The Kingstones | Devil's Cove | The Bloodstone | The Moon Pool | Goblins of the Blazing Sun
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: Languard’s Shambles at a Glance
Download
Lying between Cheap Street and Low Gate, the Shambles is a place of narrow, twisting alleyways, tottering tenement buildings and cloying desperation. Here dwell Languard’s poor in cramped, unsanitary conditions.
We continue our tour of Languard: City of Adventure by plunging into the Shambles–one of Languard’s slum districts. It’s a bad, rough part of the city, and your characters are bound to get. tangled up in all sorts of exciting doings therein!
02: The Kingstones
Ashlarian Legendry (Adventure Locale)
Centuries ago, a bloody battle between marauding orcs and dwarven warriors raged upon the River Ost’s muddy banks. The dwarves were victorious—barely—and the orcs driven away or slain.
Victory came at a great price, however, and most of the dwarves, including their leader, Thegn Delthur Werlan, were killed in the battle. To commemorate their victory—and to honour their dead—the surviving dwarves raised up four burial mounds. Now wreathed with wildflowers and worn by time’s remorseless passage few clues remain as to the mounds’ grim contents.
Atop the largest of the mounds, they set five intricately carved statues of heavily armed dwarven warriors. The five are depicted arrayed for battle about a dwarf of kingly mien. Many fanciful stories swirl about the statues in the taprooms of the Weary Traveller and the Rat and Cup. The most prominent tells how a wandering medusa waylaid a travelling band of dwarves. Although few villagers guess at the mounds’ hideous truth, local law prohibits anyone from digging into the mounds.
Where orcs and dwarves once fought and died, now stands the human village of Kingsfell. Unknowingly, the villagers—largely ignorant of the area’s bloody history—have built their homes above and around a mass grave.
03: Devil’s Cove
Ashlarian Lore (Adventure Locale)
Standing close to the dismal, sea fog-smothered village of Coldwater, Devil’s Cove and its most infamous feature—the Sunken Stair—is shunned by the villagers and all but the bravest (or maddest) explorers. Tales and rumours of strange goings on and sinister, malformed figures half-glimpsed in the mist circulate in the Stooped Man—Coldwater’s only inn. The villagers—in the main, superstitious fisherfolk—have no interest in facing the perils of Devil’s Cove, and the village as a whole is less than welcoming to strangers and visitors. Thus, Devil’s Cove remains mostly undisturbed.
Devil’s Cove is a barren place. A great field of tumbled, jagged and slick rocks, interspersed by tidal pools choked with slippery seaweed, lies at the base of lofty, precipitous and wind-blasted cliffs. No path runs down from the clifftops to the beach far below. The few people who arrive in the cove do so by boat. Some who explore the cove do not return.
The Sunken Stair is burrowed into the cove’s wind-blasted headland, and is only accessible during particularly low tides—and even then, the tide returns to flood the stairs within an hour; thus, explorers must be quick. Although the stairs’ general location is well known among Coldwater’s populace, few have ever seen them. Sickly yellow seaweed wreathes the stairs which lead to a small chamber; here, a set of stone double doors etched with strange runes bars further progress. What lies beyond the doors is unknown.
04: The Bloodstone
Campaign Component (Adventure Locale)
Surrounded by a time-worn earthen ditch and the ragged remains of an ancient stone circle, this curiously stained altar-like stone dominates the zenith of a low, ash-smeared hill. Below, huddle the quaint, olden cottages of Argth surrounded by a patchwork of enclosures and fields, linked by a queer web of sunken lanes and holloways.
Long enough to serve as a giant’s bier, the so-called Bloodstone lies at the nexus of a web of superstitions and rumours stretching back into time immemorial. At the winter solstice, great bonfires set about the Bloodstone blaze through the long dark of the night. Set to keep evil spirits at bay as proscribed by ancient, half-remembered tradition, the fires are at the heart of a schism splitting the local populace. Some folk—adherents of the old ways—believe the fires keep evil at bay through the long, cold winter months. Others—more progressive and believing in kinder, more modern deities—believe the fires are a blasphemy and instead serve as a beacon to the ancient evil spirits said to haunt the locality. Every year, the progressives try to hinder the building of the great fires and every year the two factions inch closer to bloodshed.
05: The Moon Pool
Campaign Component (Adventure Locale)
When the full moon hangs pregnant in the night sky, lycanthropes of every description are said to gather on the soft and verdant banks of the Moon Pool.
On cloudless nights, when the full moon bathes the pool in its soft radiance, an otherworldly shimmering plays across the water and a great madness sweeps over the gathered creatures. Inebriated by the moon’s inescapable influence and driven by their basest urges, the creatures cavort and despoil themselves in a wild and frenzied orgiastic bacchanal of the most indescribable sort.
Hidden in the depths of a wild and fecund borderland forest, the Moon Pool is almost impossible to find. Few humans have ever gazed upon the Moon Pool during such nights, and those who have done so emerge from the forest...changed by the experience. These witnesses speak not only of the orgiastic doings of the werecreatures but also of the three nature spirits that rise from Moon Pool to oversee the night’s events. These huge translucent figures—a wolf, a bear and a stag—oversee the events unfolding around the Moon Pool and accept the veneration of the assembled throng.
Sometimes, a werecreature driven mad, or perhaps to a state of unthinking ecstasy, by the moon’s influence, hurls itself into the pool. Such unfortunates never return to its soft bank and instead disappear forever into the pool’s depths.
06: Goblins of the Blazing Sun
Campaign Component (Atypical Goblin Tribe)
Over 50 years ago, the questing paladin Raisa Pasanen answered the desperate call of a small, borderland village beset by goblin raiders of the most repulsive ilk. Along with her retainers, she tracked the goblins to their tribal lair and carried the flame of righteousness into their cramped, odious tunnels.
Bolstered by her faith, she was triumphant. Before she put the surviving goblins to the sword, however, she gave them a choice: repent of their sins and embrace the Shining Light or die. To her surprise, the goblins chose the former, which presented the crusader with a unique problem: the goblins were trying to save their immortal souls, but to leave them to their own (chaotic) devices was to invite disaster.
Since that fateful day, well-meaning (and long-suffering) missionaries have guided the goblins in their path to redemption. They also protect the goblins and their roving work gangs from the depredations of those who do not understand the tribe’s unique situation.
The goblins are skilled miners, and the tribe’s current chief, Bork the Shining One, sends out work parties to those who would hire them. For the right employer, goblin miners offer many advantages over more civilised folk—they don’t need light, they can get into cramped spaces, and they put up with worse conditions and pay than their human counterparts. Of course, many human settlements will not allow the goblins entry and thus they are often to be found camped nearby in disordered and filthy tent villages centred on a wagon pressed into service as a mobile church of Darlen; central to this church is an effigy of Raisa Pasanen—the tribe’s patron saint.
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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