They Scamper And Scurry With Their Little Toesies: A GLoG adventure

I had to make a dungeon in an hour for a Carolingia one-shot, and lo and behold, with some polish, here it is. It was a blast ripping someone else's GLoGhack a new asshole, I cannot recommend it enough. Thanks for reading, and happy gaming.

THE WHOLE STORY

The d’Avegnor family ruled over this barony for generations. The last of their line, Cheldric d’Avegnor, was an eccentric egotist with a strange obsession with rats, and his disastrous rule ended the d’Avegnor line and resulted in a coup that nearly reduced d’Avegnor Keep to rubble. The only structure still standing is a singular tower, propped up by the sagging remnants of shattered walls, and many believe that it contains passage to an exchequer yet undiscovered by looters.

The source of Cheldric’s rat obsession was the latent portal to the Elemental Plane of Rats deep below the tower. When he accidentally opened the portal, it spewed out Rats and mutated him into a half-rat monster, explaining why he disappeared and the barony dissolved. Now the Rats lead the mundane rats in the tunnels to Cheldric’s eternal worship, continuing to feed his insatiable ego.

The most recent resident of the tower is Monteaux, a biologist on sabbatical to study the indigenous rat populations. As a bit of a recluse, she has built up a persona as a “rat witch” to try and scare away interlopers and continue her study. Why are the rats behaving so strangely, and why does no one come back from the hole in the base of the tower?

THE BROKEN TOWER

• The dilapidated, hollow interior of the tower is occluded by rubble, broken timbers, and tattered claret-and-gold banners

• A lucky quick scan notices a rope ladder tied together from banners ripped from the walls leading up to the BELFRY

• Extended searching through the rubble reveals a dented bronze key, hidden there by Monteaux for safekeeping

• It works on Monteaux’s chest in the BELFRY

• A large, pitch-black hole in the root-choked earth leads into the CHAMBER

• Mundane rats occasionally scamper in and out, bringing bits of debris back down with them

• As the players enter, a metallic, booming voice cries out “trespassers, leave at once! This tower is the domain of the Rat Witch!”

• This is Monteaux, using a metal pipe to throw her voice down from the BELFRY

MONTEAUX’S BELFRY

• Monteaux the “rat witch” lairs in this conical tower

• A large hole in the ceiling allows her to spy out into the courtyard

• A smaller peephole allows her to look down into the TOWER below unseen

• All of Monteaux’s prized possessions are in a locked, rotten chest mouldering in the corner

• A jar of rat pheromones (the source of her “power”)

• A carved wooden box that screams when opened, revealing it empty

• A journal of taxonomic notes of the indigenous plants and animals, the results of Monteaux’s sabbatical

• A lead coin that always lands tails and is listed to be minted in 11 years

• Monteaux tries to put on a rather contemptuous aura of grandiosity to scare interlopers away from disturbing her isolation

• If this facade is lifted, she will be disagreeable but cooperative towards who agree to leave her alone

• She knows that no one who has descended into the hole in the TOWER floor has made it back alive

• She has seen one Rat scuttle out; it rattled her, being entirely unnatural

• Her pheromone manipulation allows her to command mundane rats to do her bidding

RAT WORSHIP CHAMBER

• Three tunnels, set into the room like three out of four sides of a square, lead away to the... 

• STATUARY (water reflection on the tunnel’s ceiling)

• LAIR (sounds of deep snoring)

• GROTTO (harsh slope downwards)

• The untunneled stone wall, choked with vines, adjoins the d’Avegnor exchequer

• Behind the thick stone wall is just a ludicrous amount of loot for the taking

• Pushed up against the wall is a large pile of debris

• Rotting food, torn cloth, salvaged bits of metal and wood

• Many rats scurry to and from the pile, putting in new offerings for their god

• 2d6 Rats dwell within the offering pile

• One additional Rat spawns every ROUND, emerging from a root-choked hole next to the offering pile

• Also in the hole is DON’T LOOK BACK, a ruby-encrusted sword that automatically beheads agents of the Church

• The hole leads through to the exchequer

EGO CULT STATUARY

• The center of this natural chamber is dominated by a crystal clear mineral water lake

• The water comes from a recent rift in the wall of the room, burying the lowest parts of the natural chamber

• Submerged in the lake is a stone coffin housing an inert skeleton adorned in opulent jewelry

• This is Adrienne d’Avegnor, Cheldric’s mother

• Hence the carved inscription in the top of the coffin: DIVINE PROGENITOR (DO NOT EAT, DAVE)

• Against the far wall, carved out of the natural limestone, is a massive sculpture of a seated Lord Cheldric

• A long-cold brazier sits in its lap, home to a Dire Rat (presumably Dave)

• Dave, having fattened himself on naught but ash, plays dead until someone is close enough to bite and drag underwater

