The party decided to go to Erubescence – a rival city state of Hex and it’s occasional ally in local wars – to seek its help in dealing with the vengeful ghosts of the Penumbral Empire.
So, that means I had another map to make.
If you like what you see here, I’m actually publishing parts of this campaign world sequentially. The first two volumes – Genial Jack: Volume 1 and Genial Jack Volume 2– are available for purchase in Print + PDF at DriveThruRPG.
Its sinister towers rise high into the blackness above, rivalled only by the ancient menhirs of the ogres. Foremost amongst these spires are the castles of the nine Houses of the Blood, vampiric families sired by the Night Queen, as well as the foreboding silhouette of Castle Crepuscule, abode of the Night Queen herself, most ancient of vampires, said by some to be the first of her kind.The lively docks of Pulsetown bustle with activity. Garishly painted and brightly lit with coloured lamps, the district forms a stark contrast with the dark metropolis of stone which broods around it, a pocket of life and light amid the tenebrosity of Erubescence. The folk here are mostly living, this district being largely inhabited by “the Quick” – that is, the so-called Third Order, behind those fully undead, such as the vampiric nobility and clergy, and the half-undead or demi-living, such as dhampir, ghostbreed, revenants, and the possessed.Tottering buildings emerge from the murky water of the Drowned District, linked together with rickety wooden bridges and platforms, many ramshackle new structures, others partially-ruinous buildings whose top floors protrude from the Lagoon. Boats flit everywhere, with a regular ferry joining Charnel End and the Court of Cannibals.The Skin Markets reek of embalming fluid, ozone, and animals, the air filled with the guttural groans of the zombie thralls in the aptly-named Moanmart, the whimpers of living thralls in the Chainmart, and the animal grunts of livestock in the Squealmart. Merchants herd the various creatures, living and undead, through the streets on their way to the market wards, sometimes in cages in wagons.The slums of Fleaford in southeast Erubescence reek of wet dogs. The bridge leading over the canal can be raised like a drawbridge, cutting it off from the rest of the city. Rain drizzles down on the ramshackle wooden buildings, mottled with rot and graffiti, the clannish runes of werewolf packs. The folk here are mostly of the Quick, but the vast majority bear the obvious signs of lycanthropy, here undisguised: tawny eyes, profusions of hair, pointed canine ears, mouths crowded with wolfish teeth. The lupine underclass eye outsiders with suspicion. Some lope in wolf form, scratching themselves, barking at one another, scrapping in alleyways. During the Shadesblood War with Penumbra, the ghost-city from whose ancient empire the Night Queen herself is said to have once hailed, Erubescence was assaulted in the Ethereal Plane, as hundreds of ghosts flooded into the city. Though many were successfully exorcised, the once-resplendent district of Limboville remains haunted. Some of the spirits who linger here are Penumbral in origin, soldiers still clinging tenaciously to their posts; most, however, are ghosts that Erubescence itself created, the spirits of criminals executed and then intentionally reanimated to form the Wraithguard, an army of ghosts the Sanguine Lords and Ladies used to fight on Ethereal battlefields. The remains of their spectral barracks can be found in the midst of the dilapidated houses, but mostly the former homes of the wealthy have been converted into shared communes where ghostbreed citizens – half-ghosts, their phantasmal blood diluted with that of mortals – live and work. The upscale district of Bloodfen is the domain of the dhampir: the half-vampiric bourgeoisie of Erubescence. Lacking the privileges of their vampiric ancestors, they have compensated with wealth, but where the vampiric aristocracy revel in sumptuous excess, many dhampir are more understated, reflecting a decidedly middle-class work ethic. Elegant charcoal suits a few shades lighter than absolute black are favoured by dhampir of all genders, again in contrast to the lavish gowns and frock coats of the nobility. Dhampir sip cups of coffee laced with blood and read the latest broadsheets in coffee-shops on the corners.
Here are some close-ups to show how detailed this got. For the most part I’d say this one is even more detailed than the Hex map when it comes to individual structures.
The map is the same size as the Hex map. It looks great printed out, and a good spot for a cat to nap!
Here are two sample streets from the Hex Gazetteer I’m working on, and the factions associated with them. Every street in Hex is receiving similar treatment.
Tailfeather Alley
Colourful silks flutter in the greasy breeze, courtesy of the costermongers hawking rags and stolen clothes along the alley’s length. Some strangely tattooed, malformed people mingle with the crowds.
Encounter: A thrashing, skinless, tentacular blob – a Cancroid – bursts forth from the Anathemist Commune and rampages towards the party, gibbering in Aklo and leaving a trail of sizzling, poisonous blood. 1d4 Anathemists emerge after it.
Anathemist Commune: A small commune of Anathemists – warlocks dedicated to summoning and conversing with the denizens of the surreal dimension of Anathema – operates on Tailfeather Alley: about a dozen men, women, and epicenes of various species, elaborately tattooed, many with tendrils in places of arms, blooms of additional eyes along the sides of their heads, polypous growths, masses of waving cilia radiating from their backs, and other mutations, the result of exposure to the reality-warping energies of Anathema. Their rundown commune is covered in arcane graffiti; the windows display weird lights during the night. The leader of the commune is Zachariah Finch, a wild-eyed man with a mass of tiny crab-pincers sprouting from his face like a chitinous goatee.
Mister Pincushion’s Petticoats and Pantaloons: The curious specimen of the Fair Folk known as Mister Pincushion has claimed this shop as his own. An almost perfectly spherical elf whose body is pierced with thousands of tiny pins, whose fingernails are needles, and whose hair is an endlessly growing mane of yarn and other fibres, which he can grow in a multitude of colours, this mincing, surprisingly dextrous creature makes garments in this sprawling tailor’s shop, often with Faerie glamers woven into them, unbeknownst to the purchaser. The garments are of decent quality but bizarre cut; Mister Pincushion seems relatively unconcerned with wealth, and appears to be running the shop as part of a kind of working vacation from Elfhame “for a century or two.” Rumour has that he was banished by Queen Mab for unspecified indecencies. When not in his shop he can sometimes be found drinking at The Lady with the Bloodstained Fan on Carrion Street.
Tailfather Fops’ Hideout: The ostentatious hideout of the Tailfather Fops can be found here – a shabby but well-decorated rookery where the louche decadents of the Fops lounge about smoking black cigarillos and swilling absinthe between robberies. They are often seen strolling down to Heartbreak Street with full purses and swaggering strides. Their rookery itself is adorned with all manner of stolen finery, jewels, fine clothes, and other gewgaws. In the basement is a secret entrance to the sewers which the Fops use to come and go discretely.
Widdershins Way
Illicit apothecaries, dodgy alchemist’s shops, unlicensed surgeries, and similar establishments advertise with grotty wooden signs and tinted lamps shaped like hearts, livers, brains, and other organs, presumably to indicate specializations. Members of the terrifying surgeons-cum-street-warriors known as the Bonesaw Boys hang about here, selling illegally obtained humanoid limbs and organs.
Encounter: Trapped cobblestones (see Phenomena) often protect this street from the Watch and other non-thieves. There is a 50% chance of encountering 2d6 Bonesaw Boys who may menace the party demanding money, blood, or body parts.
The Mists of Memory: A sign out front of this shop has a
list of prices: “Minor Memory Modification – 50 guineas,” “Temporary Amnesia –
100 guineas,” “Mind Wipe – 200 guineas,” and the like. In the window are
displayed a whole series of model heads like those of mannequins, painted with
phrenological diagrams. A humming human woman with a severe grey bun, Griselda Flex, is the proprietor of the
shop; its interior is filled with charts and models both mundane and magical,
all of brains, skulls, and heads from a wide variety of species, including all
the sentient species of Hex. She can cast Modify
Memory and variants of the spell for the prices advertised outside.
Dr. Murgatroyd’s Cures & Curses: Judging from the somewhat anguished noises emanating from within, this decrepit medical establishment is not quite up to the standards of the physicians in Caulchurch or Ambery. Inside is a dirty waiting room with incredibly gruesome and dubiously accurate anatomical dolls that can be disassembled and reassembled. Dr. Murgatroyd himself is here at all times of the day and night – a gnome man with tinted glasses, generally clad in a soaking crimson coat and carrying a serrated saw, clockwork drill, or some similarly macabre medical instrument.
Dr. Murgatroyd sells discount Potions of Healing (Common) for 40 gp each, though in addition to healing 2d4+2 hit points they have a 50% chance of having a bizarre side effect. Roll 1d6:(1) begin growing a third arm with a mouth on its palm that speaks in an uncanny version of your voice – when fully formed, the arm detaches, dealing 1 damage, and goes its own way; (2) your stomach murmurs in dead languages for 24 hours, creating disadvantage on Stealth checks; (3) you are blinded for 24 hours but experience bizarre visions of what may be the distant future, gaining Inspiration; (4) every orifice begins bleeding slowly, dealing 1 hit point of damage per hour for the next 1d20 hours; (5) you begin puking torrents of slippery fish (treat as the Grease spell) for one minute; (6) your teeth have turned to gold, permanently – each is worth 5gp if extracted, but eating can be a bit tricky.
Queen’s Crimson: This large reagent shop is often visited by reputable mages throughout Hex, albeit in magical disguise. It openly sells many prohibited alchemical reagents such as human kidneys, dagonian eggs, waspkin wings, vampire blood, and gorgongas. There are even globules containing captive puddleweirds, which can be hurled like living grenades. The proprietress is Angelique Duvide, a tall, skeleton-thin changeling woman with a too-wide smile and eyes that don’t ever seem to blink.
The Tailfeather Fops
Perhaps the most ridiculous gang in Corvid Commons, the Tailfather Fops are a collection of well-dressed footpads with pretensions of sophistication. An independent gang with ties to the Ravenswing Thieves’ Guild, they nonetheless pay a cut of their income to the Crowsbeak Thieves’ Guild to continue operating. They specialize in robbing shops in richer parts of town, blending in with the well-dressed crowds and artfully stuffing goods into the many pockets of their elaborate frock coats. In other instances they have been known to hold up carriages and wagons, adorning their faces with masks of porcelain or papier-mâché. The Fops – led by the sighing philosopher-thief Theophilus Grubby-Hook – are sworn enemies of the Stench a few streets over, and their bloody skirmishes have interrupted many a night’s sleep.
The Bonesaw Boys
Clad in the beaked masks and antique robes of old-fashioned plague doctors and wielding an eclectic range of repurposed medical equipment, the vicious Bonesaw Boys are brutal cutthroats sworn to the Crowsbeak Thieves’ Guild. They operate throughout the Commons and surrounding districts, ambushing lone pedestrians at night and harvesting their organs, which they sell to Dr. Murgatroyd on Widdershins Way, or to unlicensed reanimators like the Marionettist. The leader of the Bonesaw Boys is a sentient tumour known as the Goiter, excised after it kills its previous host, inevitably some wretched sod who owed the Boys money, and forcibly implanted into a fresh victim. Apart from the Bloodworms they are the most feared of the Crowsbeak vassal-gangs, though they prefer to take their victims alive, for experimentation. Their hideout is off Cruel Claw Alley.
Alabastor Quan, a gnome rogue-turned-warlock and failed circus ringmaster; wielder of a cursed dagger and member of the Ravenswing Thieves’ Guild.
Armand Percival Reginald Francois Eustace de la Marche III, a suspiciously pale, apparently human noble and sorcerer, and certainly not a ghoul (how dare such a thing be suggested).
Caulis, a homunculus warlock liberated from its master; has made a pact with certain Faerie Powers.
Comet the Unlucky, waspkin ranger, a dreamer and an idealist, longing for the restoration of the Elder Trees and the liberation of his people. Loathes the Harvester’s Guild, parasites and destroyers.
Garvin Otherwise, a human rogue and burglar of the Ravenswing Thieves’ Guild, with a very, very peculiar past and a zoog pet, Lenore.
An ancient and enigmatic Lengian cleric of the Mother of Spiders, name unknown. She wears bulky ecclesiastical garments covering an uncertain number of limbs and goes by “Sister.”
Yam, an eccentric gnome illusionist and local graduate student at Umbral University. Yam cares little for money. Yam is curious. Yam is Yam.
XP Awarded: 1500 XP
The party had discovered fell news indeed – that the spectral city of Penumbra, returned out of the mists of the Ethereal Plane to haunt its destroyers, had manifested on the slopes of Mount Shudder, and had been the force behind the evil winter that had wracked Hex earlier in the year, and the attempt to barrage Hex with tidal waves by disrupting the sleep of Genial Jack. Having thwarted these attempts – and the efforts of Penumbra to obtain the Book of Ghosts from the Catacombs beneath the Gilded Graveyard – the party took a breath, seeing to other matters that had gone unattended.
First, the party allocated the funds obtained by the auction of magic items in Jackburg, providing these funds to Cogswright & Associates in Mainspring so that they could begin construction of a vessel in order to sail amidst the Outer Spheres in the Luminiferous Aether.
The gnomish illusionist Yam, meanwhile, was noting the bizarre permutations the Book of Chaos was wreaking upon their apartment. Alabastor – currently a ghost, possessing his own corpse – had learned to summona new familiar, an owl named “Owlistair CrOwley.” An odd name… but there were many odd things in Faerie, from whence the owl appeared, a servant of the mischievous Queen Mab, with whom Alabastor had forged an eldritch contract. Sister passed some time with Parethena Quell in Jackburg, admiring the Coral Fortress. Caulis, having put Hargrym’s soul to rest, enjoyed a few moments’ peace, its tower no longer haunted. Armand, meanwhile, busied himself with more of his strange botanical experiments in his greenhouse, concocting antitoxins and exploring the possibility of vivimancy, much as his counterpart had in the alternate universe he had briefly visited. Garvin was pondering his own mysteries, looking into the suspicious activities of the Horned League of Behemoth Bend, the cambion thieves’ guild of western Hex who, he believed, might have been observing the party’s behaviour…
It is to Comet, however – Comet the Unlucky, magister-cursed to suffer a headache in the presence of Sap from the Elder Trees, Comet the impassioned and stout-hearted – that we turn our attention. Comet, having been harangued out of his home by Crowsbeak enforcers, had settled in the Feypark, sleeping rough among the trees and animals of that place. Due to the park’s vicinity to Faerie, the animals of the park had acquired the ability to speak, and many had their own secret villages and outposts. Comet was busy introducing some of the waspkin from the Thirteenth Queen’s Hive to his animal-friends when a squirrel approached him, hopping along the ground at great speed. He was clad in elaborate livery and wore a plumed helmet and a sword at his waist.
“Comet!” the squirrel declared. “Protector of the woodland. Champion of the under-trodden. Friend of the forest. The Princess Elaine Longtail begs an audience with you, on a matter of greatest urgency!”
“An audience with me?” Comet said. He had been telling the forest-creatures tales of the party’s adventures for some time. “I’m sure I’m happy to meet with her. What seems to be the problem?”
“We cannot speak of it here!” the squirrel declared. “Too many ears may be listening… but please, bring your friends, the great heroes you have spoken of so many times! We have great need of your aid!”
Comet’s waspkin friends at the Hive, at his request, flitted out throughout the city with messages to members of the Variegated Company, gathering them to the Feypark. A short time later they approached the glade where Comet was living.
The squirrel herald led thr group down a winding path and into the depths of the Feypark. Asthey moved closer to the park’s center, the manicured lawns and flower-beds became increasingly overgrown, giving way to rambling woodland. Soft music seemed to play from somewhere distant, and the trees rustled with a too-intelligent susurrus.
Presently, they came to a wild clearing next to an iridescent pool. A massive old tree stump mouldered near the water’s edge; as they drew close, they saw it was encrusted with miniature fortifications, squirrel-sized. Approaching, the party was met with a sudden, bristling mass of squirrels on the battlements, longbows and slings at the ready, tiny arrows and pebbles nocked.
“Lower your arms!” the herald cried. “I come with friends from beyond the park!”
Presently, the gates of the fortress opened, and another squirrel emerged, dressed in a fine gown and bearing a sceptre.
“May I present Her Royal Highness, Princess Elaine Longtail!” the herald proclaimed, while troubadours blew a fanfare from tiny trumpets.
The party politely introduced themselves. Yam was rapt with delight.
“They’re SQUIRRELS!” they said.
“Your Highness,” Comet said. “My companions and I are here to aid you. How can we be of assistance?”
“We came here to help… squirrels?” Armand muttered to Garvin.
“This seems interesting,” the thief replied. “Give them a chance to say what this is about.”
“Word has reached me of your deeds,” the Princess squeaked. “I humbly beseech thee on behalf of my people for your aid in a matter of great urgency.”
“What ails you, your Highness?” Sister asked.
“The Royal Seat of Knothole Manor has been seized by the forces of the salamander-warlord Urdox the Slimy and his wicked fairy allies,” Princess Longtail said. “With foul enchantments and an army of vicious insects, lizards, mercenary sewer-rats, and other vile creatures, Urdox assailed the Manor and took my father, Grand Duke Richard Longtail, hostage and prisoner. I was able to flee with what remains of our forces, but many good beasts were slaughtered in the battle. I believe that the salamander lord is in league with the evil Faerie Lord Arawn, who seeks the destruction and decay of the park and all living things within it. Noble Comet, I beg your assistance in cleansing Knothole Manor of Urdox and his minions. Should you perform this deed, it will be necessary for you to assume a form suitable for entering the Manor – for if Urdox were to see you approach in your current form, my father’s life might well be forfeit. A drink from yonder pool shall render you and any boon companions into the shape of beasts, able to enter Knothole Manor stealthily.
“As reward for this deed, apart from the gratitude of my people, my father will grant you lands and titles commensurate with your valour, for many noble-beasts were slain in the battle, leaving their lands lordless.”
After some discussion, the party agreed to help Princess Longtail to rescue her father and defeat the loathsome Urdox. One by one, the group drank of the magical pool, and one by one they assumed new shapes.
Alabastor became a rat, a bit tattered but dapper all the same; he remained undead, a cadaverous vermin. His new owl familiar hooted in surprise at the sight of his master transformed into such a tasty treat. Armand became a hawk, imperious and regal, sharp of eye and talon; Comet transformed into mole-form. Sister expected to become a spider, but instead found herself transformed into a rabbit; it was Garvin, instead, who assumed a spider’s shape. Yam blinked huge eyes, having transformed into a bush baby, while Caulis transformed into a bristling hedgehog. Eleyin was delighted to be larger than her master, capable now of bearing Caulis into battle.
Shrunk down – their garments and equipment sprinkled with water from the pool to similarly diminish them, temporarily – the party conferred in the squirrel fortress, debating an approach to Knothole Manor via air or underground tunnel. They They settled on a subterannean approach, mole sappers having dug into the roots of the great tree. They reviewed a map of the Manor:
The plan would be to enter via the dungeons amidst the roots of the manor, then work their way upwards through the Barbican and into the upper levels if needed. Sister prepared a portal in the squirrel fortress using the Portal Chalk, so that later they could let the squirrel forces in, and a signal would be given via magical fireworks to coordinate an attack from the air. So agreed, the party traveled through the dank underground passage dug by the mole. Comet himself breached the final layer of dirt with his newly-acquired mole-talons.
The tunnel opened into a dark, dripping cave with walls of earth. Roots protruding from the ceiling sipped from a dank, stagnant puddle that occupied most of the floor, fed by a leaking storm-drain that bisected the cavern. At the far end, a series of carved steps led up to a stout, round door. Scum covered the surface of the stagnant pond.
Comet examined the pond carefully. “There’s something moving down there,” he whispered to his companions. “Be careful in getting across.”
“I have an idea,” Armand said. “Yam, you know Ray of Frost, yes?”
“Mhm. I see where you’re going with this.”
Together, the two mages began freezing the surface of the pond to create an ice-bridge. Yam conjured a pair of skates and began skating down the bridge, humming to themselves.
