The Twilight City | Tomb Blight | The Devil's Armchair | Slime Caverns of the Ooze Mistress | Book of Transcendent Neutrality
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: June’s Inner Cover
Download
June's new inner cover presents 20 more cool words and the names of 20 cults for your game.
02: The Twilight City
Ashlarian Legendry (Dungeon)
Buried in an immense cavern at the very heart of the Mottled Spire, the ruined Twilight City is simultaneously one of Gloamhold’s best-known and most-feared locations.
An ancient troglodyte place of squat ziggurats, fetid and twisted canals, crumbling bridges and cyclopean architecture, the Twilight City sprawls across a series of low islands struggling above the Sunless Lake’s cold, dark waters . The lake is tidal, and much of the city’s lesser structures sporadically flood during king tides or the vicious winter storms battering the coast.
Set upon the largest island, however, about the yawning black gulf of the Daemonic Maw, squat five huge ziggurats. The greatest of these, the 500-foot high Whispering Fane, dwarfs the others in both size, scale and malignity.
A score or so of troglodyte tribes yet dwell amid the fallen glory of their forgotten heritage. Warlike and feral, they squabble over the ruins and wage war against one another. Well-used to outsiders intruding into their ancient home, these fearsome warriors need no provocation to fall upon explorers—such interlopers provide a welcome source of meat and metal. Occasionally, a charismatic or powerful leader arises among the tribes and leads a savage coalition to bloody war. Other cunning chieftains offer alliances with outsiders to gain advantage over their enemies, but such agreements rarely last long.
The cavern roof above the Twilight City soars 1,200 feet above the Sunless Lake and in places has collapsed, allowing shafts of frail sunlight to pierce the darkness and gloom. Sometimes, brave adventurers—not wishing to dare the dangers of Gloamhold’s outer halls—use these rents in the rock to reach the Twilight City. Without magic, most such attempts are doomed to failure.
See Also: Gloamhold
03: Tomb Blight
Ashlarian Lore (Disease)
Much feared by adventurers and tomb robbers alike, this lurking disease has consigned many treasure hunters to a long and slow, drawn-out death.
A miasma of death hangs in the fetid air of long-sealed, undead-haunted tombs; this is Tomb Blight—a magical disease of the air and the lungs. Those suffering from Tomb Blight develop a hacking cough and sink slowly into exhaustion; their pallor greys as their breath becomes harder. Death normally comes within two slow and agonising weeks.
But death is not the end, for only then is the true horror of Tomb Blight infection revealed. Laced with the very essence of death and undeath, the infection reanimates those it kills transforming them into a tottering, wheezing ghoul-like creatures that seem to suck the life-breath from their victims.
04: The Devil’s Armchair
Campaign Component (Dungeon)
This notched and craggy hill looms over the surrounding lowlands like a broken and hunchbacked giant. The hill itself is an anomaly, standing in splendid isolation from its nearest neighbour. The ruin upon it is doubly so.
A grand tower, the so-called Devil’s Spire, replete with strange architectural features that baffle logical or rational explanation once stood upon the greater of the hill’s two zeniths. So strange is the tower’s design that some sages believe that it was built using fragments of lore recovered from the shattered ruin of distant and ancient Draken-Nar. It is not recorded who dwelt within the tower or when it fell into ruin; it has always been thus.
The ruined tower provides expansive views of the surrounding lands, and the local lord often moots the possibility of repurposing the place. However, few folk willingly approach the tower, and no stonemason—not even the stolid dwarves—dare to work on the ruin. Chambers with hideously indescribable proportions, impossible staircases that go nowhere but upon which explorers regularly disappear, and a heavy, claustrophobic sense of dread filling the ruin keep all but the most determined and stubborn explorers away.
Travellers will not shelter or camp in the ruins, often travelling miles out of their way and enduring terrible weather to avoid the place. Thus does the Devil’s Spire—and its secrets—lurk and moulder.
05 Slime Caverns of the Ooze Mistress
Campaign Component (Dungeon)
The Slime Caverns are very old, very deep and very dangerous.
A magical prison of great but imperfect construct lies hidden at the caverns’ diseased heart, and within languishes an avatar of Bibeldoop, the Amorphous One. The ancient magical prison is imperfect. While it keeps Bibeldoop’s avatar imprisoned, it cannot completely stop its influence seeping forth into the surrounds to warp everything it caresses.
The Ooze Mistress—a horribly disfigured and now hopelessly mad lich of profane power and uncertain origin—dwells in the caverns and works ceaselessly to free Bibeldoop’s formless avatar. She has toiled here for years uncountable and has forgotten her real name and life.
The caves are wet and unstable; its stone appears diseased, and rockfalls and collapses are common. The caverns are a blasphemous nightmare; sluggish streams choked with debris and unidentifiable things flow through terrible, weirdly shaped caverns reminiscent of crumbling, degenerated subterranean cities. Fouled with noxious water, the streams feed nightmare fungoid forests tended by the near-mindless mushroom servants of the Ooze Mistress. Many strange and alien things glide, ooze, flop and wax greater in the caves’ fetid, cloying darkness.
But one ooze—choked shaft connects the Slime Caverns to the surface realms. Sometimes, terrible things quest forth from the darkness to explore the upper caverns and the surface world. Adventurers sometimes come here to explore the upper levels, but few dare the perilous descent into the foul depths of the suppurating lower levels.
See Also: Bibeldoop
06 Book of Transcendent Neutrality
Campaign Component (IWondrous Item)
Penned by an archmage who espoused a unique and singular view on the place of neutrality in the world, the Book of Transcendent Neutrality holds great power and great temptation. Followed loosely, the teachings of True Neutrality therein can provide moral justification for virtually any action.
Long ago, a powerful wizard in a distant land became troubled by the extremes of both evil and good. He came to the, perhaps sanity-bending, realisation that both extremes were equally bad and that neither should be allowed to hold sway.
Thus, he began his doctrine of True Neutrality. Sometimes he worked with the forces of evil to stymie those of good, and other times he aided goodly folk to push back the tide of darkness. His goals and allies were ever-shifting, changing as he sought to maintain the balance.
The Book of Transcendent Neutrality comprises the entirety of his research into the Cosmic Balance and presents in minute detail his philosophy. Although it is a weighty tome, it comprises far more material than it should, and those who have studied the book avow that it possesses interdimensional properties. The book also holds significant magical power, and those of suitable moral outlook who have sufficient intellectual prowess studying the weighty tome gain both magical power and deep insights into the nature of the multiverse. Such insights are capable of snapping a lesser mind. Some who have read the tome have been driven mad by the experience, while others have retreated from the world, driven to despair by the nature of things and the futility of the great struggle between good and evil. A few readers, though, who wholly embrace the teachings in the book gain a freeing moral clarity that transcends the norm; such folk can be supremely dangerous.
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!
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