More coherent notes on the Underworld. The idea is that these three points of interest are arranged around an enormous open cavern area, with multiple oil lakes and fissure into the earth. The open area is where you will be encountering the underworld fauna. I guess the next thing is some maps?
-
Ape Monestary
The structure is carved into the shining black rock walls of the cavern. The walls are covered in ornamental carving, depicting figures (not ape or human) with too many limbs, eyes, hands, faces. There are thousands of these and no two are alike. All of them are depicted covered in complex jewellery and many hold weapons. They sit in recessed alcoves and cover every wall.
There are large, artificially excavated, rectangular oil ponds in front of the monastery - the krill farms. Apes farm krill more or less like people farm rice paddies. If these ever catch fire the apes have stores of bisque pots full of carbon monoxide that they use to smother the flames (basically firefighting grenades - don't tell me this isn't realistic I am aware lol).
The monastery is built on two levels, but the ground floor has an enormously high ceiling (like 50 or 60 feet), so the bulk of the thing is enormous. The ground level is the meditation hall (with petrol well), fighter's hall, the gate down to Chaos, the abbot's observatory (it looks down into the core), and the kitchens, eating areas, and golem rooms. The upper levels are the sleeping quarters and workshops (white ape monks carve statuary and stone tools/weapons the same way mediaeval monks scribed books).
White apes collect their shit and sculpt it into rough ape-forms. They mix it with blood and pieces of precious jewellery, which (along with prayer, ritual, etc.) allow the shit-form to animate and speak. They believe that the animating intelligence comes from the core. Shit is primal matter, like oil, like blood, and has a sacred aspect in the monastery. The shit-golems usually last for less than an hour before they start to collapse. Their words are almost completely random, but there is a tradition in the monastery of recording the utterances and subjecting them to oracle interpretation.
Petrol eating: only the Soldiers and the Abbott are mature enough to eat petrol. The other 150 or so apes monks are juveniles and eat krill. Apes that get to maturity are actually called 'petrol-eaters' in their language.
The Abbott is not big like the other petrol eater soldiers, he is only very slightly larger than the juveniles. If questioned on this he will get defensive and say that he is just short.
Usually the soldiers guard the portal down to Chaos, which is the most sacred site in the complex. They can be easily drawn away by danger elsewhere - their duties are ceremonial, and they don't actually mind much if people want to descend. The duty of protecting the other monks is not even slightly ceremonial.
The monastery holds the Law Eaters in reverence, the same way that religious people hold angels in reverence. They will do literally anything that the Law Eaters tell them to.
The monastery has a large, sharp, black stone built into the floor of the prayer room, roughly alter-sized. Anything killed on this stone dies permanently, and will never rise again. This is where the zombie pilgrims are headed to. There are several zombies already there, meditating in advance of their truly final death.
If you ask the abbott he will tell you that yes, the Sainted Captain was here; that they killed several people and fought their way down into Chaos with the Law Eaters in pursuit. Their fate is unknown.
-
Law Eaters
8 foot tall humanoids with 6 insectoid (spined, oddly jointed) limbs and heads like giant blowfly/mosquitoes. They bear some resemblance to the sculpted figures in the walls of the monastery (the sculptures are like more intense versions of the actually-existing Law Eaters). They wear baroque suits of heavy armour made from a strange iridescent metal that rings when struck, and are absolutely covered in strange metallic jewellery and ornamentation.
They can speak common in a droning, buzzing way; they can actually speak all languages. There are four of them in the Underworld, and they have come to hunt the Chaos Eaters that have made their way down here from King Mag's dungeon.
One of them is a captain, and carries a Chaos Blade that looks like a large, heavy macuahuitl made of the same iridescent metal as their armour. Close inspection will reveal that the 'teeth' have ripping edges that subdivide infinitely into fractally smaller ripping edges. When it hits it makes a ringing sound like a bell.
The Chaos Blade has a +3 expanded critical hit range, and a flat -3 to hit. If you crit with it twice in a row, your second crit will deal x3 instead of x2. If you crit with it three times in a row, your third crit does x4, etc. There is no upper limit to this stacking effect, but the crit chain must be unbroken - if you miss or hit normally, your critical damage resets to normal.
Law Eater
HD 6, spine claw d8 x2 (captain attacks twice with the Chaos Blade instead), armour: as plate, speed: human, disposition: professional soldiery. Not hostile unless provoked (or unless you are visibly religious).
Law Eaters are unbreakable, and never test morale.
Awe: Law Eaters are shrouded in a presence that stops you from being able to think properly. They are more real than the things around them, more solid, and they inspire reverence and terror in normal people. All mental stats are at -4 while fighting Law Eaters (this does not stack).
