CotAB: Entry 11 (tesh pains)

We journeyed to the town of Teshwave.

If I understand my pop music history, Tesh Wave was less important than the New Wave movement, but still plenty important in progressive new age circles.

We decided to take a river cruise to the city. The last thing I expected was for the ship to be taken by pirates. I was sorta hoping that The Tesh would make a concert appearance on deck. After dispatching the pirates, the captain gave us his own personal thumbs up, which is nice just in case The Tesh shows up on the way back downriver and dazzles us with some wicked piano.


Teshwave had its own share of boring tales.


Fortunately Teshwave also had its share of unexplained ruins just outside of town. Here is our map of Teshwave:


You'll notice from our map that the only real interesting stuff in the ruins happen near the beginning. We got into a skirmish with a wacko priest (lots of those guys around -- business must be good), some fighters and some hellbeasts. They were chasing around a map like a bunch of keystone cops. The map was described to us as a "cryptic map marked with an X." How cryptic is that? Everyone knows that a map marked with an X is not cryptic. The X is always treasure (unless it's porn). Maybe we should have just called it a cliche'd map.

Notice the question marked area in the middle of the map. That area led to a weird other area that we mapped out over to the left side. I don't know if the ruins are cursed or something, but we found ourselves infinitely going through doors to the south. We could get out by searching north, but we didn't find anything in the area besides the heartache of infinite trapping.

After nailing the treasure we bumped into beastie encounters right out of The Island of Dr. Moreau.

These cat things were at least part Connery.
These phase spiders actually didn't appear in battle, which was totally unfair. They get phasing powers and cloaking powers? It's just like that one episode of Next Generation where they come across an experimental Romulan ship that was trying to achieve just that. In this case, however, I think it was a bug in the bugs' programming.
Here is a margoyle. He's thinking.

So yeah. That's it. We still have bonds that control us. Or do they? They haven't done anything to us at all since we're "off the path." We could live out the rest of our lives as adventurers and the bonds wouldn't affect us at all as long as we stay in the right dive towns.

Anyway, Rexbasior carried a few sets of splint mail with him all through the ruins because he thought they were magical. They were only worth 40 gp. Ha!


In some exciting cartography news, we've hit upon an exciting new development. What has happened in the past is that Silver would use her magic quill of cartography, then Disposo would take the parchment and use his scanner of fortitude, then I would retrace the map into another mapbook, then Chlorine would add the calligraphy, then Pilgrim would cast a publishment spell into the blog. The process building the maps has just had too many steps. Well, just a couple of minutes ago, I found a really simple feature in my Book of Photoshop that makes the quilling of Silver and the scanning of Disposo obsolete. We also came across the Quill of Wacom that makes us all able to quill directly into our book of maps. We also overlapped the mapbook with the Book of Photoshop so that we have some serious grid going.

To sum up: a Wacom Tablet and actually bothering to flip the grid option on in Photoshop, should make mapmaking much much easier.

Here's the vid: