I could very easily have titled this post “How to Use a Published Adventure to Establish an Adventure Site“. I didn’t because that title would be ridiculously long and foolishly boring. People already click past my posts at near the speed of light. So, instead, I used the name of the dwarven castle in the above published Dungeons and Dragons supplement from 1995. The name means “griffon nest” in the Kundarak dwarven language.
The supplement provides the interior floor plans of the castle embedded in the mountainside. It saves a lot of work. Making castle floor plans takes time.
Once you have the place established, then you have to populate it with non-player characters. This dwarf castle has a mining operation. You only reach the castle site by air, so there is an exterior tower that contains a griffon aerie. You have to ride a griffon to enter the castle.
If you don’t have a crazy griffon rider like Madryk Featherstone to give you a ride through the air to the castle in the side of the Graywall Mountains, then you have to come through the mines which are so deep they connect to the underworld.
Solfaera Dezzav, the drow dark elf, was exiled by the drow people in the underdark of the Khyber realm. She came to Kaurak Kholzil as a refugee and helped to set up the protective network that shields the castle from the terrible things that lurk under the mountain.
The rulers of Kaurak Kholzil are Daggan Mastersmith, the King Dwarf, his wife, Rorrina Gembright Mastersmith, and his father-in-law, Dennin Gembright. They mine the precious and martial metals of Kaurak Kholzil. Daggan is a particularly severe and demanding ruler, rather joyless and humorless. His wife is much younger than he and is a bright soul who often suffers in the darkness her husband rules. She often seeks solace and entertainment from visiting adventurers. Dennin, the old dwarf, once ruled here. but now is a bit of a doddering buffoon, no longer capable of thinking in straight lines.
Of course, there are a lot of other colorful characters that live in Kaurak Kholzil. They all have their personality quirks and know things that could lead to future adventures.
Some of them, like the Mastersmith Twins who raise and cook giant spiders to feed the castle on spider steaks, are potential comedy relief. But they can also serve as noble castle defenders, using meat cleavers and enraged spiders to take on any invaders.
So there is a little insight into the mind of a dungeon master who steals good adventure ideas from published sources and embellishes them at will to continue to make the game interesting. If you are a dungeon master too, feel free to steal all these ideas for your own D & D game.
Catch a Falling Star 
Mickey Makes Manga Art
I always loved this song. When I was a boy, it was the song I would sing when I was alone in the darkness. It made me feel better, able to march toward home in spite of potential spooks and brain-eating zombies. The weight of the invisible future world could not drag me down if this tune was in my head, filling it with helium and good spirit; it allowed me to fly.
And when I listened to it playing on the radio… I always paused and listened to at least a couple of verses no matter what I was doing… I never once thought of Johnny Nash as a black man. I didn’t know he was black until I first saw a picture of him. But even then I didn’t think, “Oh, he’s a black man.” I thought, “Oh, he’s a man like me.” But, I, of course, am not black. I’m not really white either. I am a kind of pale pink to mauve mottled color with dark pink psoriasis spots in random places all over me. It is the man on the inside that is like Johnny Nash, full of uplifting things, and goofy grins, and… hopefully, hope.
But when I was young it wasn’t only singing “I Can See Clearly Now…” in my goofy farmboy voice that filled my head with air and allowed me to float away from the troubles of the world. I also learned to draw Manga style, in the tradition of Osamu Tezuka’s Astroboy , filtered through hours of practice copying Walt Kelly’s Pogo characters and various Disney cartoons.
I copied the over-large eyes and big-headed cutsieness that informed the Japanese idea of the world after the atom bombs fell on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. I tried to capture innocence and wonder and adventure in drawings that took my mind off the terrible things of my childhood, being sexually assaulted, the assassinations of JFK and his brother RFK, and Martin Luther King Jr, the Viet Nam War, and Nixon with Watergate. You can reclaim innocence and peace of mind, if you get the lines just right, and the proportions are good, and the character has just the right expression on their sweet little faces.
Okay, maybe not always so sweet and innocent. This is not the Dorothy I would want to mess with. This girl is cocky, sure of herself, and more than a little impish. A destroyer of wicked witches, that one.
But that’s what Manga Art is all about. You whistle away the darkness one drawing at a time. And there’s plenty of darkness to whistle away anymore, isn’t there? What with Tronald Dump taking on the NFL over the American Flag and National Anthem, Tronald Dump taking on Jim Kong Oon in an insult war backed up by ICBMs, and Congress busily trying to take away all our access to health care. (I know I misspelled some names there, but I am tired of talking about that guy that Dorothy told me I should call the “orange-faced poop sack.” No, Dorothy, I can’t call him that. Using language like that robs my head of its helium.) So, what do I do now about the state of the world? Well, here is the Manga Art I drew last night.
Catgirl and White-haired Snow White with a ping pong ball in her mouth.
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Filed under artists I admire, artwork, autobiography, cartoons, cartoony Paffooney, commentary, goofiness, goofy thoughts, humor, Paffooney, strange and wonderful ideas about life
Tagged as manga-style art, Osamu Tezuka, Walt Kelly