Condensation in Action 10: Wrath of the Righteous

Part 10 in an irregular series where I take bloated Pathfinder adventure paths and try to prune them into something more useful. Previous Condensation in Action posts can be found here:

Kingmaker

Rise of the Runelords

Curse of the Crimson Throne

Council of Thieves

Cults of the Sundered Kingdoms

Iron Gods

Skull and Shackles

Mummy's Mask

Carrion Crown

Wrath of the Righteous was Paizo's attempt to write a high-level campaign. Normally their adventure paths top out at level 15, but this one goes all the way up to level 20, as well as awarding the PCs additional power boosts in the form of 'mythic tiers' along the way. If you think this sounds like a recipe for disaster, you'd be right. D&D has always had three basic tiers - levels 1-3 for scrappy underdogs, levels 4-8 for tough, capable fantasy heroes, and levels 9-14 for epic heroes and domain level play - and has tended to really struggle to imagine what adventures are supposed to look like beyond that point. (Tellingly, most of the original classic module series like Dragonlance and Queen of the Spiders topped out at level 14.) What are you meant to do once you've outleveled the dragon at the bottom of the dungeon?

Most of Wrath of the Righteous is very boring: just standard-issue dungeon crawling with much, much higher numbers. The situations quickly start to get ridiculous: the PCs are strong enough to take on dungeons full of demons by book 2, so all that books 3-6 can do is fill their dungeons with ever-bigger demons. One late-campaign dungeon has guards who are fourteenth-level demonic clerics made of locusts riding ancient black dragons. In any other campaign, just one of these guys would be a terrifying end-boss whose dark schemes threaten entire nations. In this one whole groups of them just sit around like glorified security guards, keeping an eye out for intruders and waiting for the over-levelled PCs to wander past and kill them all. 

This hexcrawl is what I was able to salvage. About half of it comes from the appendices rather than the adventures proper!

Context: This adventure takes place on a militarised frontier zone, where a crusading military order maintains a string of fortified settlements along the edges of a demon-haunted region of deserts and jungles, blighted by the release of unholy energies a century ago. (The order was founded in response to this event, and has had the same leader, Queen Galfrey, ever since.) Recently, stories have been emerging from the jungles of some kind of magical and/or industrial undertaking by the region's most prominent demon-cult, the Templars of the Ivory Labyrinth. Armies fare poorly in the jungles, and Queen Galfrey is in the market for a team of disposable, deniable scouts willing to brave the warped lands of the south and work out what's going on before it's too late...

A Note on the Military Situation: The land north of the jungles is notionally controlled by Queen Galfrey, though the border is porous, and beasts and cultists from the south sometimes slip across. The jungles are inhabited mostly by monsters and cultists, too few in number to meet the crusaders on the field of battle, but amply capable of whittling down military expeditions who enter their territory. Over the last century the crusaders have several times advanced as far as the southern coast and claimed 'victory', but the jungles are impossible to hold and they have always ended up retreating, leaving nothing but abandoned forts and temples in their wake.

Hexes are 12 miles across.

