As promised, here’s an overview of the history and lore of the Black Loch. If you’ve read over all the DM notes for the loch, you probably won’t find much new here, but it’s intended as more of an introduction to the setting, with basic summaries of the locations and a few notable people. Of course, I’ll be updating this in the future, once I get some more locations finished.
Okay, time to get started on the next map!
Here’s the unfurnished version.
Gyan’dis is a ruined illithid settlement in the Black Loch. The colony thrived in its corner of the loch for over 800 years, until it was brought down and its inhabitants wiped out by Gyan’dis’ own elder brain. Normally, I’d talk a little more about the background of the map, but I’m going to leave that for a day or so, because I’m planning on writing up an overview of the history and lore of the Black Loch, which I can probably get done sometime tomorrow.
It’ll have basic information on the loch, along with brief summaries of the locations I’ve drawn so far. I think it’ll be a good introductory overview of the setting, which should be useful to patrons and non-patrons alike. Also, for non-patrons, I promise it’ll explain more about why the elder brain destroyed its own colony. I wouldn’t leave you hanging like that.
Once that’s done, I’ll be getting started on last month’s Cartographic Congress winner, a town built on a bridge over a river canyon. I’ve been champing at the bit to get started on that and it’s taking all my willpower to write up the Black Loch overview first. But it’s long overdue, it needs to be done and it’s only a day’s work at most, so I’m just going to bite the bullet and get it written.
After the bridge, I’ll be drawing the next historical map, Scotland’s Coxton Tower. And then we’ll probably find our way back to the Underscotland for another piece of the Black Loch.
Sound like a plan? Either way, let me know what you think!
The Grinning Widow is a ship designed for the Black Loch. In an underground sea, sails aren’t going to accomplish much, so the Widow doesn’t have any. She’s a galley, powered exclusively by rowing, with a crew of 20 oarsmen who all look like they walked out of a “skipped leg day” meme.
For defense, the Widow is armed with a ram on the bow, as well as two ballistas, one of which is a little scarier than the other. You see, I’ve been drawing the “big crossbow” ballista in my maps for a while now, but I wanted to change things up a bit, so I started searching for different ballista designs. I found a few I liked, but then– out of nowhere– this thing struts into the room. Yes please.
I don’t know if it’s real and I don’t care. It’s awesome and I decided it was definitely going in the map. I made a token of it, too, by the way, as well as the other one. You can get them both here. Personally, I’d give it around double the range and damage of a regular ballista in the DM’s Guide, but require a 2-person crew to fire it every round. And give it +1 to damage if the party names it.
So, here’s a funny story from my game. A few years ago, my players spent some time on a ship like this one, down in the underdark. The orog crew ended up teaching them Orcish, which my wife’s elven wizard got quite good at.
Several months later, she’s with a different party, being confronted by orc bandits, and she uses her knowledge of Orcish to speak with them. The bandits look at each other and burst out laughing, which leaves the party confused. Finally, the orc leader stops laughing and tells her he’s never heard an elf in a fancy dress speaking Orcish. And he never imagined that, if he did, she’d be speaking the filthiest Orcish he’s ever heard.
They end up eating with the orcs, who tell her that everything she says is heavily laced with curse words. She hadn’t realized it, but the orog sailors taught her to speak like they do, which is very crudely, even by Orcish standards. So she knows the language, but she can’t speak it without cursing. Fortunately, orcs don’t tend to be prudish about that kind of thing, but no one expects it from someone like her.
Anyway, next up, I’ll be drawing a mountainous island settlement. And after that, I’ll be coming back to draw something else from the Black Loch. Maybe the illithid ruins? We’ll see.
Well, I’m gonna grab some coffee and start sketching some islands. Let me know what you think of the Widow!
There’s an annotated version of this map and DM notes available to patrons.
Here’s an alternate version if you’d prefer the place dried out.
The Smoldering Abyss is a part of the Black Loch almost no one even knows exists. It’s a deep, underwater trench at the bottom of a larger underwater trench at the bottom of the loch. And, in a place where no one even wants to think about what might be under the surface of the sea, places like this tend to go unnoticed.
There are three things of note here. The first is an ancient, kuo-toan royal catacomb. Built thousands of years ago, before the kuo-toa became… let’s say “psychologically non-conformist,” it was a place where they buried their kings.
The second thing is a monster called “the Whisperer.” It’s a huge, black beast with rubbery tentacles and a wide, fanged mouth like an anglerfish. While not as big as a kraken, it’s more than big enough to scare the hell out of the sailors of the Black Loch. Fortunately for the sailors, the Whisperer hasn’t been seen in almost 250 years and many believe it to be dead. Unfortunately, they’re wrong and it’s not. It’s hibernating here and it’s about to wake up.
