Thief's-Eye View

Getting from one side of a city to the other across the rooftops would be pretty easy in a place like this, assuming the tiles didn't keep shooting out from under your feet. It would be pretty annoying for the people trying to sleep in the bedrooms below though; it's bad enough having cats racketing about on one's roof in the middle of the night, and I expect human-sized critters would make even more noise.

I'm not sure if this scene is Chinese or Japanese, but it recalls strongly the excellent night rooftop chase scene from Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon.

Scenery: A few years ago they were just another snake cult...

In D&D parlance this would be a hydra, but I believe the technical term for an Asian multi-headed snake statue is a naga, and it's a protective, rather than malign, spirit. This is an especially fine specimen; I'm guessing it's somewhere in South-East Asia, but I don't know for sure. What I do know for sure is that if your character comes across a statue like this in some temple or other, you just know you're in for some real trouble, and you'd better hope you're well stocked up on poison remedies.

The post's title is, of course, a reference to that fine piece of cinematic art, Conan the Barbarian, starring one of the great thespians of our age, Arnold Schwarzenegger.

Scenery: Absurdly Steep Steps

I don't know where these stairs are. Climbing them would be tricky enough with the support chains; without them... I would prefer not to have to.

I guess, in practice, they're not much harder to climb than a ladder, but because they're in the form of stairways they look much more precarious.

Scenery - a roadside inn

I happened on this image somewhere on the internet, and it immediately grabbed my attention because it's almost exactly the scene I was imagining in an episode of Zosia the elf's adventures I ran a few years ago.

Note: Zosia is one of my partner Annette's oldest characters, and has been around in various incarnations and game systems since about 1980-81

I thought I might start using this blog to collect together some of the game-useful scenery and/or artefact images I've gathered over the years. Hopefully they'll be of some use to others as well as to me.

Anyway, this image: I'm not sure exactly what function this particular complex serves, or even whether it's Japanese, Chinese, Burmese or whatever (no doubt somebody with more knowledge of Asian architecture could tell at a glance).

I would use it as a roadside inn and/or bath-house.