Feuerberg: First Steps Planning

I plotted out the local area around Feuerberg using a simple overhead diagram with a hex grid underlay. There's Feuerberg, its companion mountain, the local town, and the road that passes the town and then through the valley between the two mountains. I'm thinking each cell of the grid will be 1 km across. I've begun drawing up ideas on post-its and sticking them on the cells. Bright yellow post-its are sites, orange are danger. Eventually there will be a finer level of colour discrimination between post-its, probably green, yellow and red for terrain (indicating its relative ease of transit vs. danger and risk), blue for aboveground sites, and purple for entrances to the subsurface of the mountain. (This is all using Realtimeboard)

Last night, I broke each mountain's surface into four faces, and then decided that there would be one signature dungeon or challenge per face to begin, plus one at the peak of each. Only some of these zones would lead below the surface. I decided to err on the side making the mountain less easily transited rather than more, in order to encourage the use of the subsurface zones (which will extend vertically up and down) to move past them.

An image of what the above process looks like

I'm feeling my creative juices flow on this project like they weren't on some of my other recent ones. I think I've got some solid ideas for landmarks - a ruined city of the ancients partly buried in lava; the rotting carcass of a headless male dragon that the female decapitated after mating that now lays draped over the side of the caldera, a meteoric lake filled with tiny mollusk-philosophers; an old town that fell into a chasm and now lays scattered amongst beams of light at the bottom; a cave that's Lascaux by way of the Mountains of Madness, etc.

The mountain is one of the paradigmatic examples of the sublime, and this will be an affect I'm going to try to play extensively with in this. I want expressions of deep time and vertigo to undergird much of how of the pieces fit together.

The giant is both dead and not dead. Really, the giant isn't a thing that can be dead, because that would imply it was alive. The giant is an elemental force, just as the dragon is (the dragon is weaker, closer to a living thing, but more active). Its brain is made of obsidian that when chipped becomes humanoids. Its heart is molten gold. Its breath causes either death or immortality, unpredictably, if you can make it breathe again. You might think it's human-shaped, but it predates humanoids, who are shaped roughly like it. The other mountain is a musical instrument it was building, though what exactly it wanted to play (or why) is unknown.

Detail of the area surrounding the caldera