The Giant's Dollhouse

This is/was (hello Time Travelers!) my entry in the One Page Dungeon Contest 2013.

Click here to download the PDF.

If you want to tinker with it, I've uploaded the original SVG file along with the drawing I did to a folder on Google Drive. You can view the folder here.

I'd like to revisit Pöppelman, maybe write something about his family. Or expand the list of petrified people he's used in his dollhouse. But not tonight!

The Swords of Ålrick the Hairy Barbarian

During his lifetime, Ålrick the Hairy Barbarian had him made a lot of different swords, not only due to his high demands and many wars, but also boredom.

On his eighteenth birthday, Ålrick was given a choice of weapon to represent him on the battlefield - the swiftness of a sword, or the might of an axe. Ålrick couldn't decide, and demanded a combination of them both.

The Shillyshally. Ålrick's first swaxe

During the Wicked Witch Wars, Ålrick ordered a new kind of weapon that not only would spread fear among his enemies, but also show Ålrick's more compassionate side. A weapon that would allow him to go into gruesome battle with his beloved.

He called it the Handholder.

The Handholder

(Although after recovering from the Wicked Witches Love Won't Tear You Apart Curse, he denied ever having ordered such a strange sword.)

As Ålrick grew older, he ordered more and more strange swords. As an elderman of his tribe, he mostly sat on his throne and occupied his blacksmith with stranger and stranger requests.

One of these turned into the Umlaut, a tribute from himself to himself.

The Umlaut

What the one-eyed angler offered me

Flash fearsday: Ms. Bézier

Yes, yes, too many points on those curves, dear. We definitely need to straighten you out, but the knife will take care of that, Ms. Bézier.

Synopsis: A 3-D message for the kids

Synopsis

Old peaceful city in desert. 

Predicted their doom in their calender. Wanted to save something for the kids. Used arcane devices (cameras) to record a normal day in their life (in full 3-D). 

Devices uses blessed water to store information, kept in urns. One for audio, one for visual.

City and people perished. All that's left in the ruins are urns with water (tapes) and large hollow craniums (playback devices). But the water slowly evaporated, distorting the information, making them nightmare versions of what really happened.

Pouring the water into the skulls will play the scenes in full 3-D (as a hologram).

They last about 30 sec - 2 min, and will repeat forever if not poured back.

25 % risk the recordings will become aware of the present, breaking through time and space. Depending on how distorted the information is, the beings in the recordings may react hostile.

A tall pillar stands alone in the center of the ruins. Carved ideograms on its sides tells the story of the now gone inhabitants (keyed version at the bottom):

Hexenbrachen. Hex 0107

Hex 0107
Unsinkable cursed buckets. Lots of.

This area contains a lot of wooden buckets, floating but not drifting.

A curse of buoyancy keeps them floating, despite being filled with water and fish.

They served as helmets for the gnomes operating the now crashed airship (hex 2208). The creator of these unsinkable "helmets" had a theory that if enough airship passengers wore these helmets, the airship would defy gravity and keep itself floating (since an airborne vessel sinks much like a stone in water - slow, but steady).

It worked perfectly, until the gnomes got drunk one night and started throwing the buckets overboard (hex 0107). They crashed in hex 2208 eventually with the helmet maker as the sole survivor.

See the rest of the hexes over at The Hexenbrachen page here: http://save.vs.totalpartykill.ca/grab-bag/hexenbracken/