Hi everyone, and welcome back to the Finder’s Archives.
In this column, we take some of the lands from Magic: The Gathering and turn them into something you can use for your fantasy games.
The stats given in each entry assumes that you’re using Pathfinder 2 for your games, but they can easily be converted over into any fantasy system. This week we trek across the barren moor.
Barren Moor
The Barren Moor lies to the west of the civilized world, far away from anywhere that anyone with any sense would want to live. There is plenty of animal life on the moor, but there is no shelter, nor trees, nor anything else that you could make housing from that would sustain you in the arctic-like winters. Nevertheless, the barren moor has an important use in the world, and there is a single road that leads to the center of it, hundreds of miles in, and usually only traversable a few weeks of the year. And the center is where everyone who comes to the barren moor eventually goes, as it is the physical anchor of an extradimensional prison called Purgatory.
Lay of the Land
The moor stretches from the center and hundreds of miles out in all directions. It is almost entirely featureless, and flat, with sinkholes hidden beneath shallow pools of water and small tufts of grass. Apart from the road, it is only possible to move across the moor by either flying or via a flat-bottomed skiff that can skim across the tops of any of the small dirt mounds and pools. As a result, it is utterly inhospitable especially when the wind scours the area which it does frequently, often with winds at near hurricane-levels.
At the center of this misery is Purgatory. An extradimensional prison fashioned ages ago by devils. And for a price, they’ll accept anyone into the prison, whether guilty or not. Once inside Purgatory, you do not leave until your term is up. And the devils are not willing to take bribes, as it would compromise not only their lawful nature but also the oath that they took when the prison was established. Escape is extremely rare, though not unheard of. In those cases, hunting parties of devils are organized and sent out to hunt down the prisoner and bring them back. Normally the prisoner is not killed unless they’ve somehow managed to severely injure or kill one of the guards.
Dangers
The moor itself is dangerous from having sinkholes (treat as pitfalls that deal no damage, but where you start to drown instead) to devil hunting parties. These hunting parties vary greatly in strength, depending on the prisoner that has escaped, but can consist of any combination of devils (and the rare evil mortal) and vary from CR 5 for simple escapees to CR 20 for extremely dangerous prisoners.
Kim Frandsen
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