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Circe’s Palace
🕑 Added 2025-01-22 15:16:17 +0000 UTCI was setting up for a game of the Agon RPG (where the PCs travel from mysterious island to mysterious island, face the challenges there, and then move on trying to get home) when I remembered the old RoleAids Wizards book and one of my favourite sequences within – where the AD&D party becomes part of the Odyssey and arrive at Circe’s Island. The main thing I loved was the extensive random table to see what capricious bullshit the gods bless / curse the party with each day. This is a redesign / redraw of Circe’s Palace from that adventure.
Circe’s Palace is an exercise in movie-pastiche-Greek design. A palace constructed entirely of massive stone columns with the main hallways having no roof over them. Between the columns are billowing shimmering gossamer walls of fish scales given to Circe by her mother Perse, the ocean nymph. The curtains are sheer during the day, and opaque at night – further they are immune to fire and even the sharpest blade cannot cut them. They may look light and pointless, but they will prevent anyone unauthorized from moving through the palace except along the open paths through the main chamber, along the grassy halls, and through to Circe’s personal areas on the north side of the palace. The gossamer walls are impenetrable except to Circe and her 129 daughters and granddaughters for whom they part with but a brush of the hand. The entrance to the palace is also sealed off with these same curtains at night, keeping strangers and thieves in the night at bay.
Behind the palace are many animal pens – the largest is for the many goats kept here, with other pens for swine, peacocks, jackals, wolves, sheep, weasels, rabbits, skunks, mules, swans, and oxen. Of course, these animals are not natural, but are adventurers and sailors who landed here and were judged unworthy by Circe and turned into the animal type that most suits them. In time, these animals will be served up as a feast for the next group of sailors to arrive on the islands, or perhaps used to feed the many solitary lions on the islands that are Circe’s remaining sons.
The 1200 dpi versions of the map were drawn at a scale of 300 pixels per square and are 16,500 x 14,400 pixels (55 x 48 squares). To use this with a VTT you would need to resize the squares to either 70 pixels (for 5′ squares) or 140 pixels (for the recommended 10‘ squares that make sense with the furnishings shown) – so resizing the image to 3,850 x 3,360 pixels or 7,700 x 6,720 pixels, respectively.
https://dysonlogos.blog/2025/01/22/circes-palace/