• 0000: This broken-down old town is sinking into the swamps, and has been abandoned by all but its most misanthropic inhabitants, who are increasingly coming to resemble the toads that infest its rotting buildings. One among them is a master astrologer, an expert in predicting all kinds of ill-fortune, but the only thing he wants is to be left alone. If he could be persuaded to cooperate, his divinatory abilities would provide one way to navigate the ivory labyrinth at 0104.
• 0001: This shadowy, bat-haunted town is run with psychopathic violence by its despotic governor, who has reduced its people to a state of abject terror. In truth, she, in turn, is a mere pawn of the cabal of vampires who secretly run the town, using its cowed inhabitants as food stock. The vampires are no friends to the Templars, whose victory would ruin their comfortable living arrangement, and could be convinced to ally with the PCs if they were persuaded that the threat against them was serious enough. (Such an alliance would, however, obviously need to be kept secret from the crusaders.)
• 0002: In this tower lives a crazed cavalier, a defector from the crusades, who believes the victory of the demons is inevitable and hopes to win their favour and attention by committing random acts of pointless villainy. The townsfolk of 0001 hate and fear him, but their governor is in no hurry to apprehend him, as his depredations are a good excuse for all manner of restrictions and curfews.
• 0003: A succubus lairs in this desecrated chapel. She is served by a band of charmed warriors - mostly ex-crusaders - who believe her to be a holy goddess, and will gladly lay down their lives in her service.
• 0004: These mountains conceal a ruined and accursed city, among whose shattered buildings can be found an ancient library of stone tablets containing many secrets otherwise lost to the outside world, including maps of the Ivory Labyrinth at 0104 (which was built by the same vanished race who constructed this city). It has no guardians, but its curse afflicts all who discover it with psychotic and murderous jealousy, meaning that expeditions that stumble across it tend to self-destruct long before they bring word of it to the world beyond.
• 0005: This blasted ash waste is the origin-point of the demonic taint that afflicts these lands. The earth here trembles with magical energy, and the air is full of demonic whispers. Anyone remaining here too long will be tainted in body, mind, and soul. 
• 0006: The jungles here are roamed by a filth spirit who takes the form of a woman made of mud, rising from foul-smelling seepage of its rivers and caves. She is furious about the mining activities of the Templars in 0105, which are polluting 'her' waters with all kinds of weird magical run-offs, and will gladly assist in any efforts to shut them down. 
• 0100: These marshy hills are collectively known as the Moonbog. They are dotted with huddled settlements, who live in fear of the werebeasts who roam the moors by night.
• 0102: Hidden in these hills is a trap-filled dungeon of iron and stone - the stronghold of a cruel demon, the Razor Princess. She is served by a demonic murderer with the head of a stork, who abducts victims for her and drives them through her deathtrapped mazes so that their blood might lubricate her cruel machines.
• 0103: The jungle here is roamed by a flayed, headless angel, once an ally of the crusaders, now a victim of the Templars. It attacks intruders with its still-blazing sword, its body continuously spurting gouts of boiling, sulpherous blood over anyone who comes too close.
• 0104: Here stands the Ivory Labyrinth itself, a vast subterranean maze paved and walled with ancient bones. It is inhabited by primitive humanoids who have dwelt there for centuries, but who have recently been enslaved by the Templars, who have claimed the place as a site sacred to their demonic patron Baphomet. The labyrinth is very confusing, mostly due to the demonic magic that infuses it, and navigating it successfully is almost impossible without very good scouts (such as the Pitlings at 0401), magical aid (such as the Stalker's Crossbow from 0205 or the divinations of the astrologer at 0000), or a map (such as the one at 0004). The Templar leadership are all demoniacs, who willingly invite demonic spirits into their bodies, and spend most of their time in states of entranced spirit-possession. Their champion wields an enchanted golden scimitar, which once belonged to the wife of the antipaladin from 0404.
• 0105: Here, deep in the jungles, the Templars have begun mining enchanted crystals from the magic-saturated earth. Their mine labourers are demonic minotaurs, who use their immense strength to hack their way through the rock. The more of these crystals they mine, the more demonic spirits their leaders will be able to call down into their bodies. If left unchecked for too long, they will become powerful enough to sweep away the crusaders once Queen Galfrey finally meets her death. 
• 0107: Here a demonic sorcerer dwells with his herd of man-eating aurochs. He is notionally allied with the Templars, but is happy to turn a blind eye to visitors as long as they bring offerings of human flesh for his herd.
• 0201: This manor house is home to a noble family, supposedly subjects of Queen Galfrey, but secretly loyal to the Templars. Building a labyrinth in their own home was a bit impractical, so instead they settled for a hedge maze, consecrated by unholy stone bull's heads buried beneath its corners. Unbelievers who try to navigate it find themselves becoming confused, their bodies growing heavy, their skin scratched by branches and opening in hundreds of tiny wounds that never, ever stop bleeding. By the time they reach the centre of the maze, where the family wait for them, they're ripe for slaughter.
• 0204: This ruined temple is full of maggots that constantly squirm across its floor, spelling out heretical prayers with their writhing bodies. If intruders enter, the maggots twist themselves into the shape of unholy runes instead, blasting all those who gaze upon them. Beneath the temple are tunnels made from heaving, cancerous flesh, continuously fed upon by vermin. At their heart meditates an awful cleric made of locusts, the servant of an ancient demon lord of vermin. If he is still alive after the Templars are defeated, he will lay claim to their abandoned places of power and start calling forth horrible insect monsters, laying the foundations of a new demon-cult to replace them.
• 0205: This Templar stronghold is guarded by obese naked undead armed with scythes, who have the power to cause bloody wounds to open upon all those they gaze upon. Within dwell a nest of cultists who have amputated their own feet and replaced them with enchanted brazen hooves, the better to resemble their demonic master. If their stronghold is invaded they attack in a kicking, trampling mob. One of them wields the Stalker's Crossbow, whose wielder will always be able to find the last person wounded by it.