For a moment, the graceful Yam seemed poised to elegantly skate the length of the ice-bridge – until a spear hurtled from the gloom, knocking the gnome of their feet and into the filthy water! Three toads burst from the water, sentinels dispatched to guard the lower levels, and a fierce fight ensued, spells and spears flying. One toad leaped on its powerful legs and swallowed Sister whole. The beleagured rabbit cast Inflict Wounds and burst out from the toad in a shower of gore and necrotized tissue. Meanwhile, Alabastor’s familiar slew another, and the last was felled with a Cloud of Daggers that reduced it to shreds before it could raise the alarm.
“Sister’s Unexpected Toad Exit.” llustration by Bronwyn McIvor.
The lower-level guards dispatched, the party caught their breath and healed their wounds, collecting a brass key from one of the toads. The party climbed a flight of stairs, up towards the dungeons of Thornwall Barbican. First they discovered some a chamber filled with crates and chests – stores and supplies for Knothole Manor, as well as the castle’s archives. They pressed on and discovered the dungeon itself, the walls made of roch to prevent burrowing animals from escaping. A dozen cells with bars fashioned from nails or other metal oddments lined the rough-hewn corridor. Within the cells were animals – mice, squirrels, voles, and the odd rabbit. There were perhaps twenty of them all in all.
“Ah! Were you sent by the Princess?” one of the squirrels said.
“Yes!” Comet replied. “We’re here to help retake the fortress. We’ve got a key – hold on.”
The brass key taken from the toads proved efficacious, and the captured castle guards and servants were freed. They would need to be equipped with weapons to be truly useful, but at least the party now had a proper force inside Knothole Manor.
Alabastor and Garvin scouted stealthily ahead, aided by shadows woven about them by Sister. They crept through the winding dungeon halls, roots protruding from the walls and ceiling, and discovered the gaolor: a fat, glossy centipede, a key-ring hooked round one of its many limbs, coiled up and sleeping. Garvin fired a Bolt of Silence to plunge the room into silence, and he and Alabastor assailed it, battering the vermin badly. It initially fought back, snapping its poisonous chelicerae, but eventually put up its numerous arms in surrender. The pair confiscated its keys and stuck it in one of the newly-emptied cells.
“Where is the Grand Duke being held?” Garvin asked, his hand crossbow trained on the creature.
“In the Greenkeep!” the centipede hissed, suitably intimidated. “Up in the highest tower, under guard by Keenfang the serpent.”
The Variegated Company continued their ascent, moving stealthily through its tunnels. They entered a dank chamber with roots curling from the ceiling, blocking advancement to the upper levels of Knothole Manor. A pair of lizards with halberds fashioned from pen-knife blades guarded a portcullis, its crank to one side. Comet, undetected, loosed an arrow, dispatching one lizard instantly as it struck him in the throat and pinned him to the wall. The other, pelted by spells and crossbow bolts, was beaten unconscious and tied up in a corner.
Sister scrawled a portal using the Portal Chalk, opening a door back to the squirrel outpost, telling the troops gathered there to await the order and to prepare weapons to arm the freed prisoners.
The party continued through the dungeons. They found a cellar, wooden kegs and barrels stacked along its walls, along with other receptacles – including several human-sized bottles and similar containers, stolen or scavenged from the world above. Along one wall an entire bottle of champagne was still stoppered. Three drunken lizard guards had tapped a bottle of Sarcophagus Pale Ale from Bier Brewing in Shambleside. In their intoxicated state they were easily dispatched and taken prisoner.
Garvin used his Gloves of Thief’s Sight to investigate a nearby chamber. He discovered a barracks in some disarray – bunks and tables scattered about or tipped over, bloodstains still spattering the floor. Weapons and armour were heaped in piles around the chamber, many made from penknives, nails, and other oddments. Lizards and amphibians filled it, sharpening weapons and coraking to one another. He crept to the next room, discovering three mangy-furred sewer-rats wielding tridents fashioned from dining forks lounging about a table playing cards here, betting using tiny shards of glass and miniscule gold coins. Their leader joined them at the head of the table: a towering rat whose ears were adorned with rings and whose pink eyes glowed in the gloom. Leaning against one wall was her weapon – a kitchen knife, which she uses as a greatsword.
The thief described the towering rat to the captives.
“That’ll be Julia,” a rabbit said. “Julia Bloodwhisker. Head of the Stormrats – mercenaries Urdox hired. They live in the sewers under the Feypark.”
“I have an idea,” Alabastor said. “Are there any other leaders in the Manor? Factions within Urdox’s forces?”
“There’s Tatterwing,” the rabbit said. “A pseudodragon, sent by Arawn. And Mugwort, a sprite in Urdox’s services. And, I suppose, Duskjaw, the monitor lizard, a foreign warrior. He claims to be from the desert of the distant south, but he’s probably just escaped from some magician’s menagerie.”
“That’ll work,” Alabastor said. “You take up a position in the cellars. I’m going to try and lure them down.”
Alabastor entered the chamber; as a rat, he reasoned, he would not be immediately suspicious.
“Brought some rations,” he said, putting several cursed plums supplied by Armand’s greenhouse. “Oh and, ah, Tatterwing wants to see you,” he added, lacing the words with a hint of magical Suggestion.
“Hmph, the bat wants to see me, he can come down himself,” Julia hissed. “What regiment are you with, anyway?”
“Uh… I…” Alabastor stumbled. He pushed out mentally, trying to possess the rat-mercenary, but her mind repelled him; his body had crumpled to the ground, and the rats clustered around it in confusion. Flitting back to his cadaverous form, Alabastor drew a deep breath, sitting up, his eyes ablaze, his Fey Presence giving him a look of macabre gravitas. “I am a servant of the Faerie King of Death, Arawn!” he proclaimed. “Flee before me!”
“Ugh,” Julia said. “One of Mugwort’s stupid pranks. That foolish fairy will rue the day… I’m going to give him a piece of my mind.” He stomped off upwards, heading for Mugwort.
Alabastor, meanwhile, glanced slyly at the remaining guards. “Hey,” he said. “Now that your boss is gone, you boys fancy a drink? We broached a cask down in the cellar.”
The rat-mercenaries looked from one to the other, waiting for Julia’s footsteps to recede, then followed Alabastor into the cellar…
…where the party and their animal soldiers awaited, the champagne bottle aimed at the door. With a deafening pop the cork flew across the cellar, breaking the neck of the first of the Stormrats!
The rest of the mercenaries were swiftly dispatched by the assembled forces. While the forces loyal to the Princess and Grand Duke Richard Longtail got into position to fully take the Barbican, the Variegated Company ascended to Heartwood Hall.
The party entered a vast hall near the heart of the tree, illuminated by occasional window and phosphorescent fungi, stretching upward. At its centre, the core of the tree – the heartwood – was still intact. Stairs wound up the ornately carved wooden walls, leading to workshops along the sides of the hall, including a smithy and carpenter’s shop. The stair continued to climb up to a hole in the ceiling, leading to the Squirrel Cotts above. Marring the heartwood itself was a dark stain, spreading slowly from a wound in its side.
Caulis investigated the stain. It appeared to be fungal rot, seeping into the wood, tendrils of disease winding up the tree.
“I don’t like this…” Caulis said.
“Let me see what I can do,” Sister said, ministering to the tree carefully. She cast a healing spell, and some of the stain retreated, restoring some of the tree’s health.
Above them, flitting to and fro through Heartwood Hall were several mosquitoes, some bearing spears or crossbows – apparently drawn by the sound of the spell being cast. The party stealthily made their way into a nearby carpenter’s workshop off the main hall to avoid detection. Here they found a mess of tools and loose wood, thoroughly ransacked.
“Hmm,” Garvin said, eyeing the far wall. “There’s something odd about this shelf…” With a spidery limb, he pushed the shelf inwards, and it revolved – a secret door, leading to a stairway that wound up through the tree! The party hastened upwards, managing to avoid the mosquito guards of Heartwood Hall and the forces stationed in the Squirrrel Cotts, as the stair brought them all the way up to the Rotten Tower.
The passage opened into a small chamber behind a rotten arras. This the party dilsodged, finding themselves within a large chamber carved into the interior of the tree, which looked to have once been a resplendent hall of tapestries depicting the history of Knothole Manor and its inhabitants – the forging of treaties with local beasts, the hosting of Seelie fairies in the great hall, battles with rats from the sewers. One scene portrayed the Manor’s squirrel warriors defeating a human looking for a cheap meal, trussing him up with vines. However, fungal infestation had destroyed these beautiful hand-woven images, leaving them mottled and twisted, threads fraying and discoloured. Gigantic pink puffballs of mould protruded in bulbous clusters from the walls and ceiling, while fat red toadstools emerged from the floor.
Armand – fascinated as always by all things botanical – took a sample from one of the puffballs. Despite his care, the sorcerer caused the puffball to explode in a cloud of poisonous spores, causing the party to rapidly retreat. Several of the fungal puffballs were trembling strangely, as if they too would soon explode.
They entered a domed room which might once have been a ballroom or a dining chamber; teeming orange growths now utterly consumed it, eating away at the floor and walls. The ceiling and upper walls were covered in mucilaginous clusters of glossy white eggs. The bones of squirrels, mice, and other animals carpeted the floor of the room. Comet, in mole form, burrowed into the wall of the room, hoping to excavate a clearer path. The party followed, and the improvised passage brought them to an ornate mechanical elevator extending from this section of Knothole Manor upwards. However, vines and fungal growths had clotted the machinery, and the elevator was stuck in the shaft.
Yam, thinking quickly, rubbed some Salve of Sentience into the vines, awakening them to life.
“Hey, vines,” Yam said. “Uh, you mind moving out of the way?”
“Begone intruders!” The rustling, newly-sentient vines hissed. “Befoul Knothole Manor no more.”
“We’re in the service of Princess Longtail,” Yam said with great solemnity. “Please, we must ascend, if we are to cleanse the Manor of evil.”
The vines rustled to themselves, then, seemingly convinced, began to withdraw, allowing the elevator free acess to the upper levels. The party packed themselves inside and began their ascent.
The elevator came to a halt and the party stepped out from it and into an ancient-looknig structured. Moss had infiltrated the resplendent chapel of Knothole Manor – a shrine dedicated to the tree itself, whose image was carved our of the far wall. Small niches honoured other figures important to the Manor’s inhabitants, such as Titania, the Faerie Queen, and Oberon, her sometimes-husband and Lord of the Hunt; the Green Man, a nature god popular among the woodwoses in the Tangle, was here reproduced as a Green Mouse, fur transformed into moss and leaves. The pews here were totally overgrown with lichen.
Vines along the walls of the chapel had born succulent-looking berries of two types: orange and purple. Of these, Armand took careful samples.
The party set about exploring the other chamber of the Moss-Chapel. They soon discovered a chamber containing an ornate reliquary , overgrown with vines and lichen that seemed to spill out from the carved wood of the box. Several rotting corpses were snared in the vines – two sewer-rats and a lizard. Visible on the lizard’s body was a ring of keys. Carved on the wall was what looked like a series of musical notes. After several touch-and-go attempts, Garvin obtained the keys – a key with an acorn bow, another with a leaf bow, and a third with a mushroom bow – avoiding the grasping stranglevines that tried to snatch him.
Caulis, attempting an unusual tactic, distracting the stranglevines by disguising itself as a sensuous dryad, dancing lasciviously to attract the vines’ attention. The vines twitched, moving towards the alluring illusion, allowing Alabastor to swiftly open the box, plucking a simple wooden flute from within.
“Aha!” Caulis said, inspecting the instrument. “A Flute of the Forest – and this must be one of the tunes for it.” The homunculus gestured to the notes on the wall. “Play them, let’s see what they do!”
Alabastor played a brief tune, discovering that the Flute allowed him to Speak with Plants – though the vines were currently whispering “sweet nothings” to the illusion, to his mixed amusement and disgust.
The party also discovered a belfry with ornate stained glass windows depicting what looked like an army of trees, unrooting themselves from the ground and marching, animals held within their branches as they war with an enemy army of evil fairies. Hanging from the ceiling of the belfry was an ornate bell of copper hue, a crack running down it. A vine served as a bell-rope.
“I’ve heard of these,” Comet said. “A Verdurous Bell. They awaken the trees… best not to ring it save as a last resort.”
Searching the belfry, Alabastor turned up a few more notes for the Flute of the Forest – a different song.
The Company pressed on, discovering a guard-chamber with a stair leading up into the Greenkeep, sealed behind a portcullis. The gate guard was a towering monitor lizard – clearly not native to Hex – and his scorpion pet, infested with some sort of crimson fungus sprouting from its arachnid head. Theysurmised this was the brutish Duskjaw, mentioned by some of the prisoners.
Alabastor’s ghost discarded his body temporarily and possessed the scorpion, striking at Duskjaw. Yam, Armand, and Sister struck with spells, while Garvin and Comet sniped from the back. Duskjaw managed to strike several vicious blows, one sending Comet flying, but was overwhelmed before he could raise the alarm. The massive creature toppled and fell to the floor with a thud; they confiscated the Crown Key it bore. The party proceeded to the Greenkeep, stealthily creeping in shadows conjured by Sister’s shadowy spiders to avoid detection from Keenfang the serpent.
Two lizard guards with halberds were positioned at the door of the tallest tower. Alabastor – back in his rat-shape – distracted these by telling them that wine had been opened back in the guard barracks, and that he would cover for them. The deception accomplished, the remaining party members crept from the foliage and opened the door with the Crown Key, ascending a flight of spiral steps to the tower-top.
Within a cell at the very top of the tower, a bedraggled, aging squirrel with grey fur and an august mien sat on the edge of a small cot, clad in tattered garments unbefitting his noble bearing. This was obviously none other than Duke Richard Longtail himself, kept as a hostage.
“Your Grace,” Sister said with a bow. “Your daughter sent us to rescue you. Her forces await our signal to retake Knothole Manor.”
The squirrel duke stirred from his meditation, fire in his eyes. “Then by all means, give it! We shall fight the scaly bastards off yet!”
Yam proceeded to ignite magical fireworks from the tower-top, while Sister, sketching a chalk portal, gave the signal to attack.
Fierce battle was joined, the freed prisoners in Thornwall Barbican battling with the Stormrats and other mercenaries below, while a crack force of squirrel commandos poured into the Greenkeep through the portal, supported by robin cavalry. The tree of Knothole Manor shook as swords and spears struck shields. The squeaks and croaks of battle echoed through its hollow halls, the blood of toads, lizards, rats, squirrels, voles, and rabbits mingling. Insects swarmed, directed by the sinister Mugwort, though when the battle was finished, the strange fairy creature was nowhere to be found. Vines – directed by Alabastor’s Flute – strangled many foes in the Moss-Chapel.
Eventually, the battle brought the Company and a ragtag band of animal warriors to the centre of the Greenkeep. The remains of the Grand Hall dripped with slime, the tapestries on the walls sloughing into putridity, stagnant water pooling on the floor. Presiding over this decay was a massive crimson salamander, clad in rusted plate armour that looked like it might have been made for a particularly elaborate Hexian puppet. He was accompanied by two bodyguards: a lean, albino rabbit with pink eyes and a massive slingshot, and a malignant, hulking fey – though less than two feet in height, at this scale the insect-winged brute was a towering presence. A massive map of the Feypark, marked with stones to indicate armies, occupied the middle of the Grand Hal, while a force of lizards and sewer-rats bristled with weapons, the last of Urdox’s troops.
“FOR THE FOREST!” Comet cried, swinging his hammer, Chainbreaker and cracking skulls, his dancing rapier skewering troops to either side.
“Arawn take you!” the salamander cursed, drawing a small magical dagger – at this scale, the size of a gigantic claymore – and wading into battle, immediately decapitating a squirrel warrior rushing towards him.
Yam filled the mind of the hare with visions of torment, and the creature quite literally “bounced” – dropping its weapon and fleeing.
Sister and Alabastor waded in with spells. Conjured spiders burst from swelling buboes everywhere the spider-cleric touched. Blasts of eldritch force tore enemies apart, blood spilling across the map of the Feypark. Armand seared and electrocuted, reducing Stormrats to ash.
Garvin, lurking in the shadows, fired a poisoned bolt, wounding Urdox badly under the arm.
Caulis, seeing the sprite attacking Yam, conjured illusory vines; the sprite believed itself entangled and thrashed, unable to escape the grasp of the tendrils in his mind.
Comet, meanwhile, closed in for the kill. He hammered at Urdox repeatedly, Chainbreaker uttering revolutionary slogans, Comet cursing the salamander tyrant. Urdox landed a terrible blow, nearly severing one of the ranger’s limbs. Another caught him in the torso, drawing blood. Undeterred, Comet darted round the side of the towering salamander, while Madame Sanguinaire, his dancing sword liberated from the armoury of Delirium Castle, fenced with Urdox, keeping him occupied long enough for Comet to launch himself at full speed, Chainbreaker swinging. With a mighty blow, the hammer shattered the knee of the salamander, bringing him to his knees. A second block cracked his skull, dashing his brains across the floor.
When the dust cleared, Urdox and his forces were dead, fled, or vanquished. As Grand Duke Longtail’s forces secured Knothole Manor once again, Caulis studied the map with some consternation. It seemed to show other trees in other parts of the Feypark, marked with a mysterious black mark – the sigil of Arawn.
“I fear this may not be the only tree assailed by Arawn,” Caulis muttered.
“Arawn?” Comet said.
“An Unseelie King. One of the four rulers of Faerie, along with Mab, Oberon, and Titania.”
“Hmm. A fight for another day, perhaps.”
In the meantime, however, rewards were in order. The Grand Duke had ordained that, given that several prominent nobles had been slain in the battles with Urdox, the party would be granted their vacant titles.
Yam was made Earl of the Pellucid Gazebo, a delicate structure made of glass deep in the Feypark, watched over by robins and other birds sworn to the Grand Duke.
Armand was made Earl of the Orchidarium, a large orchid garden nearby, tended by many voles.
Alabastor was made Baron of the Rosepatch, a rose garden home to many mice and shrews.
Sister was made Baroness of of the Viridian Maze, a hedge maze not far from Knothole Manor, home to numerous rabbits and moles.
Garvin was made Baron of Lilypad Isle, a tiny island in a pond nearby, with frog villages about its periphery.
Caulis was given a special title – Archbishop of the Manor, sworn to keep the realm protected from spiritual forces of darkness and decay.
Finally, Comet, hero of the day, would be made the Marquis of Westbridge: a small footbridge over a stream in the park to the west, encrusted with the structures of the squirrel-kingdom.
These rewards bestowed, their bellies full from the victory banquet, the Variegated Company departed the now-happy halls of Knothole Manor and returned to their previous forms and sizes, perhaps with a certain wistfulness. This chivalric romance in the Feypark was over. Penumbra, remnant of a dead empire, still menaced the spires of Hex.
The Company began walking through the forest paths, back into the city.
Alabastor Quan, a gnome rogue-turned-warlock and failed circus ringmaster; wielder of a cursed dagger and member of the Ravenswing Thieves’ Guild.
Armand Percival Reginald Francois Eustace de la Marche III, a suspiciously pale, apparently human noble and sorcerer, and certainly not a ghoul (how dare such a thing be suggested).
Caulis, a homunculus warlock liberated from its master; has made a pact with certain Faerie Powers.
Garvin Otherwise, a human rogue and burglar of the Ravenswing Thieves’ Guild, with a very, very peculiar past and a zoog pet, Lenore.
An ancient and enigmatic Lengian cleric of the Mother of Spiders, name unknown. She wears bulky ecclesiastical garments covering an uncertain number of limbs and goes by “Sister.”
XP Awarded: 800 XP
Garvin Otherwise had taken a turn down a street in Hex, only to find himself walking down an uncannily familiar street, black clouds swirling overhead. Crimson banners fluttered in the carrion-scented breeze, indicating he was once more in the version of Hex ruled by the vampires of Erubescence, having come unstuck once again in the kaleidoscopic array of parallel universes that made up reality.