CHELDRIC’S LAIR

• An obese Rat-human hybrid snores in the center of the room, surrounded by bleached bones picked clean long ago

• This angry, somnolent wreck is what remains of Cheldric d’Avegnor

• He talks in a chattering trainwreck of ungrammatical third-person gibberish, believing himself an invulnerable god

• Every ROUND he in in danger, a Rat appears to come to his aid

• In the corner are soiled robes, a bent scepter, and a sundered crown

• A tailor or jeweler respectively could repair the items and buy them for pocket change

• The Rats will distrust, but not attack, anyone wielding them

CRYSTAL GROTTO

• An almost-complete circle of light-catching crystals dominates the room

• There is one small breach in the circle, about a foot long

• If you put a light source there, the crystals all alight with arcane glow and opens a gateway to the Elemental Plane of Rats

• The crystals can be broken off with 2 WOUNDS of damage and sold to a geologist or wizard

• Two rat-bitten skeletons, the first of the Keep’s raiders, lie mid-rot against the walls

• They raise to try and stop someone putting a light source into the gap

• Unfortunately, they are mute and panicky, so they often just try and wrench the light source out of people’s hands and destroy it

BESTIARY

Rat NX H2 A Swarm (X is ⅓ the number of Rats present), Plaguemonger (every hit, target rolls contested CON or is inflicted with a random disease), Hyper-Rat Nature (The Rats look different from normal rats in that they resemble exactly you think rats look like- every feature accentuates when you look at it, and diminishes as your attention wanders) I To worship

Dire Rat N2 H6 Plaguemonger, Acid Reflux (vomit corroding acid once per day, deals WOUNDS and destroys a random item), Hyper-Rat Nature A To eat

Cheldric N3 H8 A Teeth and Claws, Plaguemonger, Batshit Crazy (cannot take STRESS; mind affecting magic fails, caster instead takes STRESS) I To wallow

Three Rangers

SYMBIOTIC HUNTER

The line between Kin and Beast is not so far as some would like to imagine. Some select few tap into that blurring and form deep connections with animals around them, joining in a mutually beneficial partnership. Those who believe this process can be accelerated by the use of psychedelics are usually not on the right track, though Terris McGillicutty the Lizard Lover is one notable exception. Start with a bag of animal feed, a ghillie suit, smelling salts from all corners of the world, and encyclopedic knowledge of animal tracks and scat.

A Imprint. You have an animal companion: N1 H(2 x Templates) A One appropriate mundane of your choice I To serve you. It will follow your commands out of combat. In combat, you can use your MANEUVER to make it roll on its Behavior Table for its action. To make your companion’s Behavior Table, choose 2 options from the list below each Template, which can be repeats.

        ATTACK: Your companion attacks the strongest, meanest-looking creature it can see.

        PREY: Your companion attacks the weakest creature it can see.

        DEFEND: Your companion jumps in front of an ally, giving N bonus to DEFENSE rolls.

        LICK WOUNDS: Your companion heals N WOUNDS or STRESS.

        FETCH: Your companion goes to get something of your choice.

        DISTRACT: Your companion becomes the target of an enemy’s next strike.

B Bond. By shutting off your body, you can project yourself into your companion’s form. You can sense through their senses, move them, and talk with your voice through their mouth. Long periods of your original body being comatose can have adverse side effects.

C Germination. Your companion can take on a visual appearance that betrays a more supernatural nature at will. In addition, it is N2, and gets a magical ability of your choice.

D Concordance. Your companion can act and roll on its Behavior Table on its own accord, and you can use your MANEUVER to instead choose its action. In addition, your companion can now talk and fly.

PRIMAL EXEMPLAR

You can hear it, if you stay quiet enough. It is the words of the wind’s whisper, it is the letters scribed by the pawprints of scampering animals. The old peoples often call it the Voice. The Voice sometimes talks directly to some accursed few, and in their maddening perpetual dialogue they learn secrets off the beaten path. Start with a totem of your homeland, shawls in the colors of your native wilds, a handful of vaguely suspicious berries, and a Voice in your head.

A Eternal Dialogue. The Voice is constantly babbling in your skull. Template times per day, you can ask it a question, and it will reply with a question intended to get you on the right path (like socratic dialogue). As long as the Voice is in your head (which is always), your mind and soul cannot be read or artificially swayed.

B Honorary Hooves. The Voice feels you on its back and helps you find the fastest ways across its bones. You and your allies can interact with 3 HEXES in a day instead of the normal 2, and while your feet touch the naked earth, your speed is doubled.

C Helping Hands from All ‘Round. The Voice tells you how to best use its gifts. Make an INT roll over the course of a TURN’s access to natural materials to replicate any mundane object you have available. In addition, wild plants and animals are naturally friendly to you, and you cannot get lost in the wilderness.

