#encounter mountain

[dailyadventureprompts]

Villain: Jysh'parun, Outergod of Unwelcoming Earth

As distant and ancient as a mountain, as scornful as an axebitten tree

Many philosophies debate and negotiate the relation of mortals to their environment. Some see nature as a thing to be tamed in the name of survival, domesticated, exploited. Others proffer a more symbiotic path, a holistic system to be protected and stewarded.

Beyond these there are the ravings of those claimed by Jysh'parun, who claim that mortals have no right to exist at all, and survive merely by the beneficence of the trees and stones. While all but the most foolish agree that heed must be paid to nature, none but those under the unwelcoming earths dominion would think that there is some geological-feudal hierarchy to which we must all submit.

This then is the paradox of the Unbowing Mountain: a god that claims the worship of things that do not traditionally think, but views nature through a distinctly mortal lens of domination and hierarchy. It's an absurdity bordering on being a joke, atleast until Jysh'parun's influence washes over the land and the forest marches off to war while the rivers start demanding tribute.

Adventure Hooks:

Having come into possession of a disused tract of land, a young farming couple were picking the stones from their new field in preparation for planting when they came across the petrified remains of some indescribable horror. Resembling nothing so much as a horse sized mandrake-root with teeth, they've reached out to neighbours, the sheriff, even the local wizard looking for advice about what to do... only to wake up one morning and find the thing gone. Theft or reanimation are both equally alarming possibilities, and the whole region has been on edge since.

Having been thought dead for years after being lost in a winter storm, a dwarven cartographer descends from the mountains claiming to be their mouthpiece and demanding sacrifices in their name. Her words at first go unheeded, at least until the glacial rivers begin to run with noxious acid, transforming back only when something living is thrown in. Farms and villages are drying out and grisly offerings of livestock now fail to meet her standards she claims the mountains will only be satisfied when the people of the realm throw their rulers in and swear fealty to the peaks on high.

The king's palace is in chaos after a coup took place in the royal gardens, specifically when the great tree that shaded his majesty's favourite thinking bench stabbed him in the back with one of it's branches and then skampered off to replant itself on the throne with the crown in tow. Before Anyone knew what was happening, greenery had overtaken the palace locking most outside while trapping certain vital hostages inside.

Inspirations: Something that's all too often lost in the "madness and tentacles" misinterpretation of eldritch horror is that much of the genre is spun off from the particular phobias of HP lovecraft. When we use the iconography without understanding the anxieties behind it, we risk creating a shallow B movie version of the horror we want our audience to feel.

To write good horror then, we need to draw off fears we understand, and with Jysh'parun I wanted to tap into climate anxiety in a way I don't think I've seen before. We've all resigned ourselves to the fact that climate change is happening, with the understanding that its being driven by the bullheaded egos and greed of people who are so powerful their perspective on life bears no resemblance to anything we could possibly conceive of. Translate their willingness to let us suffer for the sake of profit into a psudo historical fantasy context and you get the Unwelcoming Earth: widening sinkholes that demand tolls from passersby while an approaching tsunami proclaims the divine right of kings. It's not only absurd it's fundamentally idiotic but that it doesn't mean it won't destroy you and everyone you know.

Worshippers: Delusional druids and geomancers. Goliaths and dwarvenkind who get too into being "children of the mountain". Sentient trees, Living crystals, and other elemental entities who seek to put themselves "above" other forms of life. Corrupted primoridals.

Signs: Aberrations that resemble roots or stone spontaneously emerging from nature, acid flowing from normally clear running springs, statues of lordly alien figures carved from erosion, not tools. Proclimations in an unknowable script engraved deep under the earth or on monumental scale.

Symbols: A glyph resembling a mountain range or branches of a tree in the shape of a crown.

Titles: The Unbowing Mountain, The Insuperable, King of all Corners,

Artsource

[poorly-drawn-mdzs]

Whooooo could have predicted this?

[First] Prev <–-> Next

[oldschoolfrp]

Up and away to Cloud City, in search of the "Sleeping Dragon" (Peter Clarke cover for Dungeon 48, July/August 1994, featuring the silver dragon player character Agoron Cloudwalker and his elf kindred Larala Firstleaf, from Bill Slavicsek's AD&D adventure for his own Council of Wyrms setting)

[fluffypotatey]

ngl i really wanna see the Tripitaka vs Macky beef. i wanna see the ugly jealousy. i wanna see how pissed Macky was. I want to see him argue with Tripitaka about their idea of “what’s best for swk” they care about him but one is “i can fix him” and the other is “i can accept him” and both are right but also wrong but also—

[ywpd-translations]

Ride 726: Sakamichi until the Central Sports Park

Pag 1

1: Two hours earlier, Sohoku High School racing team is on the mountain road towards the training camp

2: Are you alright, Onoda-san!?

