Varma's Pit | Minotaurs of the Scarlet Axe | Tower of the Rhinoceros | The Rampant Walrus Tavern | The Isle of Mynir
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: Cursed Temple at a Glance
Fallen sanctuary of an extinct, heretical cult of Suvia, the goddess of luck, the Cursed Temple of the Numemancers has long stood alone and abandoned in the depths of the Ochels. But what secrets yet lie hidden in the temple’s crypts and what foul things now claim the place as their own? And why do folk believe the temple is cursed?
It’s hard to go wrong with a ruined temple dedicated to a heretical religion as an adventure site. But what if the heretical sect who worshipped therein were not evil—they were merely eccentric? Will the characters still loot it? Who is there now? What are they doing? With the Languard Backdrop line, you get to decide; we provide the detailed dungeon, you provide the plot!
02: Varma’s Pit
Ashlarian Legendry (Gloamhold Location)
Named for the adventurer credited with discovering this gigantic sinkhole, Varma's Pit is nothing more than a huge hole piercing the rock above the Twilight City's crumbling, shadowed precincts. Hidden among a great stand of stunted, wind-blasted thorn bushes and dwarf trees, it is hard to find. To make matters worse, its walls and ledges are inherently unstable and crumble if unduly disturbed. If that wasn’t enough to deter explorers, centuries of bat guano deposits make climbing here all but suicidal.
Vast colonies of bats—some monstrously huge and others strangely deformed—nest in the Pit’s walls and emerge at night in a near-constant stream to hunt. Ever hungry, persistent stories circulating among adventurers bestow these bats with a sinister, preternatural hunger for warm flesh.
Even so, Varma’s Pit holds a special attraction to adventurers. For on the brightest of summer days, when the sun’s golden orb is directly overhead, its rays cut through the deep gloom below to caress the uppermost portions of the Twilight City’s ruined ziggurats almost 1,000 ft. below.
The fate of Varma herself remains unknown. After she discovered it was—in theory—possible to reach the Twilight City without having to dare the Murkwater’s treacherous tides, Varma spent months organising a secretive, but well-funded and equipped, expedition to explore the so-called Pit and to find a route down to the city far below. A trickle of survivors—mainly porters and men-at-arms—straggled back into Languard a month after the expedition set out, but all they could report was that Varma and her companions descended into the Pit early one morning and never emerged.
The following night, a vast storm of carnivorous bats burst forth from the darkness and set upon those awaiting their mistress’s return. The survivors fled, and Varma’s fate—and that of her companions—remains a mystery.
Varma’s Pit is also known as the Cave of the Long Drop and Slaughter Fall (both named after Varma's supposed fate).
See Also: Gloamhold, The Twilight City
03: Minotaurs of the Scarlet Axe
Ashlarian Lore (Tribe)
The savage minotaur warriors of the Scarlet Axe tribe stalk the flinty uplands of the Black Hills. The servants of a now all but extinct, powerful race of winged creatures steeped in the mystic arts, the minotaurs dwell among the rough, craggy peaks of their ancient home. Protecting the places of their winged masters—the Yith—the tribe wages bloody war against the centaurs claiming the Bleak Moor.
The Yith were ancient even before the minotaurs’ distant ancestors emerged from the passages twisting through the hill’s deep roots. Belligerent warriors, and confident in their ability to claim the hills as their own, the Yith’s demands of fealty meant nothing to the minotaurs. Bloody war swept the hills as the Yith rose up to crush the upstart invaders. When it was over, the surviving minotaurs knelt in the blood-soaked dust before their new overlords. Now, living only to serve their winged masters, the Scarlet Axe carefully guards all approaches to the Yith’s three nigh-impenetrable citadels.
Dwelling in small groups throughout the Black Hills, the minotaurs normally claim convoluted, multi-level cave systems with many entrances as their homes. The minotaurs know these cavern systems intimately and use them as homes, armouries and hunting grounds.
The Scarlet Axe is a chaotic, warlike society in which perceived weakness is a virtual death sentence. Might is all within the tribe, with each minotaur’s personal position in its hierarchy depending upon its ability to crush enemies and bind others to its service. Blood feuds among them are commonplace and only end with the death of one of the protagonists.
