Terra Incognita

Jay Iles
 Rhapsody of Blood:
Terra Incognita
By Jay Iles
July 2019

Cover art
Tithi Luadthong

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Designed for use with UFO Press’ Rhapsody of Blood. Sidebars like this deal with explicit
system changes for that game; everything else is intended as portable to other games.
 So, you’re embarking on a quest to fight a great evil or whatever, and have broken
into their nightmarish castle. Standard Rhapsody of Blood play, right? But maybe
you want to map out the castle beforehand, instead of letting the Travel the
Labyrinth move guide your exploration. Or maybe you’re making a fortress for
another tabletop RPG, or even want to make your own Metroidvania?
If any of that sounds good, here’s your guide to building a castle well worth raiding.

Q: What is a castle?
A: A miserable pile of Wards.
To start, you need to work out what the complexity of your castle is. This will
define how many wards it has - wards are the building blocks your castle is made
of, each serving its own discrete function and ruled by its own boss. 3 wards is the
most simple, likely to take 1 or 2 sessions to play through. 6 wards is the most
complex I’d recommend going, likely to sustain a campaign of 10-12 sessions.

Tower or Estate?
The next thing to decide is the format of your map:
• A tower is a side-on view of the castle as it rises up into the heavens and plunges
deep beneath the earth. Imagine the maps from Castlevania or Hollow Knight.
• An estate is a top-down view of the castle as it sprawls across the landscape.
Imagine the maps of The Legend of Zelda or Hyper Light Drifter.

You shouldn’t feel imprisoned by your choice, however - if you want to give your
Estate underground wards, or let your Tower infiltrate other planes of existence, go
ahead! Graphics software that lets you draw on different layers is perfect for this.
Replacing Travel the Labyrinth
With this new mode of dungeon exploration, the old move doesn’t make a lot of sense.
Instead, replace it with this one:
Commune with the Labyrinth
When you submerge your mind into the castle around you, roll +Contamination
marked (max +3). On a hit, say what you understand better about the ward, and the GM
will reveal (or draw) a map of the ward around you - including every room you’ve been in
and the rooms they’re connected to. On a 10+, pick one:
• The GM will also mark down hidden passages and treasures you missed.
• You know what direction to go in to confront this ward’s Acolyte.

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Building the Ward

Terra Incognita
To actually make your map, you’ll need a shuffled deck of poker cards, including
jokers. Don’t shuffle it between wards, unless otherwise instructed.

Ambiance
Decide on an ambiance for your ward:
Industrial: The ward makes things, and is filled with labour and machinery.
Palatial: The ward is opulent and vast.
Sepulchral: The ward is a tomb, holding dead things and relics.
Reverential: The ward is religious, filled with chants and incense and twisted
holy symbols.
Natural: The ward is a field, a forest, a desert; it is unshaped by human
hands.
Cthonic: The ward is deep undergound, dark and damp.
Eldritch: Reality is strange here, and visitors contact something not of this
world.
Custodial: The ward houses maintenance workers, secret tunnels, repair
facilities and more.
Gleeful: The ward is a constant party, with music and dancers everywhere.
Scholarly: Scribes, libraries and filing archives fill the rooms of the ward.
Let this ambiance guide you as you decide the details of its rooms.
Alternatively, you can just build the ward and decide what ambiance it has once
you’re done.

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 Room by Room
Draw four cards from your deck. If more than half are the same suit, shuffle them
back in and draw again. One by one, play them on your ward to add a new room to
it, using the card to guide your depiction of it.

Suit
The suit tells you how connected the room is to the rest of the ward.
♥ Heart: Dead end.
♠ Spade: A passage linking one room to another.
♣ Club: A nexus where many rooms meet.
♦ Diamond: A connection from this ward into somewhere else - the outside
world or another ward. You don’t need to decide where it connects to yet.

Value
The value gives a feel of the room’s purpose or mood:
Ace: Isolation 6: Purification J: Sparring
2: Revelry 7: Collection Q: Worship
3: Preparation 8: Lore K: Mortality
4: Beauty 9: Creation
5: Pain 10: Imprisonment

Keep on building
After playing all four cards, look at your ward. Does it feel complete? If not, draw
another four cards and keep going. If it does, go through these final steps:
• Pick a room to be the lair of this ward’s Acolyte. Decide what passageways are
blocked until the Acolyte’s defeat, and mark them on your map.
• If this is your first ward: Pick one of the connections out of this ward (i.e.
Diamond rooms) to be the entrance to this ward from the outside world. If there
aren’t any, pick a room to be breach point the characters have forced open.