Ugh....

Y- your condition... ahh, ahhhh

Captain!!

3: We were descending at a high speed, and then the moment we entered the mountain road his face turned... white

What do we do about this training camp

Is- is.... is he going to be alright?

4: Yeah, don't worry

It's Onoda-kun's specialty that we've gotten used to – car sickenss!!

I didn't think it would happen three years in a row

Pag 2

1: At the same place!!

2: I'm- alright, Naru.... ko... kun

Yeah you don't look alright at all

Your face is as white as paper

3: During these three years.... I've learned... and

I've come..... prepared....

4: Go ahead before me

5: There's no need to contact Toji-san either

6: From here....

Pag 3

1: To the Cycling Sports Park it's 18km....

I realized that on this mountain road

Pag 4

1: If I go with my bike, I'm sure I won't feel sick!!

Pag 5

1: I don't feel faint and I don't feel sick either

And I won't bother everyone

Ahhh... bikes really are the best...!!

2: But I'll be a little later for the start

I'll hurry as much as possible

(Time display)

4: But

5: The air is sweet, and I'm able to slowly enjoy the scenery

Ah, I can see the sea

6: I even started humming without noticing

Hm hm hm

Ahhh the “Love Hime”'s third season announcement PV only has the chorsu part of the song.... I want to listen to the opening!!

Even though I'm pedaling like this

Pag 6

1: There's many things to discover

2: 3km to go!!

3: This climb, and then the descent after it!!

4: Alright, I'm at the top

5: Hm hm hm

6: Hime hime

Pag 7

1: Hime.....

2: Waaaaaaaa, he's deaaad!!

3: Someone- someone's collapsed

Waaaaa my first dscorvery

Wh- wh- what should I do

4: My phone, my phone

Pag 8

1: I'm alive

A- i- u- e- o

Pag 9

1: See, I can even speak Japanese

2: I'm just resting

On the ground

3: You can go

Goodbye

4: O-okay

Sorry, you surprised me

5: What a strange person....

Well, then....

He was wearing a unifer, is he a student.....?

Pag 10

1: Hakone Academy is around here, maybe he's an Hakone Academy's student?

2: Uh-oh, I'm on my way to training camp! I have to hurry

I left the start to Naruko-kun, but....

4: Huh?!

This smell....

5: Just now the smell of plants was mixed a little with the smell of blood!!

Pag 11

1: He's injured!!

2: Maybe I'm wrong? Maybe I'm making a mistake?

Maybe he'll brush me off again!?

3: But

4: Let's turn back!!

Aaaaaaaa

Pag 12

2: Oh?

3: The four-eyes from before

Pag 13

1: I'm just resting, you can go

Yo-yo-you're injured!!

2: I have water and bandages!!

Oh

3: Are you kidding me

4: No way something so convenient

5: is... happe.... ning

Waa-

6: Are you alright!? Were you hit by car!?

Are you alright!?

7: Huh? No... on my own.....

On your own!?

Pag 14

1: Just for a moment, I looked away just a little

And then there was a hole and I fell

2: This is so hard, this is so hard

3: He's not listening

5: He's so bad at this....

6: But

Pag 15

1: You saved me

Thanks a lot

5: I'm glad!

7: By the way, that

Is the same as the one that a famous guy from Chiba rides

The bicycle

Pag 16

1: Huh

2: You know bicycles very well?

Yeah

3: I was riding one earlier

4: Earlier?

5: Now it's a little....

Waaa- It's fallen to the bottom of the valley...!!

6: I was riding, then I got caught in a hole

Kinda like that

Pag 17

1: Leave it to me, I'll bring it to you

2: I'll....

Ohhh, what a kind guy!!

3: I-!!

Waa--!!

5: …. well then, I'll go

Somehow now it feels reversed and I feel sorry

6: By the way....

Ahead of here

7: There's only the Cycling Sports Park

And from today for the next four days it's reserved so you can't use it

So where are you going, Four-eyes-san?

Pag 18

1: To the Cycling Sports Park

2: I'm Chiba's.... Sohoku High School's cap.... captain

Do you know of it?