• 0302: This frontier camp is the current base of Queen Galfrey. Galfrey swore at the very start of the crusade to vanquish the demons or die trying: she is now over 100 years old, her life prolonged at crippling expense by alchemical means. Utterly weary of her life of endless warfare, she has developed a not-so-subtle death-wish, and has begun provoking new battles mostly in order to give herself a chance to die in them. (It hasn't worked yet because people with alchemically-enhanced bodies and a century of combat experience and are very difficult to kill.) Morale in the camp is low, as the soldiers resent being made to risk their lives in unnecessary battles. They have been secretly infiltrated by an agent of the Templars, Hosilla, who is here posing as a knight from a minor (and fictional) noble house. If the queen actually does manage to get herself killed, Hosilla will hasten back to the Ivory Labyrinth at 0104 and tell the Templars to call down as many demons as they can and strike as soon as possible, while the crusaders are still reeling from her loss. If the mine at 0105 has not been disabled yet, they will probably win. 
• 0304: The trees here exude a sticky sap into the poisonous, swampy waters below. Anyone who ascends into the canopy is set upon by monstrous bird-creatures, who attack in screeching flocks
• 0307: Here the jungle is torn open by vast rifts inhabited by warped and troglodytic humanoids, who roam ceaselessly searching for prey. 
• 0401: This massively fortified clifftop city is the stronghold of the crusaders. The cliffs beneath are riddled with caves and tunnels inhabited by the 'pitlings', deformed descendants of the original crusaders who found their children were born warped by the weird energies to which they had been exposed during their campaigns. The people of the city regard the pitlings with scorn, but the pitlings still revere their warrior ancestors, guarding the graves of their crusader forebears and nurturing a pathetic loyalty to the state that rejected them. They are hardy and stealthy and can see in the dark, making them perfect scouts for any attack on the Ivory Labyrinth at 0104.  
• 0404: The jungles here are inhabited by giant slugs and dire crocodiles. On its poisoned rivers floats an enchanted barge, pulled by a great skeletal serpent, and manned only by a freezing undead antipaladin as cold as his own frozen heart. He wields a terrible icy halberd, which freezes the blood of all those it wounds. He will curtly question all those who pass if they have seen his wife, who vanished into the Ivory Labyrinth years ago: anyone failing to give a useful answer will receive an icy death, instead. If touched or wounded by her scimitar (see 0104), his heart melts and all his unholy powers desert him.
• 0405: Deep in these jungles lies a hidden chasm, apparently bottomless, whose walls are lined by the immense fossilised bodies of dead demon kings from ages past.
• 0502: In this town, the people long ago started to adopt the talking animals that occasionally wandered from the forests, keeping them as pets and messengers. Unfortunately for them, the animals are demon-tainted and delight in defamation and slander, with the result that the whole town is now a tangle of feuds, scandals, and misplaced attempts at revenge. (In particular, everyone is convinced that their neighbours have something to do with all the children who have been going missing recently - in fact these have been taken by the inhabitants of the house at 0503, frequently with the connivance of the talking animals.) The people are highly resistant to the idea that their animal companions are anything other than loyal and adorable. 
• 0503: High in these gloomy mountains stands a huge house in which kidnapped children tend to a great clockwork mechanism of obscure significance, guarded by cloaked, silent figures and clanking automata who hunt down any who try to escape. What, if anything, the machine actually does is deeply unclear.
• 0504: A succubus inhabits this mansion, beset by besotted admirers longing for her favour or even acknowledgement. Most starve to death in her courtyards, or kill one another in desperate attempts to win her attention and prove their devotion. Only the most exceptional displays of talent or prowess will suffice to win an audience. 
• 0600: This steep mountain valley echoes with distant, half-heard songs. (These come from a tragic ghost who haunts its slopes, but finding her is extremely difficult.) It leads to a smug little town, bright with mirrors and loud with bells, whose vain inhabitants are notionally loyal to the crusade but actually care nothing for the outside world. It would be a good source of mirrors with which to torment the rat-demon at 0603.
• 0601: This town is a prison-colony, to which convicts are set from throughout Queen Galfrey's domain to work as slave labourers, mining gems from the hills. (These are the kingdom's most profitable export.) Because slaves are so much more profitable than corpses, many captured low-level demon cultists have been sent here, and their teachings are spreading covertly among the convicts. If the flow of gems from the mines was disrupted then the crusaders would soon be unable to afford Queen Galfrey's ruinously expensive life-extension potions, and she would wither and die within a year. 
• 0603: This ruined town was built by the crusaders during one of their expansionist phases, only to be abandoned when the tides of war turned. Now it is infested by flocks of fiendish vultures, and roamed by a ghastly knife-wielding rat demon that hates and fears its own reflection. A band of mad knights camps nearby, utterly unreconciled to the town's abandonment and determined to reclaim it regardless of what it may cost them (or anyone else). 
• 0604: This ruined shrine is inhabited by a deeply confused demon, who unwisely preyed upon a priestess of the goddess of dreams. The priestess linked their minds as she lay dying, and now the demon has a head full of someone else's emotions and memories and is having a massive identity crisis. She still has her demonic instincts towards cruelty, but her new human feelings mean that she feels revolted by them. If her newly human side was carefully nurtured she might be guided along a path of repentance, but any kind of severe stress will cause her to have a massive breakdown and start lashing out. 
• 0605: Here a boiling river pours out of the mountains and runs through the jungle to the sea, terminating at a beach of powdered bone.
• 0607: This graveyard island is surrounded by shipwrecks, driven upon its shores by the regular floods and hurricanes that beset it. It is the home of a powerful ghoul, the Coffin Groom, who feasts upon the drowned dead.
• 0701: This ghost town was abandoned when its well ran dry. By night it is haunted by the walking corpses of the parched and vengeful dead. 
• 0704: This desert is inhabited by gigantic scorpion-human hybrids, who know ancient spells capable of calling armies of mummified demons up from their crumbling tombs to do their bidding. They greatly predate the conflict between the crusaders and the Templars, but have been stirred up by the energies released at 0005. If the taint could be lifted from the land they would go back to sleep.

