The Eyes Unclouded Sandbox

23 Apr, 2025

Wealdstone and its vicinity

In a weird twist of fate, I happened to be in a non RPG-related work meeting and seated next to someone enthusing about a D&D book. Naturally, I volunteered to run the thing if no one else would. You can't just let coincidences like that slip by you.

Eyes Unclouded is a collection of 11 adventures inspired by the films of Studio Ghibli. Note the Wayback Machine link: this book is well on its way to being lost media, though PDFs are available if you know where to look. Like many 5e adventures (and particularly DM's Guild products), I would characterize the adventures as uneven, linear, and laced with Forgotten Realms-isms that feel weirdly out of place. Still, I think its an interesting challenge to "stick with the trouble" and work with what's here.

Towards that end, I want to apply the old "old school space vs. new school time" paradigm from Against the Wicked City and convert the 11 linear adventures into a larger sandbox setting. I figure I'll document the process.

If you happen to be in the playgroup we're forming around this, I'd suggest not reading any farther.

The rough steps I follow are as follows:

1. Summarize the adventures and note any table-ready material.
2. Condense locations and draw a map.
3. Record factions and key characters.
4. Note what resources you are missing - encounter tables, names, etc.

Auditing the Adventures

Without regurgitating the entire book, I started by reading the 11 adventures, summarizing them, and making notes of table ready content like encounter tables and magic items.

If we briefly walk through the hooks for each adventure, we get the following:

1. Soot spirits need help moving from one ruined house to another, deep in the woods.
2. A door in an old study leads to a city of talking animals in the Feywild. The city is anticipating an ambassador from a larger court and wants to kick the PCs out.
3. The party delivers packages. Representatives from a Walmart stand-in try to stop them.
4. A satyr wants to perform a ritual at a magic well in order to kick all non-fey out of the Feywild.
5. The party encounters an ancient war mech piloted by robotic ants and powered by a sentient fire spell.
6. A town on the edge of a dense wood is attacked by cursed animals. The local military launches an expedition into the wood to steal the source of the curse and use it as a weapon.
7. A town on the edge of a dense wood is stuck in a time loop because they've clogged a magic well. Animals attack to try to unclog it.
8. A tower of wizards have traded their hearts to a star being in exchange for power. It turns out the connection goes both ways though, and they are at risk of being drained dry as the star being battles a cosmic horror.
9. A magic storm shelters a magic castle carved into the side of a giant mummified turtle. When the storm subsides, various pirates and aviators compete to get there first.
10. A flying castle can only be accessed by means found at a ruined temple. The party is hired to escort an archaeologist to that temple, but royal assassins are in hot pursuit.
11. A city is built on top of an ancient temple housing the remains of a sleeping giant. Nearby mining ventures have disturbed the giant's sleep causing earthquakes.

Immediately I am struck by a few repeating locations and motifs:

• A town on the edge of a dense wood is attacked by cursed animals.
• A magic castle can only be accessed by limited means and everyone wants in.
• Portals can be found to access a spirit realm home to talking animals, centaurs, and star beings.

Adventure 9's turtle castle jumps out to me as juice-y good stuff.

In terms of usable materials, there is a good mix of encounter tables for peaceful and cursed woods, two great tables for random effects from eating spirit food, and a couple city events tables. There's also a nice selection of trinket-y artifacts to sprinkle into treasure hordes.

Condensation

We can immediately condense every mention of a town, forest, or castle into three locations:

