Crabwell 01 - The Omniphone
Added 2022-01-31 23:30:16 +0000 UTCThe city of the eternal voice
Welcome to Crabwell, our fifth borough! We're so excited to bring you this mixture of medieval fantasy with bizarre magic. Those of you who love our maps are going to find tons of uses for this walled town, and those of you who dive into our lore are about to uncover a mysterious city with a central plot hook that you are absolutely going to want to include in your next campaign. Let's dive in!
Guide
Crabwell is a city whose history, laws, and architecture are all deeply intertwined. The city's underlying legal code is established by decree after decree echoing out from the city's central tower, a mysterious building from which an omniscient voice spouts new laws each evening. Everything about Crabwell centers on the (immortal?) Entac, who has led the city through thousands of years of ups and downs. We are particularly excited about this borough guide because we have a brand new layout, and it is gorgeous. Major props to Jelke for the lovely new design!
Maps
James has really outdone himself with this one. Crabwell is a city that you're going to want to include in every campaign: massive walls, a pleasant central square, and a calm canal are the highlights of the northwestern district. If you're a chief courier patron, you also have access to four floors of the city's signature tavern and the interior of the Omniphone. Plus, our variant for this map is the often requested "battle" version. The only thing better than a day in Crabwell is a dating fighting through a siege.
Music
Thus far, we really haven't given you too much genuine renaissance music, with fancy counterpoint and period-appropriate instrumentation. Well no more! "Hewn from Mythic Stone" is your certified classical banger. Harps, recorders, and bassoon strum away this thoughtful baroque melody. If you want to crank the refined vibes to 11, throw on the solo harpsichord variant!
dScryb Integration
We've partnered with our good friends over at dScryb to bring Crabwell to life. dScryb is an award-winning publisher that provides Boxed Text—descriptive text of places, monsters, spells, items, characters, and other observations—meant to be read aloud by Gamemasters to players. Let dScryb’s team of talented writers and editors pore over every word of descriptive text, freeing your creative energy and time for all the other aspects of planning and running the perfect adventure. dScryb worked with our writer Will to concoct evocative and illustrative pieces of boxed text to help you GM Crabwell like a pro.
Plus, Borough Bound patrons get access to an EXCLUSIVE discount: 2 free weeks at dScryb's Hero tier. Click here for access to the super secret discount you can enter for your 14 day trial. Once you do, you can check out Crabwell in all of its dScryb glory here.
The Wand of Tactics | Collaboration with Tavern of Trinkets
Did you know that our very own layout designer Jelke also designs magic items for D&D 5e? Well, he does—or mostly—he did! Tavern of Trinkets was Jelke's 5e item Patreon where he made oodles of beautiful and cleverly designed items. The project is mostly defunct now, but he provided us with this awesome (and thematically relevant!) item for you all to use in your Crabwell adventures, the Wand of Tactics!
Wand of Tactics
Wand, uncommon
This wand has 7 charges. As an action, you can hold it in front of your mouth and speak a short telepathic message of twenty-five words or less to 1 or more creatures you can see or are familiar with within 600 feet of you. The wand expends 1 charge for every creature you relay the message to.
If the target is carrying a wand of tactics crafted using a branch from the same trees as yours, the range increases to anywhere on the same plane of existence and no charges are expended.
The wand regains 1d4 + 3 expended charges daily at dawn.
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Get this week's files below!
Delivery Kid
Crabwell 01 - The Omniphone - Delivery Kid Rewards
General Messenger
Crabwell 01 - The Omniphone - General Messenger Rewards
Chief Courier
Crabwell 01 - The Omniphone - Chief Courier Rewards
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This week's map variations:
Comments
Great response. Thank you very much for your thoughtful response. I like what you said about "giving the impression of a full city and the freedom to interact with this microcosm in extreme detail." I think you hit the nail on the head, and that the comparison to your health bar is apt. I have come to much the same conclusion - the map simply representing the city is just one of those conceits people playing RPGs have to make. I'm going to save this response.
