Doom Blade of the Dark Elves | One-Tree Cave | Cromel Maccus | Cathedral of Echoes | Six Odd Things to Find in a Barn
Welcome to the GM’s Sunday Supplement! Behold four campaign components and a handy d6 list to add to your campaign and GM’s toolbox.
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.
Doom Blade of the Dark Elves
Campaign Component | Magic Item | Unholy Relic
The elder dark elf hero, Azakiel Kanimier, carried forth this enscrolled blade from their demonic patron’s lair millennia ago. The blade crafted, it is said, from the very fabric of the Abyss, is a symbol of Arachne’s demonic power and a sign of her favour. Only a true believer, steeped in darkness, can wield the blade and unlock its full, awesome and terrible power.
Azakiel Kanimier and the Doom Blade were ever in the van of the renegade elves as they struggled for their freedom against the goodly elves of Ilathyel, the legendary first forest kingdom of the elves. Azakiel Kanimier fell in the last great battle between the warring elves, but his surviving followers carried the Doom Blade away to their hidden subteranean refuge. There, the Doom Blade remained, an unholy relic guarded by the dark elves’ priests who held the dread weapon against the day that a new hero would arise to wreak terrible revenge upon the shards of fallen Ilathyel. Such a day never came; the daring elven hero Naillie Aralivar stole the weapon in a legendary theft. She herself was slain shortly thereafter, and the Doom Blade was lost. The dark elves ever seek the Doom Blade and believe that its recovery will herald a new age of Dark Glory for their mistress and their kind.
One-Tree Cave
Campaign Component | Caves & Caverns
Amid a thick tangle of bushes and brambles, high above the village on a wind-blasted hill, a lone oak—seemingly bizarrely short and stunted—struggles skywards. Danger lurks amid these brambles for a great many caves, some little more than deep hollows or depressions, litter the hillside. The most notable, and the reason the locals rarely climb the hill, is One-Tree Cave. This vertical shaft—known as the Long Drop—is of unknown depth for about forty feet down it curves gently out of sight.
A ledge juts from the shaft’s flanks about 15 feet below ground; it is on this ledge that the tree grows. In years past, village children—daring one another—would climb on and down the tree to gaze into the tenebrous depths of the Long Drop. A spate of accidents and falls, however, has given rise to a jumble of rumours about what lurks in the shaft’s unknown depths. A few of the older villagers remember a time when Turo Aikio, a daring local obsessed with What Might Lie Below, explored some of the Long Drop’s upper reaches. Turo disappeared into the cave decades ago; local folklore has much to say on the matter.
Cromel Maccus
Campaign Component | NPC
As the last scion of an all but extinct noble house, Cromel Maccus feels history’s remorseless weight on his shoulders. The Maccus family owned a small semi-independent border fief that was overwhelmed by orcs and the goblin minions over a decade ago.
Cromel was the only one of the family to survive the final slaughter, and he was carried off by the orcs to their remote fastness. There he was beaten and degraded, but the will to survive burned strongly in Cromel’s breast. When he finally escaped, Cromel returned to civilisation and vowed revenge upon the orcs. Disfigured and haggard by his experience, the locals call him the Maimed Warrior.
Now, Cromel haunts the borderlands ever searching for orcs to revenge himself upon. If Cromel has anything to do with it, though, this will not be his fate. He feels compelled to return to his family’s shattered home and to rebuild it anew. While he lacks the funds and followers to achieve such a thing, he protects the peasants and commoners and builds a reputation as evil’s implacable foe.
Cromel is brave but cautious. The last drops of a noble family’s blood flow in his veins, and it is not idly or carelessly spilt. Old scars and burns cover his body and his nose is squashed and crooked. All skin, bones and muscle, Cromel cuts a gaunt, lonely figure. Wearing well-worn studded leather armour and moving with the practised ease of a borderer he looks more at home in the wilderness than on the throne of some high-walled castle.
Cathedral of Echoes
Campaign Component | Caves & Caverns | Subterranean
Sounds echo weirdly in this vast, multi-level cavern. Divided by narrow chasms, swift-flowing streams and flowstone escarpments, the almost mile-wide Cathedral of Echoes is an underground nexus; innumerable other passages pierce the walls, floor and ceiling. Wandering monsters and lurking predators are often encountered in the Cathedral of Echoes, for they have learned that fresh food and loot are often to be found here.
Four vast flowstone columns dominate the cavern. Set in a rough diamond formation at the cavern’s approximate centre, each is girdled by faint steps—actually little more than a narrow, slick ramp—cut or worn into the rock. Time-gnawed echoes of sigils, glyphs and carvings adorn the pinnacle of each column, but their true meanings have long since been effaced.
The Cathedral of Echoes is well known to delvers; it serves as a waymarker for deeper delves into the illimitable dark of the surrounding caves and caverns. Some expeditions leave caches of equipment here in one of the cavern’s innumerable hollows or side caves, and not all return to claim their property; thus, delver lore has it that considerable gear—and perhaps some treasure—lies unclaimed, ready for the taking in the Cathedral of Echoes!
Six Odd Things to Find in the Barn
Campaign Component | 1d6
An old, mouldy hay bale—slick with slime and dotted with tiny mushrooms—hides a stout wooden trapdoor that leads to a cellar the size of the barn above.
A fine leather saddle sized for a gigantic horse lies hidden under a pile of old blankets, broken pieces of tack and so on.
Dozens of animal skulls—horses, bears, wolves, dogs and so on—decorate one of the barn’s walls. Some of the skulls are decades old; others are comparatively fresh.
Disturbed earth in a distant corner, far from the door, looks for all the world like a shallow grave.
Boxes packed with a startling collection of travellers’ clothes, shoes, and gear fill a small storeroom. Some of the clothes are bloodstained.
The barn’s windows have been boarded over, and the door is slightly warped and difficult to open. Within, mushrooms, lichen and fungi grow virulently about the floor, on the walls and so on.
Campaign (noun): a connected series of adventures; Component (noun): a constituent part
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.
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.
Remember, Everything is Better with Tentacles!