• Wealdstone is a coastal town of some 2,000 souls (6). It is ruled by an elder council (11) who are in conflict with an occupying military force (6).
  • It is menaced by animals afflicted by the hate-curse - a supernatural rage rumored to mutate those afflicted by it. (6)
  • It sits on top of an ancient temple that houses a sleeping giant, but this is a closely guarded secret (11).
  • Notable landmarks include the Kat and Cake Bakery, Purple Stove Outfitters (3), the home of the late wizard Hiran Brightflame (2), and the decorated Thousand Leaves Ward (7).
• The Coral Castle is carved into the mummified remains of a colossal dragon turtle and sheltered by a perpetual storm. (9)
  • On the coast nearby is the fishing village of Wind Cliff, home to the glider workshop of "Tofu" Clifface. (9).
  • The ruins of Mel-Aqat, an ancient giant temple, is half submerged further up the coast. (10)
• The Blue Wood is a dense thicket that constantly threatens to overgrow the cleared land near Wealdstone. (7)
  • The burnt-out remains of an old manor house have already been consumed by the wood. (1)
  • The heart of the woods is the Grave of Eirnos, a deer god. (6)
  • Elven ruins dot the deeper places, (4) including the wreck of an ancient war machine. (5)
  • The only settlement inside is the Verdurous Court, a wizard's tower that none have visited in living memory (8)

We can also find a grab bag of other locations lightly sketched in other modules:

• A bridge guarded by trolls (1)
• Eleutheria, a kingdom of animal spirits that is accessible through certain secret gateways around the region (2)
• An abandoned farmstead home to soot spirits (1)
• Mount Divergence, whose highway tunnel has recently collapsed (7)

All that remains is to combine these into a map I can hand to my players. You can check out a thumbnail sketch of one at the top of this post.

Factions / Fronts

A quick survey of the adventures presents a few viable factions:

• The Royal Army, currently occupying Wealdstone in preparation for a major campaign into the Blue Woods.
  • Led by Garin Ronith, steely half-elf general.
  • Captain Kenzo is overseeing clearing the tunnel collapse at Mount Divergence.
  • Pathis d'Cannith is technically a royal archaeologist, but he's gone rogue searching for a way to the Coral Castle.
• The Verdurous Court are a consortium of wizards who have traded away their hearts for phenomenal power. Likely to tear a whole into the cosmos.
  • Aviquin is currently the head of the court.
  • Evius is fully heartless but looking to get out of his pact.
  • Igneous is the star being that they are all bound to.
  • Glitterfire, the power source for the ancient war machine is another star being, more sympathetic to mortals.
• Hyrsam's Fey are a ragtag band of satyrs, redcaps, and eladrin who aim to force all non-fey out of the spirit world.
  • Hyrsam, the Prince of Fools, is the leader of the bunch. Presents as a Robin Hood figure, but is actually an arch-xenophobe.
  • Uewer is his righthand fey, a blindly loyal warrior. Wants to convert the party to their cause, despite the fact they aren't fey.
  • The Cat King of Eleutheria seeks to ally with Hyrsam in a bid for more control over the spirit world version of the region.

There are other smaller factions at work, but these are the ones most likely to climactically change the region if left to their own devices:

• The Royal Army could seize the Heart of the Forest, blighting themselves with the Hate-Curse in the process.
• The Verdurous Court might fully submerge into the spirit world, tearing a chunk of the material plane with them.
• Conversely, Hyrsam's Fey might succeed, suddenly depositing extraplanar refugees and spirits all over the region.

Loose Ends

With an annotated map, I just need a couple resources for my cheat sheet. I don't use a DM screen, but I like to have some charts handy:

• A weather table, easily stealable from Mausritter (p. 21).
• A plains and coastal encounter table to match the cursed woods table mined from the book.
• A simple loot table for rolling up a quick treasure horde, perhaps from &&&&&&&&& Treasure.
• A list of names: the book uses an odd hodge-podge of Elven, Latin-ish, and Japanese names. I could see breaking these down into syllables to create a generator like the one I implemented on perchance for our The Electrum Archive micro-campaign.

Finally, while I have kept page number notes for each of these locations, I would likely condense the whole thing down. 5e adventures are verbose and I feel like I could capture most of the content of these modules in a 10th of the page count if I set my mind to it.

I hope the above was at least interesting if not revolutionary. I'm still hesitant about running this setting in actual, factual 5e, but it's engaging to try to process it into a form more useful to me at the table.

#Eyes Unclouded #practice