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Tuesday, July 29, 2014

Map for The Dig + Cambrian Organisms

So here's the map for The Dig, a minidungeon on Hex 0905 of the Frogstar Peninsula hexcrawl.


I'm planning on sticking the map on the right side of a page, so the elongated shape won't be too annoying.

Basically, morlocks and their chelinausca master were digging a secret subterranean highway nearby when they noticed a bunch of humans excavating fossils a nearby hillside.  They've decided to kill all the humans.  Rocks from fossil beds (and oil reservoirs) are pretty much impregnated with about 1000 ghosts/cu. ft., so it wasn't too hard for the chelinausca necromancer to agitate the ghosts into forming a life node, which is causing the fossils to spontaneously reincarnate as organic ghost manifestations.  Their biologies are built from their own memories, so some details aren't quite right.  Anomalocaris, for example, is twice as big as it should be and can fly for some reason.


In addition to morlocks and a couple of chelinausca, here are some critters that are running around.

TRILOBITES

some trilobites were fancy, you know
this is a bourgeoisie trilobite
you can tell from the puffy sleeves
and the gold pocketwatch
(WARNING: there is a small chance your PC may be turned into a half-human/half-trilobite hybrid)  
of course trilobites can curl up

MARRIA

just floating mouths
of course, they were ridiculously tiny, but what if they were tall and walked around on little leaf legs?
when I die, I hope my bones remain in an interesting position in 500 years
sorta reminiscent of one of Scrap's drawings.

MOTHERFUCKING ANOMALOCARIS!!!

when anomalocaris was discovered, they thought it was three separate beasties
they thought the mouth was a pair of shrimp that had died near each other
and the mouth was some sort of jellyfish
and the body was some sort of leafy plant
you can still see the jellyfish-shrimp-leaf in old illustrations
so the grabby spike fangs look pretty horrible
but you may be thinking:
"whatever, it's got a butthole for a mouth, how can it hurt me"
to which I say
"impaling tongue spikes"
based on a true a story

OPABINIA
opabinia had 5 eyes
and a central mouth tentacle-pincer
YES, SIR ANOTHER PERFECTLY NORMAL EARTH ANIMAL

EURYPTERIDS
okay, technically eurypterids aren't found in the burgess shale
but you don't know that
they came 100 million years later
that's like nothing, honestly 

I'm not even sure this one is an eurypterid
that's probably a scuba-diver, though

OTTOIA

FUN FACT: this is not a penis

AAAAAAAAAAGH

HALLUCIGENIA
someone drew an anthro version of hallucigenia
this actually makes more sense that what we think hallucigenia really looked like
THIS WAS A REAL THING
YES, A PERFECTLY NORMAL EARTHLING
CAN YOU GUESS WHAT IT DOES IN COMBAT?


6 comments:

  1. Fun times. Way back when Dragon magazine had a whole bunch of Burgess shale creatures made huge and statted out for Bughunters (remember Bughunters?).

    Anyway if you want to see a space marine fighting a hallucigenia as illustrated by DeTerlizzi - http://annarchive.com/files/Drmg204.pdf

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    1. I wanted to see a space marine fighting a hallucigenia by Deet, thanks!

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  2. Recent thinking on Hallucigenia holds that earlier ideas have the thing upside down, and that it is somewhat related to the modern velvet worms. This page includes a fun animated Hallucigenia of the more recent conception.

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  3. That Dragon article is awesome, even if the scan isn't that great. I'd never heard of Sanctacaris or Yohoia before, even if the last sounds more like it should be in a scenario with pirates. ;)

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  4. The Hallucigenia pictures are way outdated. But more accurate modern reconstructions still look very weird.
    http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-NrAvioSFDhc/U0q7sRt9AzI/AAAAAAAABu8/EpibRTA1OAc/s1600/hallucigenia_illustration_03__by_dirk_wachsmuth_sg.jpg

    Oh, and Opabinia's mouth was located behind the proboscis, not at the end of it.

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    1. True, probably, yeah. I've been following hallucigenia reconstructions. But this is happily more of an "inspired by" dungeon rather than an actual museum.

      Still, nice picture. Thanks for posting a link.

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