1d20 Strange Destinations Beyond the Magic Door

Many of these link to my old projects. Feel free to click the link if interested. I think the table still works if you don't.

 1d20 Strange Destinations Beyond Magic Doors: 

  1. Zuldroom: The City of the Worm. Hideous metal walls like mounds of gibbering alien flesh suddenly frozen into iron. Flesh Golems patrol the streets. Everyone is lacking different organs. The howl of a train whistle. The stench of meat gardens. Honeycombed red mesas stretch out endlessly beyond towering walls.
  2. The Eye of Maelstrom: The skies are consumed by storms, racked by pulses of strange energies from the world that was, raging over endless ashen wastes, dark crags, and roiling seas. All is darkness but for one single place: the Eye of the Storm. A floating city suspended in the Eye of the storm, kept aloft by strange machines no one now knows how to operate. Great spikes of metal fly by the power of lightning, piloted by storm sailors who fly the storm-tossed sky for glory and greed.
  3. The City of the Howl: Things are different since the Howl. Some say it was a storm. Some say an earthquake. Others say it was nothing they had ever seen. Everyone can only remember the terrible noise which ripped through everything: a great unbearable Howl that drowned out the world. Since then the city has been mostly empty, compared to what it was, anyway. The narrow streets that snaked through alleyways, under arched bridges, down into tunnels, and back again, full of bustling people now stand empty. The grand boulevards have been flooded with treacherous waters. Dark shapes lie in wait beneath. Vines creep up buildings, cracking the stone, as nature reclaims its own. Things that have nothing to do with the natural world haunt the dark corners of this silent place.
  4. Roads of the Eldwood: The great and ancient forest which firmly occupies the middle of the Isle of Far Albion. It is a place of great beauty where the eldest of beasts and trees might be found, and caves of living stone which can sing of the days of Creation. It is also a place of great peril for dark things hide in the clefts where sunlight never reaches and foul elder-things hunt in the shadow of the trees.
  5. The Dark Streets of Whispershire: Whispershire is the anachronistically Victorian yet medieval fortress-city, one of the many such walled cities of the Commonwealth, situated on the frontier. Beyond are lands unknown and dangerous, full of treasure and peril in equal measure. Cackling madmen cry warnings of doom from overcrowded streets, distorted children's voices beckon from shaded alleys, cruel smiles and gaudy daggers glimmer, black-voidstuff dots corpses which have been left in the gutter.
  6. The Misbegotten Kingdoms: A world cruelly built by a bitter toymaker atop a magic table. Here the King of Sorrows and his Broken Heart Knights weep and worship their cruel god. Here the giant Gobblers take creatures to dance for them while they watch on with taunting hunger only fearing the Doldromers who come to poopoo their fun. It is a world of twisted creations given terrible life. 
  7. The City at the End of Time: At the End of Time, mountains of the detritus of civilizations pile up over vast wastes of ash. Forests of petrified trees and people sit in shadowed valleys. Strange fortresses of woven darkness rise. Beasts and abominations of the dying world haunt ruins that have yet to give way to complete degradation. Shadowy spirits of the dead roam aimlessly, their forms and identities gone. At the End of Time, the mad cacophonic music of entropy has torn down the walls that divide life from death, past from future, what is from what could have been. Ancient heroes thought lost appear once more to take up the call of the City. Forgotten magicks are practiced alongside esoteric technologies. Things that never were stir in the darkness, hungrily leaping into the life that was denied them and lashing out at the creatures who were given existence in their stead.
  8. Martian Colony Alpha: Amongst the blasted wastes of Mars, beneath the shining dome of Colony Alpha, in the shadows of the labyrinthine tunnels of the deep city, law and chaos engage in endless battle. Tattooed fanatics beat their breasts, chanting their war song around roaring pyres. Cruel mechanical laughter chases frantic fugitives through mazes of wicked design. Black-uniformed warriors hunt pale fanged horrors through the corridors of ancient alien temples. For in the grit and grime of the uncaring void, there is only war.
  9. The Wastes of Exile: This desert exists as an in-between place for many worlds. The sky changes colors, displaying different suns and moons and skies, as the whole world seems to pass through bits and pieces of other dimensions. This is an unrelenting place where barbarism is the norm and there is no hope in sight for those wandering the ever-changing dunes. Alien creatures from countless different worlds fall through the gaps in the fabric of space and time to find themselves permanently moved to this place. Little that ever comes here leaves. The Wastes are the place where all worlds and all civilizations come crashing down, leaving behind broken fragments of what they were if they are lucky, and only dust if they are not. It is the place of absolute entropy and meaninglessness: a place at the end of time.
