This rounds out the Enclave. Next time you hear from Vestitas, it’ll probably be an urbancrawl for either Grey Harbor, Echo Lake, or Imberkavitas, and hopefully soon, because I’m hoping to finish up the whole project and get it out of the way before Imbolc in February of 2019. It’s one of my largest outstanding projects and yet also one of the ones I’ve completed the most of.
Category: Vestitas
The Enclave: Pale Ladies and Pelagers
Pale Lady Territory
Pale ladies camp out in the long dead reactor of the facility, which operated not on nuclear or hydroelectric energy but on some mysterious energy beam that is now completely non-functional. Instead, the pale ladies have turned it into a spook workshop, using some spook addicts brought in from Brandt’s Landing as essentially slaves to produce the spook and then serve as smugglers out to the Grey River.
The Enclave: Beastmen
It’s Litha (or at least, this post is scheduled for Litha), but instead of doing one of those goal-oriented updates I usually do I’m just gonna drop the Vestitas stuff I’ve been working on. I can no longer think of any goal oriented things to post, so clearly that was never going to be a long running tradition.
This is for the Enclave, one of three unfinished areas left in the Vestitas hex crawl. Just like the hex encounters, it has no specific stats, just vaguely defined monster roles the details of which I’ll fill in later. This isn’t really the content that the audience this blog stumbled into cares about, but it’s a part of my ongoing quest to complete all my unfinished projects, so I’m tossing it up anyway. It’s not gonna slow down the Succubus review in any case, since I’m only posting these on the Tuesday/Friday non-review article slots.
Vestitas First Map Draft
Having finished up the newly scaled back Vestitas mini-hex adventures, I now have a map that looks like this:
By rearranging some hexes on the far right and far left, I was able to squeeze this all into a 10×7. Technically an 11×7, but the newly added bottom row is just there to be full of empty ocean hexes to hopefully help communicate that the ocean hexes at the bottom are all empty – including 01.08, 01.09, 02.09, and 07.09. Also the columns start numbering from 01 but the rows from 00 because that’s the only way to keep the numbering of the map consistent with the numbering of the key after I hacked the leftmost column off.
The good news is that, as you will note, there are only two blank hexes that need landmarks attached. Three if you count Echo Lake, a landmark which occupies its entire hex, and which might plausibly be mistaken for the lair of a kraken or something until the characters actually go check it out and discover that no, it’s just a lake, krakens would interdict trade.
Of course, the bad news is that this hexcrawl has five major locations marked on its map and associated content for only one of them, plus its random encounter tables are only half-finished, and it lacks actual stats for any of the new creatures featured in the mini-adventures in each hex, so it’s still far from the point of actual usability. Still, this is a pretty major milestone for the project.
The Machine Assassin
Summary: An implacable assassin robot has been stashed in an abandoned facility from the Dark Age of Technology. Upon being unsealed, it escapes, searching for its target. Upon reaching any nearby civilization, it erroneously identifies various NPCs as its target, killing them one by one.
The Snake Mutant
Awaken Online carried me through my daily update deadlines, but I am still committed to finishing old projects, if only so that I can point to them and say “look, I finish things, look at all these things I finished” when new fans are worried because I’ve missed an update or whatever. So we’re back in Vestitas today.
Murder Night
Summary: The village has a bizarre custom wherein one night a year all laws are suspended and the people can go kill each other. Allegedly, this lets people get out their violent impulses and allows society to live free of crime and war the rest of the year. This doesn’t really work, because it turns out that career criminals still need to make money the other 364 days of the year, but the tradition lives on – it helps that a town this small and this far from the Grey River has only fleeting contact with organized crime to begin with, which lends credence to the beneficial effects of the tradition even though it’s not actually related. By happenstance, the day the characters come to town is Murder Night.
Pinhead Deserved Better Than He Got
Like two-thirds of my Vestitas encounters are some horror movie premise drafted into 40k, and generally speaking that works out pretty well. I feel like I failed Hellraiser, though, and that one hurts most of all, because pretty much alone amongst all the horror franchises I’ve drawn on, Hellraiser is the only one that’s consistently failed its own premise. There was a chance here to make an RPG encounter that lived up to the potential of Pinhead in a way that his actual movies never did. It’s a general rule of the first three Hellraiser movies that every scene with Pinhead is great and every scene without is mediocre at best (and the first movie suffers from having almost no Pinhead), and it seemed like it should be pretty easy to come up with a retelling of the first three movies in RPG format that uses Pinhead effectively.
The Puzzle Box
A lot of how good this encounter is going to be is going to come down to whether or not the GM is any good at playing Pinhead. Really, I’m not even sure how to give advice to that effect, beyond “watch Hellraiser II and III and do it like that. Ignore everything that isn’t Pinhead.”
The Murder at the Mansion
Summary: The local mayor throws a small party. If the characters are at all well known, they are invited. During the party, the mayor is murdered, and there are a half-dozen potential suspects – word of this murder quickly gets out to the rest of the town, giving the characters reason to snoop around if they aren’t already. Characters will want to find the culprit to either bring them to justice or help them abscond.
Chamomile Has A Blog 