Jokers
Jokers are special! When you draw a joker, that’s a Warp Room. It’s a dead-end
room, with whatever mood you desire; mark it down as a warp room and note the
colour of joker (red or black), then shuffle the joker back into the draw pile.
When you draw the joker again, link those rooms and then discard the joker.

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In play, characters can work a ritual here to move to its counterpart room.

Terra Incognita
If you finish making your map without finding the joker again, the room is instead a
portal to the void the castle came from. Characters can travel there, but they’d
better have a good reason for doing so...

The Next Ward

Start your next ward, picking an Ambiance as above. Decide one:
• Start building this ward out from a Diamond room in an existing ward.
• Build this ward out as a separate structure - another entrance from the
mundane world into the Castle.

Keep going until you’ve built all the wards you decided in the complexity step.

Finishing your Castle

Once you’ve built your map up, there’s a few final steps to go:
1. Place down the Castle’s heart - the place the Regent resides. Link it to one or
two wards, preferably ones that aren’t directly accessible from the mundane
world. This is where the explorers must go for their final showdown.
2. Join up Diamond rooms.
2.1. If there’s a corridor you can draw from one ward to another, great!
2.2. If not, work out if there’s some conveyance you want to put in (teleporter,
elevator, riding a giant bug, etc) to elide the actual travel. You can make
these conveyances specific from one place to another, or generic such that
they allow travel to anywhere so linked.
2.3. Make sure you have at least one connection to the outside world. Having
multiple ways in risks reducing the navigating fun of the game; consider
making others exit-only (e.g. a steep drop down to the castle’s entrance).
2.4. If you feel you have enough links, you can just break the connections
exiting the remaining Diamond rooms. Cave-ins, busted machinery,
rusted gantries, etc.
3. Decide on a story for the castle. Now that you know what it looks like, think
of why it looks like this. What’s the Regent’s plan? What does each ward mean
to them? What did this used to be, before it was claimed by evil?
And you’re done!

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 Optional Extras
If you want a few more details, try out these options. I’d only really recommend
them for more complex castles, or when you’re a few generations into your game.

Gates and Keys

A classic part of Metroidvania gameplay is finding new ways to navigate your
environment. Look below for some options. To add this into your map, first place
the key somewhere important or meaningful - maybe in an Acolyte’s lair, or a
dead-end room that’s somewhat difficult to reach? Then place the matching gates
around your castle, but remember: it’s important that they do not cut the players
off from the key, or make travelling through the castle obnoxious.
Gate Type Key
A barrier you can’t pass through. A physical key, or a transformation that
A gate, an energy wall, an illusory maze. lets you pass through it.
A blockage you can’t destroy. A weapon able to devastate it.
A cave-in, a metal wall, regrowing vines.
A feat you can’t perform. A new form of movement.
A sheer wall to climb, a long gap to jump.
An enemy you can’t defeat. A means of granting the enemy mortality.
Perpetually-resurrecting undead,
unbreakable armour, vast bulk.

Notice that the keys often grant the characters new capabilities, beyond just
unlocking the gate.
In a game of Rhapsody of Blood, it might be cool to write a custom move to give it special
prominence - or else, it can just be used as a power evoked through Drink Deep.

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Havens

Terra Incognita
It’s sometimes nice to have a break from all the horror. Havens are a place for the
characters to catch their breath, tend to their wounds, and care for each other.
To place your Havens, grab a handful of 6-sided dice - at least one per ward, and
probably not more than two per ward. Hold them above your map, and drop
them. Each room with a dice on top of it is a haven, with an aspect according to the
number showing on the dice:
1. The haven provides healing, getting rid of the character’s harm and wounds.
2. The haven provides information, telling you more about this ward and the
Regent’s plans.
3. The haven provides a vendor, willing to trade valuables for trinkets gathered
from the castle.
4. The haven provides a vista, letting you see the scope of the castle - and the
state of the world outside.
5. The haven provides social interaction - this is a place where some castle
denizens have sentience and peace, and will share their struggles with the
explorers.
6. The haven provides a forge, or transmutation, or similar method for the
characters to change their armaments.
Whatever its aspect, the haven should contain no hostile elements. It’s a place of
peace and contemplation.