D Communion Through Rebuttal. Your voice joins the Voice’s harmonious cacophony. Spend a use of your Eternal Dialogue to instead make one command to the Voice that its agents must abide by. Be careful, for the Voice is amoral and indiscriminate.

CLARET STALKER

There are myths of monster hunters so depraved that they adopt the sins of their prey, forever shunning themselves from the light of the civilized Sun. Those legends stem from the Claret Order, a fringe occult order dedicated to the ritualistic hunting and slaying of the beasts of the night by any means necessary. The civilians in their carapaces of stone and wood shouldn’t have to know how black it can get on a moonless night- that is the burden of the Claret Stalker. Start with a pentagram tattoo marking your Ordership, a trophy from your last kill, a named blade forged from cold steel, and the suspicion of the layman.

A Sunless Cloak. Your blood red eyes allow you to see perfectly in any sort of darkness, and people who don’t know you’re there can’t see you when you’re in the shadows. In addition, if you’re dual-wielding and use two OFFENSIVES to make one attack with each weapon, one of those attack rolls of your choice has ADVANTAGE.

B Transmogrification. When you kill a named, intelligent supernatural creature, you can harvest a Strain from it. Ingest that Strain within a week to gain one of the creature’s capabilities. The capability occupies a DEX slot for as long as you want to have it active.

C Strains of Red Salt. When you taste blood, you know the name and physiology of the source creature, as well as their emotional state at that moment. Drink enough of a creature’s blood to kill it to become that creature for up to day.

D Lords of the Edge. You have started your own Order, and train disciples in the dark arts you know so well. You start with three Squires, orphaned rejects with one level in Claret Stalker. They are fiercely loyal to you, and eager to learn, but within 13 years you will die by one of their blades, and your Order will fade into whispered rumor.

The Hills of Bone and Whispers

 “Let ancient battles’ trauma scour calcified, accursed ground.”

• JAWBONE. Named for the giant bone in which the city’s Courthouse is carved, Jawbone lies in the mist-shrouded valley between two felled shoulderblades. Ex-Vornian and Karnish soldiers populate the crumbling apartments and tombstone-paved streets. The Red War’s sudden conclusion formally began about 5 decades ago when the Blue Concord was signed inside of the Jawbone Courthouse.

• THE RIBS. Warrens of vertical caverns are carved within each of these towering osseous spires. Each rib’s respective village is named for its lead output (Salt, Flesh, Artifice...), and all of the ribs surround an acres-large cemetery that serves as a monument to the Red War. The Mausoleum Rangers put down the undead that arise naturally from the cemetary’s muck and act as an inter-Rib mercenary police force.

• THE FORGES OF UNLIFE. The last known manufactury of Unliving silently hisses and churns out legions of hybrid machine-corpses. A demonic frog-creature known as the Foreman oversees the automated assembly line, and guards the portal to Inferno from which damned souls are plucked to power the infernal machines.

Principles:

• DEAD. Life is not natural here; it is the exception, fighting against an unrelenting wall of sorrow that seeks only to drown it. The landscape is mortared from the bones of antediluvian felled giants. A single white orchid grows amidst the field of rotting corpses. A hamlet of Unliving finds an infant floating down the river, but must learn how to care for the breathing babe fast, else it will die in their loving arms.

• WAR-TORN. The Red War’s recent conclusion has left its scars in the skeleton of the Hills forever more. A court-martialed general uses a rusting mechanical arm to bring his froth-capped mug to his lips. A screaming Vornian jingoist is brought to the gallows as he raves about the amorality of the Kanish scum. Weapons smugglers seek new employment by selling their cargo to parties across the pond in the Autumn Kingdoms.

• VICTORIAN. The Red War caused technology to accelerate to a widespread early steam level, and the culture at large changed to reflect it. A Dwarvish noblewoman stares out into the rain from within the first-class cabin of the renowned steam train Axon Express. A hunting party from the Moors chases a rotting beast into a twisted, mycelic wood marred by artillery craters. A forsaken Runeborn orphan has to make a choice whether to beg for copper shillings on the street or to work to the bone and beyond in a grotesque undead sweatshop.

--

DESIGN NOTES

To start out with, I needed a thesis as to what this region was. Something that stuck out to me was the singularity of “bone”: if it were “bones”, these hills might just be littered with skeletal debris, but the way it was written meant (at least to me) that the hills themselves were made of bone. This immediately gave me BONEPUNK vibes, which I wanted to continue to chase.

Another sort of idea I wanted to bring in was the idea of the Hills recovering from a recent war. It’s a theme that has vaguely been mentioned in some games I’ve run on the Arabus Ocean, so I wanted to maybe talk more about that conflict and bring it into the spotlight here, in this region. Perhaps the Hills lie across the Arabus from the Autumn Kingdoms?

