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 for your games, but they can easily be converted over into any fantasy system. This week we dodge magical fields and effects, and hostile creatures in the Blasted Landscape.
Blasted Landscape
The blasted landscape is the leftovers of a series of magical battles fought between two competing nations. Nations that have now forgotten that they were ever at war, much less a magical one, as this was a war fought in the shadows.
Two of the premier magical academies of the day had set themselves up in rivaling kingdoms, and over a few decades, they built not only a feud with each other but a bitter rivalry, with each setting the other up to fall in ever-increasingly nasty ways. These included the kidnapping of family members of the other academy’s members, as well as forced slavery through enchantment spells and mind-wiping.
This all came to a head when the headmistress of one of the academies was ambushed, and almost died, at the hands of three leading members of the other academy, two of whom were killed, and the third banished to the Nine Hells.
At that point, all-out war broke out, and everyone got roped in. The final battle took place as the Blasted Landscape, and what happened here no one is sure of. What has been gleaned from the pages of history, suggest a CATACLYSMIC battle between the two nations – one that ended in all participants on both sides killed, and a powerful spell that wiped the memory of the war from everyone’s mind. Now it’s a desolate place, inhabited only by the wicked, the insane, or the desperate.
Lay of the Land
This is a place of horrors. Nothing is what it seems, and what is there one minute could easily be gone the next. People have described the blasted landscape as looking into a different world, through a broken pane of glass, but one where each shard of glass is from a different time and made of a different material. This is because it is in fact phasing in and out of time and reality. At any given time, you could encounter creatures from the past or the future here, or from a different plane. Sound is weirdly distorted as well, and voices that do not exist can often be heard. The only sense that remains strangely unaffected is that of taste.
Dangers
In a place like this, there are lots of dangers. Magic has a 50% chance of going wild (use the same effects as a rod of wonder), a 25% chance of working at minimal effect, and a 25% chance of working at maximum effect. Creature-wise there are plenty of threats; golems, fiends, and elementals of all sorts can be found here. However, 2 creatures stand out: The muurfeli who seems to have been born here, as a result of the magical catastrophe that’s taken place and a single Lerritan that seems totally intent on dominating the area. It destroys anything it comes across, but it is also the oldest creature in the area by a wide margin, and likely the only one that knows what originally happened. It’s not bright, however, and doesn’t often feel like sharing any information with creatures smaller or weaker than it is.
Kim Frandsen
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