allowing mushrooms to grow naturally on the ground.

Of course, it’s not all waterfalls and mushrooms. This was the epicenter of a major catastrophe not long ago. I’ll get into that in the DM notes and the next edition of History and Lore, both of which I’ll put out when the Noble Quarter is finished.

All right, next up is last month’s Cartographic Congress winner: a magical prison. Spellhold, Azkaban… something of that nature. Then we’re coming right back to Brazenthrone to knock out the rest of the Noble Quarter, which will be two more floors. Or maybe three. We’ll see.

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Saint’s Rock – A fortified cathedral inspired by Ireland’s Rock of Cashel


 

, the inspiration for Saint’s Rock. Before it was a cathedral, it was the castle of Brian Boru, High King of Ireland. Fun fact: Brian Boru is the reason there’s a harp on your Guinness can. He’s also the reason that there are pictures of harps all over everything in Ireland despite the fact that no one plays it or has any interest whatsoever in harps or harp music.

Anyway, Brian Boru’s great-grandson gave the castle to the church, who rebuilt it into a cathedral. While the castle was dismantled, the gates and curtain wall were left in place, which, combined with the Rock’s location on a steep hilltop, made it a very well-protected church.

There are a few differences between Saint’s Rock and the Rock of Cashel, the biggest of which was the removal of a secondary chapel building and the addition of the cloisters. The passages through the walls are actually real. This photo shows what the second floor passages look like from the ground (you can see them at the bottom of the windows).

So, with this done, Brazenthrone‘s Noble Quarter is next. It’s the second-largest chamber of Brazenthrone and it’s going to take a minute. I’ll get you some work-in-progress photos along the way. Sound good? All right.

There’s an annotated version of this map and DM notes available to patrons.