In Rhapsody of Blood, these Havens are potential sites for Bloodlines to claim as Forward
Bases.

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 Example of Castle Creation
To demonstrate this technique, I built the castle on the facing page - a Complexity
3 Estate. Here’s a step-by-step breakdown of how it was made:

Ward 1: Hunting Ground, Natural

For my first hand, I drew 9♥ 6♦ 10♠ 5♥. The 6♦ went down first: a beautiful
natural glade with a deep pond fed by waterfalls, creating a sense of purification
[1]. Next, the 9♥ – a dead end themed around creation, here a cramped nest of
insectile eggs [2]. Leading off the glade was a cleft in the rocks, 10♠, where rotting
skeletons are imprisoned in hard-to-reach crevices [3]. At the end of a crevice, the
5♥ makes a deep pit, down which sacrifices met a painful end on stone spikes [4].
For my second hand, I drew 10♣ 6♥ 7♠ 4♦. First up, I played 10♣ to draw an
underwater passage from that pond to an underwater cavern [5], in which a giant
fish-spirit is chained. Coming off that cavern is a shrine made with 6♥, fed with air
through tiny passages, where visitors to the fish-spirit used to be purified [6].
Coming off the starting pond thanks to 7♠ is a rising series of small pools, tracing
the waterfall [7], and each pool’s bed is covered with a collection of animal skulls
– and as the explorers ascend the skulls become larger and more fearsome. Finally,
at the apex of the climb thanks to 4♦ is an extraordinarily beautiful mountain
spring, surrounded by blossoming trees [8].
I’ll end the ward here. I decide that the acolyte resides in [8] – they’re a great beast,
chained and collared, here to defend the spring. As such, the explorers cannot
travel deeper into the mountain before they defeat the acolyte. Finally, I need to
pick a ♦ room to be the entrance to the mundane world, and so I select [1].

Ward 2: Defiled Depths, Cthonic

So, where’s next? I have two ♦ rooms to start from, but I’m interested in finding
out what’s in the mountain, so I’ll start coming off [8]. My first draw is Q♥ 5♣ 9♦ –
and the black Joker! I’d like my first room to have a few different exits, so I play the
5♣. I decide that the explorers wade into the spring, following the water deep into
the heart of the mountain, until they emerged in a deep underground lake [9].
This room is painful - so I return to the motif from [4] of people impaled on stone
spikes. The spikes rise up out of the water, with one or more corpses impaled on
each. Perhaps as the character’s heads break the water another victim falls from
above and is impaled? With Q♥ a ladder coming out of the pool leads up to a
platform overlooking the plunge [10], with worshipful carvings making it clear
this impalement is a willing act of devotion. I put 9♦ down as a river [11] feeding

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The Hunting Estate
Heart

Terra Incognita
Acolyte
13

12
15
Ward 2 14

11
10

9 26

J
25
Warp 23 24 Acolyte
link

6 J
Acolyte 22 21 Ward 3
8
5 20 18 19
4
7
3
2 17
Ward 1
1

16

Mundane Blocked until Passage opened by

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world entrance Acolyte’s defeat Acolyte’s defeat
 into the lake at [9] and decide that – in keeping with the card theme of creation –
there’s some huts by the river bank where strange hermits use the river’s water for
their alchemical experiments. Finally, the black joker is placed by [9], but I’ll
decide what it actually represents once the castle is done.
For my second hand, I draw 8♣ A♦ J♠ K♦. The end of that river sounds like a good
place for another crossroads, so I place 8♣ to build a large cavern [12]. This room’s
theme is lore, so I want to show a clue to what’s going on with the whole castle. I
decide to pick up the thread of that imprisoned fish-spirit in [5]. I put the skull of a
much bigger fish-spirit in this room, suspended from the ceiling with chains, with
an endless river of water running from its eye sockets. Coming off this cavern is a
great tunnel, covered in scrapes and gouges [13], built with the J♠. With the theme
of sparring, I think a lot of these gouges are fresher than others. And what’s at the
end? With a K♦, it’s a grand chamber themed around mortality [14] – the rest of
the great fish spirit’s corpse. This colossal carcass writhes with infestation - giant
centipede-like scavengers, that left the marks in [13] with their sharp claws. I
reckon these are the acolyte of this ward, and killing them will stop the flow of
water from the skull in [12] - revealing the room I make with my final card (A♦), a
holy pond where a tiny spirit-fish waits in isolation [15]. Will the explorers rescue
it from this underground prison?

