It was meant to be an quick jaunt.
A week’s worth of seafaring labor lay between you and a much-needed payday. On the third night, a sudden squall pummeled the ship like a mouse in Her paws. The crew scattered to drown in dark waters. Not you, though.
Some Thing found you. You were seized by a writhing, barnacled limb and swallowed past wiry baleen. Nestled, for a time, in a diaphanous bladder. You felt the dive, the pressure. Your gelatinous prison scrape-slipped through a gap in the sea floor and a jut of volcanic stone cracked too-hard against your head.
Then there was darkness. Then there was here.
Welcome to Glimmer’s Rim.
Glimmer's Rim is a systemless psychedelic island hexcrawl designed as a stopgap adventure to use when your players hop onto a ship and sail off toward an unfinished corner of your map. It's a gonzo treasure-trove island at the bottom of the sea, with 27 distinct hexes and a short dungeon to explore. The players will find themselves the newly acquired pets of the Salt Mother, who is the sea. In search of a way home they will encounter ancient truths, unholy horrors and enough priceless artifacts that their escape will surely not go unnoticed by the god that they are robbing.
The Rim is divided into four distinct areas:
The Rim Dunes--A shining, technicolor crescent of beach, lapped by the wine-dark waters of the bay. Each scoop of sand holds coin and gem, painted china, chiseled marbled, hammered bronze. Statues poke scatter-shod in basalt mazes and pastel swirls of coral creep up the beach to breath salt air. A giant rusted cage sits half-buried at the treeline where civilized castaways cower, marooned.
The Bayou Vesper--Where roots soak black in stagnant silt, their rotten husks adorned in purple flowers. The scent of ripe persimmon steeps heavy in hot air. Sick-sweet spice glints in the still water, eddying itself in secret patterns. Even skin contact is enough to loose your mind of the fetters of sanity. This is the realm of Dame Malfaisainte, The Exalted Maw, and the whole swamp is held in a phantasm of her creation. Even the trees sway and the earth itself hums to her tune.
The Tangle--The gnarled tail of a world-splitting tree reaches out its seed-encrusted roots like twisting, bony fingers up into the eternal dusk. The pitiless thicket knots its branches ever tighter unto its center; where a core of bent bark spits loose a mountainous alien limb of fossil stone. The crook of an arm? A bent knee? Perhaps it is high conceit to presume a form familiar to the children of men.
Mother's Embrace--A cramped dungeon inside the Salt Mother's petrified bones. At it's center lies the very core of the Rim, and the Salt Mother herself--The Heart of The Sea. The shell-corpse is home to a cult set upon the re-corporialization of their god. This would be bad for everybody, themselves most of all. The Salt Mother shed her skin long ago. She does not want it back.
On top of all that, Glimmer's Rim squeezes in a handful of quirky NPCs, 30-odd foes of alien and uncanny nature, tables for evocative treasure and useful tools, battlemaps, BGM, and more than one apocalypse clock ticking quickly down to midnight!
It's an adventure of transient nature by the very nature of its origins, but nothing about the Rim is meant to be forgot once you're done with it. It stays with you--sometimes as a gleaming prize, other times as a missing limb. On the island where the ocean hides Her heart, good and ill are found in equal measure. How will you strike your balance?
