Stones to Kill the Sea
A downloadable adventure
Long as they've known it,
men have tried to own the sea
and all that it hides.
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STONES TO KILL THE SEA is an adventure designed for Bastards. by Micah Anderson but easily transmutable to your rules-light paper and pencil adventuring system of choice. It details the ten-room Lighthouse Isle of Carsen, replete with obedient automata, valuable gemstones, and ruinous artifacts. Also includes a small hexmap of the missing Great Green Sea, hooks to incorporate the adventure into your home game, and a sand-surfing hermit.
Shout out to those pioneering Bastards, Jon Davis (from whom I gratuitously lifted both style and substance), Matt Morris (who dragged me back to Bastards. and gave explicit permission for pseudo poetry), and of course Micah Anderson (like... have you even seen the Bastard's Book of Monsters???) Oh, and the title is from the Loot the Room Random Adventure Title Generator.
UPDATE FOR MAY 2023: Looking to a print run, so I tidied a few things up and added some killer art by Perplexing Ruins!
20 pages. A6. Bastards. Forever.
Coming soon to Monkey's Paw Games, and now available for US-ians in my webstore!
Purchase
In order to download this adventure you must purchase it at or above the minimum price of $5 USD. You will get access to the following files:
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Community Copy
There are a lot of games out there and a limited number of dollars to go around. I get it. I am right there with you. Feel free to snag a community copy if you want to try-before-you-buy, if you can't afford it, or if you just feel like it. No judgments here!
Drop a rating, drop a comment, drop some cash: I'll add more!
Development log
- Free web version now available!Mar 17, 2023
Comments
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Great dungeon! I'm hoping to run it in one of my desert-themed campaigns. Any sources on the (presumably public-domain) art? Especially pages 18--19 of the book.
Thanks, Sam! Please do let me know how it goes!
That particular spread is by Jasper Cropsey, engraved by William James Linton, from The Poetical Works of Edgar Allan Poe and retrieved from Old Book Illustrations (with some minor adjustments by me). The other spread is an extremely zoomed-in Henrique Alvim Corrêa illustration from a Belgian edition of War of the Worlds. The cover (also Old Book Illustrations) is by Auguste Joliet.
The only non-public-domain pieces are the illustrations on pages 8 and 11 by Perplexing Ruins as well as the hex map icons in AVI and CVI, also by PR. Hope this helps!
This is great! I really like the old woodblock style. I usually look through wikimedia commons, but I've not seen the Old Book Illustrations site before.
Also, the work is in the public domain so you have no obligation to even credit the long-deceased artists :)
And, I should add, thank you for getting me to be more thoughtful about the public-domain art I use! It's tough to pack in credits into an already-cramped zine, but no reason I can't keep better tabs on whose work I'm repurposing and provide adequate credit.
plans on printing this one?
Oh, yes.