Sunday, February 19, 2012

The Black Ziggurat of Jalamere


One More Sighting of the Infamous Black Ziggurat
Since it was first discovered by players in Blair's Planet Algol campaign early in 2010, the Black Ziggurat has appeared in a number of other games, settings and campaigns across the blog-o-sphere. In his post 'The Blackest Tesserzigguract', the idea of a cross-campaign 'Black Ziggurat' that subtly (and sometimes unsubtly) obtruded into all manner of other settings, planes, dimensions, etc. was further elaborated, to wit: There ought to be dozens of these things out there, all of them highly mysterious, hugely dangerous and potentially interconnected -- that last being subject to GM whim.


So there is a mysterious Black Ziggurat out amid the drifting dunes and harsh wastes of Jalamere. It reeks of preternatural power and pre-dates humanity by millions of years...and it is said by nomads and others who've been unfortunate enough to have encountered the place in their travels that the whole place exudes a miasmic influence that spawns nightmares and worse. Hungry spirits and worse things prowl the broken escarpment that forms a semi-natural wall around the Black Ziggurat.


No one sane goes there. No one sane has ever come back.
There are rumors of terrifying hybridized manticore-medusa creatures nesting in the escarpment near-by the Black Ziggurat, but no survivors have returned with any details as of yet.


No one from the surrounding area will willingly lead anyone to this place, except those of the Wultru and Nirizi tribes, but since those particularly unsavory humanoids are far from trustworthy, it may not be wise to hire their services in this regard...


Black Ziggurat Encounter Tables

5 comments:

  1. The feel of the place emanates off the screen. I like the creature mix. The gargantupede does double duty, freshening up the sandworm and bringing the underused centipede image into play. The sting worm is just nasty!

    Love the image too.

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  2. I wonder if a place like this wouldn't call for a few more weird monsters. Creepy crawlers, tentacled thingies. Harpies and rock giants seem to be so... mundane in regard to how this place seems to be.

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  3. @Porky: It's a start. The Special Encounters will tke things a bit farther...and we have some entries from Planet Algol's Blair himself to add to the mix!

    @gmkeros: Things start our just a little off from the norm with this table, then we crank things up a bit farther with the Special Encounters. And this is just the area around the Black Ziggurat, as you get closer, things get weirder, and weirder. But one has to start somewhere and this particular table is the baseline for this specific area. Creept Crawlies, Tentacled Thingies, Polyps, Writhing Masses, Raging Blobs, Slimefalls, and worse are on the way...

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  4. Love that image! First thing that popped into my head: it looks like the kind of image that would accompany a weird and creepy sci-fi story in one of those Terran Trade Authority books...

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  5. Thanks Scott. I really wanted to do justice to Blair's vision, so hopefully this image is creepy-weird and emanates a bit of menace, just like something resonant or contaminated by stuff leaking over from Planet Algol ought to be like. What the heck are these 'Terran Trade Authority' books? That sounds interesting...

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