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. This time we are visited by the Creeping Tar Pit.
Creeping Tar Pit
The Creeping Tar Pit isn’t so much a place as it is a condition of a place. The Pit is mobile, and moves over and consumes the areas that it passes, leaving behind a desolate wasteland where it has passed. It seems to be guided by some form of malevolent intelligence, but no one is sure what or why it is doing what it does. The Tar Pit is attracted to sites of great misery such as battlefields, mass graves, and sites of atrocities. As it consumes the land, it consumes all living and dead material as well. Unfortunately, the creatures (whether dead or alive) are reanimated as it passes, as black and vaguely humanoid shape.
Lay of the Land
The Crawling Tar Pit is a relatively small area, about 1 mile to each side, which is capable of moving and consuming other types of terrain, regardless of their type, though it seems incapable of consuming magma (it burns) and areas underground have been unaffected – even those that are directly below the Tar Pit seem unharmed as if the corruption of the Tar Pit only runs about 3 feet deep.
The surface of the Creeping Tar Pit is a foul-smelling black sludge that slurps, burps, and bubbles away in an unending stream. The ooze itself is highly corrosive like the touch of a black pudding (5e / PF2) and from it rises these humanoid creatures (that have the stats of a black pudding) with them mindlessly moving away from the Tar Pit, as it moves on.
The Tar Pit is not fast, as it moves only 3-5 feet per day, but so far nothing short of a magma flow has deterred it from its path.
Dangers
Animals instinctively avoid moving close to the Tar Pit, and most intelligent creatures stay as far away from it as possible, due to its corrosive touch and the creatures that come from its midst. It is in fact intelligent, the result of an obscene ritual where a wastrilith (a demon that inhabits the river Styx) was bound to a mortal swamp, corrupting it forever. The imprisoned demon is highly intelligent (Intelligence 19) but is unable to interact directly with the environment apart from through the actions of the sludge creatures that it creates. It is attempting to re-enact the ritual that originally imprisoned it so that it can reverse it and free itself. After having been imprisoned for more than 500 years in this form, it has lost what little sanity it had left, so no one knows what would emerge if it was successful.
See you back next time. 😊
Kim Frandsen
Latest posts by Kim Frandsen (see all)
- Finder’s Archive – Crypt of the Eternals - June 2, 2023