The thief shrugged, deciding to perfom some additional investigations while he remained in this world. He headed south to his familiar haunts of Corvid Commons, the Thieves’ Quarter of Hex, only to discover that much of the district was being levelled, straight avenues and orderly bouelvards and squares replacing the haphazard chaos that typified the district in his own reality. The Witching Hour Alehouse, however, remained; he entered and discovered the bartender, Mortimer Croak, behind the bar – though he could swear the grizzled old thief was missing the right eye, not the left…
“Hey Mortimer…” Garvin said.
“Hey there,” the bartender said. “Do I… know you?”
“Garvin Otherwise,” Garvin said, showing his Thief’s Mark, the secret Librarian glyph-tattoo worn by all Guild thieves in Hex. “I used to live here awhile back, before the vampires came in. Care to tell me a bit about things, after the takeover and all?”
“What, the Sanguine Lords have come down hard.” Mortimer gestured to the mostly-empty alehouse. “Hangings daily. The Night Queen’s law is absolute. Go by the Golem and you’ll see… bodies by the dozen.” He glanced around the bar carefully. “A lot of us thieves… we’ve sort of changed professions, so to speak.”
“Going legit…?”
Mortimer shook his head. “Joining the resistance.”
A noise at the door caused Garvin to turn, and when he looked the Witching Hour was suddenly full of regulars, carousing and haggling over stolen goods. He turned back to the bar.
“Ah, Garvin, didn’t see you there,” Mortimer said. “Must have been on my right side, eh? Well, what’ll it be?”
“Blackbeak Brew,” Garvin said, noting the eyepatch had again switched sides. He was home again… for the time being.
Meanwhile, in the Dreamers’ Quarter…
The Variegated Company stumbled through the portal and into Armand’s parlour, bedraggled and wounded, Alabastor’s corpse dragged through by Miri. Unbeknownst to most of them, Alabastor’s ghost – now in the possession of the Pneumanomicon, had followed them through.
“Did they say Penumbra?” Sister said, after closing the portal behind them. “As in, the Penumbra, the spectral city, that haunts its destroyers over the centuries?”
Sister shuddered. At eight hundred years old, she could remember the Patchwork War, the War of Shades, the Horripilation Wars – the massacres, the burned cities, the zombie hordes. Penumbra was the capitol of the Penumbral Empire, whose vast shadow lay across swathes of the south for centuries. Aggressively expansionist, the Empire was primarily human demographically, though many other species were enslaved or otherwise subjugated by it. Apart from its vast armies, the Empire’s power derived from its witch-priestesses, shadowbinders and necromancers. Enemies would find their own shadows attacking them or deserting to join enemy forces; shrouds of darkness would herald the arrival of Penumbral armies; Penumbral cavalry was known to ride tenebrous horses into battle. he city was finally destroyed in the Third Patchwork War by the allied forces of Hex, Erubescence, New Ulthar, and Teratopolis. Somehow, however, the city was not permanently destroyed, but rather passed into a spectral state, some say as the result of a final ritual on the part of the Imperatrix herself. Every time it was exoricsed, it would return to the deep Ethereal, only to manifest again, sometimes centuries later, to haunt another of its vanquishers. Over a hundred years past it had afflicted Erubescence, but the vampires had cast it back into shadow.
And now, it seemed, Penumbra had returned, this time to menace Hex.
“I think so,” Caulis said grimly. “It’s come back again.”
“It would explain why Silas seemed to ‘cut in and out’ when we listened in using Granny Midnight,” Armand said. “If he was possessed by a ghost, as those people were back int the Catacombs…”
“Then Granny would only ‘pick him up’ when he was speaking,” Caulis said. “If the ghost was speaking instead, it wouldn’t be his voice. He must be… unaware of his own possession, or something.”
The party had, for a moment, seemed to have forgotten Snuff, Valentina Nettlecrave’s taxidermy owl familiar.
“I will alert the rest of the Hexad Council at once,” the familiar chirped with the lich’s voice. “Did we acquire the Book of Ghosts?”
“It wasn’t even there!” Sister said.
Meanwhile, Alabastor’s ghost drifted down into his corpse, temporarily possessing the now-dead shell. With a monumenal gasp that spewed blood across Amrand’s carpet, the corpse sat up.
“MOTHER OF SPIDERS!” Sister said, starting backwards. “I thought you were dead, Alabastor.”
“Sorry,” Alabastor said, coughing more blood. “I think I am actually. I’m just possessing my body for the time being. I’ve got the Book of Ghosts. That is, my ghost-form does. It’s Ethereal.”
“Of course,” Valentina said through Snuff. “I will send for Melchior. Meanwhile, Silas is compromised, and must be removed from office at once. Meet me at the Hall of the Hexad Council as soon as possible.” Snuff flew from the window.
“So, Alabastor, you’re…” Caulis said.
“Dead,” Alabastor said. “Yeah. I realized the Book must be in the Ethereal. And if we didn’t get it quickly, those other ghosts would, the ones from Penumbra. I realized – all those spirits we saw down there, in the Catacombs, the Book of Ghosts was generating them, so I knew I’d come back like this.” He examined his dead limbs. “Is there a way I could… come back?”
“The phoenix-ash of Roost,” Armand said. “If you have a fortune to spend.”
“There are rumours of certain rituals,” Sister said. “Secret spells, miracles the Mother of Spiders grants her most loyal priestesses. Doubtless they have costs of their own – and who knows if the priestesses would agree to raise a gnome.”
“There are the resurrection pods below Hex, that we found in the Asylum of the Old City,” Caulis said. “But I think they’ve all been used recently – I’m not sure how long it takes them to recharge.”
As they talked, a shimmer appeared in the air in the middle of the parlour room, and suddenly the mechanical spider-like apparatus containng Master Melchior’s brain materialized in the middle of the room. It swivelled towards Alabastor.
“Aha! You have the Book of Ghosts!” the ancient archwizard said, his voice a mechanical croak. It extended a claw. “May I see it?”
Alabastor, still dazed, held out the Ethereal book, appearing to hold out an empty hand to the rest of the party. The eldritch lenses that were Melchior’s eyes focused, and a telekinetic spell plucked the tome from Alabastor’s fingers.
“Well done,” Melchior said, the book hovering before him. “Here is your payment, as promised.” A purse of coins was deposited from within the depths of the mechanical contraption. Before any of the rest of the Company could object, Melchior had teleported back to his study.
“Damn,” Armand said. “Well, there goes any hope of keeping the books from Melchior.”
“I’m sorry,” Alabastor said, shaking his head. “I didn’t think he’d just… disappear like that.” He stood up. “I still seem to be a ghost, even without the Book nearby. That’s good.”
“We need to get to the Hall of the Hexad Council,” Sister said. “We’ll worry about the book later.”
The party left Armand’s townhouse in the Dreamers’ Quarter and headed east into the middle of the city, towards the government district.
After threading their way through the black back-streets, the party entered the Hall of the Hexad Council, discovering the guardians had been rendered inert by some spell. They hurried on, into the maion hall.
Within the cavernous council chamber, a chaotic scene met them. Valentina Nettlecrave floated in the air, the illusion that gave her the semblance of a young girl flickering away, revealing something of the embalmed lich beneath; her skirts billowed as she levitated, counterspelling as Silas Thamiel, in the centre of the room, spat spells. Scorch marks and strange debris – patches of ice, a twisted metal chair floating in the air, a swarm of dead imps in a pool of demonic blood, an area of the floor transmuted to mud – spoke of the magical battle that had been waging in the chamber. Arabella Sickle, meanwhile, was chanting an Infernal prayer, calling on the Chthonic Gods to drive the spirit out of her lover, Silas – a diabolic exorcism. As the party watched, the Councillor’s body spasmed and twitched and something began to emerge – a spirit, translucent, raging, in the form of a woman clad in the Imperial regalia of Penumbra.
Sister acted fast, calling on the Mother of Spiders; webs shot from her sleeves, and a swarm or spectral arachnids flew forth, scuttling over the body of the Penumbral ghost and rapidly cocooning her in their ectoplasmic webbing. The spiders suspended the struggling wraith above the Council floor; Silas toppled, unconscious.
Arabella snapped her fingers, and a pair of demonic servitors manifested.
“Take that thing away,” she declared, pointing to the cocoon. “Put in one of the warded cells. We’ll interrogate it later.”
Valentina drifted to the floor. “Thank you, Sister,” she said. “That was… timely.”
“Happy to be of help,” Sister said.
A brief colloquy took place; it was decided that Silas would be sent to the Institute for the Magically Insane for the time being, to be examined carefully, his mind having been greatly strained by ghostly possession by the Penumbral spirit. In the meantime, the Council had grave business to attend to: the return of Penumbra posed an existential threat to Hex’s safety.
“As the city’s Inquisitor, Sister, you must extend your search not only to members of the Order of Icelus, but to any Penumbral spies that may be hiding in the city,” Valentina said. “Other spirits are certain to have infiltrated Hex… I may have some means of detecting them, but I must consult the Book of Ghosts, now that Melchior has secured it. For now, though, those of you who are still mortal are no doubt in need of rest. The Variegated Company has done a great service to this city, once again.”
Of course, not everyone in the Variegated Company was still mortal. The restless spirit of Alabastor Quan, unable to sleep and still possessing the shell of his body (magically preserved, now, with Armand’s assistance), wandered into the Feypark, in search of one of those intersections of leylines that frays the boundary betwixt material reality and Faerie, where verminous things crept – agents of Queen Mab, Alabastor’s fey patron.
“Hello there, Mister Quan,” a buzzing voice said, his pitch whining and yawing radically. “You’re looking a bit… peaky.”
The Duke of Bees – Queen Mab’s ambassador to Hex – stepped from the shadows of a twisted willow tree.
“You have died in the service of Queen Mab,” the Duke proclaimed. “Will you not take your place at her court?”
“I have things to do,” Alabastor said. “Unfinished business, as they say. I need a body. A permanent one.”
The Duke cocked his head, bees flitting from the holes therein. “You don’t like the one you have?” He scanned the park, his tawny eyes alighting on the slumbering figure of a homeless man. “Here’s one. Pop into that. What’s the problem.”
“No, I want this body back – but, you know, alive.”
“Hmm. Well. Queen Mab might have some remedy for your condition… but she will expect something in return.”
“I understand.”
“I believe you may recall a certain conversation you and I had aboard Genial Jack, at the little auction you put on.”
“Oh.”
“Yes, indeed. My request stands. Place a surviellance seed in the throne room of King Balor in Bezoar Croak.” He opened a hand, containing a black seed; this time, Alabastor took it.
“And in exchange, the Queen will give this body life again?”
“I’ll see what I can arrange,” the Duke said. “Now, I really must be off. There are strange things afoot tonight in Hex.” With that, he melted back into the shadows, leaving only a vague smell of honey. Alabastor tucked the seed into his waistcoat and started back for the city.
Exhausted, Caulis returned to its home, the former tower of its creator, the wizard Hargrym’s. Upon entering its study, the hmunculus perceived in the darkness a shadowy figure, seated in its creator’s chair. The figure twisted round, and Caulis could see that it was Hargrym himself, his spectral form wrapped in spiked chains, the barbs viciously piercing his skin, the iron links trailing off into thin air behind him. He muttered horribly to himself, and then something unseen pulled at his chains and he shrieked, his eyes bulging wide.
“Caulis,” he said. “My homunculus! How you have grown… I see you have taken up my mantle, continued my studies.”
“I’ve done my best,” Caulis said, uneasy. Did Hargyrm know of the part the homunculus had played in his death?
“I am here on the bidding of the Archdemon known as Moloch,” Hargrym intoned. Blood trickled from his face from the barbs. “He has sent me with a message. As my creation you are responsible for my debts. I died before I could repay Moloch, who furnished me with one of his Sanguineous Scriptures.”
The chains rattled.
“I see,” Caulis said. “I suppose I should have guessed I wouldn’t be rid of you so easily…” it muttered.
“Here is what you must do, or else end up as you see me now,
joining your creator in damnation. As you know, six Archdemons have a contract
with Hex: with Astaroth, Demogorgon, Lilith, Merihem, Belphegor, and Orobas. In
exchange for their assistance, Hex sends them its damned souls.
“Hell is currently teetering on the brink of civil war. There are three factions, united around the infernal cities of Dis, Pandemonium, and Tartarus. Moloch fights for Dis, while the Six rally at Pandemonium. The dead of Hex swarm to their ranks.”
Caulis nodded. It was, of course, familiar with Infernal politics: those at Dis, including Moloch, wished to restore Hell to its ancient state, when the Kings of Hell ruled their various realms, and a a Sovereign, the Prince of Darkness, ruled over all; those at Pandemonium wished to maintain the current Commonwealth of Hell; while those shadows who stirred at Tartarus wished to return to the Elder Days when the primordial Titans of old bickered in endless anarchy.
“It is your job, dear Caulis, to alter this state of affairs,” Hargrym continued. “Beneath the Church of Belphegor here in Little Pandemonium, there is a machine, a device known as the Soul Conduit. Belphegor’s followers created this mechanism to divert souls from Hex to Belphegor’s domain; even now they are joined together to become part of his infernal war-engines. But, it would take but a small adjustment of the Soul Conduit to modify this flow of the damned, diverting their transmigration not to Pandemonium, but to unhallowed Dis and the realm of Moloch.”
Hargrym retched violently, and produced what looks like a punch-card for an Analytical Engine, inscribed with an eldritch program.
“All you must do, my creation, is place this card in the Soul Conduit in place of the one already there. Doubtless the sabotage will be discovered eventually. But in the meantime, the souls of the damned will surge to Moloch’s domain, while Belphegor’s will be deprived. The difference may be enough to sway some stygian battle soon to come.”
With that, the ghost dissipated back into the aether.
“Titania curse him…” Caulis said, picking up the punch-card. It would need some help with this job – help from those skilled in infiltration.
The next day, Caulis met up with some of its companions – Garvin, Sister, Armand, and Alabastor – and explained its encounter with its creator’s spirit. Together, the group formed a plan to sneak into the Church of Belphegor, and swap out the punch-card.
Sister, ever the theologian, described more of Belphegor and his worship. Belphegor was one of the six Archdemons Hex had made a formal contract with, consigning one sixth of their damned souls to his care in exchange for his patronage, along with Astaroth, Demogorgon, Lilith, Merihem, and Orobas. He was the demon of invention, wealth, and the virtue of sloth: by definition, machines save labour, allowing the inventor to produce goods and money without actively engaging in work. Belphegor was honoured alongside the other Chthonic Gods at the Infernal Basilica, but also had a separate church in his name. Portions of the temple were open to the public, who were free to use its many marvelous inventions, provided they donate to the Church.
The Church of Belphegor had an intense rivalry with the Cult of the Magistra, whose clergy are also skilled with machines and mathematics. Though the two religions had many superficial similarities, their ethics and approach to technology were very different. The Magistra’s Cult emphasized reason, rationality, and the divine order inherent in the universe, which they held to be a kind of grand simulation programmed by the Magistra herself, the clockwinder-goddess. In contrast, Belphegor was a deity of undisciplined creation and transgression, holding that Nature itself should be forcibly converted from organic into mechanical forms.
The group began by casing the Church, heading north across the Bridge of Sins. They found the Church at the border of Mainspring, Caulchurch, and Little Pandemonium, on the corner of Brimstone Avenue and the Street of Tongues; it rose from a wreath of pungent industrial smoke, the staring brass visage of the Archdemon peering through the miasma of smog belched forth from the chimneys sprouting from the temple’s roof. Even from outside, the sound of whirring clockwork, grinding gears, and bubbling liquid was audible, alongside the mechanical drone of infernal hymns. Crimson light flickered through the windows of the building and illuminated the dome of iron and glass at its centre.
Garvin entered the Church discretely – not actively concealing himself, but drawing as little attention to himself as possible. Past a small atrium opened the nave of the Church, running like an iron throat from the visage of Belphegor to the round dome over the chancel. Priests of Belphegor were evident here and there, some drifting on levitating metal discs, others scuttling on mechanical arachnoid chairs. Their bodies were swathed in the red robes of the order; what little protruded, however, seemed as much machine as living tissue, for the clockborg flamines augmented their bodies with mechanical substitutions as they rose in the clergy’s ranks. Wax-cylinder machines croaked a constant prayer to the Archdemon of invention. Two transepts ran the length of the nave; each semitransept contained one of the ingenious machines of Belphegor’s priesthood. These four devices were accessible to the public by monetary donation. Garvin spent some time examining these: a gigantic clockwork baboon money-changer, which swapped Hexian guineas for pieces-of-bone and vice versa for a small payment of blood; a two-headed hellhound made of bronze which would whisper the current market value of any commodity from one head when said commodity was placed in the mouth of the other; an enigmatic bronze serpent capable of refining and improving objects; and some kind of duplication machine in the form of a bronze elephant-dragon, capable of replicating an object provided it and its exact value in coins were placed in the open maw of the machine.
The chancel of the Church of Belphegor occupied the space beneath a dome of tinted glass, smudged with soot from the smoking machines below. An altar was set before a massive furnace that filled the air with heat and smoke; the furnace was cast in the shape of an open mouth. A huge chimney ran from the furnace to the ceiling and out into the open air. Petitioners of Belphegor prayed before the altar and cast sacrifices into the furnace: specifically, things which were broken or failed or malformed, from rust-eaten spoons to defective toys. Adjacent to the altar was a great iron door, with a demonic head for a lock.
Presiding over the congregation was a clicking, sibilant thing that might once have been a man, but now resembled something between a clockwork cockroach and an oversized doll. It scuttled on mechanized legs, a humanoid torso emerging from where its beetle-half’s head would be; though a glimpse of flesh at the neck and hands confirmed the thing iwas still partially organic, the buzzing servos and hissing steam-valves that comprised its abdomen suggested most of its organs have been replaced with mechanical alternatives. The High Priest led a prayer in the Infernal tongue:
“Assembled petitioners of Belphegor, give thanks to the Father of Invention, Lord of the Gap and Minister of Toil. For he has given us the means to prosper without drudgery, to flourish without sacrifice, to cheat miserly mother nature of her treasures, jealously hoarded against her own children.”
The priest proceeded to sermonize, providing an eschatological vision of a world to come, a world of beautiful machines, efficient and perfect, which would replace all organic life. Here there would be no cruelty and no competition, and all would live a life of indolence and pleasure, nourished by the machines which granted them their every desire.
Meanwhile, outside, Alabastor had enacted his part of the plan. Now that he was a ghost, he could possess the bodies of the living. After luring an initiate of Belphegor out from the Church with Charm Person, Alabastor enacted his plan, flitting from his corpse into the body of Edwin, a young initiate of Belphegor with a mechanical arm. They placed Alabastor’s body in Armand’s parlour, via the Portal Chalk; they would be unable to use the chalk to escape the Church, since it did not function on ground specifically hallowed (or unhallowed) to a deity that was not the Antinomian.
To reach the lower level, the party would have to pass the iron door. A distraction was needed, so while Sister cast Past Without Trace to weave the party garments of shadow, Caulis’s psuedodragon familiar Eleyin served as a proxy for the homonculus, allowing it to cast Major Image, producing the illusion of smoke issuing from one of the machines. In the resulting commotion, amidst cries of “FIRE!” and panicked petitioners, the group entered the Inner Sanctum; the lock, they learned, was opened by forfeiting a small quantity of blood.
A spiral stair led down from the chancel to the Inner Sanctum. The anteroom of the sanctum was a round chamber, its walls adorned with magical murals depicting a world of trees and verdant hills being slowly harvested, cut up, processed, and replaced with a world of machines, endlessly. At the ceiling, a small clockwork device pivoted this way and that; within it, staring bulbously, was a humanoid eye, bloodshot and staring. This they slipped carefully past, walking to avoid its pivoting gaze and entering one of several doors.
The party entered an atrium, with a wall of shimmering force on the far side, and a curious mosaic on the floor:
After some experimentation, the party solved the puzzle, bypassing the wall of force by walking over tiles that added up to 7: 3+4-2+2. Within the room beytond, tubes from above snaked up to the nave; these deposited coins into a literal pit of money visible below, the door leading to a balcony overlooking this gleaming hoard. Another security camera looked on from above, ensuring that no one could steal from the hoard.
