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 or 5e for your games, but they can easily be converted over into any fantasy system. Today, or was it yesterday, or perhaps even tomorrow we find/found ourself/ourselves at the Corrupted Crossroads.
Corrupted Crossroads
Sages know that at the center of all time lies an area known as the Crossroads. From here it is possible to reach every potential timeline in the multiverse. It is a maddening place and only those deities who have control over time are able to comprehend it fully. Unfortunately, these sages are incorrect in their assumption that there is only one Crossroads, for the Crossroads has a darker twin, the Corrupted Crossroads. This is where time itself goes to die. It is the final resting place of all the timelines where the multiverse ended, and there is a staggering amount of them. It is guarded, some would say nourished, by an order of monks called the Eternal Pilgrims, for those who come here are stuck in time. The monks are all of various races, with none of them particularly prevalent. They all wear dark grey robes and hide their faces from visitors. It is said (though no one knows for certain) that they do not even show their faces to other members of the order.
Lay of the Land
The Corrupted Crossroads is a floating island about 3 miles square, upon which is a broken down and ruined cathedral to an unknown deity of time – one that not even the Eternal Pilgrims, who have seemingly been here forever, know who is. Perhaps it is from a timeline that somehow never existed, even as a potential. The island itself is bare and devoid of all vegetation or water, but those who come here find that while they do need sleep to clear their mind, their bodies seem able to persist forever, without food and water. Perhaps even without aging.
From the island are a number of roads and bridges wrought from shadow and darkness. They stretch out to infinity and intertwine and mix with each other to create an impossibly complex weave of darkness. These are the timelines that ended, but anyone who makes it to the Corrupted Crossroads can walk them, and experience what happened.
Dangers
There are no hostile creatures within the Corrupted Crossroads. Even directly attacking the Eternal Pilgrims does not provoke them, as they simply believe that their time has come and that resistance is pointless. The main danger within the Corrupted Crossroads is two-fold though: Walking the timelines that end exposes one to the risk that you’ll be captured within that timeline, dragged in, and eventually destroyed outright, just like it was. An intrepid hero might not even make it to the end of the timeline, as there is a risk of being sucked in much earlier than the end of it, such as being stuck in the Stone Age of the timeline, while it ends somewhere around the invention of Steam.
Secondly, getting back to the REAL timelines is more or less impossible, and can only be done through the use of complicated wish or miracle spells, or the direct intervention of a god of Time. Then again, getting to the Corrupted Crossroads in the first place requires a hero to survive an apocalypse and then engage in time travel, so it may be easier to leave than arrive.
See you next time? Or is the previous one? Who knows! 😊
Kim Frandsen
Latest posts by Kim Frandsen (see all)
- Finder’s Archive – Crypt of the Eternals - June 2, 2023