The Undercellars - a playable dungeon for Patrick's Dungeon Poem challenge

This is my (characteristically late) contribution to Patrick's Dungeon Poem challenge. It's not especially artpunk, but it is functional. Pdf version available here.

The Undercellars – to be placed beneath the next house your PCs visit the basement of…

(For PCs of levels 2-4)

1: Rotting door in the darkest and least-visited corner of the basement, three-quarters covered in heaps of old junk. Ignored by the current residents, who assume it leads to an old cupboard or something. Crumbling carvings of horned figures and winged animals just visible in the surrounding stonework. Held shut by seven locks, once strong, now rusted almost to nothing. One good kick would smash it wide open.

On the other side are stone stairs leading steeply downwards and a skeleton in rotted rags, arms desperately outstretched. Ancient scratch-marks show it died clawing frantically at the door.

2: Six rusted cages along south wall. Five hold ancient skeletons. The door of the sixth hangs open.

As soon as the PCs enter the room the skeletons animate and begin rattling frantically in their cages, shaking the doors and clacking their jawbones in agitation. (Note that the width of the room means PCs are likely to hear them before they see them.) If their cage locks are smashed they run out of the room, up the stairs, and leave the building via the nearest door or window, attacking anyone who gets in their way. They disintegrate into dust the moment sunlight or moonlight touches their bones.

For each minute the rattling noises continue, or each time a loud noise is made in this room (e.g. a cage door being smashed open), there is a 1-in-10 chance that the beast in 3 awakes. 1d6 rounds later, it will crash through the door to its chamber and begin hunting the PCs.

Rusted iron hooks on the north wall hold the rotted remnants of dozens of green robes. The pocket of one holds a silver necklace set with small garnets (120 GP). The eastern wall is carved with a long list of names – several hundred in all, including the ancestors of many prominent local families. Wooden wreckage fills the middle of the room, warped by time and damp. Rusted iron door leads east to 3. Gaping, dripping hole leads south to 7.

3: The iron door that leads into this room is rusted shut. Bashing it open requires a Strength check. Each attempt made has a 1-in-3 chance of awakening the beast.

At the bottom of the stairs a huge creature lies sleeping, curled up on itself. Resembles an immense horned snake with six clawed legs. A glint of gold can be seen protruding from beneath its bulk: a white gold idol of a bat-like beast (500 GP). The beast can be woken by loud noises, or by taking damage: otherwise it sleeps through virtually anything, including having the idol slipped out from under its coils.

