Unicorn RampantClaw / Claw / Bite magazine & Tabletop Role-Playing Games

Here’s a bit of description I wrote for the Savage Tide game I’m running. Feel free to borrow it or use it for inspiration for your game’s journeys through the underworld.

And so the journey begins. Throwing off the mooring ropes and raising the anchor, the Sea Wyvern leaves the docks and sails upstream on the river Styx.

Thick fog blankets the moors and cliffs of hades. As the hours pass the cliffs to the right fall away and the flow of the Styx slows. The sky above is black, broken by several orbs of different sizes – some large as platters, other smaller than Greyhawk copper half-pennies. Sarial’s skeletal styxian linnorm and conjured hell-wind continue to propel the ship upstream through the swamps. Green, gray and black foliage stretch out as far as can be seen. Hunger and thirst come to some, sleep to others, but there is no measuring of days here. No sun ever shines in the middle underworld.

But eventually there is a dawn, of sorts. The swamps run against a range of moutians, and the river you sail upon flows down out of a valley between the peaks. A stronger wind is summoned and the ship sails up into the mountains. Behind the peaks the sky is lit by a fiery radiance. As you sail into the mountains you see a bleak and lifeless landscape, punctuated by pits in the ground. Atop one of the mountains you spot a iron fortress with horrible winged things aloft above it. You have returned to Pazunia – the plane of infinate portals. Soon a braying of hounds is heard echoing against the steep rocky slopes. A pack of wild dogs, their bodies aflame, run along the ship for a time snarling, barking, and aventually stop to let their tongues of flame drape over their fangs.

More days pass sailing across this barren hellscape. Eventually the river’s course winds into a mountain-side cave, and you sail in. A wind picks up and quickly escilates to a howling roar. Conversation is only possible by shouting, and Sarial’s conjured wind fails. Only the linnorm’s tireless swimming pulls the ship against the sometimes raging current in the tunnels you now navigate. Some take refuge from the wind below decks but even in their fitful sleep’s dreams the wind screams.

After a maddening eternity of deafening wind the tunnels you follow open up onto the middle of a steep cliffisde. Rock looms above to to port. The river runs along a jagged channel on the steep slope, and to starboard a vast void is filled with twisting rivulets of flame, floating rocky debris, and globules of liquid, all constantly stirred by a whipping wind. As you sail beside this sight the elemental mixture you see changes constantly, fire becomming water, only to vanish into air, then to solidify into stone again.