Mountain Underground
A downloadable one-shot
You dream of a faceless woman;
she calls you into the spiralling dark,
past the roots of reality,
to the Mountain Underground.
A weird one-shot for Into The Odd and Electric Bastionland.
Run with or without prep, in one session or a few.
The book includes:
- Two new starter package tables, including arcane artisans, and peculiar underfolk
- A short, evocative adventure
- Two dungeon areas, filled with eldrich creatures
- A boss encounter, with an ancient wish-maker
Terrible nightmares have plagued the residents of Gladd's Vale since the old mansion re-appeared on the hill. People go missing on the full moon, alien fauna spreads over the town, and a strange wind howls from the heart of the house.
Enter the overgrown halls of the Manifest House, uncover its secrets, and descend past the thresholds of reality to the Mountain Underground.
If you play the one-shot, please let me know! I'd love to hear your feedback/scathing critique.
Download
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Comments
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This is rad
Is a print version in the works?
Yes! The lovely folks at Copy/Paste have asked me to make a print version for Eco Mofos! So keep a look-out! I'd love to get this version printed one day too though
Magnificent work! I like how it looks like ItO. It would easily pose as an addon sold together with the original
This looks great. Cool vibes, excellent layout and design. However, I can’t figure out how to use this at the table. The mansion is pretty straight forward. But nothing else is very clear to me.
Room 3 of the mansion says that there is an exit to room 10 of the tower, but that’s the end of the tower, not the beginning, and implies that it leads to the underground mountain.
The Tower (p20) says there are 3 floors, each with 3 exits, but there are only tables for the second and third floors, no first floor. (It took me a while to even realize these were tables of the rooms). Can you not return to the first floor?
The tower map (p23) design suggests 6 floors, most with 1 room each, leading mostly linearly.
So, from what I’m understanding you go from the mansion, to room 10 of the tower, to the mountain, and the rest of the tower is not accessible. If that’s a typo and “10” should really be “0”, great, but can I get back to the first floor? How many floors are there, 3 or 6? And do you navigate them as the map suggests or is the map just for flavor and not meant to be useful, even though it’s repeated on each page is if it’s intended to be useful?
I admit I only read this quickly, some of the text (at least towards the end where most of my focus was) doesn’t make sense to me either. For example, the woman gains HP if someone dies near the mountain, but there are no encounters there… unless the PCs die fighting her? So why do I care if anyone dies here unless she kills them?
The whole thing feels like a fever dream, but not the good kind I can run “without prep”. I’m going to guess that think this suffers from a lack of 3rd party play testing. Like I opened with, the layout is masterfully executed for use at the table, but I think some of the content needs to be retooled to make it work.
All that being said, I look forward to seeing more from this creator!
Thanks so much for this! These are things I missed in proofing that need to be clarified; I'll try explaining here, and I expect to release an updated version soon too!
Room 3 of the mansion should absolutely lead to room 0 of the tower - that's really unfortunate typo.
The tower itself is supposed to be linear, leading from the mansion to the mountain. It's split into three floors; the first contains rooms 1, 2, and 3 in order, and the second and third floors should change each time the players enter them. The tower is intended to feel like an unpredictable space, so you can (if you like) roll to see which room the players end up in.
All that to say; I'll be retooling the tower description and adding graphics to the map to better convey the order of the floors!
As for the woman gaining HP; that is intended to happen while fighting her - I reckon I'll add it to her stat block rather than the area description to make that factor easier to parse.
Again, thanks for your feedback! It's really valuable since I am, so far, my only proofreader.