The Cannibal-Haunted Ruins of Saltern Abbey
Part of the joy of designing the Sunday Supplement in 2025 was the freedom it gave me to create whatever I fancied. The almost 200 Campaign Components cover a wide range of locations, items, creatures and more. Inevitably, connections formed between some of these ideas.
This week's Sunday Supplements presents four related posts drawn from last year’s Campaign Components that could easily form the basis of your characters' next adventure. (And, in fact, I quite fancy designing this adventure!) All you need now, though, are a couple of maps, some stat blocks and imagination!
Ruin of Saltern Abbey
Ruined Abbey
Standing on a narrow, be-cliffed sliver of land thrust out into the Bitter Sea, the ruin of Saltern Priory is a forlorn, wind-battered place.
Dedicated to Serat, Mistress of Storms, the priory was once a bustling, prosperous house of worship. Extensive sea caves riddle the headland below the priory. The priory’s faithful used the caves for holy worship and communion with their unpredictable goddess. They also harvested the sea’s most plentiful resource—salt—therein boiling off the water in great pans of iron, ceramic, and even lead.
Despite its wealth, however, the priority was abruptly abandoned 60 years ago after some scandal or another—its exact details depend on who relates the tale. (Most such stories involve some combination of a treacherous prioress, a schism in the priesthood, a giant, luminescent pearl, and nefarious doings of a blasphemous or unwholesome nature.)
For a while, a small community of fisherfolk used the increasingly dilapidated and ruined priory as their home. Eventually, they, too, left, tiring of the miasma of isolation and hardship hanging over the priory. In their wake, they left nothing but piles of fish bones and a ramshackle shanty village built amid the ruin.
The few fisherfolk and sailors to come close to the place now report ghostly, devil-fires burning amid the ruins at night, and strange sounds of a most unwholesome nature drifting across the water. No sane fisherfolk come within a bowshot of the ruins, and not even the bravest of them come ashore to explore the crumbling ruins.
In truth, the ruins are not as abandoned as they appear. A gang of smugglers and blackguards lair therein, making the most of the place’s haunted reputation to carry on their illicit doings with impunity. They have also found the old priory’s crypts, but thus far, the magical portal guarding the crypts has defied their attempts to gain entry. That is just as well, for a pack of ravenous ghouls—insane worshippers of Ukre’kon’ala lurk within…
Prior’s Walk
Coastal Path
Built for the prior of Saltern Priory, this rugged path meanders for about five miles along wind-ravaged cliffs and down to shingle-choked isolated coves before petering out in a dense stand of wind-sculpted trees. Beyond lies the sleepy village and castle of Sandford.
Several drystone huts—in varying states of repair—stud the path. Basic in the extreme, they were built for the prior’s convenience—as somewhere for quiet contemplation or shelter from the savage storms that battered the coast. Rarely used in the priory’s heyday, they now stand mostly empty and abandoned—occasionally used by travellers and the like as temporary shelter from harsh weather.
A wild-haired, dishevelled hermit dwells in one of the huts, however. His hut fronts a small natural cave system; within it is a charnel, nightmarish horror. Driven mad by some terrible event in his past, he is a cannibal and enthusiastically worships Ukre’kon’ala (CE god of cannibalism, gluttony and greed). He preys on lone travellers and the occasional shipwreck survivor using the path. Sometimes he lights fires in the dead of night to entice ships onto hidden reefs and jagged rocks. Thus far, he has failed to wreck any ship, but it is only a matter of time before his efforts are rewarded.
Locals have not yet connected his depredations with the stories of missing travellers, but there is a growing realisation that a predator or blackguard—perhaps a gang of wreckers or bandits—lurks somewhere in the path’s environs.
Ukre'kon'ala
Foul God
CE god of cannibalism, gluttony and greed
Epithets: The Ever-hungry Maw
Symbol: Fanged mouth
Domains: Death
Favoured Weapon: Dagger
Raiment: Blood-splattered clothes
Worshippers: Cannibals, orcs
Teachings: Greed is good, and the best food wriggles when you eat it. Plants are for animals; predators and the powerful eat meat—fresh meat.
Holy Text: Revelations of Utu’rak the Unstable
This foul deity demands terrible sacrifices—living humanoids eaten by his worshippers in horrific and indescribable, sanity-shattering bloody rites. The longer the sacrifice survives the ritual—and the greater their pain, suffering, and horror—the greater Ukre’kon’ala’s satisfaction. In exchange, Ukre’kon’ala gifts power and prosperity to his faithful.
Ukre’kon’ala’s worshippers are always deranged and often mad. They have seen and done things that no right-minded individual should ever see or do. They often dwell in coastal communities and have a connection to the sea. A few insane hermits dwelling on isolated islands or desolate stretches of coastline worship Ukre’kon’ala; woe betide any traveller or shipwrecked mariner unlucky enough to share such an individual’s fire at night.
Hat tip to Richard Green for Ukre’kon’ala initial design.
Sandford
Fishing Village
Overlooked by a stout castle of simple but effective design, the sleepy coastal fishing village of Sandford straddles the Nimar River’s estuary. Six miles east of the ruin of Saltern Priory, Sandford is the personal holding of the Rakkanens, an ancient family descended from the warrior-knight Matias Rakkanen who hacked the place from the wilderness generations ago.
At low tide, a broad, glistening sandbar emerges from the Nimar’s waters to link the two halves of the village. Locals know the sandbar and its ways well, but visitors and newcomers are well advised to tread carefully, for the sucking, cloying sand can be treacherous.
Few locals give much thought to the ruin of Saltern Priory that stands but six miles or so along the coast, preferring to pretend that the allegedly haunted and cursed place does not exist. Instead, they worry and fret about the village’s harbour and the perennial problem of the harbour silting up—a storm last winter drove significant quantities of sand into the harbour, and sporadic dredging efforts remain ongoing. The harbour is the village’s beating heart—without it, penury and hardship will likely beset the villagers.
As well as inundating the harbour with silt and sand, the last winter storm also revealed a curious rock formation in the Nimar’s estuary. Now at low tide, the tops of ten seaweed stones—nine arrayed in a rough circle around the tenth, larger stone—emerge from the Bitter Sea’s fretted waters. The locals call the formation the Dancers and tell predictably fantastic and fanciful tales about them…
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 this week’s Campaign Components make it into your game or sparks your creativity.
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