The Blades of Gixa: A #dungeon23 Megadungeon by Quadra

🏘️ The Town Atop The Megadungeon
7 months ago – Fri, Nov 14, 2025 at 11:47:15 AM

A new video update about creating the surface spread for Baintoch, the town that sits atop the megadungeon in The Blades Of Gixa.

Lady Ilsten Bain dreams of glory. Of the grand City of Baintoch that sprawled across the land, the city that welcomed with open arms the pilgrims that flocked to its famous blessed bathhouse. Of the money they brought with them, and the prestige.

She looks out from her governor's mansion into the rain falling on the Town of Baintoch, imagining grand boulevards reaching far into the obscuring fog. But she knows the twisting streets no longer extend much further than she can see.

The rain began falling long before she was born, and the waters crept ever higher, drowning the land, forcing the City and the world into a gradual diminishing and retreat to ever higher ground. Eventually, the pilgrims stopped coming, the baths closed, and Baintoch fell back to the old walls of its original settlement, from the time of Saint Orvus.

Saint Orvus, who had cleansed the waters in that ancient era when the sky was bright and goddesses walked the land.

Baintoch had grown into greatness from these walls before, why should it not flourish once again? The Baths still lay under the town, decrepit, dangerous, half-collapsed, occupied by generations of kobold bandits, the nasty little lizard-folk that refused to bow to the Admiralty and join civil society.

A few sailors, drunk already at midday, stumble across the wet cobbles below, looking for their ramshackle lodging.

Lady Bain turns from the window and regards the pile of jewels and gold artifacts on her desk, scattered beside a heavy old tome: the haul from some lowlifes with more daring than sense. They'd recently arrived on a merchant ship, spent some nights at the Butchered Ogre, and delved down into—and if they are to be believed, below—the Baths to steal these treasures.

Town guards had found the bruised and bloody party stumbling out of the Baths while on patrol, arrested them and confiscated the fruits of their thievery. But if the tale they told was true—and the tome suggested it might be—the Baths went deeper than her patrols had ever gone.

She walks over to the desk, staring down at the pages covered in archaic script recounting many old myths of this place, of underground kingdoms and lost elvish tribes, of goat-folk tyrants and serpentine madwomen. And of all their fabulous treasures.

Yes, she decides, closing the book, she will release the grave-robbers and send them out on the next ship. And she will even return the treasures to them—minus a hefty tax, of course. Her son, the captain of the guard, will protest, but he does not know sailors and scoundrels as she does. They will do as their kind always do: boast and lie and flaunt their wealth until some other scum slits their throat for it. And thus with words and gold and blood they will spread the tale of treasure under the streets of Baintoch, and the town's ancient myths will find a new life on the lips of sailors across the Admiralty.

The Baintoch of old became wealthy and powerful hosting pilgrims seeking healing and comfort in the Baths. That era is long gone, but Baintoch will rise again on the backs of a new kind of pilgrim: adventurers, seeking filthy lucre.

So: I'm happy to share with you a new video update about my #dungeon23 project, The Blades Of Gixa, specifically about Baintoch, the town that sits above the megadungeon. This spread was an interesting challenge, mostly because it was quite difficult to work out what information should be on it!

Ultimately I landed on referencing the various surface factions but not delving too deep into their inner workings, as that will go onto a dedicated factions spread (and there just wasn't room for that here!) Instead, the surface spread features more surface-level information like where the different factions are located, a bit of info about them, general information about the island and town, and a few specific procedure things like a weather table and information about lodging and banking.

The banking thing might seem a bit odd, but I was reminded of it listening to 3d6 Down The Line, an old-school megadungeon actual-play podcast in which managing heaps of loot becomes a big problem for the player characters! I figure that part of my job as the person making the setting is to figure out some of the boring stuff for the referee like taxes and banking and moving wealth around, so they can just have some quick stuff to reference and focus on the more interesting bits, like encounters and factions and weird characters.

My next steps for The Blades Of Gixa are to create the Factions spread, make more tables, and continue fleshing out and cleaning up the keying of the 12 dungeon levels. I'm also starting to clean up the scanned final-ish pages, as you'll see at the end of the video. Turns out, every step of this is a lot of work! Thanks so much for your patience and support!

🔊 Major tat (Tabletop Audio Tool) update!
9 months ago – Fri, Sep 19, 2025 at 11:37:45 AM

Hi everyone, I hope you're doing well. This has been a challenging month for me, as I was traveling for a good chunk of it, had COVID for a good chunk of it, and things are...not going great in the country I live in, the USA.