04: Tower of the Rhinoceros
Campaign Component (Wizard’s Tower)
A slender tower of glimmering white marble topped with a glittering silver and gold roof rises from the centre of plush, landscaped gardens surrounded by a high wall of black and sharp glassy flint. Strange beasts stalk the gardens, and their roars often echo forth from the garden.
Strange sounds and otherworldly aromas drift from the walled compound surrounding the tower, and sometimes at night, fell-coloured lights glimmer atop the slender tower.
This is the Tower of the Rhinoceros.
A strange sorcerer hailing, it is said, from a strange and distant land dwells in the tower, but few have seen, let alone spoken with him. All that have done so, speak of his immense bulk and of the thick horn rising from the centre of his forehead. Thus, did the tower gain its name and thus did it garner a cluster of fearsome legends and rumours about the strange and doubtless foul doings practised therein.
05: The Rampant Walrus Tavern
Campaign Component (Tavern)
Renown for brawls, late nights and hard drinking, the Rampant Walrus tavern stands in plain, inviting sight of the docks upon which the fisherfolk unload their catches.
The Rampant Walrus has been a dockside fixture for generations. Owned by the same family, the Rekola, throughout its long, ale-splattered history, it is a much-loved institution. Regulars drink from walrus tusk drinking horns; these horns are passed down through the generations, and owning one (or more) brings much prestige to the family.
A once impressive bas-relief carving of a gigantic walrus head decorates the front of the building. Painted brightly but splattered with the leavings of innumerable seagulls, the carving has an air of faded grandeur, incongruous with the establishment itself.
The owners of the Rampant Walrus have never been rich, and they’re never likely to be. The tavern needs constant repairs, and the patrons like cheap drinks, basic furniture and actively despise fancy trifles such as wine. There is no hope of attracting better, more affluent customers. Price rises are met with derision, horror and—sometimes—violence. Every regular of standing—and particularly those who own one of the famed drinking horns—believes they own a little bit of the tavern, and all are vocal in how it should be run. Thus, owning the Rampant Walrus is both a blessing and a curse. While the owner has much influence on the docks and among the fisherfolk, they must have a steely nerve, impressive negotiation skills, patience and, unsurprisingly, a high tolerance of alcohol.
06: The Isle of Mynir
Campaign Component (Island)
Struggling above the roiling, endless waves of the Bitter Sea, the low-lying Isle of Mynir has a deadly reputation among pirates and sailors alike. Named for the first mariner to land on the isle and return to tell the tale, the island has a dark reputation.
The isle stands amid a ragged patch of stinking seaweed brought hither by several powerful ocean currents. A rambling stone building of worn cyclopean stone blocks, with the aspect of a temple or palace, squats upon the island like a shipwrecked sailor who has barely managed to drag themself from the surf. Those who have closely studied the curious, foreboding building assert that it shows signs of being submerged at one time or another.
Dark legends tell of a singularly elder treasure hidden in the worn building and of certain sanity-blasting carvings that were surely carved by primal, inhuman hands that can be found therein.
A singular forest of stone statues depicting terrible, aberrant scaly humanoids of some unidentifiable type surrounds the building. Endlessly staring out to sea, the statues maintain an eternal vigil. Others, eroded and festooned with seaweed and barnacles, are exposed at low tide. Then, the tide retreats a full half-mile to expose glutinous, stinking mudflats of disturbing hue littered with stone blocks. These blocks, and the statues scattered amongst them, have ripped the bottom out of many ship’s boats and the like conveying explorers to the island.
Sailors anchored far offshore report hearing strange sounds coming from the island at night. Old sea stories tell of the statues coming to terrible, blasphemous life when the sun sinks below the horizon and of their strange gyrations and genuflections seemingly directed at whatever lurks within the temple-palace. The accounts of some olden explorers swear that the statues were in different positions every day, adding to the aspect of cosmic horror smothering the island.
Whatever the truth of Mynir, curious explorers find it exceedingly difficult to find any mariner brave enough to put ashore. Thus, the mystery of the isle, the seemingly wave-worn, cyclopean building and its forest of seaweed-strangled statue-guardians endures.
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.
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