Silver Tablets of Tragator | Caverns of Forbidden Dreams | Imber Church | The Golden Hydra | Stagger Inn
Welcome to the Sunday Supplement, Raging Swan Press’s weekly email for GMs. This week, we have one free download, one piece of legendry, one piece of lore and three miscellaneous campaign components for your game.
Should we develop any of these idea further? Comment below.
01: How I Design the Sunday Supplement
Blog Post
I've written a blog post about how I go about designing the new-look Sunday Supplement. Since Raging Swan Press launched it in March, I've had a steady stream of questions about my design process, and this seemed to be the best way to explain how I do it. Curious?
02: Silver Tablets of Tragator
Ashlarian Legendry
Unknowably ancient and surpassingly beautiful, these glimmering silver tablets—unblemished by age—are a remnant of an elder epoch beyond human, elf or even dragon lore and imagination.
Fourteen complete silver tablets and a dozen or more fragments are known to be extant in the world. All are thought to have been recovered from the sprawling, desert-choked ruins of mythical Tragator.
The vagaries of time and the acts of obsessive collectors and archivists, however, have spread the tablets across the known world, making a systematic and comprehensive study of their writings impossible. The singular cuneiform writing upon the tablets resists such paltry magics as *comprehend languages*. Thus, the study of the tablets and their lore is slow and faltering—each owner making what progress they can in unlocking the elder secrets their tablet or tablets record.
The last time a dozen of the tablets were together was during the elf-kingdom of Ilathyel’s zenith. Using the secrets they unlocked from the tablets, the elven sages (re)discovered the planet Cth and the terrible, ancient being said to slumber upon it.
The possibility of discovering yet more cosmic secrets of great and dreadful import spurs the tablets’ owners ever-onwards. Some work for good while others pursue their own, self-serving agendas. An informal organisation has sprung up around the tablets. Its members sponsor expeditions into the southern deserts to rediscover and loot the sprawling lost ruin of Tragator. Most, however, jealously guard their tablets and the secrets thereon. Few are willing to share access to their tablets, and the group’s occasional conclaves are fraught and dangerous affairs.
03: The Cavern of Forbidden Dreams
Ashlarian Lore
Buried deep in the Shoalstone, and only accessible via a precipitous, oft-flooded tunnel, the Cavern of Forbidden Dreams is a place of pilgrimage for those seeking forgotten elder knowledge. Standing miles out to sea, rising from the surrounding waters like the humped back of some great primordial beast, the Shoalstone is a place of dark legend and wild mariners' tales.
A steep-sided and lonely low-lying chunk of rock, the Shoalstone hosts vast flocks of sea birds on its foam-flecked flanks. Some mariners levy upon the birds accusations of malign intelligence, and more than one black-hearted wizard has taken one to serve as his familiar.
At low tide, on the Shoalstone’s southern face, the retreating waters reveal a narrow passageway. Crudely hewn, steep steps, thick with seaweed and barnacles, lead down into the caverns below. Explorers should be wary, however, for much of the subterranean complex floods at high tide.
Disturbing, worn carvings of foul creatures performing unspeakable rites and worshipping nameless elder things decorate many of the passageways and corridors. In a few places, humans are shown being sacrificed or tortured in horrific, stomach-emptying fashion. The darkness here is oppressive, and the narrow, winding passages claustrophobic.
Strange things dwell in the darkness. Explorers report that the ghosts of elder beings are bound to the caverns by some unguessably powerful curse. These implacable wraiths attack all those entering their lightless domain, save for those bearing certain sigils or implements which seem to hold them at bay.
Legends tell of brave (or foolhardy) adventurers dwelling within the caverns to commune with the spirits lurking in the cloying darkness. Such folk are often said to suffer terrible dreams of ancient places and events as a result. From these fevered dreamings came the first record of Gloamhold's inner reaches and the Twilight City buried deep in its dusty, benighted depths. Even now, sometimes those planning to dare Gloamhold's terrors come to the Cavern of Forgotten Dreams hoping to learn fragments of forgotten lore that will prove the difference between a successful delve and disaster.