Coprophage: A Law Eater can eat a human body in minutes, using a combination of distended, ripping mouth-parts and a long proboscis that can inject tissue with digestive acids. If it spends a turn eating a corpse it will heal 1 HP, and can usually (depending on the size of the body) do this for up to 15 turns, devouring it entirely.
-
The Tombs of the Serpent Men
They are mostly empty, and extremely trapped. This is the second trap dungeon section (and right after the Mimic Hell!). A little more Indiana Jones, ancient stone mechanisms style, because that stuff is classic and fun.
The actual tombs behind the traps are full of lucrative grave goods, and serpent man mummies (who are actually dead and inanimate - without angels, things that die usually stay dead). The mummies are cursed in various ways.
There are a few living Protector-Thanes in the tombs, because Serpent Men are also biologically immortal. They are big, strong, and well armed. They are sluggish unless warmed by fire (serpent-men are native to regions closer to the core). They have NPC-style personalities and interactions (and least one has lost his lover, who descended the well into chaos many years ago). If you don't disturb the grave goods (and you can communicate somehow), you might find allies here.
The other enemies are vermin, underworld fauna, Cuckoos, Chaos Eaters, and maybe some species of slimes that have crept into the tombs over the centuries.
The stair from the Mimic Hell leads directly into the Tombs, so this is the first area that the PCs will experience. The come out literally right next to an open door into the large, open section of the Underworld that the main locations are built around.
-
The Cuckoo Caves
The Cuckoos were a Serpent Man biological weapons in centuries past. They are birdlike, pale humanoids, who slowly and unconsciously take on the physical features of humans close to them. Their 'natural' form is a thin, hollow-boned human with black eyes and small, sharp teeth and borderline supernatural dark vision. They were grown in vats in their tens of thousands, and were used as infiltrators and chaff soldiers during the wars against the surface. They are mostly known as a horror story in the Barony, because a massive Cuckoo attack was one of the many disasters that caused the Old Kingdom to fall.
This was in the past. Now, they are an endemic pest in the Underworld. Cuckoos aren't really sentient, although they are superlative mimics and can pick up language and social cues with frightening ease. None of this really sticks - a Cuckoo who can speak common will have forgotten it again in a couple of weeks. They also don't really think. They say the things that they think you want them to say, in order to convince you that they are like you. They know when to smile and when to tell a joke and when to cry, and sometimes they get these things slightly wrong and it freaks people out.
Cuckoos that you meet underground won't be human-like at all. They usually move in groups of ten or so, and often, if you encounter them in the wild, they will group around you to observe you and take on your features. It will usually take four or five hours for a cuckoo to look exactly like you, and to have started picking up your mannerisms. It will take two days for the mimicry to fool people that don't know you. Four days and it will be hard to notice to people who know you well.
You can watch the cuckoos around you start to look like you in real time. Once they are reasonably sure that the mimicry will fool you, they will start to demand your gear, or start to try to tell your companions that you are the real cuckoo. This is usually not very convincing, at least until they've had three or four days to practice.
Most adventurers who encounter them have a kill-on-sight policy, because they are physically fragile, and because their mimicry can cause devastating confusion and morale loss if given time to take root.
Cuckoos reproduce asexually, by vomiting up clusters of 10 - 15 eggs. They eat petrol and require no other sustenance. If you cut them open their organs are strange, grey things, saturated with crude oil (this is also what their mimic forms look like when you open them up).
They live in caves and natural fissures in the rock, and defend themselves with their bare hands. Most Underworld fauna hate and fear cuckoos, and won't go anywhere near them. The Cuckoo Caves are right outside the Tombs of the Serpent Men, and there are hundreds and hundreds of them living in the dark holes and tunnels in the rock face.
The PCs may encounter two more surviving Starlings, sitting on a rocky outcrop, facing one another, surrounded by fifty or so identical, naked copies of themselves. One of the Starling survivors is self-mutilating (she has cut away most of her face), and the other is catatonic with trauma and despair. The mutilated Starling is possessed with the second of the three demons from King Mag's prison, but this demon is less together and driven than Misery and is compulsively inflicting pain on its host as a coping mechanism for its general fear and lack of direction. It will be easy to disperse. The catatonic Starling can be rescued and taken back to the surface (and the PCs will be rewarded for this), but she is traumatised to the extent that she will never fight again. The cuckoos will try to steal her possessions, armour, and clothing if you take her away, but they will not be difficult to scare away. If she is rescued, eventually she will be able to tell you that the Sainted Captain left them there to die, heading in the direction of the Ape Monastery. She is convinced that the Sainted Captain is the host for the third demon.
No comments:
Post a Comment