So from those details, I sort of let ideas emerge from my intuitive soup. I wanted to avoid having a sort of ubermensch running the scene here to avoid cutting it too close to the Sylbarran Conclave- which is a shame, because an immediate impulse was to have some Dracula-alike ruling the place. I wanted to have the hills of bone be a result of the landscape being made from the skeletons of long-dead giants. All of this contributes to the poetic stanza at the top of the region, phrased so that it might fit into the Dirgesinger’s Canto.

Phase 2: the bullets. I like to structure the initial bullets like this.

• The biggest city in the region. Details about this urban hub go first. As a general rule, I like to use the bullets to put images in the DM’s/player’s minds, not to necessarily show my whole hand and explain everything. Describing a simple interaction between two residents may be just as powerful as namedropping the church and magic school and government building and marketplace.

• A smaller city or civilized area. Wherever the second largest cultural/civilization center is in the region, I detail it next. Oftentimes, I like to insert a subtle adventure hook in one of the first two, if not both, if I can help it. But to get everything I want to “fit”, I sometimes don’t have that luxury.

• An area in which to adventure. Some interesting little detail that the players can interact with or learn more about. There’s inherently a mystery, a clear potential for gameplay, or (if I’m lucky) both.

On the latter bullets, I lean more into the “putting images into the DM’s mind” side of things. Architectural periods, art history terms, evocative adjectives- I want to short-circuit a clear emotional picture into the DM’s brain of how to create content that fits in this region. That’s something I think settings should do more of: guide the DM as to creating in the spirit of the setting instead of laying out the literal, canonical truth of things.

Next, I plan to bang out a quick Character Matrix for the Hills of Bone and Whispers, then perhaps a short dungeon as well. Thanks for reading, and happy gaming.

Woe Betide the Cairn-on-the-Mount

 ACT I: HUNT

REASONS TO HUNT THE BEAST

1 There's a bounty on its head, and you need a(nother) castle

2 Its blood is said to have properties of a necessary potion

3 It came into town and killed the bishop's daughter on the chapel steps

4 The hunters are out of prey, and the village will starve

5 There's a treasure map in its stomach

6 A local oracle foretells disaster in the world's signs just as the Beast is sighted outside town

ENVIRONMENTAL HAZARDS

1 Thick fog

2 Driving rain

3 Intense wind

4 Difficult terrain

5 Extreme temperature

6 Roll twice, this can stack

BEAST ABILITIES (Roll once per party Level)

1 Flight

2 Incorporeality

3 Immunity to metal 

4 Spits fire

5 Splits like an ooze

6 Immune to Rune Magic (Arcane, if you're boring)

7 Immune to Blood Magic (Divine, if you're boring)

8 Size change

9 Gelid blood- if you are near it while it bleeds, you slowly freeze

10 Surprise, motherfucker; it can cast spells like a wizard

In addition to these abilities, when the Beast is reduced to a state where one more blow may kill it, it opens its eye. Choose one CLOSE person- they get a disease known only as "Rot". Rot occupies 2^(full days with Rot) DEX slots, and incurs an equivalent penalty to all STR, CON, and WIS rolls. When Rot occupies every DEX slot, it kills the host. Necrotized black flesh spreads outwards from the host's eye day by day until it consumes their body and they crumble to ash.

ACT II: CONDEMNATION

"That's... puzzling. Ever since you've returned from destroying the Beast, we have not felt the presence of the Great Mother. As such, our clerics cannot heal your Rot, and the nearest other ones are days away at least. Your only hope is going to the Cairn-upon-the-Mount, the home of the Great Mother. Perhaps you may appease her yet, and your companion's Rot be cured."

ACT III: PILGRIMAGE

• OFFERINGS
• The villagers tread no further than this room to bestow their sacrifices
• What do they give as an offering to the Great Mother?
• How much of it was left as unsatisfying, and how much has been dragged away?
• CRYPT
• The Cairn was built by the antediluvian indigenous peoples of this realm
• Who are they, and which of them are buried in this room?
• What was the guardian they entrusted to keep their bodies intact?
• GATE
• The builders experimented with ripping holes in reality and opening gateways to other realms
• Where does this latent gateway lead?
• How do you open it?
• GAUNTLET
• The offerings from the entry chamber are dragged through here to the final room
• What overwrought trap occupies this room?
• Why is the Beast lineage impervious to its effects?
• MOTHER
• The Beast's wrathful mother slumbers in grief (roll for 2 extra Beast Abilities)
• How does she grant the village folk their divine power?
• How can you appease her and set things right?
• SANCTUM
• The original builders wanted to hide this chamber, where they secreted their most valuable treasure
• What was so valuable to them as to be hidden in this room?
• Who is looking for it today, and how close are they to getting it?