Once it wakes it tracks intruders by scent, patiently pursuing them around the complex. It isn’t fast, but it is very persistent, and once it has cornered someone it will methodically rip and bludgeon at them with its teeth, claws, horns, and sheer scaly mass until they are dead. The only ways to escape are to kill it, to leave via the stairs at 1, or to escape along the river. It cannot swim, so if anyone leads it to the river and then swims or boats away from the shore it will abandon the hunt and return to its lair.

4: Alcove holding heap of rubble that was once a statue. Clawed outstretched hand now the only part still recognisable. Wedged behind it is a rotted corpse in a tattered green robe, with a copper and malachite ring around one finger (25 GP). The present residents of the building above can identify it as having belonged to an eccentric great-aunt who went missing several decades ago.

5: Six stone pillars hung with rusted chains. Ancient bloodstains splatter the floor around each pillar for a range of several feet. Bone slivers wedged between the flagstones.

Clinging onto the ceiling are six black-winged murder-birds, in a state of deep hibernation. They will awaken 1d6 rounds after the PCs enter, and attack anyone not wearing a green robe. If routed they fly off to the river and away, not returning to their roosts until 1d3 days later. The beast from 3 will stop and eat the corpses of any dead murder-birds it comes across during its pursuit.

6: Walls engraved with crude carvings of human figures engaged in improbable-looking sex acts. Floor strewn with rotting pillows and bedding. Rack of cracked white clay pipes in northwest corner, beside a dented copper bowl containing a black tarry sludge, dried-out and unidentifiable. In the northeast corner are broken wine bottles, battered pewter cups, and a still-intact copper flask containing 8 doses of potent laudanum laced with hallucinogenic herbs. (Drinking a dose induces 1d6 hours of deep sleep filled with vivid and disturbing dreams – worth 10 GP per dose to an artist or insomniac. The whole flask at once would suffice to knock out the beast from 3, if it could be somehow tricked into swallowing it.) A shelf on the wall holds two silver goblets engraved For the Champions (15 GP each), and a golden chalice engraved For the Queen (160 GP).

At the bottom of the pit to the south lounges Dryden, an immortal violet-skinned youth in tattered orange rags, dozing away the centuries on a pile of rotted silk. His long purple fingernails are still immaculate, even after all these years, and he wears a golden bracelet set with topaz jewels (240 GP) around his left wrist. He is beautiful, flirtatious, sexually omnivorous, and utterly incurious, answering all questions about himself and the complex in the vaguest possible terms. (‘It was built by… people… who’ve been gone for… quite a while?’) He would like the PCs to help him escape, but if they don’t then he won’t push the matter. He can always just sleep until someone else comes along.

Anyone who comes into skin-to-skin contact with Dryden will feel temporary elation followed by a strange sense of weakness, and will lose 1 HP per hour for the next 1d3 hours.

7: Irregular tunnel, damp and dripping, rocky floor slick and uneven underfoot. Three spindly pale-skinned proto-humans wedged into cracks in the rock, sleeping – they can sleep through all but the loudest noises, but bright light will bring them stretching and blinking from their crevices, long white limbs unfolding themselves from the walls, pale tongues licking across wide mouths full of needle-like teeth. They have no language, but can be placated with offerings of food – otherwise they will attack the plumpest-looking PC, seeking to drag them off into the darkness and drown them in the river before eating them. If routed they flee south and along the river to 8 – they are unaffected by the ghosts at 10. If the PCs pursue them to 8 they will make a final stand and fight to the death. Their crevices contain a haul of old, cracked bones and a rusted dagger with a large pearl set in the pommel (120 GP).

8: Smuggler’s camp. Corroded lanterns, rotted barrels, a crate of packed with bottles of contraband brandy (400 GP, but far too heavy, bulky, and fragile to carry around while adventuring). A rowboat has been pulled up onto the shore here. Its timbers are warped and leaky: it could be used to travel between this location and areas 10, 12 or 14, but would undoubtedly sink if used on a longer voyage.

9: A bare stone span crosses the river, its wooden handrails rotted to nothing. Ancient clawmarks on the stone. An undead smuggler named Redmud Bill crouches on the bridge, clutching his burned-out brass lantern. He wears threadbare work clothes and a jaunty black tricorn with an opal bead at each corner. Will not let anyone pass, threatening to ‘rouse the river’ if anyone tries it.

