Bath Imaginable

My submission to the Appx. N Jam 2026 is now live on itch.io, you can check it out right here. The adventure turned out differently from my initial thoughts once I got to the art phase of the project. I thought it could be a fun exercise to compare how my ideas translated to the page, and dig into why I made the choices that I did.

I was limited to four A5 pages (in other words, both sides of a single, letter-sized piece of paper), so let’s take a look at each page in order.

Cover Page

I knew I wanted a cover page, despite it occupying 25% of the available space. I originally thought I would draw one of the industrialists from Timber Town wielding a fire whipper and keeping a couple of reptilian warriors at bay, but none of those ideas made it into the final draft and when I started diving into public domain illustrations of corals, I fell in love with the alien vibe Philip Henry Gosse’s 1856 illustrations brought to the cover. The font and color contrast helps sell the science-fantasy vibes without many words.

But there are still words. I wrote previously about the good use of verbs in the Cairn adventure, In a Petal Unlimited, so I wanted to make sure my cover page also provided a clear hook: find the treasure.

I had wanted to offer six hooks as an opportunity to expand the worldbuilding, but decided not to; I’d prefer more of my precious word count be spent on describing the setting and its inhabitants knowing that an inspired GM could find other implied hooks. I’m a big fan of iceberg theory.

Dungeon Key

Originally, I thought the entire adventure would be a wilderness crawl, but after pushing my ideas into the proverbial brown-bag of the back of my mind to let them ripen, I decided that a tight, five-room dungeon could offer a lot of narrative in a limited amount of words.

I had always planned on there being a couple of adventure locations on the map, but I combined the ancient lighthouse and warriors’ temple ideas into a single location and cut anything that didn’t add to the story.

I don’t usually add “if this, then that” type text to my adventures, but since this one is designed to be a one-shot I thought it would be fun to add some world-changing stakes. The Ritual also ties in Yager-yugh from the final page, and offers a potential moral dilemma for outsider player characters not endeared to Timber Town.

Maybe it’s just me, but I find the Sea Witch much more sympathetic than the folks of Timber Town given our real-world man-made ecological apocalypse is already well underway.

Dungeon

My favourite thing about isometric dungeon maps, besides their dollhouse-like vibes, is the way they communicate verticality. I really wanted to lean into that with this statue trap, set up by the Warriors to get the jump on anyone from Timber Town (or other nosy explorers) looking to rob the temple or interrupt the ritual.

The isometric perspective also makes it very clear how all of the rooms connect, which is important when my word-count is so limited. I didn’t have to spend any time describing how a fall from 3 leads straight through 4 to 5; it’s clear in the visual design.

Back Cover

This is the first page I finished and it’s actually the closest to my original post. It was while working on the drawing of the Bleached Basin that many of my ideas calcified, while the rest fell away like brittle, grasping fingers of bleached coral. For me, I discovered, the visuals lead. Without the pressure to put my ideas into words, and with hours ahead of me to draw, think, refine, and draw again, the entire setting *develops* in my mind like a photograph darkening to reveal itself.

I’m most proud of this final page, really, because it communicates so much about the harsh reality of living in this place with very few words.

Conclusion

I’m really happy with how this adventure came out, and I’m grateful to the Appx. N Jam judges for taking a look at it. This isn’t something I would have come up with if it weren’t for the imaginative prompt I was provided with and all of the awesome inspiration I was filled with looking at last year’s submissions.