Finally, there are the smoking rocks. Those are a type of hydrothermal vent known as a black smoker. They’re like tiny, underwater volcanoes that pump boiling hot water filled with minerals into the sea and are usually found around 3km below the surface. If you’re planning to use the map, keep in mind that those vents would actually make the water fairly warm here. And they’d burn anyone who got too close pretty badly.
With another Black Loch map down, I’m going to spend the rest of the day drawing some tokens, which I should have for you sometime tomorrow. After that, I want to check another Black Loch map off the list. I’m not sure which one, but I’ll let you know in the next post. Then, I’ll be drawing last month’s Cartographic Congress winner, a mountainous island settlement.
Anyway, that’s the plan for now. Let me know what you think of the abyss!
There are DM notes for this map available to patrons.
Here’s the unfurnished version.
Hey look, I drew a reasonable-sized map! 34×55! I knew I could do it! Don’t get used to it, though, the next two maps I’m drawing are a 13-floor tower and this.
Delaro’s Manse is a part of the Black Loch, marked on the map as “Secluded Manse.” Delaro Montalos is one of the few humans living in the underdark sea. He’s a wizard who came to the loch to conduct research into an extradimensional gateway he created.
Normally, in a D&D setting, the term “extradimensional” refers to planar travel, but that’s not the case here. Delaro isn’t going to the inner planes, the outer planes, or anywhere else described in Planescape. He’s going outside of that, to another multiverse altogether.
I imagine this place as a completely different reality with laws of physics that bear no resemblance to our own, but I think there are a few other ways to play it. The most interesting, to me, is having Delaro’s gateway lead to our world, at some interesting point in time. You could drop your party into the middle of the Second World War, or the French Revolution, or the Wild West. You could have your party appear in a city under siege by the Mongol horde, or in the capital of the Incan Empire as the conquistadores are about to arrive. Hell, you could drop your party into the middle of modern day Tokyo. There are tons of possibilities if you want to go that route.
I feel like a lot of people are going to want to use this map for things other than the Black Loch, so I’m going to make an alternate version, which I think I can get done tonight. I’m just going to get rid of the stalactites and put some grass in there, so the place isn’t explicitly in a cavern. It won’t take long and it’ll keep some DMs from having to say, “I told you it was on a grassy hill, stop asking questions.”
Anyway, I’m gonna get on that. Let me know what you think!
There’s an annotated version of this map and DM notes available to patrons.
Here’s the updated Black Loch map.
All this stuff is free for everyone. You can download it here.
So, these are the tokens I drew. I’d say you can figure out what most of these critters are, although you may have some questions about the half-orc with a mustache and a combover holding a cup of coffee. That’s Stan– short for Stanislaus, not Stanley– and he’s my character in a game I’m playing in.
You know your dad’s friend from work? That’s Stan. He’s a strange sort of RPG character, but the campaign he’s in involves flying around the solar system in a spelljammer searching for dragonballs, so he’s less weird than you’d think. And one of the other PCs is a railway maintenance robot, so there’s a case to be made that Stan isn’t even the weirdest one in the party.
Anyway, I know nobody else needs Stan’s token, but I thought I’d throw him in there just in case. I’d rather you have Stan and not need him than need Stan and not have him.
Well, that’s it for now. I’m gonna get started on the next map.
Oh, one last thing– if you’re new here, I made around 300 more tokens you can also have. Feel free to share them if you know anyone who’d want them.
Here’s the unfurnished version I promised. Instead of talking about it, I’d like to share something completely useless with you. I was looking through the 5th Ed. Monster Manual today and I noticed that there were a TON of entries starting with D. The D’s start on page 46 and end on 122. Anyway, I did what any crazy person would do and I got out a calculator. There are 76 pages of D’s out of a total of 304 pages of monsters, meaning that 25% of the monsters in the Monster Manual start with the letter D. And what’s the game called? That’s right… D&D.
*head explodes*
A few months back, I said I was going to draw some more tokens and I intend to start on that. The reason I hadn’t before is that I was a little behind on things, mostly as a result of the Cobalt Flotilla taking a bit longer than I’d anticipated. Anyway, I’m now caught up and I’ll get started on those today. Hopefully, I’ll be posting them tomorrow, then another batch every month or so.
After that, I’ll be drawing the map chosen by last month’s Cartographic Congress: “a pirate lord’s fortress with a casino and underground lair hewn out of granite.” That proposal won the vote by the biggest margin I’ve seen in a long time, so I’m going to go out on a limb and say that’s a thing a lot of people would like a map of. It’ll be like the Mont Acceaux Casino, except you don’t get kicked out for throwing up all over the floor.
Anyway, I’m gonna get to work. Let me know what you think of the map!
