Four Lurking Threats for Your Campaign
When neophyte adventurers start their careers they fight kobolds and goblins and run screaming from such fearsome terrors as ogres and owlbears. But as they grow more puissant they defeat greater and greater threats. If they survive, they may become some of the most powerful folk in a kingdom (or perhaps even the world). What challenges such folk?
He Who Waits
Lurking Elder Threat
The few locals living near a curiously domed hill of fell aspect call the place Bone Hill for the profusion of pitted and crumbling fragmentary remains found if one digs even a little way into the earth. Bone Hill is clearly unnatural, its low summit rising from a swath of flat grassland. Various legends and rumours identify the hill as a massive barrow—the leaving of some long-forgotten war—but no one, not even the locals, has any clue as to the evil lurking within.
Buried beneath the hill, the archlich Eanatum Sippar slumbers in the depths of his labyrinth-tomb, waiting for a time of world-ending peril. Millennia ago, he foresaw a time when an ancient, nameless being would arise to destroy the world. Eanatum does not slumber so that he may save the world, though. No, Eanatum slumbers so that as the long-foretold catastrophe engulfs the world, he can siphon some of the being’s power and attain godhood and true immortality. Ironically, his act of selfishness will save the world as it will critically weaken the nameless elder threat—unless adventurers, following hints and clues lurking in certain ancient texts, discover what lurks beneath Bone Hill, break into his tomb and slay him first…
Labyrinth of the Lich-Priest
Lurking Elder Threat
Of vast extent, this convoluted labyrinth-tomb of near-infinite complexity has lain hidden from the world for centuries uncounted. Filled with traps and patrolled by deathless, animate guardians, the labyrinth exists to keep someone in and everyone else out.
The labyrinth has long been sought by the Servants of Darkness. Within, the lich-priest Aarto Tuiretuinen, greatest of all Braal’s servants, languishes in a magical trap of supreme cunning and power. Wrought by a cabal of sorcerers and druids unable to destroy Aarto, the prison has endured longer than most kingdoms and empires.
Thanks to a phylactery of supernal strength held by his profane lord, Braal, lesser god of hate, malice and revenge, Aarto is essentially unkillable. Thus, he endures ensnared in a deathless torpor of the ages, awaiting the time when his lord’s servants breach his prison and sunder the enscrolled bonds that keep him therein.
Also referred to in certain ancient, crumbling texts as the Labyrinth of Shadows and Silence, the dungeon lurks at the nexus of a series of contradictory and jumbled legends. Many adventurers have sought the place, assuming great wealth and glory lie within. Most fail to even find the place, but those that do must contend not only with the labyrinth’s traps and guardians but also the Servants of Darkness who ever watch out for adventurers brave and skilled enough to pierce the complex’s malign heart.
Mounds of Starry Doom
Lurking Elder Threat
These five ancient, time-worn burial mounds of stupefyingly vast extent squat as they have done since time immemorial in the vast and unending southern grasslands bounding the Glittering Wastes. Surrounded by a vast ring of obsidian marker stones, the mounds squat at the centre of a nest of terrible legends and traditions.
Ancient tribal tradition among the nomadic centaurs roaming the grasslands has it that the barrows are laid out in the same fashion as the Sickle of Fire—a minor constellation of stars thought by doom-mongers and demonologists to be a harbinger of inescapable doom. They believe that when the stars are right, the barrows will open and that the ancient and terrible enemy lurking within will pour forth to destroy the world.
The centaurs do not allow outsiders to investigate or even gaze upon the massive mounds. To do so invites death at the tips of the centaurs’ lances and arrows.
The Mounds of Starry Doom are also called, whimsically by some, the Barrows of the Stars. Travellers and explorers are not known to have gazed upon the mounds for generations, and some sages now believe they are nothing but a fairytale told to terrify and excite the feeble-minded and the gullible.
The Renitent Guard
Lurking Elder Threat
A squat and gloomy castle of sinister and ancient construct lies in a deep cavern far below the realm’s capital city. Sinister legends and rumours hang over the fortress and its Renitent Guard. Most folk believe the place to be nothing more than a myth or legend. Only a few sages, other learned folk and experienced adventurers know the truth of the matter.
Scores of indefatigable iron warriors—each imbued with the skills of a master swordsman—stand ceaseless vigil upon the nameless castle’s spell-warded ramparts and towers. This is the aptly-named Renitent Guard—deathless and incorruptible soldiers ever-loyal to their master, a surpassingly powerful demi-lich of unknown name and origin. Sentient iron golem captains—some possessing powerful battlemagic—command the Renitent Guard.
Given the castle’s formidable defences, of those who have gazed upon its grim battlements, few have ever seriously contemplated assaulting the place; even fewer have survived the ensuing carnage. And thus, at least for now, the secrets of the castle and its deathless lord remain unsolved.
Ashlarian (proper noun) of Ashlar; Campaign (noun) a connected series of adventures; Component (noun) a constituent part; Legendry (noun) a collection or body of legends; Lore (noun) knowledge and stories about a subject
Thank you for reading the Sunday Supplement; I hope some of this week’s Campaign Components make it into your game or sparks your creativity.
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