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The Astral TurtleCraft
🕑 Added 2025-01-31 15:32:56 +0000 UTCAt first encounter, this appears to be something akin to one of the massive dead gods that lie abandoned in the astral – an incredible dragon turtle of immense scale, petrified and silent. And indeed, that is likely what it once was, before it was hollowed out by the Astral Architects.
The self-titled Astral Architects were an order of wizards from many different planes who had met and operated primarily in the astral plane which linked all their worlds together. They named the craft the Tempus Aeternum – a name that has been long forgotten along with the order that crafted it.
Now it is a massive craft powered by a terrifying eldritch engine deep in the bowels of the turtle (seriously, not a figure of speech). The eldritch engine is powered by the souls of lost travellers in the astral – and can “reel in” a soul if linked to someone’s “silver cord”.
The eldritch engine is tended by the forsaken – the husks of the “Astral Architects” who created this monstrosity. These are the original tenders of the engine, dating back to its creation. Their souls are stretched thin, their minds nearly erased by the horrors of their work. Each of the forsaken wears a stonework mask to conceal their empty eyes and gaunt faces – they “live” in the engine room on the lowest tier of the craft. You can look down upon the chamber from the main level and midships deck through heavy darkened glass or crystal walls – but actual access to the engine room is via the basement level.
The basement level is split into two sections – one for the primary crew (currently nearly empty) and the other for the engine. The engine room looks dark and “off” when viewed through the walls above, but is a place of horrors in person. The air is thick with the stench of iron and death and the whispers of the damned; the only light coming from the engine itself and the strange alien plants growing around it. The walls of the chamber are deep red and are inscribed with macabre murals depicting the suffering of the trapped souls; a grim reminder of the price of power.
Vivisector Calizo is the current master of this craft, but their very small crew are just learning how to use the eldritch engine. The craft is currently adrift and running on minimum power until new souls can be fed to it… and if no new souls can be found soon, the Vivisector and the forsaken will start turning on each other aiming to feed each other to the engine. Unfortunately for the Vivisector and his crew, the forsaken’s souls have been stretched far too thin by hundreds of years in the engine room and cannot feed the craft… But a group of adventurers might do perfectly.
Physically, the entrance to the craft is on the main level (upper left) – a massive set of gates set into the mouth of the turtle. There is one level below the entrance level (the crew quarters and engine room), and several levels above. The highest two levels have no stairs – access is via a straight vertical shaft that leads up between them (perfect for astral use, but a pain in the ass when in proximity to anything that produces a gravity field).
The only inhabitants are Calizo and their skeleton crew, the forsaken, and a small number of malevolent wraiths that lurk about, souls that managed to escape the engine before being completely consumed.
This map was drawn for the Gaxx Worx adventure “Wrath of the Sea Lich” (based on an earlier map by Augustinael for the Gaxx Worx adventure “The Fate of Chentoufi”). The text and descriptions in this post are unrelated to that work, and are based on ideas that struck me while I was drawing it. The text is in part inspired by a D&D campaign I ran a decade or so ago where the adventurers turned the shell of a dragon turtle into their primary means of travel – when they acquired the shell it was being used by a group of raiders as a boat. Still, they soon upgraded it to fly like some magic-powered medieval Gamera.
The 600 dpi version of the map was drawn at a scale of 150 pixels per square and is 9,300 x 11,700 pixels in size (62 x 78 squares). To use this with a VTT you would need to resize the squares to 70 pixels (for the recommended 5′ squares) – so resizing it to 4,340 x 5,460.
https://dysonlogos.blog/2025/01/31/the-astral-turtlecraft/
