The Ritual Pool (Patreon)

“Wow! This looked like something right out of the Ten Commandments!”

Around the wastelands, hidden among the ghost dunes, are ancient ritual sites built in the times just after the reign of the pretty ones. Many were built by the Gooz in an attempt to bring back the ancient masters of this world, but others were built to summon darker masters – anything powerful enough to make a difference in this forsaken world.

This site, of course, exists to summon the great Uluhtec – but only by those who wield the sacred orb. And the would-be-leaders of the gooz have been fighting over THAT for who knows how long. By climbing the stairs around the sides and back of the massive idol that sits before the pool, one gets to the platforms on the idol’s head and back. From here a gooz can see a fair distance across the dunes, but can also watch the rituals held around the pool itself. Up here is also where the sacred orb must be placed before beginning the ritual to call forth Uluhtec (which has more than once resulted in the theft of the orb while the ritual has been going on beneath it).

I drew this map as the starting point for the GOZR RPG playtest I’m running. Gozr is a science-fantasy RPG written by James V West that takes place in a world long after the departure (somehow) of humanity. Perhaps they all mutated into the Gooz, or perhaps they left the Gooz behind as they left this world. Regardless, the Gooz are reminiscent of the plebs, mutants, and minions from the Den sequence of the Heavy Metal movie, and I decided to play this to the hilt and have the campaign begin in the aftermath of a great battle in this obviously Den-inspired location. More maps from my Gozr playtest will show up on the blog over the next two to three months as I run the game and the players have already explored the locations involved.

The 1200 dpi versions of the map were drawn at a scale of 300 pixels per square and are 10,800 pixels (36 squares) wide. To use this with a VTT you would need to resize the squares to either 70 pixels (for 5′ squares) or 140 pixels (for 10′ squares) – so resizing it to either 2,520 pixels wide or 5,040 pixels wide, respectively.

https://dysonlogos.blog/2021/08/09/the-ritual-pool/