Building A Seclusium

Building A Seclusium, Here We Go

Lingering Unfinished For A Little Over A Year

I have owned The Seclusium of Orphone of the Three Visions by D. Vincent Baker for about four years, but I didn't get around to trying to use it until a little over a year ago.  For those unfamiliar with this product here's the back of the book blurb,

     "This book provides the rules, guidelines, tables, and suggestions for creating wizards' seclusia for your own campaigns, and features three sample seclusia in various stages of completion, including the Seclusium of Orphone of the Three Visions."

For those of you wondering "WTF is a seclusia?"  the back of the book also gives these four definitions,

     1. A place to which a wizard withdraws from the world to pursue mastery.
     2. A place of magic and plasms and grotesques and horrors and treasures and doorways to other worlds.
     3. A place which, when abandoned by the wizard but with its treasures and dangers remaining more or less intact, is a terrible and antic catastrophe in process.
     4.  A place which makes for marvelous location-based adventures.

So last year I thought it was high time I bust this book out, make a seclusium and place it on my campaign map somewhere.  A combination of laziness and name preference led me to choose the most completed sample seclusium belonging to Orphone of the Three Visions.  By the way, this isn't a review, just an anecdote of my experience using the book as intended for the first time.  Once the PCs actually interact with this location, then I'll write up a review, as I don't want to review materials that haven't seen actual campaign or one-shot play.

I was able to complete five of the six sections of this seclusium last year, but stopped due to tediousness in the process and non-urgency (this encounter location wasn't going anywhere near where the PCs were at the time.)  I vowed to complete this back during #DIY30, but got bogged down with other projects and am just now picking this up again.  Today I was able to narrow the work left down to five questions in Section 6 and although I have a rough map of the island where Orphone's seclusium is located, I need to draw a map of the tower and key it.  Not sure how much of this I'll get done tomorrow, but after I get those tasks complete, I'll place this location on my campaign map.