The ruins of Crab Shank's old town

 A couple of hexes from the Isles of Fire and Cruelty

 

18.15 – 19.14 – 19.15: Ruins of the old town

Crab Shanks Isle is located on the south east of the archipelago. The last Edge Landers to set up shop here angered the elves at 25.06. One night the whole tribe mobilised and attacked, wiping out the entire settlement. The elves burned the buildings, tore up the agriculture and tortured and killed everyone they found. Most of the bodies are gone now, decomposed, washed away or eaten, but the charred remains of the town are still standing.

A brave (or reckless) Hungry Keeper seeded a dungeon in the ruins at 18.15, dedicated to Shut Lung. It is inhabited by a school of deep ones in the waters below, tended to by a motley cult of brainwashed and traumatised human survivors. The deep ones are paranoid and careful not to alert the elves to their presence, and are planning to escape to less hostile waters if they can manage it without incurring the wrath of Shut Lung.

The ruins at 19.14 has attracted a crew of outcast Puck treasure hunters. The diminutive fae have modelled themselves on Edge Lander dungeoneers, and as such are violent, amoral and lustful for gold. They have adorned themselves with whatever accoutrements of the gold hounds trade they can scavenge or jury-rig.

In the ruined port at 19.15 lives the ghost of Captain Pineas Parker, former governor of Crab Shanks. Horribly tortured before his death at the hands of the elves, Parker is tied to this plane by the continued existence of Parker's Pipe, a magic item now in the hands of the elves at 25.06. Destruction of the Pipe will free Parker to the aether.

"Elf Island" - Sandbox / Hexcrawl Preview

I've been playing about with Hexographer recently and I've put together this little map, a Far Flung Island inhabited by warring Elves, mischievous Puck and a nervous Edge Landers trading colony.

I'm planning to write this up as a sandbox / hexcrawl module, including such highlights as;

- Warlike tribes of vindictive Elves, bearing centuries old grudges and savagely cruel imaginations.

- Mischievous villages of creatively genius, but morally bankrupt, Puck.

- Sea Devil infested marshlands.

- Dormant volcano. Dormant volcano. Volcano!

- A newly settled trading colony.

- A recently destroyed trading colony.

- Dungeons and not-dungeons galore.

I'd love to hear any suggestions you guys have for things to put into the island, monsters you'd like to fight or locations you'd like to adventure in, as well as any hints + tips on making better maps next time round!

Island Elves

There are heroes in the seaweed...

Before the Edge Landers, the people at the furthest reaches of the world were the elves. An ancient and nigh-immortal race, the elves were born in the crushing depths of the sea, birthed in the stunning, shuddering coral reefs. They gestated in the dark and then burst forth into the light, bringing all the colour of the rainbow with them.

Elves are savage and serious in war and sport, mercurial and ecstatic in all else. They build little, instead growing their living weaponry along the coral reefs. They armour themselves in bark and shark skin, stringing teeth and pearls around their necks for jewellery. Their hair and skin are shocking canvases, their clear bronzed skin sprayed with splashes of vivid colour, shards of coral and sea weed growing from their scalps.

For millennia the elves of the Far Flung Islands have lived their simple and inhuman lives. They see the younger races as tormented creatures, chasing obsessions of such crippling grandeur that they cannot hope to achieve them within their minuscule life spans. Elves are creatures of passion and nothing else. For creatures of such lengthy existence they are insanely near sighted. They experience life as a series of barely connected events, tied together only by the cosmic bonds of their own personality and whims.

Elf revelry

The elves are loathe to go more than a day from the sea, and it is a rare creature who will sail away from their coral reef birthplaces. They call up elaborate castles of glass and sand along the coasts of their island strongholds, dancing around great fires at night and striking out into the crystal seas come sunrise in search of prey.

Homes of sand and glass

Elves are known for monstrous cruelty. Before the Edge Landers carved a path through their ancestral homelands, the elves might as well have been the edge of the world for all that it mattered to the younger races. Elves rarely leave the islands but when they come en-mass it is almost always for war. The creatures might remember a slight hundreds of years old and muster for revenge, mounting up in great war parties that will strike out across the ocean in an orgy of torture and murder, utterly oblivious to the fact that the objects of their sudden anger are centuries buried.