But! I still got a lot done. 

This past month I've continued drawing the overworld, world-building, and writing up tables for the book, but that's all basically just a big pile of notes right now I need to sort thru, and not really a cool thing for you to look at yet. My main focus has actually been on another reward, for this Kickstarter and the last: tat, my tabletop audio tool for Win/Mac/Linux, which many of you have gained access to with your pledges!

This morning I released a major new update, tat v0.5.4!

I have a big write-up about it over on PARADISO, along with a video showcasing all the features of the new version, which you can also check out here:

The short version is, there's a new version of tat out now with a bunch of new features, like audio triggers, timers, themes, localization support, and more!

And now that this is out I'll be returning my primary focus to The Blades of Gixa itself. I'll still put a bit of time into bug-fixes and whatnot for tat, but a large majority of my work time will go towards finishing, organizing, and laying out the high-level world-building and overworld of Gixa, and going floor-by-floor to flesh out each level with descriptions, stats, tables, and the like.

Thank you so much for your patience and support! Be well, and stay strong out there.

🌘 The common knowledge of the RPG setting, and moons!
10 months ago – Tue, Aug 12, 2025 at 03:02:05 PM

Work on The Blades of Gixa is proceeding apace, if not entirely according to plan: in the last video update, I said the next step after my history spread would be to create the spread for the "overworld": a map of the surface above the dungeon, the town of Baintoch on the small island Montiri. And I did work on this for a while, drawing many of the buildings and working out some major characters, factions, and the like.

But I hit a wall when I realized I was unsure how to key this surface level: I didn't know what context players (or the referee) would have for the surface, and what information would be appropriate for the surface spread. With my history spread, I'd developed the history of the dungeon, and a bit of the overworld, but I hadn't defined what would be "common knowledge" for characters first arriving to this place. In fact, my intent was that nearly none of the information on the history spread would be common knowledge.

So I took a detour, and this update's video is all about that:

The new page is titled "The Greater World (As It Is Widely Known)," and, as the title suggests, it is all about everything outside the dungeon: what the surface is like, who its major factions are, what species and languages are common, how the calendar and moons work, how magic and the gods work, and a bit about the situation on the small isle Montiri, beneath which lies the megadungeon.

If you wanted, as a referee, you could make copies of this page and hand them out to your players, or you could just use it as a guide for describing the world to them and answering those "would my character know this?" questions.

This page will be accompanied by another one with information for referees only: what's happening behind the scenes, true motives, resources, relationships between factions, etc., as well as some simple tools for playing out what's happening in the greater world between sessions.

What's going on with those moons?

The world of The Blades of Gixa uses a lunar calendar: 13 months of 28 days each, for a total of 364 days. This just makes long-term timekeeping easier than our goofy real-world irregular-month 365-day system. Referees have enough to worry about, they don't need to also wonder how many days a particular month has. The month's names are also alphabetical, for ease of use!

This world's two moons exhibit some unusual behaviors, moving in tandem, spiraling through the sky, with some quite weird lunar phases. The referee and players absolutely do not need to know any of the mechanics behind this, so the page just has a chart with the days of the month and the corresponding moon phases. But the video features a segment in which I play around with a crude prop to demonstrate why the moons work the way they do, as a bit of bonus information!

What else?

• I did make good progress on the overworld spread before this, so I'll be working on finishing it now that I have this context. 
• I'll also be working on the facing page for this one, with referee-only info about the world and how to run it, the weather table, etc.
• I've started on the big spread of the various tables covering creatures, treasure, effects, books, etc. players will encounter.
• I will be traveling for a fair chunk of this month. It may slow things down slightly, but shouldn't be a big deal. I'll still be working on this while on the road.
• Hat, Patch, & Bag design & development is still ongoing, but the book is top priority, so that's where my focus is right now.
• If you have an idea of what RPG system you would use to run The Blades of Gixa, do let me know if you haven't already! This will be useful when writing guidance on using and adapting the dungeon with different systems.

🌖 Progress on the surface, weather, moons, characters, factions, how to play
11 months ago – Sat, Jul 12, 2025 at 10:43:20 AM

Hello dear backers!