My name is Onoda Sakamichi

We're having a training camp there from today

Pag 19

2: Who?

Huh- ah, no- haha it's it's just a name

He doesn't know me....!! This is so embarassing!!

3: You're kidding me.....

4: The super famous person of Chiba!!

5: This is baad... I was s surprised I bluffed and pretended not to know

Ah... uhm, and you?

6: Huh, me?

I'm- I'm!!

Pag 20

1: I'm Hakone Academy first year, the super rookie!! I'm Tobirama!!

2: It hurts

This person's head looks like a scrubbing brush

[touhoutunes]

Title: 超絶サヴァイヴ (Superior Survival)

Arrangement: あとぐる

Vocals: 小峠 舞

Album: 花氷-HANAGOORI-

Circle: 舞音KAGURA

Original: Deep-Mountain Encounter

[drumlincountry]

local weirdos encountered this week:

Woman who is running for election soon and revealed what political party she was running for via .........a flower crown.

guy who runs a butcher’s which is also a sweet shop.

woman who wanted to name her daughter Fiona but was convinced not to by the movie Shrek.

Guy who learned from his ukranian refugee friends that his patronym was ‘Ciaránovich’ and now introduces himself by that instead of his surname. Including at work.

13 year old queer kid who asked me what fruit I would be if I was a fruit. immediately overruled my answer by telling me i would be a strawberry.

lad who runs an illegal sushi take-away restaurant out of the literal kitchen of his very normal looking house. No signage, since it’s illegal. U order via whatsapp.

hypnotherapists x2

8 white cis women who invited me to a full moon night swim for international women’s day. We did a fire ritual and someone unironically used the “daughters of the witches you couldn’t burn” quote.

[zevrans]

i realized i got actually better at bg3 combat on this 2nd playthrough because all the fights i found hard on my 1st playthrough are like a piece of cake now and i win on a first try😳

[jessiesjaded]

People with bears and moose and mountain lions in their country will be like 😖 Australia scary 😖 girl I can fight a kangaroo or snake if need be, kill that bitch with a shovel if I had to- Mr grizzly decides to test its claws and fangs tho?? Moose feels a little stompy?? Good fuckin luck cunt

[ratboyugly]

doin sketches of some of my photos, here’s a couple of this overlook at baldpate mountain for the emh fans :)

[dailyadventureprompts]

Villain: Duke Sabrian, the Trueborn Bastard

The barred windows of the carriage let in only cold mountain air and the endless procession of crucifixes marking the road up to the Duke's castle. You idly wonder if he's picked out which ones he'll nail you and your friends to once you've told him that you've failed.

Though he styles himself the gallant exemplar of everything the noble warrior class could be, Duke Sabrian is in truth the embodiment of all the failings of his social order: brutish, bloody-minded, and blind to any plights beyond his own. More than a decade past Sabrian fought a war against his own sibling to seize control of their duchy and since then has ruled from an isolated mountain fortress fearing reprisals from the people he subjugates.

As long as the Duke rules things will continue to get worse, and it's only a matter of time before the party and those they care about get caught up in it.

Adventure Hooks:

Exhausted after delving their first dungeon the party are shaken down by a group of the duke's men, who are better armed and carry the threat of reprisal should the party draw steel on them. Perhaps it's better to give the toughs what they want and live to fight another day... say after finding out where the guards get drunk so they can trick/charm/beat the location of the stolen treasure out of them.

Countess Ledrick has a problem. Despite being one of the mercenaries who helped win Sabrian his throne she was never formally sworn in as one of the duke's vassals when she took over her lands and is widely regarded as little better than an upjumped brigand. Now a large shipment of tribute heading for the Duke's council has gone missing on the borders of her land, and it's only a matter of time before the blame comes to rest on her. She'll need all the help she can in recovering the lost treasure which just might be the party's ticket to a position in her court.

While out in the market a couple of the party members are approached by a woman in a hood doing her very best to try to seem inconspicuous. Through smiles and whispered pleas she begs them to help her hide from the guards, palming them a small handful of jewels in the attempt. If the party gives her aid she'll eventually introduce herself as Mina, keeping most of her story to herself but letting slip that she stole something precious from Sabrian and that she needs their help getting out of the duchy and into some neighbouring lands. It'd be an arduous journey, made even more arduous when in the next town the party discover posters and criers proclaiming that the duke's wife Minerva has been kidnapped, promising a great reward for her return and a terrible punishment for those who made off with her.