“Hmm, tempting, but not what we’re looking for,” Garvin said.
The party returned to the atrium and eyed a control panel by the door, appearing to show five different positions with a lever. Alabastor experimentally pulled the lever down to “five.”
Suddenly, the entire room shifted, as elaborate clockwork began grinding away behind the walls. With a shudder, the entire complex began to shift, the Inner Sanctum’s rooms rearranging themselves so that the room itself was relocated to the fifth floor. Other markings on the control panel seemed to indicate the location of different rooms, but without knowing the system of numbers marking which room as which, the party didn’t know where the Soul Conduit was located.
“Belphegor’s the demon of Sloth…” Sister said. “His initiates must resent having to walk around. So instead the rooms move.”
“It must have been hell to design,” Alabastor said, through Edwin’s lips. “Not to mention stupidly expensive to build. And there must be a ton of empty, wasted space all around this place, so that the rooms can swap places without colliding with one another… they really are lazy.”
The party proceeded to explore more of the complex, playing with the levers and creeping carefully
Heat blased them upon entering a vast chamber of iron and stone, an industrial foundry filled with cauldrons of molten metal, poured by a host of scuttling half-clockwork demons into intricate moulds to form machine-parts. The twelve demons are directed by two initiates of Belphegor armed with mechanized prods like pitchforks that periodically zapped the creatures with magical energy. Alabastor, in Edwin’s body, spoke to them briefly and managed to glean a few details of the other rooms, but given the constant movement of chambers, the Sanctum had no “layout” as such. Just off the foundry they found a foreman’s office containing records of different parts being produced, records of the various initiates of Belphegor, several spare unholy symbol of Belphegor, a foreman’s black and crimson robe, and an extra copy of the Hammer Key. The robe was donned by Sister, and the party helped themselves to the other items.
Two doors led form the foundry, one admitting them to a massive factory churning with activity beneath the streets; conveyer belts of parts deposited gears, springs, and other components into large cauldrons. Creatures like misshapen lumps of flesh, riddled with whirring machines, then assembled these components, though the devices they were producing were inscrutable – possibly themselves components of some even larger machine. An initiate of Belphegor presided over the assembly line from a catwalk above.
The party continued exploring, passing through room after room, sometimes changing levels with the control panel, and managed to acquire additional robes from a supply closet, disguising the party further. They found a chamber where a series of long metal slabs were arrayed; upon several, sleeping forms were evident, hooked up to elaborate machines directed by several priests of Belphegor. The priests used the intricate clockwork scalpels and automaton arms to replace the body parts of those on the slabs before them: limbs were sawn off and replaced with metal ones; viscera were gutted and replaced with churning gears and pumps; eyes were popped out and replaced with clicking mechanical lenses. In another room, a machine took the form of a sinister chair with a headrest, surrounded by a madness of cogs and pistons, all currently still. Shelves around the edges of the room contained numerous scrolls, each bearing what looked to be a prophecy. They read several:
“The Bat and the Bear will soon consume one another.”
“The Voices of the Dead will freeze the Six-Sided City.”
“The Dreams of the God-Fish are caused by the Nightmare-Spider and the Vengeful Ghost.”
“Mooncalf Valley will flood when the Mountain snores.”
“The Vagrant will triumph.”
“Beware the Witch of the Iron Wood.”
“Interesting,” Sister said. “I wonder how accurate they are?”
“Dreams of the God-Fish,” Garvin said. “Sounds like Jack to me. The Nightmare Spider – that could be the Order of Icelus…”
“…and the Vengeful Ghost is Penumbra!” Caulis said. The prophecies, it seemed, were reasonably accurate. The party snatched several more for perusal later.
Another room was occupied by a vast machine that looked a bity like a printing press and a bit like a gigantic bronze lamprey. A large stack of books sat on a table near the lamprey’s maw, and another at its tail, past a series of mechanical arms. Sister perused some of the books at the tail end.
“They’re all in Infernal,” she said.
Experimentally, Caulis placed one of the books into the maw. The machine grumbled to life, devouring the book, digesting it, and then excreting in the form of pages which were then bound by the arms. The text had been translated into Infernal; the original was lost.
A machine that looked a bit like a sausage maker crossed with a gigantic bronze snail filled the next chamber; a mechanical lift led up to the top of the machine, where an initiate of Belphegor periodically dumped a crateful of bodies parts into the snail’s radula. A second initiate pulled a lever, and the machine whirred, grinding up the bones and flesh deposited into it and then extruding a fleshy mixture from the snail’s underside, which formed themselves into the shape of a servitor-demon. Mechanical arms then augmented the creature with clockwork parts.
In yet another chamber, a three-dimensional map of Hell filled the floor; the door led onto to a mechanized balcony with a small control panel. Garvin climbed up, discovering a slot in the control panel for a program card. Hundreds of other cards would be found throughout the room on shelves, each with an Infernal symbol. Armand translated, and the party realized the cards changed the map, each programmed with a different city; the illusion on the floor shifted as the card was changed.
“There’s one here for Penumbra,” Armand said, taking out a punch-card. Tentatively, Garvin inserted the card.
Instantly the illusory map rearranged itself, transforming to present a craggy mountain which everyone recognized as Mount Shudder, the grim western peak outside of Hex. Perched on its slopes was the spectral form of a metropolis, seeping up from a crack in the cliffs like a strange infection, wraith-like architecture spilling from the chasm and across the slope.
“Penumbra is on Mount Shudder,” Sister said. “Of course… the mountain is seething with necromantic energy. We need to tell the Hexad Council.”
“I still need to reprogram this Soul Conduit,” Caulis said. “Come on, let’s finish up and get out of here.
The party continued their explorations, discovering an electric sigil buzzing with energy, inscribed on a dais on the floor. To one side was an analytic engine and a library of punch cards.
“A teleportation symbol,” Armand said. “Should make for a swift escape, if we need it.”
The next chamber revealed yet another mathematical puzzle:
This, too, the party circumvented this puzzle, tracing a route across the tiles: 2 x 9 – 7 – 5 x 1 =6. Garvin crept through into the chamber beyond, Caulis having given him the program card.
Something stirred in the hot gloom. There was a smell of ozone and brimstone and metal. Greenish light flickered and there was a muted scream, and a sound of whirring machinery, a sucking organic squelch – a soul, directed by the machine to Belphegor’s domain. The machine that filled the room was made of flesh and bronze and adamant, a chaotic sprawl of gears and pistons: the Soul Conduit. Intermeshed into this abominable mechanism are humanoid bodies, their faces masked. They made constant adjustments to the machine, turning dials and knobs, pulling levers, and otherwise tending to the thrumming, gyrating monster of metal: the ultimate fusion of workers with the means of production.
Garvin approached the Soul Conduit, scanning its myriad dials and knobs, and located the program card slot. Crouched to avoid the gaze of the many workers integrated into the machine, he stealthily removed the card, replacing it with the one Caulis had given him.
As he turned to leave, one of the masked figures twisted to look at him; with a start Garvin recognized him as none other than Sprigley Gilette, retired member of the Variegated Company, former adventuring companion and, in the aftermath of his mental trauma in the Librarian Asylum below Mainspring, a Chthonic Cultist. The group had witnessed Sprigley’s conversion and gradual self-augmentation with a certain trepidation, but Garvin had never expected to find him so thoroughly… integrated.
“Is that you, Garvin?” Sprigley asked. “What are you doing down here?”
“Oh! Ah, Sprigley. I’m, ah, a new initiate to the Order of Belphegor. Just getting the tour, you know?”
“This area isn’t usually permitted for neophytes,” Sprigley said.
“Well, I’d better leave then, I suppose! Ah, good seeing you, old friend!” He slipped out of the chamber as swiftly as possible.
Garvin returned to his party members and the group input the coordinates for the teleport room. They began moving, but moments later, an alarmed blared and the elevator ground to a halt.
“Shit,” Garvin said. “We’re made. Let’s get out of here!”
A mad scramble ensued, the alarms blaring, as the group opened the door and climbed out of the elevator into the central cylindrical shaft around which the structure’s rooms were arrayed. Near the top, they could see figures in an open door, pointing madly; one fired a weapon, and a bullet ricocheted off the metal walls. Employing a rope and Garvin’s wall-walking boots, along with Fly spells, the party made their way up the cylinder to an open doorway and ducked inside, making their way to the teleportation chamber. They input the punchcard for Fiend’s College – one of several potential destinations – and stepped inside – but only Alabastor was teleported correctly; the other party members found themselves instead teleported into a cramped cell.
“Damn it!” Sister swore. Garvin, fortunately, was already picking the lock; he emerged in a room whose walls were covered with mirrors, each one showing not a reflection but a view of some part of the Church: clearly the viewpoints of the clockwrok securirty devices. Garvin quickly dispatched the acolyte tending the controls and glanced quickly at the cameras, which revealed utter bedlam as initiates of Belphegor scrambled to find the intruders. Manning the security devices, Garvin was able to open the other holding cells and re-start the elevators, allowing them to return to the teleportation chamber; before they did they looted a nearby arsenal, discovering a series of rust bombs and mysterious clockwork scarabs.
“Why did Alabastor get out and not us?!” Caulis asked.
“There must be a condition,” Armand reasoned. “A symbol of some kind which the teleporter reads, and activates properly only if supplied. Like a password…”
“Like an unholy symbol of Belphegor?” Sister said. “He was possessing Edwin, so he was wearing one.”
“Worth a shot,” Garvin said, as heavy footfalls sounded overhead, Belphegorites still searching madly for intruders.
They donned stolen unholy symbols, stepped into the teleporter pad…
…and emerged in the vestibule of Fiend’s College, Alabastor waiting for them nervously.
“Close call,” Garvin said.
“But we fulfilled the contract,” Caulis noted. “Hargrym’s shade will be appeased.”
Alabastor Quan, a gnome rogue-turned-warlock and failed circus ringmaster; wielder of a cursed dagger and member of the Ravenswing Thieves’ Guild.
Armand Percival Reginald Francois Eustace de la Marche III, a suspiciously pale, apparently human noble and sorcerer, and certainly not a ghoul (how dare such a thing be suggested).
Caulis, a homunculus warlock liberated from its master; has made a pact with certain Faerie Powers.
Comet the Unlucky, waspkin ranger, a dreamer and an idealist, longing for the restoration of the Elder Trees and the liberation of his people. Loathes the Harvester’s Guild, parasites and destroyers.
Miri, trollblood wizard, plucked from Mount Shudder and raised amongst Hex’s arcane elites. A recent graduate of Fiend’s College.
XP Awarded: 1500 XP
Bleeding and exhausted from their sojourn into the Catacombs of Hex, the party stumbled through the portal they’d created and collapsed in the parlour of Armand’s townhouse, dragging those members hovering at the edge of consciousness through the rift. One of the zombies gifted to them by the Corpsenurse stumbled along behind them, having the survived the brutal traps. Yam and Sister were both critically wounded, their spells depleted, and in need of extended rest. Armand himself, who had remained behind, joined the group preparing to return to the depths. After a brief rest, the adventurers stepped from the well-lit parlour chamber back into the fetid crypts, intent on retrieving the Pneumanomicon before their foes.
Back in the musty darkness, the group moved slowly forward, listening intently. They quickly came to an intersection and heard something moving towards them. Comet flitted ahead, noting several heavy, imposing shapes, tusked and shrouded.
“Trollbloods?” Miri whispered
Armand sniffed. “Not living ones.”
“Probably attracted by the light,” Alabastor said.
A short debated ensued as to what to do about the approaching creatures, even as they drew closer, bringing with them a foul reek like formeldahyde. Making a quick call, the group chose to fend them off, Caulis and Alabastor firing eldritrch blasts, Miri adding a magic missile. One of the shapes crumpled with a groan; its companions hissed and withdrew, dragging the cadaver behind them and leaving a putrid smear of embalming fluid and liquefied flesh.
“Let’s… not go that way,” Comet suggested. The waspkin ranger scouted the nearby tunnels, noting an infestation of woundwort to the south; to the north, a nest of phasebats roosted in a tomb. The party elected to head north, Miri using a spell to distract the phasebats with a conjured smell to move past them. Comet picked the lock of a door to the east, and the group hurried into another corridor. An eerie feeling prickled at their skins – as if they were walking through invisible webs – as they entered another chamber to the east, apparently quite empty. Another tomb adjoined this one, to the south.
This tomb contained four ornate sarcophagi; one had been broken open and thoroughly looted, but the other three were untouched.
Alabastor tentatively approached one of the sarcophagi and examined it for potential traps; finding none, he decided to open it.
“Might as well help ourselves while we’re down here…” he muttered, slipping his fingers under the lid. Suddenly the sarcophagus growled, the stone lid becoming a lip; it burst open, a fanged maw within gnashing its teeth at the gnome. A huge tongue lashed out, smacking Alabastor in the chest and coiling around his arm, the mimic’s digestive juices begnning to burn through his clothes. He cried out and the party turned, weapons in hand and spells at the ready; Miri bombarded it with magic missiles, even as a second sarcophagus lurched into horrid uncanny life, shambling towards Caulis and Comet. The party’s remaining zombie companion chomped down hungrily on the mimic’s tongue and it squealed, loosening its grip; Alabastor drew back, while Armand struck with a bolt of lightning, leaving it a smoking, charred husk.
The second mimic attempted to hide itself, reverting to sarcophagus form, though laughably it was no longer in line with the other sarcophagi; the party decided nonetheless to spare it. They quickly searched the remaining sarcophagi, Alabastor discovering a Wand of Daylight, identified after some quick magical examination.
The party hurried from this room lest Armand’s spell attract further attention, and entered what seemed a thoroughly looted tomb. Armand, on a hunch, took a pinch of ghostdust, and was suddenly assailed by the sight of a huge spider hunched in a corner of the room on the Ethereal Plane. The creature’s bloated abdomen was translucent, containing a seething plethora of ghosts, trapped within its body and slowly being digested; within it spectral webbing was trapped a key with a Hand for a bow, and a wand of some kind. Steeling himself, Armand cast Blink and flitted into the Ethereal to snatch the wand and the key; the spider hissed and began moving towards him, but he flickered back into the Material just in time to avoid its chelicerae.
The party now headed back west, completing a loop in the Catacombs. They catiously headed south, towards where the embalmed trollbloods they’d encountered earlier had fled. Armand flickered back into the Ethereal and poked his head into the adjacent chamber, discerning a huge shape in a massive tomb beyond, hunched in the darkness. He phased back into the Material and described the potential foe, but Caulis suggested they might at least attempt to converse with the creature. After some debate – Miri eagerly suggesting a sneak attack, Caulis and Alabastor arguing for a more diplomatic approach – the party decided to try and speak to the being, whatever it was.
They eased the door open and stepped into a massive tomb with soaring ceilings and a gigantic sarcophagus at its centre. Hanging on the walls were the skulls of huge beasts and gigantic weapons, including a battleaxe with a haft like a tree-trunk.
The being that hunkered in the gloom was unsettling, to say the least. A towering creature, easily thirty feet tall, it hunched beneath the vaulted ceiling, neck and head bent to avoid scraping the stone, a reek of embalming fluid emanating from its vast, mummified bulk. Yellowed tusks protruded from a skull-like visage, the eyes replaced with glittering black gemstones. Down the mummified giant’s body, snaking and zigzagging, was a crooked seam, presumably where the giant’s organs were removed from his body. Something squirmed within, pressing against its dead flesh.
The thing sprawled in the darkness, claws tapping the stones; in one massive hand it grasped an entire barrel of embalming fluid from which it swigged, as if from a tankard of ale. A huge set of stone double doors was visible behind the mummified giant.
Realizing the creature was a giant, Miri’s combative tone shifted.
“Greetings, ah, grandfather,” the trollblood wizard said in Giantish, bowing slightly and approaching.
“A troll-child!” the mummified giant said, regarding Miri with its black jewel eyes. “I am Yowl, former Guardian of Hex. What brings you to my humble hall, little one?”
“We seek passage to the lower levels, grandfather,” Miri said. “If we might pass, we would be very grateful.”
“Passage, is it?” the desiccated hulk rasped. “Very well. I will grant you passage, treasure-seeker, but you must perform for me a boon. In these Mansions of the Dead, I have many rivals – enemies who slay my subjects, usurpers and scavengers. These halls grow crowded. Slay one of these rivals for me, and I will grant you safe passage to the level below.”
“And who are your rivals, grandfather?”
“There is Dahlia Deadeye of the Graveyard Girls, thieves and scavengers who seek to plunder my treasures; Vermillion Bill of the Blighted Brotherhood, a stinking cutthroat who clots these halls with the reek of his festering mushrooms; the Corpsenurse, who kidnaps my precious children and makes them her own; and the Empress of Rats, a bastard vampiress who stalks the halls west and south of here, feeding on those she catches.”
Miri translated for the group.
“Children?” Caulis said, unable to help itself.
“Yes of course,” Yowl said. “One was killed earlier… doubtless those meddlesome Blighted Brothers… Should be nearly rejuvenated by now, actually…” He groaned, shifted, and, with a grunt of pain, pulled at the seam along his abdomen. A hole opened in his stomach, and out poured a great glug of embalming fluid. A hideous waft of pickle-reek flooded everyone’s nostrils, and they gaped in revulsion as something stirred within the pool of gloop that had gushed from the undead giant’s guts: none other than the mummified trollblood the party had killed earlier. The creature looked at the party in terror and cringed backwards, crawling towards its “father.”
“Ah, that might have been us that killed your ‘child,’ grandfather,” Miri said. “Our greatest apologies.”
Yowl laughed uproariously as he cinched his stitches tight again. “Well fought, then, little troll-child! No permanent harm done…”
The group discussed their options, and resolved to help the friendly-seeming giant – specifically by destroying the Empress of Rats, since, if Yowl spoke truly, she was a multiple murderer, preying on the people of Hex.
After resting briefly in the stinking Tomb of Yowl, the party headed towards the den of the Empress of Rats according to the undead Giant’s directions.
They first picked their way through a series of mouldering stone chambers, writhing with swarms of rats oozing across the floor in a hairy, slimy tide, like putrid liquid; these they dispersed with flame and spells, Alabastor and Caulis deploying eldritch blasts till the echoing tombs were spattered crimson, vaulted ceilings dripping with rat guts. The commotion, however, soon alerted something else deep in the tomb. It stirred, its chittering echoing through the darkness of a yawning pipe that trickled a thin stream of sewage into the tomb. The party hunched and crept down the narrow tunnel, fingertips sill sizzling with puissance. They squeezed through a long, crooked passage that seemed to go on forever, until at last it opened into a chamber beyond.
Countless rats scuttleed through the brick-lined expanse, once a cesspit which had been adorned with treasures looted from the catacombs and from the streets above – paintings and tapestries hang on the walls, and dozens of cups, coins, and articles of jewellery were strewn about, some embedded in mounds of feculence. The thing which seethed and thrashed and squeaked in the midst of this finery and rat-flesh was a confusion of fur, teeth, and tails – thousands of rats with their tales tangled together, become a writhing ball of rodent flesh. The amorphous form moulded itself into a roughly humanoid shape, resolving sharply to become a bone-pale woman clad in a regal robes of living rats, her yellow fangs glinting, eyes black.
“Who tresspasses in my domain?!” The Empress of Rats hissed. “You will pay for your transgression!”
Bottlenecked in the tunnel, the party beat a hasty retreat, scrambling backwards out of the broken pipe and back into the tomb, the Empress of Rats prowling ominously after them. Thinking quickly, Caulis inscribed a hasty magic circle at the base of the pipe, carefully scattering powdered silver over the indentations, and gestured for the party to stand back. As the Empress of Rats crawled from the pipe on all fours and scuttled into the circle, the homunculus activated its magic and the vampire was trapped, penned within the eldritch ward. She shrieked in fury and dissolved once more into a swarm of rats, but these too were unable to leave the circle and thus formed a kind of grotesque column of gibbering rat-flesh, bones breaking and flesh pulping as the individual rats she had become tore at one another, their furry bodies crushed by the magical prison.
