Those Fragile Bridges (Aclas Hexcrawl)

Far in the south of Aclas, in the Yaladine archipelago, is an island, and a looming tower. Sailors call it the Lure - they say it glows at night, and is the home of misshapen beasts and a cult who wishes to flood the world - so they keep their distance.

It is, in truth, a prison, or a toybox. Domain of the Mystic who calls himself Puyinthel - mystic of the focus Control. From his tower he watches you dance, and he calls you his. Escape attempts are untenable as long as he lives - from miles away he looks down, reading thoughts and breaking necks.

Your parents lived and died on this island. You don't plan to do the same.

Random Encounters

2. The mystic's attention - he checks a snapshot of your fears, emotional state, and obsessions (as Insight) for anything out of the ordinary. The hair on the back of your neck rises.

3. 2d4 Pursuers (1 HD, shields, swords, shortbows) - Puyinthel's guards and killers, armed with figments of his imagination. Barbed arrows damage you again each time you move between hexes - but they'll catch you if you slow. If you roll an 8, this is the full set of Pursuers and includes Inga.

4. A cow-sized nudibranch (stats as carrion crawler) festooned with Sithican decorations in verdigrised bronze.

5. A recurring NPC - if the players have met no one, a fisher from Home out on a pleasant walk :)

6. 1d6 predatory lungfish (1 HD, slow movement, ambush predators, bite +1 1d6) drag themselves out from the damp earth.

7. Siwatu Amaechi, a hapless soldier (2 HD, big spear, real armor) from some island or another, now washed up on the Lure. 

8. The Ghost.

Hex Keys

A1: Home

A fishing village of a couple hundred - with no boats. Its residents dive, or fish with spears, but never further from shore than they can swim.  

Well, almost no boats - Puyinthel's eight Pursuers live in a long hall, and keep one among them to hunt for those desperate few who try to swim. Their foreign captain (and Duelist A, with the Vom Tag technique of her former Ossean training), Inga, tires of this post - Puyinthel provides them little for their loyalty. She is, in a way, just as much a captive as you. If you hunted down the deserter in C2, this would be enough to turn her towards you, and away from the Mystic.

A2: Sea Serpent

A great snake made of gold writhes offshore - it has been dying, bleeding glowing ichor into the sea, for decades. Ever since Puyinthel struck it down.

Serpentists see this as an extremely heavy-handed and not particularly positive omen - and for more materialist PCs, the dying snake means anyone swimming or sailing through this region has a 4-in-6 chance to be crushed, drowned, reduced to splinters, et cetera. 

Its blood ignites like gasoline. Its hatred of Puyinthel burns like the sun.

B1: Graveyard

Where the Mystic leaves broken toys. Sometimes, whether he doesn't trust them or because he's just bored, someone from Home gets an invitation to his tower - and when he's tired of them, they find themselves thrown, bodily, to the west to shatter on the ground.

These people are only buried at night, when the villagers think the Mystic isn't looking. 

And during these nights, and their vigils, a ghost stalks the graveyard. It tears at its own grave, howls at the rising sun, howls at the Panopticon, screams and screams and screams and screams its childrens' names and its parents' names and then, in the middle of a syllable, falls silent.

If it were given someone to possess, it could think. And it could take revenge. It knows this - and it screams this, in those moments when it is conscious enough to communicate.

B2: Panopticon

The pillar of the tyrant, manifestation of Control. To be detailed in an upcoming GLAUGUST post. 

B3: Shipwreck

Once the pirate ship Never Seen This Man In My Life, Officer - now, a ruin, scythed apart by coral and stones. Inside is a sole survivor, mind fizzing from exposure to Puyinthel, maddened by the belief that he is that mystic.

On his hip is an immense break-action pistol (1d8+4 damage, ignores armor, two-handed) - four brass cartridges jangle in his pouch, and a fifth is loaded.

C1: Sithican Temple

A buried ruin, carved with angular squid. Its half-sunken, gateless door is just large enough for you to crawl through, into a claustrophobic tunnel flooded with sticking, drowning mud.

Past this, the temple opens - a dark room, filled up to your knees in silty water. Rolling in it, desperate to stop itself from asphyxiating, is a multicolored cow-sized sea slug (stats as carrion crawler). 

Behind the nudibranch, on a mud-covered stone plinth, is a pearlescent chalice of piercingly blue water. Those who sip from it feel as if they are drowning, and then "die", for three hours - they still move, and speak, and think, but according to spells, spirits, anyone you ask, and mind-reading, there is nothing here but a corpse. There are six doses.

C2: Deserter's Camp

Surrounded by noisemakers on strings. In the center, Matvei fails to sleep. He fled from the Pursuers out of conscience - unable to bear any more time acting as the Mystic's boot.

Inga will execute him if he is captured - she has a reputation to uphold. 

For G L Å U G U S T 2 0 2 5 - prompt 5:1 "Tiny regional hexcrawl"