Sunday, September 16, 2007

I Love Lighthouses!

There appear to be some gremlins in Act I. I'm not sure exactly what's going on because they didn't appear in my play-throughs. Other than to say I'll be handing the beta to a third tester in the coming days, I'll keep mum about Act I until I diagnose what's going on. However...

What's This About Lighthouses?
There's something about the lonely, seaside monoliths that just screams "adventure" to me. Though it's not considered one of the all-time greats, one of my personal favorite Dr. Who adventures is "The Horror of Fang Rock," which saw the Doctor trapped in a lighthouse with a mystery killer that offed the inhabitants one by one. It was fantastically spooky, and when the Doctor was asked, "You mean there's no way to contact the mainland?" the chill with which Tom Baker imparted the response, "Oh, no... We're on our own now..." still stirs my imagination.

Fans of my past work may remember the lighthouse in "Saleron's Gambit: Part 4" in which I set up a double-murder suicide that saw the murderer come back as a wraith inhabiting the cellars. This choice of locales was not a coincidence. It was the first sidequest I made in that module and the first map period other than the principal town of New Amn.

And so I can announce that, yes, I've gone back to the same well. There's another lighthouse in "The Maimed God's Saga." And in keeping with the overall theme of decay, this one's ruined, destroyed in a natural disaster that occurred in DR 1323, 51 years before the campaign opens, and, yes, there are more sinister happenings there.

And so, again, the lighthouse point was the first map I made after the main town. I leave you with a picture of the approach at dusk when the PC comes across one of the inhabitants who doesn't seem to want to stay dead... Gee, maybe a cleric has a special way of dealing with such creatures...

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