“Now!” Caulis said, and the party unleased their full fury, Comet firing into the column of rats with arrows, the others laying into it with spells. Despite their assault, the vampire seemed to regenerate at a preternatural rate, shifting from rat-form and back to humanoid form, her wounds closing. Then Alabastor remembered the wand he had discovered back in the mimics’ lair.
“Stand back!” he said. “And cover your eyes!” He activated the wand, filling the tomb with a blinding flash of sunlight. Armand groaned, throwing up an arm to protect his sensitive eyes, his pale skin scorching slightly in as pure solar radiation filled the room. Instantly the Empress of Rats burst into flame, her swarm-shape incandescent, filling the air with smoke and the revolting smell of burning fur.
Alabastor picked up a necklace from the ashes that remained – a simple cord strung with rat-teeth. He would later learn that these were the Fangs of Retching – if swallowed, one of the teeth would cause the necklace’s wearer to vomit up a swarm of obedient rats.
“Those should be proof she’s dead,” Miri said, nodding at the necklace.
The party returned to Yowl’s tomb. The Giant acknowledged the Fangs of Retching as proof of the Empress’ death and bade the Variegated Company pass into the fourth level of the Catacombs.
This level the party managed to navigate with relative ease – though Caulis ran afoul of a trap near the entrance, a pit lined with poison-smeared spikes at the base of the stair, concealed by a decaying rug. The homunculis was impaled and nearly died, its life saved by an emergency potion.
Beyond the trap, after a few lucky turns, the party discovered a 150-foot-long hall lit with flickering candles of black tallow behind iron grills which cast a criss-cross lattice of black shadows across the floor. Comet took a hunk of vermihydra leftover from the fight several levels up and threw it into the shadows; it was instantly bisected, as if the shadows had become razor-sharp.
Fortunately, a simple solution presented itself: charges remained on the wand of Daylight, and so Alabastor was able to banish the shadows long enough for the party to pass through and into a chamber beyond, whose door was opened by the Hand Key found earlier.
Here, Alabastor’s conjured daylight, centred on the Fangs of Retching, dimmed dramatically. The chamber seemed preternaurally black; within its centre, only dimly visble, could be found an ornate black marble sarcophagus inscribed with the name “Raoul the Obscure.” Six black stone gargoyles squatted round the sarcophagus, faintly visible in the muted sunlight. A spiralling stone stair led down to the fifth level.
“I don’t like the look of those statues,” Comet said, eyeing them suspiciously. The party kept a careful eye on the gargoyles to ensure they didn’t suddenly animate, and descended rapidly, leaving the sarcophagus undisturbed. They crept down the stairs, the waspkin going first; his foot touched a crumbling brick that might have led another party-member to stumble down into the blacknes below, but the cunning ranger simply took to the air on his delicate wings.
The fifth level of the catacombs was flooded with near-impenetrable darkness; Alabastor’s Daylight spell cast barely as much light as a fitful torch. Carved niches lined the walls containing corpses, some of them disturbed – hideously deflated, as if something removed all of their bones. Only a few shards remain, and the bodies are riddled with wounds where something sharp pierced the skin.
The party passed into another grand hall, this one impossibly vast. The architecture here looked older than the rest of the Catacombs – iridescent metal glistened in the gloom. They were entering the Old City, part of the ancient Librarian ruins deep below Hex. Thousands of small, black pods lined the walls, row after row of sleek, opaque ovoids. Inspection revealed that within was a dense black liquid. Another deflated corpse slumped on the floor, now little more than a skeleton. On another hunch – the hairs on the back of his neck stirring slightly – Armand took a pinch of ghostdust, peering into the Ethereal, and discovered a spirit, floating in the gloom: that of a Graveyard Girl who wandered too deep.
“Pleased to meet you,” Armand said, while the rest of the party watched in confusion.
“Glad to see some new faces down here. Say – if you agree to bury my body properly, I can give you something you’ll need.”
“And what is that?” Armand asked.
Penelope held up a glowing key with a sunburst design. “I assume you’re heading to the sixth level. That’s where I was headed.”
Armand nodded. “Take her bones,” the aristocrat instructed to no one in particular. Miri sighed and scooped up the body.
Fat, white shapes like gigantic albino bats roosted on the ceiling: huge white moths with delicate, crimson-veined wings and juddering mosquito-like proboscises.
“Marrowmoths,” Caulis whispered. “Don’t disturb them or we’re done for.”
They passed into an adjoining room, discovering a massive machine of back, iridescent metal churning and thruming, pouring out inky blackness in an atramentous torrent. They watched as light streamed from Alabastor’s necklace into the machine, sucked in by some arcane mechanism. Two openings at the base of the generator were evident, one big enough to crawl into, the other narrow and spout-like, giving the machine the semblance of a monstrous black kettle. Below the spout was an empty ovoid like a large vase. After some experimentation, Armand discovered the machine was a kind of Librarian crematorium – any physical matter placed in the larger opening would be converted into a sort of concentrated darkness, pure liquid entropy.
“Fascinating,” the sorcerer said absently. “I’ll have to come back down here at some point…”
This also provided the party a helpful means of disposing of Penelope Greycheek’s corpse. After her organic remains were compressed into darkness and into the ovoid vessel, the Light Key materialized, and Penelope herself melted into restful shadow. Armand now deactivated the crematorium.
With the device powered off, daylight flared from Alabastor’s bewitched necklace – the darkness no longer was quite so thick. Alabastor ended the spell so as not to disturb the marrowmoths as they passed stealthily back through the grand hall. This time they entered a hall filled with flickering statues of peculiar metal – Guardians of Gloom, activated only by light. Relying on darkvision, the party crept past them and into an empty chamber, furnished only by a series of featureless, oddly-shaped structures like tables or basins.
A third time, a hunch struck Armand, and he took another pinch of ghostdust, to peer into the Ethereal. The drug revealed the chamber to be a teeming ghostly greenhouse, filled with succulent immaterial vines and strange, pallid blooms, long-cultured by the Librarians and now growing wild. Armand’s normal detachment was banished at the prospect of botany.
“Hold on, I’ll be back momentarily,” he said, casting Blink again to flit into the Ethereal. Madly, he began taking cuttings of the immaterial plants. He snipped a bloom here, a sprig there, a vine…
As he cut into the tendril, a mass of plants moved and shifted. It groaned. Spectral vegetation unfurled, took a squelching step. A twisted assemblage of vines and matted muck rose from the garden; embedded in its body were the spirits of others who journeyed into the depths, now intertwined in its parasitic vines, imprisoned and slowly fading as it fed on their essence. One, Armand noted, clutched a key of black, iridescent metal.
“I’ll take that!” the sorcerer said, telekinetically snatching it with a spell before flitting back to the Material mere moments before the monster engulfed the spot where he had stood.
The party returned once more to the hall of marrowmoths and crept through the sole remaining corridor, down a coiled ramp, and into the sixth level of the Catacombs. A massive obsidian door loomed at the base of the stair, a door with two locks. Above the door, coiled and repugnant, a taxidermy dragon stirred, its wings fluttering.
“Who would disturb the tomb of Genevieve Chancel?” it demanded.
“Her former mentor!” Snuff answered, Valentina’s voice chirping through her undead familiar. “We are on a mission of great importance – we come not to use the book within, but to keep the Pneumanomicon from falling into the wrong hands!”
The dragon considered. “A likely tale,” it said. “Is this not precisely what a theif would say?”
As they argued, the paryt became aware of movement in the passage behind them. A ragged train of figures approached – some looked like vagrants, others walking corpses. One was a City Guard, tattered and pale.
“We have them now” it said, in a cold, feminine voice. “The Book of Ghosts will be ours! Forward!”
“Now do you believe us?!” Snuff demanded. The zombie dragon flapped its wings and spat forth a gob of green flame at the approaching figures; meanwhile, Armand placed both the Shadow and Light Key into the locks. They pushed the door open.
Within ws a suprisingly plain tomb, with little within it save a spare sarcophagus and a lectern of bone… a lectern upon which there seemed to be no book.
“Where’s the damn book?!” Miri asked, casting around.
Comet began flying high and lo in search of the text.
Meanwhile, the thieves behind them had made their way past the dragon, badly scorched but still considerable in number. The party was cornered. Caulis groped for the Portal Chalk and prepared to make a quick escape… but where was the Pneumanomicon?
“Hex will fall!” The leader of the intruders declared in the same weird, echoing voice as its warriors advanced, weapons drawn. “Penumbra will have its revenge! The world of the living will crumble and the Thanatocracy will reign forever!”
It was Alabastor who realized it.
“The Book… the Book is a ghost,” he said. “I know what I have to do!”
The gnome unsheathed the dagger of Queen Mab, the one by which he swore himself to his secret Faerie patron – and thrust the blade deep into his own heart. He dropped dead almost instantly.
“Alabastor!” Comet cried out. Miri, one wand drawn, sent a magic missile at one of their attackers and scooped up Alabastor over her shoulder, while Caulis activated the portal back to Armand’s parlour.
“We have to go now!” Armand declared, firing a spell.
Alabastor, meanwhile, looking about himself with fresh eyes, as his newly formed spectral body coalesced over his own freshly-made corpse. His gambit had worked – the Pneumanomicon, as he had guessed, prevented the spirits of the dead from crosing over, hence the proliferation of ghosts near to it. And there it was – sitting on the lectern, in the Ethereal Plane.
With a smile, the gnomish spectre grabbed the tome, and fled with his companions through the portal.
Alabastor Quan, a gnome rogue-turned-warlock and failed circus ringmaster; wielder of a cursed dagger and member of the Ravenswing Thieves’ Guild.
Caulis, a homunculus warlock liberated from its master; has made a pact with certain Faerie Powers.
Comet the Unlucky, waspkin ranger, a dreamer and an idealist, longing for the restoration of the Elder Trees and the liberation of his people. Loathes the Harvester’s Guild, parasites and destroyers.
Miri, trollblood wizard, plucked from Mount Shudder and raised amongst Hex’s arcane elites. A recent graduate of Fiend’s College.
An ancient and enigmatic Lengian cleric of the Mother of Spiders, name unknown. She wears bulky ecclesiastical garments covering an uncertain number of limbs and goes by “Sister.”
Yam, an eccentric gnome illusionist and local graduate student at Umbral University. Yam cares little for money. Yam is curious. Yam is Yam.
XP Awarded: 1000 XP
The party reeled in the wake of the revelations the demonic assassin they’d subdued had exposed, combined with the intelligence gleaned from the withered lips of the head of Granny Midnight. It seemed possible that Silas Thamiel himself, a member of the Hexad Council, might have dispatched Gobble and Slake to kill the party, directly after seeming to support their efforts to uncover whatever sinister conspiracy was seeking Hex’s destruction. All was not what it seemed.
Comet and Alabastor suggested that the Variegated Company speak to Master Melchior, their frequent employer. After much discussion, it was so resolved, though Armand remained behind to rest and recuperate his spells. Sister scrawled a chalk portal on the wall in case they needed a swift escape, and the group headed east from Armand’s townhouse to the school. They talked their way past the griffin guards and headed up to Melchior’s study; the archwizard and brain-in-a-jar was busy performing various arcane calculations, telepathically scrawling formulae on a chalkboard and considering them with his mechanical eyes.
“Ah, my Organon-hunters… how goes the search?” The ancient enchanter asked, conjuring an illusory version of himself to converse with the party.
The group explained the situation carefully. Melchior tapped his illusory fingers against his illusory lips, pondering.
“If we are speaking of some kind of mind control – someone affecting Silas magically – they must be operating at a fairly close range,” he said. “On the other hand, we might be dealing with something else: a case of demoniac or spectral possession.”
“Ghosts?” Alabastor said, quizzically.
“Uh, there’s no such thing as ghosts,” Yam said.
“What are you talking about?” Miri interjected. “Haven’t you met ghosts before? They’re all over the place.”
“Nah. Those are just complicated illusions.”
Melchior chuckled. “Yam, your eccentricity is charming, as ever. Whatever you call them, the entities that some have described as ‘ghosts’ might well be responsible…”
Caulis frowned. It had sent its familiar, the pseudodragon Eleyin, to keep a watch around the school, in case some other assailant approached; something had flown past Eleyin in the darkness.
Suddenly, there was a scratching at the window. Alabastor went to investigate, to discover a tiny owl pecking and clawing at the pane, as if trying to get in. Curious, the gnome complied.
The owl hopped into the study and onto Melchior’s brain-tank. Its body was, upon closer inspection, stuffed – it was embalmed, a taxidermy creature. Abruptly, the creature chirped in a girlish voice which everyone recognized as that of the lich Valentina Nettlecrave:
“Ah, here you are. This little fellow is Snuff, my familiar. I wanted the opportunity to talk to you privately, but for someone in my position, that can be difficult.” Snuff bowed to Melchior’s illusion. “Good evening, Melchior.”
“A pleasure as always, Valentina,” Melchior said, his illusion nodding. “I believe you are acquainted with the Variegated Company?”
“Indeed. It was them I am seeking – my movements are watched. Were I to meet with you physically, it would attract undue attention. But Snuff here can act as a line of communication.”
“Has Silas been acting… strangely?” Sister asked. “We have some reason to suspect he may have been behind an attempt on our lives.” She quickly explained the circumstances of the attack, while remaining vague as to their use of the head of Granny Midnight to spy on the Council.
“I have lived in Hex for eight centuries,” Snuff chirped in Valentina’s voice. “Many believe me addled. Senile. Paranoid. But your news only confirms my worst suspicions. After the meeting of the Council, I was greatly disturbed. It is unlike Arabella to make an argument for religious persecution, however rational. Perhaps more worrisome, Silas’ reluctance to involve the Warders directly strikes me as deeply out of character. No offense, but they are trained professionals, and you are merely gifted amateurs. Why then would he entrust this task to you? I suspect he knows that if he alerted the Warders to the conspiracy, they would find out something he does not want them to. Even so, the Warders are in in Silas’s pocket, not mine. I do not know who else on the Council can be trusted. But I do know that whoever is behind these attacks on Hex is cunning. I am sure they have other plans in motion. So far we have been able to defuse each attack before it became cataclysmic. We have been lucky. But if we are to stop these attacks, we must act, rather than simply reacting.”
“There was that note,” Sister said. “That Eleyin intercepted. It might tell us their next move.”
“Right,” Caulis replied. “It said they were searching for the Pneumanomicon.”
Melchior looked up. “The Book of Ghosts… yes.” He said. “As my notes indicate, it should be located in the Catacombs beneath the Gilded Graveyard, in the tomb of Genevieve Chancel.”
“I suggest you head to the Catacombs at once,” Valentina said through Snuff. “With the conspiracy unraveling, they may renew their search for the book. I will send Snuff with you, to act as my eyes and ears – I knew Genevieve while she lived, though we fell out before her death. Still, I may be able to assist you.”
“I can provide transportation,” Melchior said, and went to the window. He proceeded to whistle intricately.
“This may also be helpful,” Valentina said through her familiar. Snuff began making horrid retching noises, and proceeded to vomit up a small phial of silvery liquid. Alabastor caught it and stowed it in his waistcoat. “It’s a potion of animate dead – pour this on the remains of any creature you find and they’ll reanimate.”
Moments later, there was a sound of commotion below. The griffin gate-guards had assembled in the courtyard with a large skycarriage, ready to convey the party by air to the Gilded Graveyard on the other side of the city. The party made haste, bustling into the vehicle, which was magically enlarged extradimensionally within, to provide ample space for all six, plus Snuff and Eleyin.
The district of Grey Hook was the most luxurious of south Hex: an ornate neighbourhood, all greys and whites and blacks and vivid reds, its buildings of marble and obsidian and polished stone, some sculpted to look like bone, others actually fashioned in part from the skeletons of giant beasts. Neo-Cranialist structures resembling gigantic gloomy faces glowered down at passersby. The Gilded Graveyard sprawled in the extreme south corner of the district and of the cityitself: a rambling cemetery with thousands of graves. The eastern parts were a bit better tended than the west, which were on the shabby side. Time was that the Gilded Graveyard was the preferred burial place for the city’s rich elites, but the decay of the surrounding districts – the Midden, Suckletown, Shambleside – had scared many away, leading to a craze for private plots outside the city and “domestic tombs” in the homes of the wealthy. Now, the Graveyard was often the haunt of tomb-robbers and petty crooks.
The party departed the carriage and sought out an entrance to the Catacombs, noting graffiti on nearby gravetstones. They settled on the western entrance of the crypts. Down a flight of stone steps was a small antechamber with three branching hallways. Ornaments fashioned from human bones adorned the walls, morbid decorations from Hex’s barbaric past. Graffiti had been scrawled beside the doorways. One had a skull with pigtails, the words “GRAVEYARD GIRLS RULE, BLIGHTBOYS DROOL” painted beneath it. Another had a beetle-like symbol painted beside it. A third had pictograms of what look like toadstools or fungus. In the centre of the room was a black, bubbling fountain in the shape of a serpent, dark water spilling from its stony jaws.
“Genevieve’s tomb is on the sixth level,” Valentina said through Snuff. “Best look for a way down.”
Comet scouted to the south, discovering a locked stone door. He picked it and listened, hearing a chittering noise within. He opened the door and crack and looked within to see a pile of corpses exhumed from the catacombs and graveyard, heaped in a chamber like discarded dolls. Laid within their exposed chest cavities were glistening white eggs; some had hatched, and voracious larvae – fat, yellow creatures the length of a human arm – were busy devouring them. Three huge black and yellow beetles tended to the gruesome brood, occasionally picking off one of their own young and devouring it.
Shuddering, Comet crept stealthily back to the party. They resolved to head east instead, only to discover a ghoul slumped against one wall, his throat cut, his clothes stripped, blood drying beneath him. Feasting upon one of the ghoul’s hands – chewing at its dead fingers – was a swollen yellow-black beetle the size of a large dog.
Disgusted, the party let loose with a blaze of spellcraft, wands and fingertips blazing. The creature barely had time to register their presence before it was reduced to a yellowish smear on the flagstone floor.
The ghoul’s corpse proved to have a key with a spiked skull symbol – one that Yam recognized as the symbol of a famous gnome bard, Damien Bloodsun.
They proceeded further into the tunnels, heading south to discover the reason for the fungus symbol they’d glimpsed earlier, entering a chamber whose walls were covered in a thin layer of red fungus, spreading out from a morass of bones strewn across the floor in a crimson heap. Caulis identified this as Woundwort – a hideous parasitic growth that enters the body through open wounds and spreads beneath the skin, causing limbs, organs, and other extremities to detach and spread the fungus to other surfaces, moving with an uncanny life of their own.
“I’m glad Armand isn’t here,” Yam quipped. “He’d be scraping this stuff up, I’m sure.”
Venturing carefully past the Woundwort – the party was uninjured, and thus safe – they found a strangely stained corridor. Beneath the blackish smears could be seen an ornate series of tiles bearing pictograms of snakes, wolves, spiders, spotted frogs, octopi, bears, owls, scorpions, fish, and lions.
“A puzzle,” Miri said. “I’d bet anything some of these are trapped.”
“It must be something to do with the order we depress them…” Sister said.
“Could it be a food chain?” Alabastor mused. “Lions and bears near the top, spiders near the bottom?”
“Hmm. Some of these animals are poisonous,” Comet said. “It could be we should avoid those.”
“Miri, see if you can throw me across,” Yam said. “Let’s just skip this stupid trap.”
“Alright, if you’re sure,” the brawny trollblood wizard said, and tossed the gnome down the corridor. Yam landed on an octopus-tile, released a cloud of vapour, but the gnome managed to avoid breathing in any of the fume.
“Well, that didn’t work,” they said. “What now?”
“Stay there, Yam, I’m going to try something,” Sister said, donning her gasmask and stepped onto a spider-tile. Instantly, there was another puff of gas which flooded the corridor, and now both Yam and Sister were poisoned, coughing and spluttering as their lungs and skin burned. Miri stepped onto a scorpion-tile, to indentical results.
