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Overview

Next: Areas 7-12

Level 1

Stonephasing Doors

The first level of the Apocalypse Archive contains a series of doors which exhibit the phenomenon known as “Stonephase,” moving from location to location frequently. It is unclear precisely what purpose these doors served. They might be shortcuts, but some feel more like traps. Scholars believe they are the result of spatiotemporal decay, the gradual unraveling of the laws of physics within the First Library.

Phasing doors should appear (and disappear) whenever the Referee feels like throwing one in, according to the whims of the Archive. However, if you would like to randomize their occurrence, roll 1d20 every time the party enters an area; on a 20, one of the doors is present. Choose or roll on the following table to discover which door appears. Doors typically open upon being touched, unless otherwise noted, and typically only phase when unobserved.

Roll (1d6)	Door
1	Circular. Anyone who enters this door sees what appears to be themselves exiting a long corridor. Should they enter the corridor, the door closes behind them. If they attempt to leave, they find the door they came through simply leads to the other end of the corridor. There is no way out of this infinite trap save through magic – or if someone else opens the door and does not enter the corridor.
2	Oval. This door leads to an intricate maze. Quickly hand-draw or generate a maze, which takes a different shape every time. The maze includes various other Stonephasing doors (roll again on this table to determine which). It may be that this is where the doors “rest” when they’re not in other parts of the complex. Various other creatures may be encountered in the maze. Roll 1d6 for every ten minutes spent inside to determine what is encountered: (1) Illumined Vessel, (2) Hemadryad, (3) goblin of the Fodder Clan, (4) Celebrant, (5) encephalomorph drone, (6) biomechanoid servitor.
3	Triangular. This door leads into a triangular chamber with two other, identical doors. These doors lead to other parts of the first level. Roll 4d12 and add the results together to determine where they are currently located (i.e. areas 4-48).
4	Rectangular. This door has a counterpart in another room on the first level. Roll 4d12 and add the results together to determine where it is currently located. Each time the door is closed, its unobserved side shifts rooms.
5	Pentagonal. This door leads to a five-sided chamber with no other exits. Once the door is closed, time begins to pass at a different rate inside the chamber, such that an hour within equals only a second outside. The door has a 50% chance of being in the same place when opened again – otherwise roll 4d12 and add the results together for its new location.
6	Hexagonal. This door leads into a six-sided chamber containing six interconnected pod-like structures at its centre, like the petals of some bizarre biomechanoid flower. Anyone who climbs inside one of these pods will find all of their wounds healed and ailments removed, as per Heal Disease. If a dead body (or fragment thereof) is placed into one of the pods, it revivifies as per Resurrect. Every time a pod is used, the character inside must pass a Constitution save or suffer from a side-effect. Roll 1d6: (1) hair and nail growth rapidly accelerates, producing exhaustion (disadvantage on attacks and ability checks until you rest), (2) they are violently ill for the next hour, retching up all food and drink consumed in the last 24 hours, (3) they experience physical deterioration, finding their teeth loose, hair falling out, or similar effects, permanently losing 1 Constitution, (4) they age 1d10 years, (5) tumours erupt throughout their body, draining 1 Constitution per day until death unless they are excised with Heal Disease or expert surgery, (6) moments after leaving the pod they begin quivering violently, every cell in their body vibrating, liquefying into a gooey pink slime; a Constitution save is required to reassert physical coherence, but if the character scores 20 or higher, they produce two identical versions of themselves.

Walls

Although the metropolis possesses a range of architectural styles and features, most of the walls of the Old City are formed from archaeolith, the so-called “First Stone.” They typically have a curiously organic appearance, as if the entire city were a gigantic fossil. Some believe that this is evidence that the Old City was “grown” rather than constructed by traditional means, and that the city may once have been a living organism. As evidence for this view, many xenoarchaeologists point to the still-extant biomechanoid structures throughout the First Library, which evince a similar design as the walls. The colour and hue of archaeolith varies, typically ranging from obsidian-black to sickly green. Damaging archaeolith is near-impossible with ordinary weapons, but sustained excavation is possible with the right tools.

1. Trapdoor Entrance

This six-sided trapdoor is caked with dust, a layer of grime concealing a series of impossibly intricate bas-relief carvings. Though abstract in design, the carvings seem to portray some nebulous disaster, presenting a stylized cityscape disintegrating before multifarious catastrophes. Earthquakes rend sinuously curving streets; massive tendrils extend from the sky to wrench spires from their foundations; twisting flames flicker across alien palaces.

