Hexenbracken: Hex # 0420 The Black Metal Army

So, I've been a bad blogger lately. I blame work. After writing, editing, and revising policy documents all day long, which I've been doing a lot of lately, coming home and writing some more is just not happenin'.

That said, I wanted to contribute to +Zak Smith's call to provide a blog entry about the Hexenbracken project he started.

So, my part of Hex 0420 (hehe hehe) contains the following (of two contributions to that hex):

Titanic arm made of black, very hard metal makes a lewd gesture toward what used to be a contended border. Chance of rock slides.

Okay, so that's kinda ha-ha funny, but what purpose does it serve beyond putting the PCs in danger of being buried in rocks? The only apparent aspect of this monumental feature is a titanic arm, raised in a lewd gesture. 

In part, it's a graffitti. It's a reference to  +Adam Muszkiewicz' and my Metal Gods of Ur-Hadad DCC campaign, and to a substance (black metal) found in our game world. That said, something cool is here.

  

The arm is made of an incredibly hard and durable black metal, the manufacture of which is lost to the ages. It rises some 80 feet from the uneven and rocky ground, near the peak of large hill. There are many such hills in this particular region.

The real danger here is not the obvious one (rock slides), though that is a concern (can some die rolling going on there, just to make it to the arm). The danger is in what lies beneath. 

First, this could be just one of many, complete mega-statues. You remember the "many such hills in this area" thing I said up above? Well, each one contains one of these statues, each one hundreds of feet tall. What you can see is only part the arm, from just below the wrist. The rest of the statue is down below, buried in stone (probably by magic, I'm sure). And each one is unique. Some are flippin' the bird, as above, or mooning the enemy lands, wiggling their naught bits. Basically, a resounding "Fuck you!" to their enemy's border. I think that's rock and roll (or punk rock, or metal, or whatever--defiance, motherfuckers!), so that's where that comes from. Then, what is the nature of these statues?

I think I have two ways I'd take this, just off the top of my head. 

First, these things are, say, about 800 to a 1,000 feet high/deep. What if each one was a building (or dungeon, since they're buried)? They would constitute a sort of lateral megadungeon. Hell, that whole area is mountainous. It could be lousy with these statues. Maybe they're also interconnnected in some way. I imagine that there could be all kinds of neat sci-fantasy stuff in them. Metal snakes with paralytic beams in their eyes, ecologies of subterranean flora and fauna of various sorts, some of it certainly hostile and equipped (why?) with loot for the taking. I'd like to see external entrances of some kind, and evidence of incursions by later groups of people or creatures. But this is a hexcrawl, so I think you would want them to have just a few exposed entrances to the whole network. They'd need to be nearby, and maybe extend into one or two other hexes, depending on the extent of the "black metal army."

Also, we could make them into sleeping gods, or giant fighting robots, or something just a little bit more... active. They could be autonomous creatures of some kind, or perhaps they could be powered up and piloted in some fashion. The options are plentiful for the more active plan.

So, there it is: Hex 0420. I think I'd check it out. There could be some good adventuring to be had.