“Alright, let’s try Comet’s way,” she said, between ragged coughs. The party now crossed the corridor by stepping only on the non-poisonous animals: wolves, bears, lions, owls. There was some argument about fish, so these were also avoided, but the group managed to bypass the rest of the traps.
Pressing on, the party found themselves in a long hall lined with niches, each containing a stone pedestal on which was displayed a plaster mask taken from the face of famous archwizards of Hex, including Vincent Nettlecrave (Valentina’s father), Phillipa Grimgrove, Zenobia Soulswell (mother of Emperor Xavier Souslwell), Numerian the Narcomancer, Morbus the Sickened, and Esmerelda Prawnsdaughter.
Turning down a side-passage, the party discovered a door engraved with the name “Damien Bloodsun.” This they opened with the spiked-skull key they’d found earlier. Within, the tomb was dressed stone, black marble, and porphyry. At the far end of the chamber presided a statue of a gnome standing atop a heap of skulls, his hair wild, his face contorted into a bloodthirsty howl, his hands clasping a guitar adorned with necromantic sigils. A sarcophagus lay beneath the statue. Carved faces cover the walls of the tomb, contorted into expressions of mania, ecstasy, despair, rage, and hatred. The stone floor was littered with bones and rotting corpses – perhaps twenty in all, some putrid and bloated, others picked clean. The bodies were twisted and distorted, wrenched into monstrous shapes and riddled with strange growths – extra limbs or heads or tentacles. Some near the far end of the hall looked as if they had literally exploded. As the party entered, torches lit themselves in sconces on the walls made from bony hands.
Alert to potential traps, Alabastor tested for the presence of magic with his dowsing rod, discovering massive amounts of it at the sarcophagus and in the walls. He and Sister attempted to dispel any magical traps, but their efforts failed. Miri and Sister disfigured some of the faces carved into the walls with Acid Splash, but realized it would take hours to disfigure all of them, and so the party resolved to leave the tomb for the time being, instead backtracking to the hall of death masks
They discovered a stair leading downward, progressing deeper into the crypts. Along the way, Sister found a carved skull, upon which she used her Gargoyle Lamp. The skull yawned and cracked its stony jaw.
“Have you seen anyone come this way?” Sister asked.
The skull swivelled in its socket. “Aye,” it said. “A band of strange folk… a Watch officer, a vagabond, a girl dressed in a funeral shroud. An odd collection…”
“Maybe they’re possessed,” Alabastor reasoned.
“Could be,” Sister said, extinguishing the lamp; the statue became inert once more. The party pressed on.
Down on the second level, the party was crepeing along a dark tunnel when they heard a strange, unsettling sound – as of scissors opening and closing.
“Good. Nice. Awesome,” Yam said nervously. Some of the party recalled the creature Abjectus, formed from the castoff reanimated limbs of the Corpse Factories in Shambleside.
Comet, again scouting behind to try and discover the source of the sound, discovered a looted tomb, its floor heaped with bones and body-parts, many of them embalmed. The carved niches in the walls which once would have held corpses now held what looked like the tools of a tailor: many pairs of scissors and a great quantity of thread. A quantity of embalming fluid was kept in the chamber as well, stored in one of several violated sarcophagi. Something moved in the darkness…
“We don’t want this thing sneaking up on us,” Sister said.
“Hey Miri,” Yam said. “Toss me again. It’ll work this time.
Miri shrugged, and once again hurled the little gnome – who fired off a Lightning Bolt into the tomb, striking the horror within. There was a hideous shrieking, a smell of burning flesh and hair. The party braced themselves as Abjectus emerged. The thing which squirmed and crawled and lurched through the tunnels nearly filled them with its twisted, decomposing bulk: a hideous amalgam of twitching, grasping, groping limbs, straining torsos, and dangling, slack-jawed heads with roving, dead white eyes, dull as the eyes of dolls. Its teeth clacked; its joints creaked; its muscles bunched and strained as it pulled itself like a cadaverous inchworm through the darkness. Stained with formaldehyde, it was held together with forever-fraying stitchwork. A clutch of delicate arms sprouting from its back and sides constantly tended to these stitches, holding the awful patchwork together through continuous activity with ever-unspooling thread, rusting needles, and rasping scissors.
Comet hurled a javelin and attacking with his haunted rapier, Madame Sanguinaire, further wounding the horror, while the rest of the party struck with spells. It lashed out as best it could, but soon found itself badly hurt, and began retreating into the depths of its den, trailing blood and thread and stray limbs whihc crept away into dim corners. The Company followed, only to discover the horror had fled through a hole in the floor.
This they investigated carefully, slowly lowering themselves into the cave shaft. They entered a dank burrow filled with worm-castings and the partially eaten corpses of several carrion beetles; Abjectus, it seemed, had fled down one of several side-tunnels winding off from the central burrow. They had not progressed far in pursuit,, however, when something else writhed and scuttled through the gloom. In the magical light illuminating the shaft, they glimpsed a slihuouette with lashing tendrils extending from some grotesque central bulk.
Retreating rapidly back up the shaft, the party lay in wait for whatever came through the hole. The monstrosity which emerged from below made their blood run cold. Its lower body resembled that of an enormous maggot, while its upper body appeared as a swarm of fanged, writhing worms. Several recognized the beast from bestiaries as a vermihydra, a species of subterannean hydra distantly kin to the famous reptillian swamp-monsters.“Vermihydra.” Illustration by Bronwyn McIvor.
The party let loose with spells and weapons, including a conjured Cloud of Daggers. Heads were severed, but not only did the monster regrow two writhing worms in place of those removed, the haads themselves promptly sprouted legs and began scuttling towards their attackers! A vicious melee was joined, the voracious horrors savaging the party with fangs and lashing tendrils. They counterattacked with fire and acid, cauterizing the stumps where the vermihydra’s heads struggled to regrow. Eventually, the beast lay dead, its remaining “young” – severed heads – scuttling back into the burrow below. Sister scorched the remains with a Sacred Flame to ensure they did not decide to sprout legs.
Exhausted, the party decided to avoid the vermihydra lair for the time being, after Comet, using his enhanced ranger’s senses, deduced the presence of more of the monsters below. Alabastor added some of the vermihydra heads to his Snatcher’s Sack.
Instead, the party sought for another way down. They returned to the tunnels, this time heading west. They discovered a massive tomb that seemed to have been converted into some kind of horrid nursery. A brood of zombies whined in the violated sarcophagi like babies screaming for food; other sarcophagi contained inert corpses. Lumbering amongst these mewling charges and cooing to them was an enormous toad-like thing with mottled grey-green skin, webbed, gangling limbs, and a huge hump-back, swollen massively, which threatened to crush her under its enormous weight. This hump was pocked with disgusting holes like gigantic sores, into which the creature occasionally placed an inert dead body. The holes sealed with a membranous coating and some process began within – evidently one which revived the corpse, to judge from the numerous zombies bursting forth from her amphibious flesh, pulling themselves from her slimy bulk in a putrescent second birth. She hopped and waddled about the room, feeding little charges rotting brains as they screamed hungrily in their sarcophagus-cradles.
The party stood slack-jawed in horror, but Yam walked up to the toad-thing as bold as brass.
“Hello, there,” the gnome said. “What’s your name? I’m Yam.”
The creature croaked hideously and turned to look down at Yam.
“Oh hello little dearie,” it said, its voice quite feminine. “You can called me the Corpsenurse.”
“Nice to meet you. We’re, ah, on a bit of a quest down here.”
“Oh yes?” She cast a glance over the party. “Not here to loot the tombs of the little dead ones, are we? To steal from the mansions of the dead.”
“Oh no no no,” Yam said. “In fact we’re here to stop some thieves from robbing from the dead.”
“Indeed?” The Corpsenurse seemed inestimably pleased by this.
“That’s right!” Yam said. “Maybe you could help?”
“Hmm. I have an idea,” the Corpsenurse said. She plucked one of the corpses struggling to be “born” from her back, plopping it down in front of Yam. It was covered in mucilaginous fluid. She repeated this process with several more. They groaned and dripped and whined to be fed; she gave them each a morsel of brians. “My little babies will help you. Take them with you – and watch out for the rats!”
“Thank you very much!” Yam said. After chatting for a bit longer with the creature to get a sense of some of the geography of the Catacombs, the party left the Nursery, all but Yam shuddering.
They quickly discovered what the Corpsenurse meant about rats as they discovered a hall whose walls were fashioned from thousands of humanoid skulls of every shape and size, fitted meticulously together like stones. The ossuary was also utterly infested with rats, whose burrows could be seen within the walls, rats scurrying in and out of the mouths of the skulls in slithering, furry torrents. Alabastor emptied the vermihydra heads onto the floor, distracting the hungry swarms long enough for the party to move past.
They came now to a heavy door, locked; this time they did not possess the key. Instead of searching for it, the party chose to force their way through, weakening the stone with Acid Splash. Miri thrust her weight against it to no avail – but their newly acquired zombie companions were able, through their combined efforts, to shift it. Instantly, a thin, clawed hand burst through, clawing at one of the zombies and dragging it within. The party followed, squeezing through the door to discover a pack of pallid, feral ghouls, already feasting on the zombie. Spells and javelins flew, slaying two of the creatures; the remainder fled before the Variegated Company.
The party pressed on down a long passage and into a gigantic columbarium holding the remains of dead soldiers by the thousand – innumerable carved niches holding tiny boxes of ashes, each with a name and dates of birth and death. Unlike the rest of the Catacombs, this area seemed wholly clear of rats. Pikes and banners decorated the walls, along with various statues of fallen soldiers. Sister also briefly spoke with one of these, Albertus Greendale, a veteran of the Second Patchwork War, slain by the vampiric forces of Erubescence. He confirmed the presence of a ragtag group of rival delvers.
The party at last came to a chamber with a stair leading down to the third level. A massive creature lounged before the stair; it had the body of an overlarge hyena, the wings of enormous carrion crow, the tail of a gigantic rat, and a skull-like, disturbingly human head with flesh stretched thinly over a gaunt, bony face.
“The thanatosphinx,” Alabastor said, recognizing the creature from legend. “Escaped from the menagerie of Xavier Soulswell.”
“Indeed,” the creature said. “My reputation proceeds me. I imagine, then that you know what I’m about. I’m bored down here. I like to play a little game. I ask you a riddle. If you answer correctly, you proceed. If you answer incorrectly… you die.” It flexed its enormous claws. “Who is up to the challenge?”
Comet stepped forward. “I’ll give it a try,” the waspkin said.
“Very well. Here is the riddle. If I drink, I die. If I eat, I am fine. What am I?”
Comet thought for several long moments. “Uh. Fire!” he said.
The thanatosphinx smiled. “Correct!” it said. “You and your friends may proceed. I’ll see you on your way back up…”
Relieved, the party began descending the stairway to the third level. As they made their way down, however, one of the zombies stepped on a stone which suddenly depressed. The entire stairway abruptly shifted to become a smooth ramp, oil spurting from hidden mechanical nozzles to make the ramp slippery. This, in turn, kindled to flame. The party tumbled helter-skelter over one another to land at the bottom of the stairs badly burned, some unconscious, their zombie helpers from the Corpsenurse all skewered on a series of spikes at the bottom of the stairs.
“Mother of Spiders preserve us,” Sister groaned. “Time for a quick retreat.” She scrawled a portal on the wall using the Portal Chalk, then muttered a spell to summon spiders to stitch up the wounds of her companions with their webs. The party limped back into Armand’s townhouse parlour from the Catacombs, injured and exhausted, but intent on returning to the depths as soon as they had recovered from their ordeal…
Huge slave population is replenished by raiding and piracy
Perched upon the frigid Stained Steppes where the Shriekwinds scream men into madness and the Razorhail shreds travellers into ribbons, Blodvinter is carved almost entirely out of ice – not frozen water, but frozen blood. Ruled by the thurs, a race of giants with blue-black skin like that of frostbite victims, Blodvinter was created in centuries past by a brutal warlord who at that time had led a great horde down from the Steppes to conquer much of the north. After his wars of conquest, the thur chieftain demanded that every people he had subjugated deliver to him sacrifices, conveyed to his ancestral home on the Steppes. These sacrifices he had slaughtered; their blood was collected and used to form first the blackish-red Hall of Frozen Carnage from which he ruled and then the rest of the city. Blodvinter stands as a monument to the brutality of the thurs, even after their empire fragmented and dwindled. Though the giants still hold sway within the city and the surrounding Steppes, their numbers are few; much of the city is now populated by their innumerable thralls.
Erubescence
Vampire-ruled aristocracy
Aggressively expansionist
Motivated by a desire for land, wealth, blood
Ruled by the Sanguine Lords & Ladies, Erubescence is a realm of vampires, a place where the living pay homage to their undead masters in hopes of one day being chosen and ennobled themselves. Warlike and ancient, Erubescence conducts frequent raids on neighbouring realms in hope of acquiring thralls and sustenance. Necromancy here is commonplace; those who die are almost universally reanimated, or else broken down for parts in the construction of massive necrotic servitors. Despite its militant aggressions, Erubescence itself is an orderly and prosperous realm. While vampires in other lands must dwell as parasites, killing to survive, existing in the shadows, here their open rule ensures that their needs are met without unnecessary deaths, and centuries of governance have made them wise and deft in matters of statecraft. Erubescence has recently been highly expansionist and is known to covet many of the territories around Hex.
Ganglion
Living capitol of the noocratic Gelatinous Empire
Centre of maritime power
Insatiable lust for knowledge and dominion
Clinging to Carbuncle, the largest of the Iridescent Isles that lie in the Gilded Sea, Ganglion is a gigantic super-organism, capital of the Gelatinous Empire, the civilization of the psychic jellyfolk. Consisting of thousands of jellyfolk Blooms forming a single hive-mind, the Gelatinous Empire spreads out from the quivering metropolis of Ganglion, where elder jellyfolk contribute their minds to a vast pool of psychic sludge at the heart of the city. Nacreous spires rise from the Carbuncle, the palaces of the Imperial Court, while dozens of slaves labour under the watchful eyes of their medusoid masters. In addition to slaves, the Gelatinous Empire are infamous for their desire for knowledge. In particular, wizards and other spellcasters are favoured victims, their minds consumed by ruthless jellyfolk psychics, their spells and lore devoured and added to the wisdom of the collective. Though Hex and the Gelatinous Empire have had little direct contact, doubtless the jellyfolk long to absorb the accumulated wisdom of its mages.
Hypogeum
Underground parliamentary democracy
Besieged by monsters
In need of resources to repel subterranean invaders
The grand city of Hypogeum is the largest of the underground gnome cities, though it is inhabited by many other subterranean creatures as well: troglodytes, ratfolk, derro, kobolds, subterannean Fair Folk, earth elementals, salamanders, cambions, trollbloods, and goblins (confined to a Goblin Town, a goblinoid ghetto), among others. Built on the shore and even atop the Gloomsea, Hypogeum is constructed within stalactites and stalagmites, buildings clinging to the rocky spires, tunnels winding their way through stone. The city’s government is unique, with each stalagmite or stalactite selecting their leader through their own particular methods – some are aristocratic, some democratic, some administer elaborate tests, some hold a series of magical duels. These leaders form a rough parliament called the Cavemoot which makes policy for the city as a whole. Hypogeum’s greatest threat comes from below, for in the deepest layers of the Sunless Realms, slumbering monstrosities are awakening: primeval monsters, perhaps created by the Librarians or other ancient species, now stirring from their torpor. Hypogeum is in desperate need of warriors, weapons, and wealth to repel this endless onslaught of horrors, help which surface cities have been reluctant to provide.
Idolum
Secret city of shapeshifters
Government by sortition
Unknown long-term agenda
The legendary city of Idolum was long thought to be nothing more than a myth, a travelers’ tale, but recent expeditions and commercial ventures have confirmed its existence. Idolum is the city of doppelgangers and their kindred, a haven for shapeshifters where they need not disguise themselves to survive. The structures of the city are cunningly disguised; most believe they must be fashioned entirely of Murkstone, but the wilder stories insist they are actually gigantic mimics in the shape of buildings. Whatever the case, Idolum camouflages itself in the presence of intruders; only a select few outsiders have been given the privilege of walking its ever-changing streets. Since its citizens can assume any identity they please, Idolum has a deeply anti-hierarchical society, with decision-making carried out using sortition, political positions symbolized by certain immutable insignia. It is widely believed (but almost impossible to confirm) that Idolum has a vast spy network and may have even installed agents in powerful positions in rival countries. Its ultimate goals are unknown – and, thus, all the more unnerving to outsiders.
New Ulthar
Cat-ruled dynastic theocracy
Militant religious society
Seeks a return to bygone days of imperial glory
In the city of New Ulthar it is death to kill a cat, for the cats of Ulthar are incredibly intelligent, ruling the city with rapacious wisdom. Capable of speech, the cats are thought by some to be the result of magical experimentation – possibly the descendants of wizardly familiars. Such theories are considered heresy in New Ulthar, whose pitiless Inquisition roots out such unorthodoxy with ruthless efficiency. New Ulthar itself is a plains-city with many gardens and vineyards, as well as necropolises dedicated to previous generations of cat-rulers. A priestly class tends to the cat-princes and -princesses, with merchants, craftsmen, and slaves. Its rulers see themselves as divine scions of a fallen empire, old Ulthar, and long to restore the half-forgotten glory of their heroic past. They are supplied with slaves and other bounty partly through piracy, commanding an impressive corsair fleet known to capture ships and raid towns and villages to the north. Though relations between New Ulthar and Hex are currently fairly friendly, they have clashed in the past when New Ulthar’s ambitions conflicted with Hex’s commercial and political interests.
Penumbra
Ghost-city with unfinished business
Phases into existence unpredictably
Torments its former foes until destroyed, to return again
The spectral city of Penumbra was destroyed utterly during the cataclysmic Third Patchwork War, fallen to the forces of an alliance including Hex and many other realms. Centuries past, Penumbra’s enemies razed the city to the ground and slew virtually everyone within using a mixture of magic and mundane might, leaving nothing behind but ashes and a few broken stones. Such was the totality of this hecatomb that the city itself has become an enormous, immensely powerful ghost, the souls of its former citizens trapped within it, undead and eternal. Over the ages, Penumbra has returned many times and in many different locations to continue its war of retribution against those that destroyed it. Each time it manifests, the city sends out its ghostly forces to assail its foes, sometimes reanimating corpses to form zombie battalions, or afflicting the citizens of its erstwhile destroyers with gruesome hauntings, curses, and guerilla necromancy, an ectoplasmic terrorism that ends only with its exorcism – until it returns, re-forming in the Ethereal Plane to renew its undying campaign.
Roost
City of towers with a resurrection-based economy
Phoenix-warden nobility command enormous wealth and power
See Hex as a competitor whose magic might undermine their abilities
Composed of hundreds of impossibly tall spires rising above gleaming walls, the city of Roost is a site of pilgrimage, for its noble families – the tower-builders – are phoenix wardens, tending to the magnificent fire-birds within the specialized nests that give the city its name. Gigantic bird-feeders and eyries, the nests are each created and maintained for a particular phoenix, one who visits the lucky noble house over the course of its remarkable life cycle, in which the bird bursts into flame and then is reborn from the ashes. The nobles collect the ashes, which they use as reagents in elixirs capable of returning the dead to life. Because phoenixes live for several centuries before combusting, their ashes are incredibly rare, allowing their noble wardens to charge enormous fees for their alchemical wares. The rest of Roost flourishes around these towers, with much of its population directly employed by the nobility as servants, guards, alchemists, assassins, or thieves. The nobles live in terror that arcane innovators in Hex or elsewhere will some day find a more cost-effective means of resurrection, fatally undercutting Roost’s economic system.
