Iroculum | The Arnivan Tapestries | Bone Mill | He Who Waits | The Crooked Canyon
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: The Dread Dungeononomicon Map Pack
Download
We released the Dread Dungeononomicon. This Dread Ebon Tome contains over 30 fully fleshed-out and lovingly detailed self-contained adventure sites. Stock the dungeon with your own monsters (and—perhaps—their treasure), decide their backstory, and you are good to go.
This week, we present a massive map pack containing all the dungeon files (tagged and untagged) for the included Dungeon Backdrops.
02: Iroculum
Ashlarian Legendry (Star Metal)
Iroculum, a rare and beautiful iridescent star metal, is much sought after by wizards, illusionists and other spellcasters intent on weaving or binding vibrant colours into their spells. When exposed to light, iroculum gives off luscious colours that seem to shimmer and change as the viewer’s perspective changes.
Spellcasters specialising in illusions, colour-based magics and the various prismatic spells use iroculum as a power component—a component that enhances the efficacy of the spell cast—and as a material to be woven into the fabric of powerful magic items.
Iroculum is a relatively soft metal and easy to work. Thus, it is well suited for use in jewellery, the tips of wands and so on. It is ill-suited for the manufacture of weapons, armour and shields. The few permanent wondrous items that can conjure forth one or more of the various prismatic spells were all forged from iroculum.
Notable and unique magic items crafted from iroculum include the legendary Glimmerstaff and the Shimmering Diadem of Kalrazor. Both items are surpassingly beautiful, staggeringly valuable and supremely powerful.
03: THe Arnivan Tapestries
Ashlarian Lore (Scattered Three-Part Map)
These three tapestries are a treasure map of sorts and show the location of the legendary Barony of Lem and its vast and inexhaustible diamond, ruby and emerald mines. Commissioned by the famed warrior-merchant, Tapio Arnivan, the triptych shows the route the brave merchant allegedly took to reach the barony in 503 NR.
Tapio returned to Ashlar four years later, a very wealthy, but ultimately unhappy man. His wife was long dead, and his three sons—spoiled, impetuous children—argued incessantly with one another. Tapio was as canny as he was brave, though. As the years passed and he felt death approaching, he commissioned the three tapestries as gifts—one for each son. Each tapestry showed a different part of his route, and while beautiful, each was nothing but a work of art—useless as a map without its two counterparts.
Thus did Tapio hope that the promise of unending wealth would draw his sons back together and that they could put aside their differences to work together. In this, he was mistaken. After his death, the bickering and arguing between the three intensified, and the triptych was never reunited. The three brothers each jealously guarded their tapestry while plotting and scheming to steal the other two. Thus did matters stand for decades. Now all three brothers are dead, but their descendants carry on the feud.
04: Bone Mill
Campaign Component (Adventure Locale)
Standing atop a lonely hill, a half-day by cart from the nearest town, Bone Mill stands in splendid isolation at the end of a short track leading away from the main trail. Farms and hamlets pockmark the surroundings.
Bone Mill has a sinister and distasteful, but necessary, purpose: it grinds bones into fertiliser. Without it, the harvest would suffer, and people would go hungry, but still, few talk about what goes on at Bone Mill.
The elderly, but still spry, Jani Rintala and his wife, Esteri, run this macabre place. The mill works day and night when the winds are right, but otherwise, its creaking grows silent. A steady trickle of carts delivers bones to the mill—from slaughterhouses, old battlefields and other, less respectable, sources. A large walled courtyard, often choked with bones, stands behind the mill, and the couple often comb through the remains in search of overlooked treasures. The proximity of so much death has affected Jani and Esteri, and they have grown strange over the many years they have worked here. The couple now have few friends and are often heard arguing.
Unknown to the family, a necromancer lives in a nearby farmhouse. While keeping up appearances (poorly) of a wealthy landowner intent on improving her holding, she visits the mill’s courtyard in the dead of night in search of the choicest remains for her diabolical doings. Meanwhile, her tireless, undead minions excavate an extensive multi-levelled cellar beneath her house.
Related Thought: Clearly, someone needs to write a module called Secret of Bone Mill.
05: He Who Waits
Campaign Component (Lurking Elder Peril and Saviour)
The few locals living near a curiously domed hill of fell aspect call the place Bone Hill for the profusion of pitted and crumbling fragmentary remains found if one digs even a little way into the earth. Bone Hill is clearly unnatural, its low summit rising from a swath of flat grassland. Various legends and rumours identify the hill as a massive barrow—the leaving of some long-forgotten war—but no one, not even the locals, has any clue as to the evil lurking within.
Buried beneath the hill, the archlich Eanatum Sippar slumbers in the depths of his labyrinth-tomb, waiting for a time of world-ending peril. Millennia ago, he foresaw a time when an ancient, nameless being would arise to destroy the world. Eanatum does not slumber so that he may save the world, though. No, Eanatum slumbers so that as the long-foretold catastrophic engulfs the world, he can siphon some of the being’s power and attain godhood and true immortality. Ironically, his act of selfishness will save the world as it will critically weaken the nameless elder threat—unless adventurers, following hints and clues lurking in certain ancient texts, discover what lurks beneath Bone Hill, break into his tomb and slay him first…
06: The Crooked Canyon
Campaign Component (Wilderness Adventure Site)
Deep and twisted, the Crooked Canyon cuts through a ragged range of monster-infested borderland hills. A swiftly flowing river, often swollen and angry with distant rain, rushes through the canyon over a series of fast rapids and spray-smothered waterfalls. It cuts the canyon ever deeper and fills its length with the roar of its endless journey.
In places, the river has cut and gouged arches and caverns into the hills and flows there through the dark and shadow of the underworld. Foul things dwell in many of these caverns, preying on those daring the river and the canyon
Cut into the canyon’s walls, the remains of a fallen civilisation linger on long after its people failed. Whole settlements—interconnected with laboriously tunnelled passages—pierce the canyon’s walls. Only accessible now by climbing, in most such places, little remains for treasure hunters or adventurers; anything organic has long since mouldered away and successive waves of treasure hunters have uncovered and borne away all obvious loot.
However, flying monsters—harpies, manticores and worse—claim a few of these fallen settlements. Thus, a steady trickle of adventurers makes the laborious trek upriver in search of gold and glory.
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.