Michael Benoit
2024-01-23 03:07:33 +0000 UTCHey there! Really glad you're a fan of this map. Your question is quiet layered, and you've already picked apart a lot of the crucial details. The truth is that basically none of our maps are ACTUALLY realistic in terms of size and scale. It would not be possible to create cities at that level of scale and detail unless we decided to spend months and months and months just to get a single quarter of a town finished. We would have to compromise so much to do so, and also the finished maps would be impossibly big and basically unusable for even the most powerful PCs. Instead, our approach is to try to nail the FEEL of a city and encapsulate districts on a micro scale. This introduces additional frictions (like the fact that an entire city might only be a couple hundred feet across), but it means the cities are more usable, both tactically and practically. That is: you can actually run city-spanning combat encounters, and your computer won't burst into flames. I think most players can intuitively understand this friction. When you play Skyrim, obviously it doesn't make sense that Whiterun has only like... 10 houses in it. What matters more is that the game gives the impression of a full city, and the freedom to interact with this microcosm in extreme detail. One way to sidestep this issue is to only use maps when a map is specifically relevant and necessary for gameplay (e.g. roleplaying stealth, combat, etc). The rest of the time, you can reference landmarks, NPCs, and whatnot while using theater of the mind. Alternatively, you can say that for Crabwell (at least), the city center is instead overwhelmingly bureacratic, and that the vast majority of citizens live in farms just outside the walls. As with everything else in TTRPGs, eventually you have to accept that your modes of play and the tool you use are abstractions. This map is not LITERALLY the city the same way your HP isn't LITERALLY your health... it's just a manageable, simplified representation that allows the game to run smoothly. Pardon me for the long-winded answer. There just isn't a single response to a broad question like this! If you have additional strategies you decide to employ, please let us know how they go! -Will
Borough Bound
2024-01-22 20:10:09 +0000 UTCReally fantastic map. I am excited to use it in the near future! Question: the Crabwell "cover image" shows a lot more buildings than the map does. Do you have tips for explaining the size and wealth of the city, despite the comparatively few number of buildings shown on the map? This is kind of a general question about town maps in general: most seem too small for the number of occupants said to live there, and it's hard to make a town big enough to have lots going on, but small enough to fit on a manageable map. I'd love to hear your input!
Michael Benoit
2024-01-21 19:35:10 +0000 UTCHey there! No, making interiors for every single building proved impractical for us. We felt it was more important to make unique and detailed interiors for significant points of interest with multiple floors than it was to throw together a bland interior for every random house or shop. Perhaps if we ever expand significantly, we can add full interiors as some sort of stretch goal!
Borough Bound
2023-10-23 13:57:22 +0000 UTCDid you retract the idea of having interiors for every building? Not that I'm complaining, it likely wouldn't matter anyhow, but I'm just curious, since the first Borough with interior seemed to have just that. :) Also thanks for all of you guys' great work, it's super awesome!
coffeedoggo
2023-10-23 13:53:34 +0000 UTCOnce again, we are graced with a treat. I love the interiors, they look cozy!
Mage
2022-02-01 01:47:31 +0000 UTCVery reasonable, alright! I just downloaded the file and yeah, this is already alot of material to work with. Thank you for your hard work!
Tuz-oh
2022-02-01 00:08:06 +0000 UTCThe current plan is to release 2 versions of the Definite Editions map to help out folks by removing the Omniphone. This release already has 16 map files plus interiors, so we just didn't want to overwhelm folks. with this one!
Borough Bound
2022-01-31 23:51:04 +0000 UTCLove the concept! I know this might seem contra to the concept, but since this town has a relative "vanilla" design, would it be possible for you to create a version of it that replaces the location of the Omniphone with an empty plaza? It would not have to be an entire new map, just a small PNG to place over the location of the tower. This would open up the usability for this map and make it setting agnostic.
Tuz-oh
2022-01-31 23:49:24 +0000 UTC