Teratopolis
Magic-scarred republic
Monster-breeders
Motivated by a desire for retribution against Hex and a return to prosperity
Teratopolis was once a thriving port city, until during an arcane war with Hex (the War of Miscreation) the city’s drinking water was poisoned with alchemical substances that permanently warped the populace, transforming them into ravenous monsters. Most of the citizenry devoured one another in days, but a few managed to retain their sanity and survived. They rebuilt the city, taking in outcasts, rogues, pirates, parasites, and other pariahs, making themselves a haven for the deformed and unwelcome. They herded those former kindred rendered insensible and beast-like into great pens and pits, selectively breeding these creatures into beasts of burden and war. Though two hundred years have passed since the War of Miscreation, Teratopolis still nurses a grudge against Hex, and spies from the rival city are constantly striving to undermine the interests of the City of Secrets, disguised using potions and magical rings or garments to obscure their monstrous forms.
Tetractys
Magocratic city of exiled wizards
Innovative theories of spellcraft competitive with Hexian lore
Resent Hex and long to return to their home of old
Hex’s greatest rival in scholarship and eldritch learning is Tetractys, the City of Mysteries, which was founded by wizards from Hex who were exiled for magical misdeeds. These disgraced scholars created Tetractys for the express purpose of besting Hex in matters arcane, taking with them many magical artefacts, books, and other items stolen from their erstwhile home. Though lacking access to the Old City and its lore, the wizards of Tetractys discovered another source of knowledge: the Sortilege Engine, a machine of tremendous power designed and built by Jagged Sullengrove, which is able to formulate new spells and perform complex arcane calculations. Using the Engine, the wizards of Tetractys have devised all manner of revolutionary new arcana, contesting the sorcerous supremacy of Hex, and insisting with haughty certainty that their modern knowledge surpasses the ancient lore of Hex’s institutions. Despite such boasts, many believe that the wizards of Tetractys would like to seize Hex to combine its magical knowledge with their own, and the two city states have fought several minor wars over the centuries, each marshalling the best of its magical prowess to outdo the other.
Verdigris
Junkyard city of primeval machines ruled by scavengers
Sophisticated technological prowess
Crazed automaton Chrono-Pope urges robot crusades
A city of rust and ancient machines, Verdigris is a huge junkyard, a scrapland ruled by Scavenger Barons who comb through the corroded remnants left behind by the Morrow – the vast empire which ruled the world during the Amniotic Age, after the Librarians fled or died out. The city has a parasitic economy based around salvage: relics gleaned from the sputtering, dilapidated depths of the city are sold to trading partners in exchange for food, clothing, and other goods. The Barons have used some of this bygone technology in wars with their less commercially amenable neighbours to terrible effect, leaving whole towns smouldering craters, armies displaced in time, and fortresses transformed into unrecognizable forms. Verdigris has often been Hex’s ally, but tensions have recently been mounting as the Chrono-Pope of Verdigris has protested Hex’s use of automata, deeming it exploitation and slavery.
Welkin
Shattered remnants of a broken cloud kingdom
Feudal monarchy obsessed with chivalric quests
Paranoid court wizard believes Hex caused its islands to fall
Once, the mighty state of Welkin ruled the skies, a series of floating islands which drifted above the lands it ruled, threatening those below with utter destruction from above should they ever shirk their feudal dues. Individual flying keeps roamed the clouds, and the Sky Knights of Welkin – wyrm-riders of the highest calibre – were a force to behold. Now, Welkin is a dying kingdom. Over the ages its islands’ magic depleted, the eldritch crystal suspending the flying archipelago in the sky waning and eventually giving way. Some islands toppled and fell, with cataclysmic results, killing hundreds or thousands; others settled slowly, and a few limp on, sluggishly clinging to the sky, their sorrowful descent the subject of melancholic odes. With the destruction of its floating fortresses came a corresponding decline in Welkin’s power, its many landbound vassals rebelling, till now all that remains is little more than the city itself, an archaic monument to a bygone age of chivalry. Its Sky Knights linger, the ancient families still breeding wyrms, but even these are growing fewer, many retreating into a torpor and refusing to mate. Welkin’s king, the young Cadwallon IV, is advised by a powerful archmage, a cambion known as Ambrosius Wilt, who insists that Hex was responsible for depleting the sky-stones that made the kingdom fly.
Alabastor Quan, a gnome rogue-turned-warlock and failed circus ringmaster; wielder of a cursed dagger and member of the Ravenswing Thieves’ Guild.
Armand Percival Reginald Francois Eustace de la Marche III, a suspiciously pale, apparently human noble and sorcerer, and certainly not a ghoul (how dare such a thing be suggested).
Caulis, a homunculus warlock liberated from its master; has made a pact with certain Faerie Powers.
Comet the Unlucky, waspkin ranger, a dreamer and an idealist, longing for the restoration of the Elder Trees and the liberation of his people. Loathes the Harvester’s Guild, parasites and destroyers.
Garvin Otherwise, a human rogue and burglar of the Ravenswing Thieves’ Guild, with a very, very peculiar past and a zoog pet, Lenore.
Miri, trollblood wizard, plucked from Mount Shudder and raised amongst Hex’s arcane elites. A recent graduate of Fiend’s College.
An ancient and enigmatic Lengian cleric of the Mother of Spiders, name unknown. She wears bulky ecclesiastical garments covering an uncertain number of limbs and goes by “Sister.”
XP Awarded: 1200 XP
The party was reeling in the wake of a sinister discovery: someone had been deliberately tormenting Genial Jack, apparently in an effort to produce tidal waves to weaken Hex, and this same individual or individuals might be the ones behind the Harrowgast that had plunged Hex into an endless winter with the aid of the trollblood clans to the north. A secret order of Lengian assassins had been their catspaw this time – but who was the mysterious “S” who, twice now, had been implicated behind the two otherwise disconnected schemes? Was it some traitor to the city within Hex – or one of its many foreign rivals?
After conferring with the High Navigators of Jackburg, the party decided that the Hexad Council – the executive government of Hex, elected by its magical citizenry to the highest offices of the land – must be alerted of this mysterious and sinister threat. Still, there were some misgivings concerning individual council members.
“Silas Thamiel was aggressive when it came to Troll Country,” Alabastor pointed out. The group was on their way back to Hex, in a small ferry conveying travelers between Jackburg and the City of Secrets. Waves lapped at the side of the boat as the group drank hot tea and rum in a quiet corner.
“And Arabella Sickle wasn’t exactly our biggest fan,” Garvin agreed. “I wonder… her last name is ‘S’.”
“Not exactly hard proof,” Miri pointed out.
“We should be cautious,” Sister said. “Tell them what they need to know.”
“Do they know about Melchior and the Organon?” Comet asked, good-naturedly.
“They’ve definitely don’t, and we’d like to keep it that way,” Armand insisted, with faint irritation. “So keep quiet about anything pertaining to the Books, to the Hive of the Thirteenth Queen, anything of that nature.”
Caulis studied its newly acquired shrunken head, stolen from the Cuttlethieves. “I have an idea,” it said. “This head… the head of Granny Midnight. It can be used to listen in on people. You whisper their name into her ear and she speaks with their voice. After we meet with the Council, we could, you know. Whisper one of their names in her ear. Listen in on what they talk about.”
There was some discussion about the safety of this plan, but the group resolved to follow through with it after their meeting with the Council, with High Navigator Quell accompanying them. Getting off the ferry at the foggy district of Caulchurch, they took Tonsil Boulevard up to Enigma Heap and made their way through the looming structures of the Old City to the Hall of the Hexad Council.
They announced themselves at the gates of the Council to the gigantic golems that stood guard, insisting that their business was both pressing and secret. After a bit of persuasion – assisted by Alabastor’s silver tongue – the guards relented, and the group entered the Hexad Council chamber, interrupting what seemed an intense argument over repairs to the docklands following the small tidal waves caused by Genial Jack’s nightmares.
“Pardon the interruption,” Alabastor said. “But we have important news.”
Quickly, Parthenia Quell and the party-members quickly summarized recent events for the Council.
Silas Thamiel – stern, scarred, and authoritative – looked down at the party with concern.
“If a conspiracy is afoot, it may well be that some foreign power is behind it. Hex has many enemies. It may be wise to dispatch the Warders to begin seeking them out. Perhaps a Committee for Hexian Security should be formed, to defend us against these insidious forces.”
A murmur of agreement rippled through the Council. Garvin, ever observant, noted that Silas looked unusually haggard, dark circles under his eyes, which twitched occasionally as from lack of sleep or some other vexation.
Next to speak was Arabella Sickle, whose normally haughty posture was tempered by what seemed grudging respect.
“I must admit to having my doubts as to your capabilities. But it seems as if disaster has been neatly averted, with the blessing of the Navigators. This Council’s trust in you was not misplaced. I am disturbed, however, by your description of this Lengian, a worshipper of Icelus. Hex values freedom of belief, but the powers of this order openly violate another freedom – freedom from psychic violation. The mind is sacrosanct.”
She looked to Sister.
“You are a Lengian priestess, and a loyal citizen of Hex. To be blunt, I trust your loyalty more than that of the Matriarchs of Cobweb Cliffs. Were we to appoint an external Inquisitor from the Warders or another church, the Lengians would never accept them. But if we were to appoint you an Inquisitor, charged with rooting out heretics worshipping this Icelus, how would the Lengians react?”
Sister looked deeply uncomfortable, but considered the proposition. “It would be… a delicate process. The Matriarchs would not be pleased, but… I might be able to convince them of the necessity of action. The Order of Icelus are deeply heretical. Still… to become ‘Inquisitor’ does not precisely sit right with me…”
Arabella smirked. “Then I am afraid we will have to instruct the Warders to take action, possibly even establish a more permanent presence in Cobweb Cliffs. I fear difficult times ahead for your people…”
Sister bristled, conferring briefly with her companions
“Very well. I’ll be your Inquisitor, but I will require autonomy and trust. I will report to the Council, but I am not your minion. I will seek out these cultists of Icelus, but I will do it my own way, and using my own methods.”
The Infernal Archbishop smiled. “Very good. I hereby move to grant the Lengian known as ‘Sister’ the position of the Hexad Council’s Inquisitor. All in favour?”
A vote proceeded, with Silas, Valentina, and Barnabas voting in favour, and Iris and a half-slumbering Angus abstaining. The motion carried; Sister was elevated to the rank of Inquisitor. With swift magic, a suitable symbol of office in the form of a gilded six-sided web was conjured, to be worn about the neck.
Iris – currently violet-haired – adjusted her spectacles thoughtfully. She seemed anxious.
“I agree with my colleagues that these reports are disturbing, and I share their concern for the city’s well-being. However, I am concerned that if we involve the Warders directly in further investigations, the conspirators may be alerted and slip free before we can find them. I suggest we consult with the Institute of Omens, and the Soothsayers of Saint Monstrum’s Cathedral. They may be able to use divination to produce some clue as to the identity of the conspirators. In the meantime, I suggest we entrust the Variegated Company with further inquiries, and grant them acting Special Investigator status, reporting strictly to this Council.”
The Company conferred amongst themselves, and presently agreed to this larger task as well.
Barnabas – plump, intelligent, appraising – fidgeted in his seat.
“Who stands the most to gain from this sort of destructive activity?” he asked. “The trollbloods I can understand… you can’t expect such primitives to comprehend the finer points of geopolitics.”
Here, a newly-educated Alabastor winced, while Miri gritted her teeth.
“Ah, present company excepted,” Baranabas said hurriedly, with a glance at the seething trollblood wizard. “But whoever is behind this is more than some savage with a grudge. What do you think the conspirators are trying to accomplish?”
“I have no specific reason to suspect their involvement,” Garvin said, thinking of his sojourns to the alternate reality where vampires ruled the city. “But is it not known that the Sanguine Lords and Ladies have long coveted the knowledge of the Old City? Might this be the work of Erubescence and the Red Realm?”
Barnabas stroked his beard. “Perhaps. Certainly the subtlety of this scheme brings to mind the vampires. But they are historically no friend of the trollbloods…”
“The Night Queen has always seen Genial Jack as an equal,” Parthenia put in. “Unless her thinking has altered in some fundamental way, I cannot imagine her wishing him ill.”
“Could it be Teratopolis, out for vengeance against Hex?” Caulis put in. “We did… you know… turn them all into horrible mutants.”
Iris shook her head. “It is possible, of course, but we have been making strides with Teratopolis. Trade has increased between our realms. It feels as if we are finally putting the War of Miscreation behind us.”
“I wonder if Jack himself may be helpful,” Angus mused. “Could this assassin, or another like him, not try to target him again?”
“We are taking steps to ward Jack’s mind against intrusion,” Parthenia said. “And, using the ritual the Company provided, we can guard his dreams directly.”
“Yes, this ritual!” Valentina said, having been silent the whole meeting. “Where did you find it?”
Armand interjected, reluctant to disclose the party’s possession of the legendary Oneironomicon.
“A, ah, spell we discovered in the Old City,” he half-lied.
“I see,” the rumoured lich in the guise of a young girl said. “I would be very interested in seeing this spell, when it is convenient. But I digress – you have work to do, Special Investigators. Unless my colleagues have further questions?”
There was an exchange of looks, but the Council agreed to bring the meeting to a close. The newly empowered Company departed the Hall of the Hexad Council, making for Armand’s nearby townhouse. High Navigator Parenthenia Quell returned to Jack, shaking hands with Sister and thanking the group again before leaving.
“Well, that went differently than I thought!” Comet said, proud of his new status. “The Order better watch it!”
“Something was off in there,” Garvin put in. “That was too easy.”
The party was heading down Nightmare Alley towards Fever Lane when Garvin’s highly cultivated thieves’ senses prickled. The party was being followed by two figures, both swathed in heavy clothing
“We’re being followed,” the thief informed his companions.
“I’ll send Eleyin to take a closer look,” Caulis said, sending the psuedodragon familiar to spy on the strange pair. One was a short, fat figure, in a black frock coat with a huge slouch hat shadowing their features, the other, tall and thin, a grey gown swathing her skeletal frame. The little figure walked with a walking stick topped by a cat’s skull. The homunculus reported back what it had seen through the familiar’s eyes.
“I have an idea!” Comet said. “Down here!” He buzzed down a side-street, gesturing that the party follow. Sister, meanwhile cast Pass Without Trace, and the group concealed themselves in the shadows of doorways and behind pillars along the street’s length.
Hoarse, uncanny laughter echoed down the empty street . The thin woman in the grey dress waltzed out of the shadows, grinning with yellow teeth.
“Now where did the little dearies go?” she asked. “Did you see, Monsieur Gobble?”
Soft foot-falls slapped the pavement as a round shape in black bounced out of the darkness.
“They must be here somewhere, Madame Slake,” the second stranger said, toying with his walking stick. “Naughty little alley-rats skulking in the shadows. And what must we do with alley-rats?”
“Why, Monsieur Gobble, we catch them in a trap,” Slake declared. Her grin began to widen, and suddenly proboscii juddered from her palms like obscene knives, a pair of mosquito wings sprouting from her back. Monsieur Gobble doffed his cap, revealing a grotesque second mouth gaping at the top of his skull, an obscene tongue tasting the air, scenting for prey…
“Demons!” Armand hissed, recognizing the interplanar interlopers as they sloughed off their mortal disguises.
Before the pair could discover them, the party leapt into action. Sister uttered a prayer to the Mother of Spiders, and instantly hundreds of spiders swarmed from the darkness, spinning webs that utterly cocooned the female demon, holding her in place. Garvin, meanwhile, fired a poisoned bolt at the male demon, even while Comet emerged from the shadows with his dancing rapier beside him, Chainbreaker in hand.
Gobble chuckled and plucked the poisoned bolt from his breast, licking the head with disgusting savour. His stomach burbled and growled, and, bouncing back, his second mouth gaped wide, and a vile stream of sulphurous vomit spewed forth, along with a veritable troupe of malformed lesser demons – like a revolting magic trick, they had emerged from his gullet, a bilious gastrointestinal conjuring.
Battle was joined, vicious and swift. Spells flew, Miri firing with two wands, Caulis and Alabastor slinging blasts of puissance, the homunculus entangling the newly spawned imps with magical vines, the gnome distracting Gobble with illusions. Comet wove through the carnage, blood spattering his magical hammer, while Armand and Sister cast from the sidelines and Garvin, flitting magically to a high balcony, continued to snipe with his crossbow.
When the dust cleared the party stood victorious, spattered with the blood of the horrid imps. Gobble had exploded in a puff of eldritch flame. Miri approached Slake, still subdued, and bent over her, wand in hand; the mosquito-demon hissed and broke a limb free from Sister’s webs, stabbing the trollblood in the neck and beginning to siphon blood from her. Miri snarled and slammed the creature’s head against the ground, ripping the proboscis from her neck and snapping it in two. Slake shrieked in agony.
“Who sent you?!” Miri snarled, as Sister wove a Zone of Truth.
“Let me leave, unharmed, and I will tell you,” Slake said, eyes glowing in the darkness.
Miri looked to her companions for assent, then back at Slake. “Agreed.”
“I do not know his name,” Slake said. “But the man who conjured us was dark of hair, weathered of complexion. Human. Tattoos ran along the left side of his face.”
“Whoa,” Comet said. “Isn’t that…?”
“Silas,” Armand said, eyes narrowing.
“What did he tell you to do?” Sister asked.
“To follow you, watch you – and, if the opportunity arose, destroy you.”
“Well, you failed there,” Miri said. “Very well. Get out of here before I change my mind.” She got up off the creature, which rose from the dissolving webs. A pair of mosquito wings emerged from her shoulders and she flitted away into the night with a curtsey.
“Come, let’s make haste,” Armand urged.
“I want to see what Granny Midnight has to say,” Caulis agreed.
The party repaired quickly to Armand’s home a few blocks away. Caulis took the withered head of Granny Midnight from its pack and whispered “Silas Thamiel” into her shriveled ears. Immediately the severed head began to speak in Silas’ voice.
“…they can be trusted with this. They have proved themselves more than capable in the past.”
There was a gap in the conversation. Quickly, Caulis whispered “Arabella Sickle” into the head’s ears.
“…agree with Silas. As I said, I have had my doubts about them, but their loyalty to Hex seems assured.”
Another gap; they tried several names, to little avail, then switched back to Silas.
“…should coordinate with the High Navigators to ensure we have a plan if the assassins break through their mental defenses, but -” Suddenly, the head ceased speaking.
“What’s wrong with it?” Comet asked, curious.
“I’m not sure,” Caulis said. “It’s like he stopped in mid-sentence.”
They listened for a time longer, and Silas continued to “cut in and out,” speaking and then suddenly not.
“I have a suspicion,” Sister said. “Perhaps Silas… is not always Silas. Perhaps something else is occasionally taking him over!”
There’s been some interest recently expressed on Discord and Google+ (before its demise – may it rest in peace) as to how I run this campaign. This is the first of a series of posts on how I approach an urban D&D game. It is, of course, not the only way to run this sort of thing – indeed, I suspect I rely rather less on a lot of common conventions for urban adventuring, most notably by eschewing procedural content-generation methods. I’m going to start by describing the kind of game I aim to run, and then I’ll talk about the procedures and techniques I use as a DM to create and sustain that game.
Urban Sandbox
Sandbox adventures frequently involve sprawling wilderness landscapes, hexcrawls, and similar structures. My goal is to take the feel of openness, freedom, and agency associated with typical sandbox play, but largely confined within the space of a single city. While some adventures have taken the characters outside of Hex (the main city in this game) to places like the wintry wastes of Troll Country, the Gothic province of Varoigne, the guts of the gigantic whale Genial Jack, and the depths of Faerie, the game is centred in and around Hex. In this sense, I am simultaneously adopting and inverting the approach of a West Marches campaign, which aims to cultivate an overarching environment, but also warns against the perils of “town adventures.” Hex is nearly all town adventure, but the town has been transformed into an adventure-worthy space.
