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Thursday, July 11, 2019

How are Issues 1 & 2 of Through Ultan's Door Connected? And other news


First, some news: 


1. DriveThruRPG has finally approved the PDF of Issue 2 of Through Ultan's Door. You can now purchase electronic copies of the zine here.



2. I have heard the voice of the people, and chosen to add shipping directly from my Big Cartel store to Canada. Note: it is not really any less expensive than buying it from the Melsonian Arts Council, and I'm not sure how much faster it'll get there. But should you want the option to buy it closer to home, you can now do so. Everyone else outside the U.S. should go to The Melsonian Arts Council.

But now, on to the main topic. I've received some questions about the Catacombs of the Fleischguild featured in issue 2 relates to the Ruins of the Inquisitor's Theater in Issue 1. The short answer is that the Catacombs are down river from the Ruins of the Inquisitor's Theater. If you just hop in that ornate green canoe at area 25 of the Inquisitor's Theater, and paddle with the current downstream, in 15 minutes you will find yourself at the entrance to the Catacombs of the Fleischguild.

Originally, I had been planning on including a map of the sewer river with issue 2. But it's a point crawl map, which necessitates descriptions of quite a few nodes, and a big old encounter table. It proved to be too much material to include in issue 2, and I decided to bump to issue 3. I was also encouraged to do this because Gus drew a crazy great map of the sewer river that really fired my imagination. So this made me want to give it the space to breath in an entire issue. This has produced the awkward situation that I'm giving you a second dungeon on a pointcrawl map without giving you the map or rules for transit between destinations. C'est la vie.

A Teaser of one part of Gus' deliciously crazy sewer map

I will try to rectify this by making some more material about the sewer river available here in advance of issue 3, which is, naturally, still a long way off. But it's worth saying this too:

The Ruins of the Inquisitor's Theater is intended as a slow burning entree into the strange world of Wishery that lies on the other side of Ultan's Door. The Catacombs of the Fleischguild is different. While it "lifts the curtain" on further mysteries of Zyan, it is much more of a self-contained "jewel box" of a dungeon. For all its implied Zyanese theology and culture, it is more amenable to being dropped in to existing campaigns without the aid of Ultan's door to the dreamlands. Of course, for me, it is and always will be part of Wishery. But the waking world is full of echoes of Wishery (or is the other way around?), so perhaps this dungeon can find its way directly into your Living Greyhawk or Duskvol or City State of the Invincible Overlord. I would be the last to imagine that I could contain such phantasms by placing them on a map.
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7 comments:

  1. jbeltmanJuly 22, 2019 at 3:41 AM

    The print copies at the Melsonian Arts Council are sold out!

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    1. Ben L.July 22, 2019 at 7:36 AM

      They are. I am working on setting up world wide shipping on my big cartel webstore. I now understand better how all USPS shipping options work, and I can accurately price items. Shipping will likely be a bit more expensive than on Melsonia, but at least it will be available!

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  2. squeenJuly 30, 2019 at 6:31 AM

    I think its brilliant. Nice job Ben.

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  3. AnneAugust 2, 2019 at 2:22 PM

    There's a nice fit between your writing and Gus's maps.

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  4. shan.ejacksonMay 25, 2020 at 5:34 PM

    I love what you are doing and I have a quick question about something your material made me think about. Please forgive and/or delete if necessary, but I'm trying to avoid being spoilery. In one of your issues you have some single-use magic with some very interesting effects, but they require characters to do some some rather unpalatable things without much that I can find in the way of clues. Performing the required acts use up the substance, and probably not at a time that makes the magic of any use. How do you imagine that players will determine what the items do? How do you handle this and magic identification in general. Thanks for your support of the hobby!

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    Replies
    1. Ben L.May 26, 2020 at 5:23 AM

      The simplest thing to say is that classic D&D has spells (e.g. the 2nd level spell identify) that do this for you. In my actual dreamlands game, the party had a patron in the waking world, the child witch Adrianna, who identified all their magical items for them. If it's a potion, you can also come up with rules for potion tasting, basically giving them a hint (or revealing) the nature of the magic with a little effect that doesn't use up a dose. Recently, on this blog I floated the rules for non-magical research to identify and reveal the powers of items, but this would be more appropriate for multi-use artifacts. See here http://maziriansgarden.blogspot.com/2019/11/magic-items-are-born-not-made.html and then here http://maziriansgarden.blogspot.com/2019/08/downtime-activities-non-magical-research.html

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