Tetsujin no Llama

6) A group of monsters have collected near the hidden doorway and antechamber leading into the crypt. Roll twice on the wandering monster table. As ugly as this might seem, if adventurers retreat a bit, the pursuing monsters will have to come after them through two separate doorways, making them relatively easy to isolate and overwhelm, and it's still fairly close to the cave shrine, so spellcasters can stay in an area where they can speak, if they need that in order to cast spells.

7) This niche is set off from the corridor by a set of sturdy iron bars. Treat as X-Heavy metalwork (GURPS Dungeon Fantasy 2, p. 18); the bars are permanently fixed in place and cannot be unlocked. The area beyond is blacked out with the Darkness spell. It's also difficult to use magic to pick out what's in the space; it's protected by a variant of the Pentegram spell (cast at level 20, if it becomes important). Breaking the bars breaks that spell.

The space contains N/3 Demons From Beyond…

For about the past few years, I've been working from home. It's a long story of corporate shenanigans which resulted in me surviving a second buyout of my employer by another company but my physical office dropping out from under me. The point is that I'm physically isolated from my colleagues in an office in my house full of...well, any stuff I would want to have with me.

On a mostly but not entirely unrelated note, I've long vaguely toyed with the idea of painting miniatures. It'd be nice for other hobbies I'm involved with. On the other hand, it requires at least a little hand-eye coordination, and I'm not good with that. What finally made me decide to do something about it was finding OpenForge, 3d-printable architecture and terrain for gaming. I like architecture.

What made these come together is...y'know how some people doodle in the margins during long, boring meetings? I realized that I had the opportunity to "doodle" as extravagantly …

Here's what's in areas 1-5 on the ground floor crypt map:

1) The room is partly filled with a dense grey mist from a few inches above the ground to a height of about three feet. Oddly, does not flow or expand outside of the approximately 12' by 12' room. Anyone peering under the mist sees a wooden chest in the southwest corner of the room.

The mist is acidic, doing 1d corrosion damage per turn spent immersed in it. It's possible, though, to crawl under it. Crawling under the mist requires a roll against DX - (2 x SM) per turn (that is, a -2 penalty for SM +1, a +2 bonus for SM -1, and so on). Failing the DX roll incurs a single point of corrosion damage, or a full die for a critical failure.

The chest itself weighs 40 lbs. is somehow resistant to the corrosion. It is locked (a straight roll against Lockpicking opens it), but there's a poisoned needle on the mechanism:

Detect: Per-based Traps.
Disarm: DX-based Traps.
Circumvent: The chest can be smashed open though…

The cave shrine is attached to a labyrinth-like crypt where various dead were laid to rest. Some had been noted holy men. Others were common people picked out for reasons lost to the depths of time. And some were very evil, stowed away in the supposedly safe confines of the crypt. But it's not so safe as one might hope. The crypt is full of magical power which has reanimated some of the dead, given an illusion of life to some objects, and let some things slip through the walls between worlds. Some time after the crypt was build and then sealed off by its makers, other monsters from the nearby natural caves broke in through a back entrance. Not long thereafter, they sealed it off again.

The crypt can be reached thorough concealed doors to the south through the cave shrine and to the northwest through the ground floor caves. The entire paved area is covered by the Silence spell (GURPS Magic, p. 171). It has somehow been applied to the entire volume on the crypt rather than on speci…

The upper level of the shrine is mostly empty space. The corner towers of the external structure have a single floor at a second level. The stone staircases leading to them are intact, but the walls are crumbled and uneven above about ten feet; there used to be taller towers, but those have fallen into rubble. However, there's a ladder in the southwestern tower. Bandits occasionally use it to climb high enough to see over the ragged wall and keep a lookout for potential threats.

The statue of the god in the cave shrine is a little over twenty feet tall, so it extends into the space of the upper level. The face used to have jeweled eyes, which have long since been removed. However, the top of the head has a hollow compartment (anyone who climbs up can roll against Search to see that it can be opened) containing a prayer wheel (see below).

The remains of the shrine are occupied by a group of orcish bandits; see GURPS Dungeon Fantasy Adventure 1: Mirror of the Fire Demon for stats a…

The first review for GURPS Hot Spots: The Silk Road is up, and Blind Mapmaker is quite kind.

There's a passing mention of there not being a lot of jokes in this one, which is accurate. In addition to using my Very Serious Historian Indeed approach for this one, I had specific alternative plans for the pull quotes, which are a primary source of humor. The creation of some one-line spaces for pull quotes put a bit of a hole in things (no room for an attribution, so they emphasize a short line from the book itself), but basically all of the pull quotes are from primary sources. Most are from letters written by people living along the Silk Road, but there's one from a stuffy Roman moralist complaining about Chinese silk, and there are several from Journey to the West, which is about Silk Road travel, more or less. Oh, plus there's a bit from Kipling in the section about the Great Game which is from the book giving us that very expression, and one from Aurel Stein in the index,…