I also DM for a large group – currently I have 10 semi-regular players. Because players come and go, skipping some sessions and attending others, the “plot lines” of the campaign are incredibly loose. There have been significant, ongoing events happening in the campaign world: Erubescence’s ambitions, the machinations of the Griefbringer, Hex’s ongoing labour struggles, a conspiracy quietly unfolding in the background which my players are now unraveling. And, likewise, there is a very rough “main quest” which the party dips into: their search for the mysterious volumes that comprise the Organon of Magic, ostensibly for the ancient archwizard and brain-in-a-jar, Master Melchior, whom much of the party actively distrust. Mostly, though, the game is a patchwork of disjointed episodes, a picaresque series of heists, vendettas, delves, and personal quests. This disjointedness is a feature, not a bug; while the players will sometimes pull on a plot thread and see where it leads, we never follow one storyline too long or too doggedly. They drive the “story” such as it is, choosing where to go, what to do, and what interests them most.
The closest literary analogues for this sort of game are Fritz Leiber’s Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser stories, as well as Terry Pratchett’s Discworld novels, where a cast of recurring characters are swept up in a series of adventures only loosely connected to one another. Hex has other fictional forebears – Sigil, Cörpathium, New Crobuzon, Camorr, Ashamoil – but structurally, Lankhmar and Ankh-Morpork loom largest. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s Holmes stories also have something of this – London in Doyle’s writing sprawls Gothic and gaslit, a labyrinth of mysteries and fog which the protagonists wander, embroiled in a disconnected sequence of macabre incidents and misadventures.
In designing Hex, I made sure to have the city open onto various other worlds and nested structures. Setting it atop an ancient, gigantic city, I made it adjacent/continuous with a megadungeon that serves as a convenient adventuring location; that dungeon is thick with impossible spaces, pocket dimensions, and portals. The idea is to present such a smorgasboard of possibilities that the players never get bored and always have a host of options as to where to go next. I want to evoke a sense of rich, infinite adventure.
Baroque DMing and Urban Space
At one point someone on Google+ (I think it was Patrick Stuart?) described what I was doing as a kind of counterrevolution. While I run a 5th edition game, philosophically I borrow a lot from old-school D&D – my game features the potential for fairly high lethality (in practice, death is pretty rare because my players are cautious), open-ended challenges, creative problem-solving, an emphasis on an immersive setting, and a prioritization of exploration and emergent storytelling over “narrative.” I prefer puzzles to “balanced” combat, out-of-the-box thinking to skill rolls, rulings to an excess of rules. The one old-school standby which I tend to eschew is procedural generation. I’m not oppposed to random tables inherently, and I do use some occasionally both of my own devising and otherwise, but I far prefer to have prepared as much as possible beforehand. The template I’m looking back to here is City State of the Invincible Overlord, where the city is entirely mapped and keyed.
In navigating the city, I want my players to feel as if nothing is being invented on the spot – the setting should feel as if it exists independently of them, and they are exploring its secrets. It should be suffused with interesting details and a sense of grandeur and verisimilitude. My goal is to produce a feeling of absorption and fascination, an experience of actually navigating a real-feeling, mind-independent space.
This is, in large part, why I wanted a physical, detailed map of the space, so that the players could see the city sprawling before them. It’s a common dictum that this is the wrong way to run cities, the idea being that maps constrain the imagination and pin down what could be a fantastic space too much. In drawing the map, I tried to create a visually appealing and chaotic space that enhances rather than undermines a sense of mystery. Yes, we can all see the Tower of Whispers on the map, but what could be inside such a bizarre spire in the middle of the city? Why is there a giant crater in the middle of the southern half and why haven’t people rebuilt over it? Is that a gigantic dragon statue broken into peices in the lower left-hand corner? And what is with the giant trees? I want players to look at the map and feel excited to explore. And, of course, there’s a hidden space as well – the Old City below, the massive sprawl of tunnels, sewers, caves, and ruins that the PCs have only partially explored.
The aesthetic I’m going for, then, is explicitly a maximalist one – in some ways, “the Baroque” is a good descriptor for what I’m attempting.
The Baroque celebrates excess, as this Jordaens painting, “As the Old Sang the Young Play Pipes ,” illustrates.
Historically, the Baroque was aligned with a Catholic counterrevolution against Protestant austerity and simplicity; Baroque aesthetics strove to evoke a sense of awe and extravagence, with plentiful, ornate detail, complexity, sensuousness, emotion, and drama, in contrast to the dour severity that often characterized the Reformation. My goal in DMing is to create something of this vertiginous rush of complexity and detail, while still making the experience intelligible and player-driven. Indeed, player agency here is absolutely key: it’s vital that the players feel they can explore wherever they wish and find something engaging to interact with. Otherwise, the setting would end up feeling like a very pretty but ultimately flat series of backdrops that the PCs roll by on their way to and from pre-scripted plot points. To ensure this doesn’t happen, it’s important to distinguish between prepping and planning. The former is about providing a detailed, thought-through environment for players to explore and inhabit; the latter is about aiming for a specific narrative arc or set of story beats. I do a ton of the former and almost none of the latter.
A picture taken before a game…Things get a bit more complicated during a game!
During play, I keep the Hex map itself spread out in front of players at all times, so they can see where they are and how locations relate to one another spatially. I don’t always go street-by-street in describing everything as they move around the city – this would make the game very slow – but I do “zoom in” to a district level, street-by-street, once the party arrives in a given neighbourhood. I think of it a bit like how Planescape: Torment (a huge influence) handles city movement: there’s a map with districts, you click on one, and then you “zoom in” to that particular district’s individual streets.
Zoomed-out map from Planescape: Torment.Zoomed-in map.
If the party decides to “zoom in” on a specific location, I always have something ready – I’m not suddenly grasping for details that aren’t present, and forced to make something up or generate something randomly that wouldn’t be as interesting as something I thought up ahead of time. I’ll have descriptions of each street, NPCs worked out, encounter tables when appropriate, and often some oddity or other the party could choose to interact with, like a weird homunculus wandering about outside a condemned building or a vagrant spellcaster painting magical murals on a wall.
When players enter a district for a specific purpose, we “zoom in” to a subsection of the map and switch from general descriptions to street-by-street descriptions.
Consequently, I rely on what I think qualifies as extremely heavy preparation – again, prepping, not planning. What I’m aiming for here is what Joseph Manola over at Against the Wicked City identifies as the essential quality for good roleplaying books: “the contents need to be something better than you could come up with, unaided, simply by following cliches and/or random madlibbing and/or coming up with irrelevant filler.” Whenever I write something down, it needs to be better than something I could come up with on the spot at the table, better than a cliche, and not irrelevant filler. There is no Powered by the Apocaylpse-style collaborative setting-building here: the PCs do have backstories and I do incorporate those into the texture of the world, but I don’t ask them for details about a scene or give them opportunities to shape the world outside of the actions of their characters. Those actions are consequential, sometimes massively so, but they are bound by an in-universe logic and constraints. Similarly, I don’t rely on random die-rolls or other procedural heuristics or techniques to generate street-maps, encounters, or NPCs. It must all get planned exhaustively, so that when the players stray from the beaten track the spaces feel lived-in and authentic and just as interesting as the parts I expected them to visit. This means drawing a crazy-detailed city map with every street and major landmark indicated, and producing extensive notes for every likely adventure location – I’m currently sitting at about 270,000 words for a total of 38 sessions so far (yes, I’m behind on recaps).
Obviously this means a lot of writing and drawing. But, as the DM, this is to me a huge part of the fun: I don’t think of writing adventure notes or drawing maps as work. I have other hobbies and leisure activities and things to do, of course, and a job that takes up a lot of my time, and I do occasionally take hiatuses when things get too busy to keep up with the campaign, but I find the act of creation and then sharing that creation with a group of people incredibly rewarding – so this preparation really isn’t a chore. All that said, I do use certain procedures to make this easier on myself.
Pre- and post-play Procedures
I organize the campaign using groups.io, a wonderful email group service with a lightweight, easy-to-use interface and the ability to quickly and painlessly distribute polls to those within a group. Before every session, I post two polls: the first is a scheduling poll to see who can play when, and the second is a poll of broadly defined adventure possibilities, usually picking up on things the characters did in the previous session, or sometimes reflecting events that have transpired in the setting. Some of these are ongoing, so if the party neglects them, they’ll change: for example, the endless winter caused by the Harrowgast in some of last year’s sessions was something the players ignored in the polls, until rioting in the streets and famine made them take notice. Genial Jack’s nightmares are another example – the players heard rumours that Jack’s sleep was disturbed, but it took them a couple of sessions to look into it, and if they hadn’t, things would have gotten worse and worse.
The polls function a bit like a quest log or journal in a computer roleplaying game, but many of the available threads are generated by the actions of the players, rather than simply representing “available jobs” (though there are some of these too). In a recent session, for example (one not yet posted to the blog), we picked up on the backstory of Caulis the homunculus, whose dead creator had saddled the character with a demonic debt – something the player had included in their back-story since character creation. In another, Comet’s player had mentioned the waspkin was hanging about in the Feypark to avoid harassment by the Crowsbeak Thieves’ Guild, and was getting to know the plants and animals there; this led directly to a fun little adventure where the character shrunk down to rodent-size for some Redwall-style medieval animal hijinx. In the two-part Château de la Marche adventure the party explored a character’s familial estate and faced off against a villain they’d failed to kill in an earlier adventure. In our most recent session, Yam’s player had a clever idea for keeping the reality-warping Book of Chaos safe, and so I wrote an adventure planned around the idea. The idea here is to avoid making the characters passive, but to view them as active agents in a world that reacts to them; the poll, which players themselves can comment on or add to, simply lets me see which direction they’re headed.
Polls indicating a rough plan for future sessions let me prepare adventures and areas for exploration more extensively.In this case, a detail I’d improvised in the previous session led to option 6, which tied for the most popular option. In discussion below, we decided to go for option 6 over option 1… The map above was prepared in response to the vote and discussion above. I hadn’t planned for the party to visit Shudderland as part of a pre-determined plot thread – but once it became clear that’s where they were headed, I mapped it and wrote notes for the surrounding countryside.
Of course, once we arrive at the table, the party is free to go anywhere. But having a broad direction discussed and decided ahead of time not only lets me prep the areas we’re going to play in more extensively, it keeps a big group of players on track and avoids having to recap every single thread of the unfolding game every time we sit down to play. There’s no railroad, and no pre-scripted story, and no invisible walls that keep players stuck in a single area, but there is a consensus going into each session of what the party would like to accomplish. It also means that players who can only come every few sessions – or even those who stop by once or twice a year! – can jump into a session easily without being paralyzed with too many choices.
After each session, we use an extensive Google spreadsheet to track experience, which also shows how much XP each character needs to level. This, along with the session recaps I post here (massively facilitated by the notes my players take), helps a big group to maintain a sense of cohesion. Those who’ve missed sessions can read the recaps to catch up on what they’ve missed and make sure character sheets are up to date.
Adventure Hooks
While it’s always up to the players where they want to go and what they want to do, and I try to plan sessions in reaction to what the players have done previously, I do have some stand-bys for common adventure hooks. These include:
Adventures related to a PC’s faction. Most of the PCs are members of an arcane university (there are eight: Fiend’s College, Umbral University, the Académie Macabre, the Citadel of the Perptual Storm, the Institute of Omens, the Warders’ Lyceum, the Metamorphic Scholarium, and Master Melchior’s School of Thaumaturgy & Enchantment), a thieves’ guild (the big ones are the Crowsbeak and Ravenswing guilds), religious organizations (the chief gods of Hex being the Archdemons, the Unspeakable Ones, the Mother of Spiders, the Magistra, the Charnel Goddess, the Elder Trees, and the Antinomian), and other factions, like the Faerie courts or wizardly cabals.
Adventures related to a PC’s backstory. Most of my players wrote brief backstories with little adventure seeds scattered throughout them, providing plenty of opportunities for adventures.
The “main quest” items they’ve been hired to recover all have adventures associated with them.
Calamities and other events invite PC participation. The endless winter, Jack’s nightmares, looming war.
The two-part adventure at Armand’s ancestral estate was inspired by the character’s backstory and previous encounters the PCs had with NPCs.
Running the Game
During an actual session, I more or less proceed as follows:
Players arrive. Drinks are poured, food is ordered, socializing commences until everyone is present.
The game starts. I start a playlist I’ve prepped beforehand on my Google Home, usually consisting of various ambient/videogame soundtracks.
I go around the table and ask each player what their character has been doing between sessions. Because we play a very episodic game, it is relatively unusual for the group to pause “mid-adventure.” Each player takes 3-5 minutes to respond, so this usually takes beteen 15 minutes and half an hour. For example, Armand’s player has a series of strange botanical/alchemical experiments the character is undertaking.
We segue into what I think of as the “preparation phase” of the game. At this point I will remind the players gently about the objective they voted on before the session. Then I step back and let them play out a quick scene, usually in a tavern or in one of the houses of the characters, as they plan whatever venture they’re undertaking, be it a dungeon crawl, a heist, a political meeting, a wilderness journey, an auction, a trip into the nightmare-haunted mind of a gigantic primeval whale, etc. This usually takes a few minutes, sometimes longer if there is substantial disagreement among the party members about how to proceed.
After the preparation phase is complete, we launch into the “main phase” of the game – however the players want to tackle it. Generally this wraps up by the session’s end, but new adventure seeds will be uncovered, ideas had, conspiracies unmasked, etc. Sometimes the party needs to pause midway through, but this is rare. I’ve become fairly adept at judging how long it takes for a given adventure to be completed. During this phase, I periodically try to check in with everyone – with a big group, its easy to sink into silence and let others take the lead.
The session concludes, and we often briefly discuss what we might do next.
I use groups.io to notify players of XP, update the spreadsheet, and post polls for the next session time and objective. Players discuss any possibilities and hash out a rough plan of what to do next session, ask questions about gear, leveling, etc.
Further Notes
There’s a partially justified objection, both in some OSR circles and in indie/narrativist/story-game circles, of a very prep-heavy style of play, and most versions go something like this: if you prep too much you get precious about your setting and/or your story and will inevitably railroad players, and prep-heavy DMs are usually “frustrated novelist” types who really wish they were authors telling their own story rather than referees of a game. There’s real wisdom here – this is why people dislike Pathfinder adventure paths and bloated AD&D adventures and all that kind of thing.
However, again, heavy prep does not necessarily entail pre-scripting or planning a plot. Indeed, by extensively preparing locations and NPCs, I find myself feeling reassured at the table. I am also never gripped by panic of a blank space on the map – if the players decide to go somewhere I hadn’t envisioned, odds are I have at least some notes for what’s there, and enough modular material (encounters, adventure seeds, weird happenings) that I can make the area feel interesting enough that it doesn’t become obvious when the players are leaving the rough path I envisioned for them.
None of this makes good improvisational skills superfluous. I make things up all the time, improvise almost all NPC dialogue, and of course embellish my notes with invented details. Inevitably, the players will do things I don’t expect and come up with plans and ideas I never would have imagined. Having a wealth of setting information on hand lets me roll with the punches. Prepping locations and NPCs rather than plots means that there’s no “script” to deviate from and thus no “wrong” way for the players to proceed.
Sometimes, players blow bits of your setting up; this is to be encouraged. Illustration by Bronwyn McIvor.
There’s also a long list of things that I gloss over or just plain don’t care about when I’m actively DMing a session:
Precise timekeeping. If the players ask, I tell them a time, and when it’s relevant to the adventure, I keep a loose sense of what time it is in a session, but otherwise I just don’t care.
Precise book-keeping. If we were playing a gritty wilderness survival game or a pure horror game I’d care much more about this, but since the party is in a rich metropolis, I always assume they are well fed and have access to supplies. They still need to buy specific equipment, and sometimes we will roleplay shopping, but a lot of this gets done between sessions. If someone forgot to buy arrows for their bow and would really like to be able to shoot things, whatever, we’ll retcon that they bought them. With a group of 6-7 players per session, it just doesn’t make sense to spend time roleplaying merchant encounters excessively or fussing over exactly how many days of rations they have left.
Sorry Gary, no strict time records for my group…
Rules discussions and minutiae. I and my players are very much “rulings not rules” people. They trust me to make fair decisions. Combat in the game is common but not the main activity most of the time, and I play fast and loose with 5th edition’s fairly flexible rules system, interpreting PC intentions and actions generously, and making quick calls when needed. I can’t remember the last time there was a rules dispute at the table, but if someone discovers a rule that got ignored which might have benefited them or something, I’ll give out Inspiration as recompense.
Balance. I regularly give the players access to magic items that are pretty powerful tools for characters who are at this point mostly 4th-6th level (like the Head of Granny Midnight, the Portal Chalk, or the Rod of Mind-Swap). I also regularly throw monsters at them that are way above their recommended CR. They’ve played enough with me to know when to run and how to play intelligently without getting killed. This is a pretty standard principle of sandbox play generally, but it’s one I try to lean into.
So, there you have it – the procedures and philosophy underpinning my Hex campaign. Let me know if there’s anything you’re curious about – I’d be happy to answer any questions. I plan on writing more posts like this in the future fleshing out additional details both of how I DM and how I design dungeons, cities, and adventures.
Illustration by 
“Snuff.” Illustration by 
“Abjectus.” Illustration by 
“Vermihydra.” Illustration by 
“The Corpsenurse.” Illustration by 
They announced themselves at the gates of the Council to the gigantic golems that stood guard, insisting that their business was both pressing and secret. After a bit of persuasion – assisted by Alabastor’s silver tongue – the guards relented, and the group entered the Hexad Council chamber, interrupting what seemed an intense argument over repairs to the docklands following the small tidal waves caused by Genial Jack’s nightmares.
“If a conspiracy is afoot, it may well be that some foreign power is behind it. Hex has many enemies. It may be wise to dispatch the Warders to begin seeking them out. Perhaps a Committee for Hexian Security should be formed, to defend us against these insidious forces.”
“I must admit to having my doubts as to your capabilities. But it seems as if disaster has been neatly averted, with the blessing of the Navigators. This Council’s trust in you was not misplaced. I am disturbed, however, by your description of this Lengian, a worshipper of Icelus. Hex values freedom of belief, but the powers of this order openly violate another freedom – freedom from psychic violation. The mind is sacrosanct.”
“I agree with my colleagues that these reports are disturbing, and I share their concern for the city’s well-being. However, I am concerned that if we involve the Warders directly in further investigations, the conspirators may be alerted and slip free before we can find them. I suggest we consult with the Institute of Omens, and the Soothsayers of Saint Monstrum’s Cathedral. They may be able to use divination to produce some clue as to the identity of the conspirators. In the meantime, I suggest we entrust the Variegated Company with further inquiries, and grant them acting Special Investigator status, reporting strictly to this Council.”
Barnabas – plump, intelligent, appraising – fidgeted in his seat.
“The Night Queen has always seen Genial Jack as an equal,” Parthenia put in. “Unless her thinking has altered in some fundamental way, I cannot imagine her wishing him ill.”
“Yes, this ritual!” Valentina said, having been silent the whole meeting. “Where did you find it?”
“I’ll send Eleyin to take a closer look,” Caulis said, sending the psuedodragon familiar to spy on the strange pair. One was a short, fat figure, in a black frock coat with a huge slouch hat shadowing their features, the other, tall and thin, a grey gown swathing her skeletal frame. The little figure walked with a walking stick topped by a cat’s skull. The homunculus reported back what it had seen through the familiar’s eyes.
“Why, Monsieur Gobble, we catch them in a trap,” Slake declared. Her grin began to widen, and suddenly proboscii juddered from her palms like obscene knives, a pair of mosquito wings sprouting from her back. Monsieur Gobble doffed his cap, revealing a grotesque second mouth gaping at the top of his skull, an obscene tongue tasting the air, scenting for prey…
Battle was joined, vicious and swift. Spells flew, Miri firing with two wands, Caulis and Alabastor slinging blasts of puissance, the homunculus entangling the newly spawned imps with magical vines, the gnome distracting Gobble with illusions. Comet wove through the carnage, blood spattering his magical hammer, while Armand and Sister cast from the sidelines and Garvin, flitting magically to a high balcony, continued to snipe with his crossbow.
“Special Investigators.” Illustration by 
