The Dripping Tap

Shalom and salutations ! Bringing you an update on MYR REGATH, my dungeon23 megadungeon inspired by my love of ruined-cities-as-dungeons and inspired by Jewish mythology. Last month I did an esoteric experiment with the Sefirot, but for the season of scares, I decided the opposite level would be THE JEWISH UNDERWORLD ! Don't Jewish people not believe in Hell? Or an underworld? What's going on? Sh'eol is a word that appears 66 (ish) times in the Torah. Many secular Jews and scholars put Sh'eol as cognate with "the grave". It comes to what we call contemporary or Rabbinic Judaism from the religion of the Ancient Israelites . There's not extensive fables of characters seeing what's down in Sh'eol, but it comes out of the Near Eastern underworld traditions like The Akkadian  Erṣetu  and Sumerian  Kur . Like the underworld present in The Epic of Gilgamesh , these peoples believed the underworld as both the destination for human spirits, otherworldly spi...

Vast and trunkless legs of stone  found here  (GLOGtober 23') CHALLENGE #1  [ PRIMEUMATON ] 5.  Cool things to replace your eyes, teeth, and fingernails with. The sheydim will never forgive mankind the transgression of working metal. In the days before The Great Flood , the sheydim were supreme upon the face of the Earth. They need not fear that their desires and will would be rebuffed, they had no equals among the beings of clay and earth. Then a sheydim visited sickness upon a family, taking Jabal, Jubal and Naamah down to Sheol in sickness. They spared their sibling Tubalcain , and this was another mistake. Tubalcain - long having listened to the songs of stones - trekked to the top of Mount Qaf . At its summit it's said he tore his shirt, seven times seven lightning bolts cracked across the sky, and G-d gave him the knowledge he wanted for revenge. Tubalcain came down from the mountain, crowned in light and carrying raw ore from the mountain. He was the first to ...

Vast and trunkless legs of stone  found here  (GLOGtober 23') CHALLENGE #3 [Semiurge] Come up with a grimoire with some unique spells, a story behind it, perhaps some trap or riddle to figuring it out, etc The Road of Dead Buddhas A vaguely Middle East + Central Asia inspired setting, evoking the historical Silk Road in themes and setup for adventure. Few walk it in its entirety; yet spices, silk and expensive goods span its whole breadth. When a traveler speaks of the long road, they call it  The Road of Dead Buddhas . Since the ascension of  Annuvaran Monasteries  over those of  The Burning Heart , not a soul can forget the wisdom of the sages: " If you see the Buddha on the road, kill him ." As people travel these lands for gold, certainty and conviction are as picked-over by vultures as the many corpses that litter its trails. Reader Be Warned By the Grace of G-d the Most High, The Merciful, stay away from that book. Rumor says that it come to or corne...

Here's a further update on my Dungeon23 megadungeon, called MYR REGATH , the City of Sortilege!  Last post I talked about coming back around to my cultural roots, transitioning my project into taking heavy inspo from Jewish Mythology, and now I get to share how I've been putting that into practice. In Concept So, looking into Jewish mythology / mysticism, I came across this map.  These are the Sefirot (sing. Sefirah). They are not a physical map so much as a metaphorical, spiritual and esoteric map. These ten spheres are realms or emanations . A basic breakdown being that God cannot appear in the physical world - because He is all powerful - but he must be felt. God's power filters down through these sefirot, compacting and filtering from the power-level of Ein Sof - literally The Infinite - down to the physical realm that humans exist in and can perceive.  Kind of like a beam of sunlight, when refracted in a prism, splays out all of its interior colors, only to be sent...

Vast and trunk-less legs of stone found here (GLOGtober 23') In the beginning, there was nothing but The Deep . Before there was The Deep, there were MONSTERS . As the infinite created Itself - God the Most High creating Himself and making Himself Known - the anti-spark of the first Creation rang out. With the first Light came the first Shadows. The beginning warranted its own antithesis. With no world yet pulled from The Deep to contain themselves, they were souls without bodies. They were The Sheydim . They had souls, and The Most High made them bodies - leaving them unfinished - to rest on the final and seventh day. Some made due without bodies, some took their unfinished bodies and were grateful, others destroyed God's work meant for them. Even to this day they live, and they are numerous. If a mortal were to peer into Al-Ghayb (The Unseen Realm) they would see 1000 sheydim to their left and 10,000 to their right. They outnumber humankind one million times one million fol...

October arrives, and with it many a game design prompt!  The prompts are here courtesy of Glass Candles. I am going to use this as an opportunity to expand my silk-road-inspired setting, unless I decide otherwise idk Will update these as links once they're written and released.    GLOGtober 2023 CHALLENGE #1 Minor Demons Cast in Copper , gain power at the cost of giving up a body part to a Jewish demon Cool things to replace your eyes, teeth and fingernails with! CHALLENGE #2 Random encounters on an ancient road. Most excited for - will include some False Buddhas to defeat and slay, but focus on encounters on THE SHADOW ROADS! The roads never traveled, veiled in shadow, crawling with the afterimage of dead civilizations   CHALLENGE #3 A cool grimoire with unique spells and a riddle/trap Tome of Refractive Planets , a Sufi / al-Buni grimoire shielded from those who would abuse it with the cloak of its own reputation. CHALLENGE #4 Masks, mosques or musks. (+ essential...

Here's another #dungeon23 update for y'all, courtesy of some real "how the sausage is made" historiography on my part. This is for my megadungeon called MYR REGATH, the City of Sortilege. This update honestly has more to do with me as a person and a creative, even more so than the dungeon itself. It has to do with the evolution of doing a project like this over such a long time, going back to my roots, and finally having a mythological framework to tie all these disparate levels together more so than simply "because I like all this crap". Myr Regath began, as an idea I had in 2019, to do a megadungeon of a Tiefling city . Inspired by the 4E supplement Vor Rukoth (which was a sandbox of plot hooks, treasure and locales of a ruined Tiefling city) I thought it would be cool to have a civilizational center of D&D's most iconic ancestry. Infamously my friend cautioned me that our play group "would love it, as long as all the roleplaying, exploration...