• The edges of the trapdoor are strangely scorched and melted, and the carvings are gouged from the prybars of previous explorers. Sections of the carvings seem to once have been moveable but are now locked in place.

• The trapdoor requires a successful Strength check to open.

• Looking upon the carvings for too long inevitably produces a stinging headache and lingering nosebleed.

• If one listens carefully, the distant, muffled echo of what might be a scream resounds briefly against the inside of the door.

• Like many structures of the First Library and some of the doors within the Archive, the entrance to the Apocalypse Archive is afflicted with Stonephase. Unstuck from conventional spacetime, the trapdoor entrance to the Archive “roams” the city unpredictably, lingering for as little as a few minutes to as long as days. The door seems to be shy – possibly photophobic – and shows a preference for narrow alleyways, dank storage rooms, and other shadowy spaces, with a particular predilection for the labyrinthine rookeries of Corvid Commons, the wheezing side-streets of Catch-All, the dimmer corners of Gloomway, and the catacombs below the Gilded Graveyard. It is sometimes mistaken for a manhole cover or cellar-entrance.

• Should it be desired, the trapdoor’s Stonephase can be randomized. It has a 1% chance of shifting per day, including while the party is inside the Archive. They might emerge not where they started but in the cellar of a Fanghill mansion, a leprous alleyway in quarantined Catch-All, a thieves’ rookery in the Commons, a haunted crypt in the depths of Grey Hook, some other section of the Old City, and many other such locations.

2. Staircase

The carvings evident on the trapdoor entrance continue along the walls of the spiralling staircase, which extends deep into the earth, depicting ever stranger and more horrific catastrophes. The oozing monstrosity known as the Plasmic Woe, now contained in the Warded Ward, can be glimpsed flooding a continent with its amorphous bulk, expanding as it dissolves everything within its gelatinous, ever-growing body; a terrifying blankness pocks reality with bizarre lacunae; vortices open, pouring out otherworldly oceans that flood whole planets; carnivorous forests reclaim cities and devour all they find. The primeval steps are intermittently spattered with old bloodstains.

• Gazing too long at these carvings is hazardous and begins to corrode the mind. For every round the carvings are studied, a Wisdom save is required to avoid 1 damage and extensive bleeding from the eyes, nose, and ears. A success yields some hint as to the contents of the Archive – skim to one of the chambers marked as a Containment Chamber and briefly describe what its contents would do to the world were it unleashed.

• The exact length of the staircase varies with each expedition; traversing it requires 1d100 minutes, no matter the speed of those descending or ascending. Make a new roll each time the staircase is entered.

3. Dead Guardian

The thing that once guarded this vast, six-sided chamber of primeval stone is long dead, the mechanical components of its body still dangling from the ceiling like empty hooks in a colossal slaughterhouse, ancient metal malformed by fire and spellcraft. What might have been a skull swivels slowly to and fro, its many sockets now empty. It is difficult to picture what manner of alien flesh was once grafted to this anathemantine skeleton, but what little is visible of the floor beneath mysterious drifts of ash is stained from the slain guardian’s decomposition. Occasionally a spasm runs through the broken machinery, and the spindly appendages twitch like the legs of a dying spider. The whole thing brings to mind a monstrous chandelier, or a mobile for some gigantic child.

• Six doors are arrayed on the various walls of the chamber, five open, one firmly shut; simply discovering their number and location may take some time, given the sheer size of the anteroom.

• Adjacent to each of the doors are glyphs in the High Goblin language, daubed in blood. These read: “Evil Light,” “Woods,” “Nasty Music,” “Home,” “Up,” and “Down.” “Up” is adjacent to the staircase entrance, and “Down” is sealed. A nonagonal depression is evident beside “Down,” which fits the Amber Keystone (currently in area 30).

• A glimmer of sickly light can be glimpsed through the door labelled “Evil Light,” while eerie, discordant music can distantly be heard from the door labelled “Nasty Music.”

• Investigation reveals that mixed in amongst the ash are a number of fused, blackened bones. A successful Intelligence check suggests that these belonged to goblins.

4. Empty Shelves

The enormous shelves in this immense hall have been stripped bare, divested of every book, tablet, scroll-tube, and memory-crystal. Cobwebs and dust are all that remain. Something glimmers in the darkness deeper into the chamber. There is a faint smell of burnt hair and meat.

