Dweller in the Pool | Greenheart Wood | Prophet's Cave | Antero Kaivas | Offshore
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 Companion
Download
In some ways, the Dread Companion is a relatively insignificant book. It’s got a low page count, and physically it’s small and lightweight. Don’t let that deceive you, though. This book is super useful if you own the Dread Dungeononomicon. Want to know exactly what 20 Things or Monstrous Lair instalments suit a particular Dungeon Backdrop? This book has you covered.
Sometimes (or often), the simplest ideas are the best, and the Dread Companion is simple. Download it today and reduce your game prep!
02: the Dweller in the Pool
Ashlarian Legendry (Gloamhold Locale)
Stories told by battered and exhausted adventurers struggling out of Gloamhold’s ebon depths tell of a curious pool buried deep in a remote cavern.
Something large and terrible and ancient dwells in the pool, and it is ever-hungry. When it senses warm-blooded creatures drawing near, this sentient, gargantuan ooze of preternatural size and strength sends forth questing, amorphous pseudopods of immense size. Few mortals possess the strength to resist being pulled into the pool’s statue-choked depths. There, they sate the thing’s boundless, malign hunger.
The truth of the matter is even more nightmarish than the few survivors of the cavern can guess. (The only adventurer to guess the pool’s hideous truth—who managed to claw his way out of the ooze-thing—has been derided by his fellows as deranged and unhinged.) No monster dwells in the pool; rather, the pool is the monster. This ooze-thing, of singular but unknown origin, has an ability similar to a medusa’s. Victims drawn into its body are drained of their vitality—further feeding the thing’s inexorable growth—and transformed into lifelike statues of hideous aspect. Dozens, if not scores of these statues, piled one upon another, litter the pool’s depths.
03: Greenheart Wood
Ashlarian Lore (Quasi-Magical Wood)
Greenheart wood is super heavy, super dense and super hard. It is also super rare; most greenheart trees grow in tropical climes or within the boughs of a druid’s grove. The oldest greenheart trees can grow up to 100 feet tall, but their trunks rarely exceed two feet wide; thus, a goodly supply of the wood is hard to come by in more temperate climes.
Beautiful when polished, greenheart wood is exceptionally resistant to damage and rot. Generally assumed to be three to four times stronger than oak, it is difficult and time-consuming to work.
Greenheart is much sought after by master shipwrights, master carpenters and wizardly folk. Greenheart is perfect for sheathing warships’ hulls (at near-ruinous expense) or for use in the crafting of enchanted staves, spears or shields. Wooden weapons crafted from greenheart use the next damage die up (for example, a quarterstaff deals 1d8, not 1d6 damage) but weigh thrice as much as a normal item. Some greenheart statues—labouriously crafted by master sculptors over years of slow, steady progress—are centuries old and remain unblemished by time’s passing. These works of art are much sought after by the great and good for the kudos that owning such a piece of art can bring.
Designer’s Note: Greenheart is a kind of tree in the real world that I have slightly adapted to suit a fantasy world. Why design something new when nature has kindly already done the work?
04: Prophet’s Cave
Campaign Component (Haunted Cave)
Piercing the flank of a craggy bluff, Prophet’s Cave overlooks a busy trade route. This cavernous, airy cave has a wide, low mouth, a be-rubbled floor and a soot-stained roof.
Here once dwelled the charismatic, but slightly mad, priest Paavo Jurva in a roofless, drystone wall cottage he built himself, set in the cave’s depths. From Prophet’s Cave, he sermonised to the many travellers using the road below and accepted their gifts and offerings. He became something of a local celebrity—travellers would go out of their way to listen to his deranged ramblings about the end of the world and the Great Inescapable Doom that would soon fall across the land.
When Paavo died, he was buried in a cairn by the cave’s entrance, but soon afterwards rumours of ghostly hauntings, of a spectral figure watching the road below and of strange sounds emanating from the cave began to circulate in the taprooms of the nearby traveller’s inns. Now, travellers do not willingly travel that stretch of road after dusk for fear of falling foul of the Ghost of the Mad Prophet—as the haunting has come to be known.
Prophet’s Cave is also variously referred to as Cave of the Mad Prophet and Priest’s Hole.
See Also (?): He Who Waits
05: Antero Kaivas
Campaign Component (Cultist)
The butcher and chandler Antero Kaivas is a vile man worthy of terrible and absolute punishment for his innumerable blood-soaked crimes. As well as being a butcher and chandler, Antero Kaivas is a cultist of Braal who uses his two trades to hide the evidence of his many victims.
Chandlery and butchery are smelly, dirty businesses, and few people want to live near a chandler. This suits Antero well; he lives alone outside town in a ramshackle compound surrounded by enclosed fields. Few folk voluntarily visit his place of work and residence; strangers that do so often do not survive the experience.
Once a week, he takes his wares—meat, baked pies and candles to market. Only the poor buy from Antero—candles rendered from “animal fat” smell terrible, and he prices his meats and pies keenly; he takes dark, grim pleasure from knowing what his unsuspecting customers are sharing with their families.
To further supplement his income, Antero sells the bones left over from his butchery to Jani Rintala and his wife, Esteri, at Bone Mill and the hides of slaughtered cattle to various local leather workers. Thus, Antero is a respected, if avoided, member of the local community; no one guesses at the horrors that go on in his blood-spattered workshop.
See Also: Bone Mill
06: The Offshore
Campaign Component (Coastal Enclave)
A decade ago, piloted by her drunken captain, the Emerald Sprite grounded on the Doom Bar—a notorious shoal responsible for many sinkings and drownings. She did not sink, but with her keel gouged out, the Emerald Sprite would never sail again. All seemed lost until Olli Ilma, an enterprising merchant with a questionable history, purchased the wreck for a pittance.
Instead of breaking her up for scrap, as many assumed he would do, he had great oaken pilings driven deep into the Door Bar on either side of the wreck and built out upon them a rambling but stout building of disorganised design. With the work completed, he named the resulting structure the Offshore, proclaimed it an independent sovereign state, and styled himself king. (Other folk disparagingly called him the Reef King, and over time, the name stuck.)
The Offshore is a neutral safe haven where even the direst enemies can meet to discuss terms, safe in the knowledge that the Reef King would suffer no violence in his “kingdom”. Thus, within a bowshot of the Offshore merchant ships are often found anchored near pirates and smugglers, sworn to good behaviour by the Reef King’s rules.
Beyond its supposed role as a safe haven, the Offshore is also a gambling den and pleasure palace ungoverned by any other state’s laws or customs. Consequently, it has a risqué but enticing reputation in “certain circles”. Nearby kingdoms turn a blind eye to the Offshore because its existence keeps the more “troublesome” mariners, merchants, and pirates far from their own ports.
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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