#dungeon23 Days 74-84: The Tomb of Khasha-Sha

This entry is part 6 of 8 in the series #dungeon23

Time for another #dungeon23 post. This time, I detailed the ruins of a ghost town/palace containing the tomb of a local ruler, the enigmatic Khasha-Sha. Day 84 was yesterday, so I’m posting this today!

This one’s a spot on the last map I shared, in my last #dungeon23 post. It’s specifically an abandoned palace (it’s called a tomb, but that’s because the palace is abandoned and tomb-like, not because there’s a corpse there—though there are some graves there. The place is inspired by a long-ago visit to Fatehpur Sikri, and as previously, I found the process of filling in a detail or three a day very helpful in terms of coming up with neat widgets and surprises to work into the thing.

The numbering looks pretty consistent, though you can see a hint of this with location 83—in the Northern corner—where there are some weird shapes and a location marker labeled Observatory. I saw a lot of traditional observatories during my travels in India, and they tend to work their way into palaces or similar adventure locales when I design. 

Some of the language of the labeling is similarly misleading, like that word “tomb”: for example, the “yurts” aren’t like what we would call yurts in our world. Partly I’m thinking characters might reach for familiar analogies, and partly I’m thinking that misleading language is part of the experience of travel: you expect X, but you find Z instead. It’s another wrinkle added to the wrinkly surface of this bizarre, broken setting.

I’m still enjoying the process, in any case! (If I weren’t, I’d have quit, after all.)

Series Navigation<< #dungeon23 Days 66-73: Some Little Fragments#dungeon23 Days 85-109: Harsh Fragment and Subsurface Refuge Complex N43A, Level 1 >>

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