• Following the source of this light reveals that it radiates from the eye sockets of a twisted, pale corpse, that of a small, hunched creature with five eyes and too many digits on its hands. It looks like a goblin, but a horrendously mutated one; it wears leather garments and still clasps a bone spear. The creature’s skin is sizzling slightly, its veins scorched and black; a thin trickle of smoke seeps from its mouth, ears, and nostrils. The light that bleeds from the eyes of the goblin corpse is indescribable – a sickly, eldritch effulgence that should not be. As one approaches, the eyes twitch with a life of their own and begin to roam towards whoever nears.

• Apart from its armour and spear, the goblin carries a copy of the Shadow Glyph Program Card, which can be used with the Fleshscribe (area 26). This looks like a thin disc of iridescent metal inscribed with a peculiar sigil in Aklo, meaning “Shadow.”

• Cutting the goblin open reveals that its internal organs have all been hideously burned. If left untouched, the goblin rises as an Illumined Vessel within 1 hour.
  
  Illumined Vessel: 2 HD (8 Hit Points), Armour 1, Bite (Str, 1d6), Speed 20 ft., Undead (immune to poison, disease, mind-influencing effects), Str 12, Dex 6, Con 14, Int 2, Wis 6, Cha 4.
  
  • Infected Light: A Vessel sheds light in a 60-foot cone; anyone who can see who is exposed to the light must pass a Constitution save or gain Radiation equal to the amount by which they failed (see Radiation effects below).
  • Iridescent Blood: A Vessel hit with a melee attack sheds gouts of glowing blood. Its attacker must pass a Constitution save or gain Radiation equal to the amount by which they failed.
  • Snuff: All light sources brought within 10 feet of a Vessel are sucked into its eyes, fuelling the light within. Magical darkness damages the Vessel for 1d6 per round with no save.

• Anyone with eyes caught in the beams of the light must pass a Constitution save or become contaminated by it, gaining Radiation equal to the amount by which they failed (20 on a critical failure). A successful rest reduces a character’s Radiation by 1d10. Heal Disease reduces it by 1d100. Spells like Heal Wounds may provide brief respite from individual symptoms but do not lower Radiation. Anyone who dies while irradiated rises as a Vessel similar to the goblin after 1d6 hours, possessed by the light inside them.

• Those with Radiation of 6 or more can perceive trails of star-spoor leading from this chamber to area 6 and area 8, like a kind of glowing immaterial mucus imperceptible to those who have not been Illumined.