The Halls of the Awakened is a cultists’ lair hidden deep in the Black Loch. If you’re interested in my version of the lore, I’ve written a giant wall of text about it in the DM notes here. I’ll have an unfurnished version of the map for you tomorrow.
A bad guy lair with an entrance inside a cavern isn’t anything new, but I intentionally made the caverns here pretty big. As the party makes their way through, it gives them time to get a little paranoid. And to start asking questions, like, “Is this the right place?” And, “What if that person lied to us?” And, “What if this is a trap?” It creates some tension and makes them feel like they’re someplace dangerous, which is the mood I like to create in a dungeon.
If you read the lore I wrote about this place in the last post, it has a lot to do with psionics. I expect most people will probably use this map for something else, but, in case you’re interested in inserting the Architects of the Awakened into your game, I wrote some ideas for psionic powers into the DM notes.
Of course, you can use the rules for the unofficial Mystic class if you want, but that’s not what I’m looking for in a psionic NPC. What am I looking for? Darth Vader. No, seriously. If I’m introducing a powerful force the players are unfamiliar with, I want it to scare the hell out of them. I want them to get telekinetically flung across the room like a rag doll. I want to have stone walls flying at them and ceilings coming down on their heads. I want stuff to happen that isn’t in the Players’ Handbook.
If you throw a fireball at the party, they know what that does. “It’s fine, no big deal, we’ve got the HP to handle it.” But when you tell someone they can no longer breathe? They don’t know what that does. There are rules, of course, but they don’t know what they are because I made them up. The unknown can be pretty scary, especially for experienced players who aren’t used to surprises.
Anyway, I’ll get the unfurnished version of this up tomorrow, along with the updated Black Loch map that has the location marked on it. I’ll also talk about what’s next. Until then!
The Architects of the Awakening are a duergar cult who were the villains of my previous campaign. They’re also the subject of the next Black Loch map and they have a fairly complex story. My group broke up before I got the chance to tell it all, so I’m going to write it out here in case any of you find them interesting enough to use in your own game.
For a TL;DR, check the end of the last post.
First, we need to talk a bit about duergar history. The duergar were a clan of dwarves who were enslaved by mind flayers for several thousand years. They eventually rose up against their masters and won their freedom, but their hatred for the illithids never faded.
Some time later, a duergar queen named Duerra launched a war on an illithid city, capturing the residents and performing experiments on them to discover the secrets of their mental powers. She is said to have found the source of their psionic essence and to have infused it into her own people. This tale is more legend than history, but, for the purposes of this story, it is the truth.
It is indisputably true that the duergar possess more of a talent for psionics than most races, but, despite having the psionic essence of the illithids within them, their powers are nowhere near those of their former masters. The question of why this might be is one that the duergar have never really asked. But, about 100 years ago, a priestess named Astali, a follower of Deep Duerra– the aforementioned queen who later became a goddess– started asking it. And she was determined to find an answer.
Continue reading “The Lore of The Architects of the Awakening”
I’m giving out all the patron content for this map to everyone. You can download it from my Google Drive here. I’ve also put it in the public Foundry module (manifest URL).
The Torrents are one of the ways to reach the Black Loch from the surface, starting as an above-ground river and turning into a series of cascading waterfalls going deeper and deeper underground.
As an entrance to the underdark, I like this for a few reasons. First, it’s fast. There’s no three-day journey down the stairs. Your party can make it into the bowels of the earth in around an hour. Second, it’s super dangerous. There’s no better way to emphasize the perils of the underdark than nearly killing half the party on the way there. Also, it’s one-way, which is nice. No DM wants to write a whole campaign and then have the PCs decide the underdark “isn’t for them.”
There’s also an interesting possibility with the Torrents that I’ve been thinking about: you can have the party enter the underdark accidentally. I wrote a few ideas about how you might go about doing that in the DM notes, if you’re interested. Personally, if I were going to send a party in like that, I’d wait until a big part of the campaign had just concluded. Then, just as they’re heading down the river to meet the king and collect their heaping mountain of gold bars…
“A loud crash wakes you up in your hammocks. The boat appears to be falling.”
I’m not saying you should do that, I’m just… I’m not saying you should not do it. It would be really funny, though.
Next up, I’ll be drawing a map chosen by the Cartographic Congress: a mountain monastery clinging to a cliffside with a waterfall running past. This will be based partly on Paro Taktsang, a Buddhist monastery in Bhutan. There’s something I love about places built in really dangerous locations.
After that, I’ll probably do another map from the Black Loch. I’ve been thinking about adding a location to the loch map based on something from my previous campaign. It’s a duergar cult called the Architects of the Awakening and they’re up to some pretty twisted stuff. The campaign never finished, but I think it’d be pretty cool to put the bad guys in the Black Loch and see if anyone else wants to do something with them.
Anyway, that’s about it. Let me know what you think of the Torrents!