  10. The Unburied Forest: A miniplane where Death has been held captive. The dead from all over time and space find their graves strangely packed together here, the sound of terrible digging preceding their unnatural rebirth. Graves pack together in uneven mounds over the lumpy soil as black-barked trees jut from the ground like broken ribs. The dead madly rush to find ways to deal with their lack of peace sometimes through denial, obsessive pursuits, or endlessly recreating their traumas in an attempt to resolve their unfinished business. 
  11. The Weirdways: An alternate version of the modern US. Fantasy creatures rub elbows with human beings. The roads are definitely haunted and strange things live out in desolate places. Fight swarms of Not-Lemons in old gas stations. Try to get your van back from a child-like moss giant. Wander on, my son. Wander on.
  12. The Hinterland City of Garroteburg: Massive towering fortress city on the edge of the arcane wilderness. This city has been built up over generations by mad nobles until it stretched into the sky! Here enter the hobby-warren of an Eastern Box Gnome, send a message via telepathic lightbulb elf, or bandy philosophy with a lamp, bits of a bookshelf, and a flowerpot that have all been assembled into the rough shape of a human being and given sentience!
  13. Deathless Cadromar: It is said that red-robed priests raise the dead in Cadromar rather than putting them to sleep. These Vivimancer priests permit soldiers no sleep in death as repeated resurrections eat away at their humanity. Holy Tomb Knights guard the resting places of the saints, and even the saints live, reshaping reality, itself, even in death. Cadromar is a gray land of twisting rivers, ravaged by endless war, ruled over by a Hungry God who guards the Black River of Shaioun.
  14. Bronze Age Badlands: Giant Carnivorous Ducks roam a desert wasteland filled with talking birds, cavemen, and bronze-wearing imperialists. Solve your problems through the game of the gods: soccer!
  15. Faery's Puzzle Box: The fae love to play cruel games with mortals and invent devices of challenge and torment. This mahogany box with feathery gold trim contains a small world of peril. Solve the problems before time runs out, or be trapped forever.
  16. The Deep Gardens: Bioluminescent flora and fungus bloom here in a vast array of bright colors. The air is thick and sweet with psychedelic spores. Reality and dreams blend and you can never really be sure if you are awake. The Pale Gardeners walk on spindly legs, minding the garden with their myriad black-shining eyes and careful chitinous claws. They think your flesh will bloom into something marvelous.
  17. The Verdant Ruin: A mirror image of the place from whence you came but overrun with green. Moss, vines, and ivy. Everything appears to be ruined, ancient, made foreign by time, worn down by ages of wind and rain, smashed and crushed by roots of towering, wild trees. The whole world is a reminder of the inevitable decay of all things. You feel like you too will probably be overrun by green if you stay here for long. You also have the terrible feeling that you are being watched.
  18. The Sound Jungle: This place is utterly dark. Your eyes can see nothing but velvet darkness. However, if you close your eyes and let the sounds of this place wash over you, you begin to see without seeing as a world entirely made of sound reveals itself to you. Piping melody monkeys leap through deeply thrumming trees. Tigers of bass reverberations stalk through the tall whispering grass.
  19. The Phoenix Library: Every book ever burned finds its way to this library. This is a library full of forbidden things, knowledge someone didn't want you to see. It is abided over by the hunched birdmen that toss their phoenix feather quills as flaming weapons. Ever watchful crystalline guardians of law appear wherever a portal is opened to this place to stop those who attempt to enter. Far more dangerous might be the books themselves, as some books were burned for a good reason.
  20. The Subnautical Forest: Coral and waving alien fronds make up an ethereal forest at the bottom of the sea. Passing through the doorway, you find you can breathe although you are evidently underwater and you can walk along the ocean floor like dry land. Ancient Grecian columns rise in the distance, looking like they belong to an ancient temple. Beware the sharks.

Comments

  1. I am adding these to the list of the strange other worlds player-characters can fall into. They're all extremely creative.

    ReplyDelete
  2. You're going to do the other lands, right?

    ReplyDelete

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