Radiation Level	Symptom
1-5	A mild headache gathers behind your eyes. You can no longer rest without a successful Constitution save first. When you close your eyes, strange, kaleidoscopic visions dance briefly on the inside of your eyelids before fading, afterimages from some layer of reality you are not yet fully perceiving.
6-10	Your vision is becoming more acute. You gain Infravision up to 60 feet or extend it for 60 feet if you already possess it. Your irises have changed to a swirling infragreen-undigo-hyperred whorl and emit a faint but definite lustre.
11-15	Your vision continues to sharpen, painfully. You can perceive the individual hairs on your companions’ skin. When you look at a grain of sand you are momentarily captivated by the scintillating facets of its irregular surface, more gorgeous than any diamond. The sensation is exquisite and unbearable. You gain advantage on Wisdom checks involving perception but become exhausted after passing one (disadvantage on all saves, checks, and attack rolls).
16-20	Even the brightest lights leave you unbothered. You have advantage on saving throws against being blinded.
21-25	You have a high-grade fever and begin sweating profusely. You are resistant to disease and poison, gaining advantage on all saving throws against them; such contaminants cannot bear the bright heat suffusing your body.  This does not apply to the saving throw you must make to rest.
26-30	Your blood glows. You can see it shining softly through your skin. If it spills, it shimmers and iridesces. If you are injured in melee combat, your attacker must pass a Constitution save or gain Radiation equal to the amount by which they failed.
31-35	You can stare directly straight into the sun without pain or any other ill effect. You are immune to the radiant attacks of other Illumined and can no longer be blinded. Letters of unclean light form and unform inside your mind, teaching you the Sidereal Speech, the secret language of the Final Star by which it speaks to itself and the Illumined.
36-40	Your head pounds with the ceaseless thrum of the alien fire now blazing deep in your mind. When you close your eyes, the incandescent Demon Midwives of the Final Star beckon you lasciviously. You can feel your eyeballs swell, your pupils dilating, drawing in more light. All lights within 5 feet of you are snuffed out, drawn into your eyes.
41-45	Something is wrong with your shadow. It bucks and writhes as if trying to get away from you. The dark, secret parts of you are being burned away, leaving only a perfect shell, a vessel for the light. Lose 1 Charisma.
46-50	Your eyes begin to glow distinctly. You have advantage on ranged attack rolls made while your eyes are open. The world is too exquisitely beautiful and complex to look upon without a kind of luxurious pain, a panting aesthetic bliss.
51-55	The light in your eyes is now so bright that you create an area of dim light in a 10-foot cone. Any attack roll against you has advantage if the attacker can see you. This light is infectious: anyone inside of its glow must pass a Constitution save or gain Radiation equal to the amount by which they failed.
56-60	You absorb light as a leech drinks blood. You no longer require food or drink. All other light sources within 10 feet of you are snuffed, drawn into your eyes.
61-65	The light in your eyes increases in intensity. You now shed dim, contaminated light in a 30-foot cone. You can feel the light spreading into every crevice of your body. The insides of your lungs, the valves of your heart, the depths of your bowls – all are limned with this eerie light. Were you to be cut open, you would spew a great gout of uncanny colour alongside your entrails.
66-70	An atomic blossom unfurls in your mind. You dream only of the light. You dream of an unclean flame licking across your limbs. You dream of crushing gravity, of impossible heat, of a great and terrible voice speaking in your mind. You can no longer rest at all. Your dreams eclipse the Dreams of a Dead Empire.
71-75	The light in your eyes is now bright rather than dim, extending in a 20-foot cone with dim light for another 20 feet. Stealth becomes virtually impossible while your eyes are open.
76-80	Your shadow breaks free with a hideous flickering. Lose 2 more Charisma. If you drop below 76 Radiation, your shadow returns like an abused but loyal dog, limping back to your side.
81-85	All is revealed to you. Nothing can hide before the light – not even thoughts. You can detect the thoughts of those around you constantly so long as they are illumined by the light. The strain is unbearable; being around other thinking beings brings a pain that only the light can dull. They, too, must become Illumined.
86-90	The light in your eyes is now kin to a powerful lantern, shedding bright, contaminated light in a 60-foot cone and dim light for an additional 60 feet. All matter is star-waste. You are an avatar of solar abjection. Your mind blazes with the furious, sacred glory of the Final Star.
91-95	The light fills your mind. When you close your eyes, all you can see is abwhite fire and hyperred vortices, and the eerie shapes that writhe within them, nascent stirrings of the foetal solar god whose luminous seed has been planted inside your brain. You gain +2 Wisdom and Intelligence.
96-100	When you close your eyes you see the future, and the future belongs to the light. It will consume this world as it has consumed you. All will be bathed in the perfection of its glow. All will burn away. All will be consumed. This planet and the others in orbit of this pale and feeble sun will be absorbed, as will the sun itself, and the Final Star will be reborn in this universe. All will fuel its cancerous conflagration. All will be united in that incandescent intelligence, a god-mind of blazing nuclear synapses, a deific, eternal explosion destined to spread across this reality and all others. Over the next hour, your fragile organs incinerate. Your blood turns to ash. Unless your Radiation drops within an hour, your body dies and you become an undead Vessel to the Star, rising within 1d6 hours.

5. Darkness Bath

At the centre of this chamber, a hexagonal pool brims with darkness. No light can pass beneath the surface of this absolute blackness. Although the darkness looks liquid, it is immaterial, though deathly cold. A curious mechanism like a gigantic spout is evident to one side.

• Infravision cannot penetrate the magical Darkness.

• Anyone who enters the Darkness Bath sustains 1d6 damage each turn. For every point of damage sustained, they lose 1 point of Radiation. Any light source immersed in the darkness is snuffed.

• The bath is quite shallow, with sloping sides, but deep enough that quite a large creature could become fully immersed – 20 feet deep at its lowest point.

• At the very centre of the Bath is a plug which some groping hand might find. If pulled, the Darkness Bath drains, and a passage to Level 2 leads to the Atramental Tank (area 60). The spout mechanism refills the Bath.

6. Voidskin Scroll Archive

Spiralling shelves twist around themselves throughout this domed chamber. They contain a series of carefully rolled scrolls of black vellum, the substance scholars call Voidskin, thought to be tanned from the hides of the astral leviathans which drift in the gaps between planes. Something glows amidst the shelves.