I've been working away on the dungeon, but I don't have a big fun video about the project to show this month. All the stuff I've been working on are still works in progress so most of what I have to show for it are half-baked sketches, pages of notes, and some text documents on my computer. Not as exciting as last month's history spread, but hey not every month can be that flashy ;)

So this update will just be a run-down of what I've been working on:

• The surface/overworld: A spread showing the village of Baintoch, which will serve as an early refuge for the players (unless they aggravate the Governor, the village guard, the church...) and the island of Montiri, upon which it sits. Beneath Baintoch is the first level of our Dungeon, the storied Ancient Baths of the Cult of Gixa!
• Weather: The weather will be quite simple, inspired by Cairn's nicely straightforward weather system. There's not much need to get very detailed with it, as players should be spending most of their time underground, and besides, all of the weather types are pretty much just variations on "it's raining."
• Lunar Calendar: This part of the world operates on a lunar calendar, tracking the two moons Jörmu (the blood moon) and Kunda (the gold moon), as they spiral through the sky. They are named for the great sky-serpent Jörmukunda, who in legend ate the sun, and now drags it through the sky in its belly. The moons, it's said, are its eyes, their phases formed by the twisting and blinking of the great serpent in the sky. The lunar phases have some implications for clerical magics.
• Characters & factions: this bit has been rather complicated. I've been going through the dungeon and documenting all of the major characters and factions & working out their characteristics, problems, objectives, and relationships. I haven't figured out how best to present all this information yet, but that's in the works.
• Introduction & how to play: I'm writing an introduction for folks who encounter the book for the first time, which will hopefully help them understand what this crazy thing they're holding actually is. I'm also writing recommendations on how to run the dungeon, including thoughts on mapping, time tracking, etc.

In addition to all that, I've put out another Paradiso Craft video about making terrain (with a little story about a cat), which you might enjoy :)

I've also released a big update to HUNDREDS, my platinum best-selling big book of tables for Mothership (and other SF games): d100 ranged weapons! Another big update is coming in the next few weeks, featuring the companion table, d100 melee weapons. Big updates like these bump the price up, but are free to everyone who already owns the book, so if you want a big flavorful book of sci-fi tables, grab yourself a copy today on DTRPG or Itch :)

OK I think that's enough update for now! See ya!

🖤 Quadra

PS: I'd still love to hear what system you would use to run this! Leave a comment or send a message. This will help me figure out what kind of advice to give for running/adapting the setting :)

⏳ Making History for the Megadungeon
about 1 year ago – Mon, Jun 02, 2025 at 09:53:46 AM

Hi everyone! I've been working on crafting the history of the megadungeon & some intricate information design to convey it. Here's a video all about it, plus a text update:

📚 About the history

The history of the dungeon is contained in a 2-page flowchart spread, with time on one axis and place on the other. Time is split up into 5 eras: The Age of Caradel, The Life & Times of Gixa, The Age of Sorrows, The Long Drowning, and Now. The place axis is spread across the surface and all 12 levels of the dungeon. Each event in the history is contained in a box, and you can follow arrows connecting the boxes to see the sequences of events. Each major character is introduced with a symbol to help you track them through the history.

If you go from left to right you can follow all the major events that happened in a particular location. If you look below the banners along the top, you can see all the events that happened in a particular era. And if you follow a particular character's symbol, you can trace their path through the history.

Additionally, each era doubles as a table you can roll on, with each event as an entry. Players can find information in books, paintings, rumors, etc. across the dungeon that will be keyed simply as referencing a particular era. As the referee/DM, to work out specifically what it says, you roll on that era and draw from the event that comes up, using context to determine what you convey. So rolling the same event for an elvish history book, a goat-folk religious tapestry, or a giant frog bedtime story might yield rather different perspectives!

See the video for a deeper dive into the history!

✍️ Other Blades Of Gixa updates

• The next big spread to tackle is the surface, which I have laid out but still have some inking and plenty of keying to do. Other spreads include character/faction information, tables, and guidelines for running & adapting the book to different systems (what system would you plan on running this with?).
• Galen has been working on the soundtrack -- you can hear some of the music sketches in the video!
• I've been working with Glass Embroidery on the bag & hat designs, and they're coming along nicely :)

💯 HUNDREDS goes platinum!

An extra bit of fun news: HUNDREDS, my 1-cent-per-entry big book of tables for Mothership, just became a Platinum best seller on DriveThruRPG! It has even more tables coming soon, so if you're interested in getting a copy, now's a great time before the price goes up!

🖤 Quadra