Scribbles and Horrors

Terrifying and wise, the Ormyful are too subtle to be understood.

The Ormyful are huge four-limbed creatures with an eye on each fore-shoulder and a gargantuan mouth opening out where the belly should be.

Although they live for millennia, the Ormyful are not knowledgeable about historical events, or geography, or politics, or magic, literature, chemistry, astronomy, theology, agriculture, engineering, mathematics, architecture, urban design, philology, mycology, or anything at all about the world at large. Instead they stay, for their whole awful and infinite lifespans, stuck in great underground passageways. The Ormyful remain in these dark places, whispering and murmuring to one another an inimitable discourse. They are philosophical animals.

Their philosophy is good—the best, in fact. The Ormyful possess subtle, penetrating, brilliant, perspicacious minds, and keen, light-footed tongues. Nothing matches them. However, it is well known by those who know that it is impossible to converse with an Ormyful.

Firstly they despise people. The existence of others is maddening to the Ormyful. People are loud and small, with rude projects and pathetic aspirations. Their policy is to do away with humans on sight, and they are very fast. Ormyful cannot eat, but they do chew.

Secondly the Ormyful can barely be heard. The most heated arguments are bare whispers to human ears, and it is in a language convoluted and ancient.

(This has not stopped people from trying—the sage Martin Trench spent his livelihood attempting to capture Ormyful discourse and succeeded, in a sense. The result of his decades-long study, augurs, and spell-work are thirty-seven volumes of dense, scribbled text, all but impossible to read. The prose wraps around itself; it is a maze of terminology and allusion, self-referential, dichotomic, poorly phrased. Words had to be invented to describe other words, and even these are inscrutably vague.)

One thing the Ormyful cannot stand are books and the writing. It is a horrible to an Ormyful that a creature capable of thought would imprison words in books–intentionally forget what is necessary, forsake real knowledge, which, to the Ormyful, is intrinsically oral. Books are wrong, disgusting, horrifying, maddening, terrible, fearsome, destructive, evil, noisy, genocidal, and all-consuming. An Ormyful fears nothing more than a library.

On sight of a book the Ormyful shudder into shrieking. This shrieking goes on and on, until all traces of the offensive object are stamped out. They do not want to touch it, and so the Ormyful will collapse ceilings, start fires, smash walls, pulverize the whole area out of manic fear and obsessive terror.

As is widely known (by those who know), the Ormyful are wrong. Their way of being is, simply, and obviously, incorrect. Here are beings who thirst for knowledge but refuse to seek it. They possess impeccable minds and tongues, but broken souls. They are incapable of true learning. In this way they are the most lonely, wretched, hateable creatures. They deserve something like pity and a wide berth.

Some say that they are demons, lost in their despair until the end of days when The God will sweep them up into himself in his all-encompassing benevolence and knowledge of certain Truth.

This is Level EPSILON. It is the first map in my underworld that is completely drawn. Level Epsilon is also a “first level” in the sense that it is one of the levels accessible from the surface, and is a likely place for first level adventurers to explore. There are plenty other entrances to the underworld which could serve this function as well, though.

Before sitting down and actually drawing the map I worked out a outline of the different areas, and choke points between them. I had some idea of what this level needed to do:

1. Connect to levels NU, PI, and ZETA below and to level ALPHA-EPSILON above
2. Serve as an introduction to OD&D and my campaign
3. Have plenty of space for getting lost in and exploring
4. Harbor a couple of big secrets for the party to accidentally uncover

I also had a couple of concepts I knew I wanted to include:

1. Stuff all around–rooms and hallways are crowded, full to the brim with junk
2. “The Players” a theatre-themed monster group
3. Skeletons, because I like skeletons
4. animal-men of some kind
5. “The Winding Way”, a distinct architectural feature that is mysterious, but also helpful for navigation

With these in mind, I divided the sections up more or less arbitrarily. I made sure that every section connected to “The Winding Way” at least once, and made other connections as seemed necessary.

I then went to work on the actual maps themselves. It took about 3 hours for each map, over the course of a couple weeks. I sketched in pencil the outlines of the sections as described in the outline, and more or less let myself go. The result was dungeon sections that were very separated from one another–almost like little islands. While choke points are good, I might experiment with smaller sections and more choke points closer together in the future.

The architectural styles of each of the sections turned out to be very distinct from one another. I didn’t exactly intend this at the beginning, but it’s nice. Each section has a different wandering monster table, so it makes sense that it has a different “feel” as well.

All in all, I’m pleased with the way this map turned out. I am excited to begin keying it, and to have people adventure within.