• Wandering the whorl of the Scroll Archive are two more Vessels: sparks of the Final Star that have inhabited the corpses of mutant goblins similar to the one found amongst the Empty Shelves (area 4).

• The trail of star-spoor leads inside the stacks.

• Each scroll is worth 1d100 gp to collectors; though most have been looted, some 250 remain, often in hard-to-reach corners. Roll on the following table to determine the contents:

Roll (1d12)	Text
1	A star chart, totally unfamiliar, clearly drawn from the perspective of some other planet.
2	An astronomical catalogue written in the Sidereal Speech, listing thousands of planets, stars, constellations, nebulae, and other celestial objects. Many of these are unfamiliar to astronomers of this world: there are entries for Secret Stars, Anti-Stars, Ghost Stars, Mindspheres, Astral Webs, Time Wounds, Hollow Worlds, False Planets, and many other unknown phenomena.
3	Blueprints for a machine. Its purpose is opaque, but it might be some fashion of weapon, gate, or power generator.
4	A spellbook containing formulae for the Illuminate and Darken spells. Light cast by these spells is tainted by the Final Star. Darkness produced by these spells deals 1d6 damage per round to the Illumined.
5	A map of part of the Apocalypse Archive – roll 1d6 for the level.
6	An illuminated history of the Membrane Wars written in Aklo, principal language of the Librarians. The details of this enormous transplanar conflict are difficult to understand, as the text is littered with references to eldritch mathematics and military technology for which Hexians have no point of reference – “Antitemporal Filaments” “Astral Conjunctions,” “Celestial Nodes,” “Nihil Points.” This scroll is one volume of countless thousands. Those housed here refer specifically to that part of the war waged against the Final Star and its Illumined armies. The Final Star seems to be some kind of solar deity that slowly consumes entire universes, assimilating all of their matter and energy into a single, vast intelligence, a monstrous thinking sun, ever-hungry, sprawling across time and space and dimensions. It has spread itself across multiple realities, and the Librarians were desperately trying to keep it from devouring this one.
7	Psalms of the Final Star – a series of litanies in the Sidereal Speech praising the glory of the Last Light, the sense of numinous contentment it brings, the ecstasy of its immolating caress, the majesty of its all-consuming glory. They are exceedingly poetic, but rather repetitious.
8	Fire at the End of Time, an Aklo text detailing various theories as to the nature of the Final Star, including the following: (1) the Star was created artificially as an energy source for an advanced civilization, but something went cataclysmically wrong and it achieved consciousness, (2) the Star was born during the collapse of a universe when all matter and energy converged, resulting in such impossibly dense concentrations of radiation it became spontaneously self aware, (3) the Star is the by-product of waste eldritch energy shunted from some long-extinct transplanar empire into a sort of heatsink pocket dimension, (4) the Star was originally a weapon created by the Unspeakable Ones, the Librarian gods, in one of their conflicts, activities somewhere between wars, games, and rituals, (5) the Star is an elemental demiplane of fire which achieved self-consciousness, (6) the Star is the ghost of a stillborn reality, a universe which never achieved expansion, a kind of cosmic foetal spirit. The text concludes by casting doubt on all such interpretations; the Final Star is fundamentally unknowable.
9	Angelology of the Final Star, an Aklo description of the different types of Illumined. These include Vessels or “Lightbringers,” bodies that the Star has occupied; Cherubim, which burst forth from the fleshly cocoons of Vessels after incubation; and Seraphim, formed when multiple Cherubim swollen with the life-essence of their prey combine together into a single organism. There is speculation that the Illumined are psychovores, that is, soul-eaters, devouring the essence of those they kill and absorbing all consciousness into the Last Light. Their only weakness is to certain forms of elemental darkness.
10	A spell scroll of Conjure Flame. The light of this spell is infected with that of the Final Star and all damage dealt by it also increases a creature’s Radiation.
11	Census of the Illumined: a list of names in the Sidereal Speech, endlessly long.
12	A memory crystal containing the consciousness of one those whose world was consumed by the Final Star. If placed into a body using a Consciousness Transcriber, the being will speak of the spread of the Cult of the Last Light and their message of holy union with a being of eternal love, of the contaminated Light and the Illumined who carried it, of the horror of the infectious Beacons, of the way eventually the light spread to everything and everyone, filling the sky with its evil glow.