04: Imber Church
Campaign Component (Church)
Imber Church is cursed, or that’s what the peasants living in the nearby village believe.
The church took years to build, as repeated problems with the foundations necessitated rebuilding, which has given the edifice a decidedly lopsided appearance. A week after the church was consecrated and the first service held within, high winds blew most of the roof off. Since then, lightning has struck the church’s bell tower twice, fusing its bells, raised by subscriptions in the surrounding communities, together.
Such woes are to be expected, however, for Imber Church stands upon a high hill ringed by a time-gnawed earthen henge. The builders, obsessed with sweeping away all vestiges of the old ways and dominating the landscape, built their church atop the highest point for miles. But what they thought was nothing more than the remnants of an old and unremarkable hill fort is actually a vast buried necropolis. The church’s crypt intersects with the complex’s upper reaches, and it is this connection that is causing the church to slowly sink into the ground. The clergy carry out constant, and increasingly desperate, repairs to the church’s foundations, but every year, new cracks and rents appear in the crypt’s buckled walls.
05 The Golden Hydra
Campaign Component (NPC)
Given as a gift to a merciless despot a century or more ago, the Statue of the Golden Hydra was ostensibly a tribute to turn him away from sacking a much weaker neighbour. But the Golden Hydra held a secret: it was not merely a beautiful statue of a monstrous winged hydra. Sentience lurked within the hydra, and that sentience had a terrible purpose.
An elderly master assassin, nearing the end of his blood-soaked life, willingly gave himself to the making of the Golden Hydra. In return for a vast sum of gold and noble titles for his children, he agreed to “die” so that he could slay the despot. All went as planned, and one night while the tyrant dined beneath the Golden Hydra with his favoured concubines, the assassin struck. But the makers of the Golden Hydra had given no thought to what the master assassin would do once he had fulfilled his obligation. They had no idea of the horror they had created.
Escaping the tyrant’s palace, the Golden Hydra fled into a deep, inhospitable and rugged borderland mountain range. There, he claimed an abandoned dwarven hold dug into the flanks of a high mountain as his new home. He summoned his old followers to his new fortress and set about dominating, bribing or annihilating the humanoid tribes dwelling in the hold’s environs.
Now, untroubled by the prospect of death, he has built a new cabal of assassins—the Followers of the Blood-Dagger. From his all but impregnable mountain fastness, the Golden Hydra sends forth his fanatical killers both to serve his own ends and those of his secretive and wealthy clients. In his new deathless form, the Golden Hydra—the literal Grandfather of Assassins—he also patiently works to advance the fortunes and standing of his children’s descendants over the bloody, lifeless corpses of all who would stand against them or stymie their plans…
06 the Stagger Inn
Campaign Component (Inn)
This walled and battlemented traveller’s inn stands in the depths of a bleak, windswept moor at the intersection of several well-used tracks. Arrow-shaped mile markers graven with the number of miles to the inn dot the moor and provide valuable assistance to travellers seeking shelter.
At the Stagger Inn, the welcome is warm, but the prices are high, as there is nowhere else to stay for miles around. During the winter, the Stagger Inn can be cut off by heavy snowfall for days or weeks at a time, and the small community that dwells therein are hardy and self-sufficient. The inn boasts a stable, a blacksmith, a chapel dedicated to the god of travellers and a well-stocked trading station. A flagpole rises from the inn’s central tower and proudly flies the inn’s flag, which depicts a comically overladen traveller bowed down by the weight of his pack.
The wolves, bandits and humanoid raiders prowling the moor have learnt to avoid the Stagger Inn. Its master, Untamo Vihas, is a powerful battlemage, and several of his henchfolk are skilled warriors well able to defend the place from all but the most overwhelming of attacks.
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 the above material makes it into your game or sparks your creativity.
Remember, Everything is Better with Tentacles!
Want the Markdown Files? Every member of our Patreon campaign gets the markdown files for the new-look Sunday Supplements to make it even easier to add them to their campaign.