Ward 3: The Lodge, Palatial

For my final ward, I’m looking to make something a bit different, and so I decide I’ll
start this elsewhere and work out how it connects together later. First, I take the
black joker I set aside and shuffle it back in, and then draw my first hand: 3♦ J♦ 3♣
A♥. I’ve decided that this ward is a hunting lodge where the nobles that killed the
great fish-spirit, chained its children and exploited the natural world spend their
days partying. So our first card – 3♦ – is the entrance hall of the lodge [16], a place of
preparation where the everyday clothes of the outside world are put aside and the
regalia of the hunt is donned. Following it is J♦, a long hallway [17] defined by
sparring. It’s here that the nobles practice their martial skills against each other. 3♣
creates another room of preparation, a gallery [18] lined with mirrors and officious
servants here to help the nobles with their cosmetics. And finally, A♥ creates a small
room at the end of this corridor [19], a locked (but ornate) door behind which
constant weeping can be heard.
I’m not done with this place, so I draw again: 8♥ 2♠ 2♣ Q♠. 8♥ becomes a room at
the end of the gallery [20] dedicated to the lore of this place – a series of paintings of
the masters and mistresses of the lodge, culminating in a grand depiction of the
regent whose unholy eyes have burned holes in the canvas. 2♠ becomes another exit

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from the gallery [21]- fitting the theme of revelry, this is an elegant soiree where

Terra Incognita
masked butlers offer canapes and flutes of champagne. That genteel tone gives way
in [22], where 2♣ creates a sprawling feasthall. Here, the lodge’s patrons cast aside
their masks of decorum and feast on the slain quarry, throwing gnawed bones onto a
growing pile in the room’s centre. Finally, Q♠ is played to build a small ossuary off
the side of the feasthall [23], where the best bones are cleaned and reverentially
placed in elaborate sculptures as an act of worship.
I think there’s still more to flesh out here, so I draw another hand of cards – 4♠ J♣ 5♦
and the black joker! That joker is first up, and I’ll place it off the feasthall . Knowing
what we know about this passage’s other end, I’ll say that this is where the drinks are
kept; a pool is constantly replenished with the divine water of the mountain’s depths
for the noble’s refreshment, and the explorers can easily swim through the passage to
travel between those areas. A 4♠ makes a corridor out of the ossuary [24], its beauty
reflected in glorious stained glass windows displaying the lodge’s triumph over
nature. The J♣ is placed at the end of this corridor, and here’s another sparring
room [25] – but this isn’t a sporting arena as in [17], but a simple ring in a dirt-
floored room where blood is spilled in battles to the death. My final card – 5♦ – is
placed off this room, and it’s the home of the losers [26]. Their withered bodies,
drained but still alive, writhe in pain here. The explorers might notice that many of
these undying wretches were the past leaders of the lodge depicted in room [20],
having been defeated by their replacement in the ring of battle.
That’ll do it for this ward. I think the Acolyte here is the head butler, charged with
maintaining this eternal feast by the Regent. They can be found throughout the lodge,
but will retreat from a fight with the explorers until they arrive at room [26]. Once
they’re defeated, their key-rings will unlock a secret passage from [26] to [19] – if any of
the explorers was motivated by a kidnapped contact, they can be found here, or else
the weeping prisoner is an avatar of Nature herself bound by the regent. The keys also
unlock passage from [27] down into the great fish-spirit’s corpse in [14].

Final Touches
I place the castle’s Heart inside the fish-spirit’s corpse. Where else for the Regent to
place the seat of their power? Making links, I connect [17] to [4], and block off the
connections coming out of [15] and [11] – I think we have enough links.
So that’s our castle – a hunting lodge where nobles have chained the divinities of a
holy mountain to cement their dominion over nature, with a Regent working to
expand this dominion over the entire world.

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