Background: While many born into the nobility feel confined by their station, Sabrian always knew he was made to rule. He was one of those people who excelled at the standards he was expected to meet, for whom the path of life is not only a straight line but part of a larger destiny that gave order to the world.

The problem was that Sabrian was the younger son, and his older sister chafed against noble life as much as he suited it. Sabrina was high minded, well read, and was possessed of several strange notions. The first being that those who own and govern the land owed something to those that lived upon it, the second being that her name was Solace, not Sabrina. The third was that she was not a woman, simply a person. The fourth and perhaps most outrageous was that she they would not be taking a husband, nor even a lover for the purposes of producing heirs and rather than just handing over their claim on the duchy to their well deserved brother like so often happened when the noble family tree refused to branch they would instead be creating some kind of made up of council made up of their vassals the elected mayors from the duchy's largest towns.

Sabrian wasn't having any of it, his sibling had clearly gone mad and was denying both of them (but mostly him) their birthright. After years of arguing, petitioning their mother on her death bed, and an outright threat of banishment from the now ascendant Duke Solace, Sabrian went out, raised himself an army, and went to war with his softhearted kin. The fighting was worse than anyone could have imagined, the people rose in Solace's defence and Sabrian had to resort to brutal tactics to put them down burning villages and farmland in the drought of summer and marching his followers over the ashes towards their next target.

Solace's head was delivered to him in a basket the same day he took the throne, and for the decade since Sabrian can't hold court without remembering the reproachful look in his sibling's dead eyes.

Further Adventures:

Knowing the common people hold no love for him, the duke governs from an ancestral bastion high in the mountains, a cold and lofty perch quite suitable for an unassailable tyrant who thinks himself above all. His remoteness and unwillingness to bother has paradoxically allowed his vassals the ability to govern their lands the way they see fit, which leads to a patchwork of graft, neglect, and personal ambition. In recent years Sabrian has sought to curve this independent streak by putting more and more resources behind his personal guard, who are now commanded by a former bountyhunter famed for her ruthlessness.

Increasing isolation gives the party a chance to rally together a resistance against the duke, but such a coalition might be built on shoddy foundations. A sizeable minority of his underlings feel hard done by him and might turn if given the right encouragement, though they may prove untrustworthy. Solace's old supporters have been ruthlessly hunted and will be mistrustful of newcomers, especially those that fought under the usurper. Minerva's clan are powerful nobles in their own right in a neighboring territory, and once they have their daughter back would be happy to throw their support behind the party's plan to oust the useless tyrant, provided the party are willing to play ball with them.

Sabrian has been unravelling, retreating from public life, executing his servants an courtiers for suspected treason, even keeping his formerly loving wife locked in a tower for the better part of a year. In the ten years since he married Minerva to secure her parent's support for his usurpation he has been unable to father a child, no matter what healers he turns to or what concubines he lays with. The inability to produce an heir was one of his primary reasons for going to war with Solace, and now he is failing in that exact same noble duty. This rather ironic fate was delivered unto him by Litirenn, god of farmland and cultivation, as punishment for burning one of the god's shrines during his rampage through the countryside ( along with the shrinekeeper who was an outspoken proponent of Solace's reforms. The god is going to be watching the party's actions closely if they set themselves in opposition to the duke, giving them a nudge now and again, ensuring the land rises to support them, that kid of thing.

Art 1

Art 2

[kibibarel]

I like the idea that Arven got his friends into cooking and they like sending him pictures of their meals for him to judge. Nemona has 0 skill at it. She’ll put her heart and soul into it, but she’s the type of person who’d make you a PB and J and somehow something is burnt. Penny on the other hand finds the most disturbing recipes she can and makes it. At this point Arven can’t tell if she genuinely has terrible taste buds or if she’s that dedicated to messing with him.

i love this. i think Penny would make every recipe in the Mountain Dew Cookbook

[oldschoolfrp]

"Deadly Encounter, " David Martin's first cover for Dragon, issue 101, September 1985

[carmesine]

The fearless duo revealing the untamed beauty of the mountains.

[unboundrealms]

Griffon's Nest [20x21]

Hey everyone!

My latest map is of a Griffon's lair. When your party is tasked with hunting down this fearsome beast, you need a proper nest where they can have a classic "A savage beast or misunderstood mother" moment.

In other good news - all my previous work is available for free at my Patreon!

All you need to do is navigate to the Freebies master post and grab download of maps such as: Hole in the Wall Tavern and Serene Lake!

If you have any questions or feedback, please leave a comment!