Bill’s mind is so eroded that all he can remember is that he came here in search of treasure, and he’s meant to wait here and guard the bridge ‘until his mates get back with the loot’. Nothing can induce him to leave his post, but he will permit the PCs to pass if bribed with treasure worth 100 GP or more. If shown the corpse of the smuggler-chief from 15, he emits a grief-stricken wail and leaps into the river. He will not resurface.

If the PCs attack or push past him, Bill rips one of the beads from his hat and throw it into the river. Moments later, massive blasts of freezing water mingled with stone and bone start exploding upwards, causing everyone standing on the bridge (including Bill) to save every round or take 1d6 damage and be knocked into the roiling, churning water below. Anyone in the water takes an additional 1d6 damage per round from crushing and drowning, and is permitted a Strength check each round to fight their way onto the shore. (If Bill falls into the river, he takes only half damage and automatically clambers back onto the bridge after one round.) The river remains roused for 1d8 rounds, and then falls quiet, though if Bill is still alive and fighting at this point he’ll throw in a second bead to rouse it again.

PCs who obtain Bill’s hat may find it a useful way of getting rid of the beast from 3, as once knocked into the river it will simply thrash around helplessly in the water until it drowns.

10: Graveyard. Along the side of the river stands a row of uniform grey headstones marking the graves of illegitimate children, secret spouses, disowned relatives, and murdered rivals, engraved with cryptic symbols meaningful only to the hands that carved them. The ghosts of those buried here are desperate for acknowledgement, but over the centuries their stories have all become jumbled together, an endless tangle of scandals and secrets without beginning or end. Anyone approaching them will find their mind filled with pleading whispers, and must save or stand, transfixed, listening to the stories of the dead until they are physically dragged away. Anyone left among the graves for more than an hour will be possessed by a confused composite ghost, and will flee the scene on an impossible mission to prove that they were covertly murdered by their illegitimate father who was also secretly their wife, or something of the sort. This possession lasts for 1d6 months, or until a Bless spell is cast on them.

11: The river is slow-flowing, icy cold, and deep enough to swim (or drown) in. The riverbed is covered with drifts of ancient bone – several hundred skeletons worth in all. Diving beneath the surface with a waterproof light source (e.g. a Light spell) will reveal light glinting off a suspiciously pristine greataxe still clutched in the hands of a skeleton encased in rusted armour, its copper haft engraved with astrological symbols. This is the axe Starshine, which normally functions as a Greataxe +1, but serves as a Greataxe +4 when wielded in starlight beneath the open sky.

12: A lone proto-human (as room 7) sits here, singing wordlessly to itself in the dark, casting nets woven from the sinews of strange subterranean beasts. If approached by PCs bearing lights it abandons its nets and dives into the water, swimming rapidly downriver. Its nets are especially effective against winged creatures such as those in 5 and 15, which if hit with them must save or crash, wings entangled, to the floor.

13:  Tattered parchments nailed to the walls in flapping sheets, bearing mostly-illegible genealogies and family trees stretching back through the centuries. Warped wooden tables heaped with dried-up inkwells and mouldy parchment. Skeleton sprawled on the floor in rotten green robes, its skull staved in by a blow to the back of the head. A wide flight of stairs leads eastward down to 14, strewn with the remains of another two hacked-up skeletons in green robes.

A huge coffer made from beaten black iron stands in south-west corner, packed with centuries worth of accumulated blackmail material: documents bearing witness to false marriages, forged inheritances, land grabs, rigged elections to civic offices, etc, etc. Most are so old as to now be of only historical interest, but a patient sift would yield enough material to ruin 1d6 prominent local families if revealed. All would be willing to kill to prevent this information becoming public.

14: Three crudely-carven statues of horned figures. Those to the left and right are male. The one in the centre is female. All are enfolded in drapery and depicted reaching outwards with long, clawed hands. Bronze bowls at their feet, stained by centuries of offerings in wine and blood.

Anyone pouring wine or blood into the bowls before the male figures gains +1 strength permanently, and is filled with belligerent and vengeful urges. If they ever back down from a fight, or fail to avenge a slight or wrong done to them, then the next time they sleep they are tormented in their dreams by terrible horned figures, gain no rest, and suffer 1d6 damage. This curse can only trigger once per day.

Anyone pouring wine or blood into the bowl before the female figure gains +1 wisdom permanently, and is filled with impulses of pragmatic cruelty. If they ever make a decision that causes material disadvantage to themselves in order to benefit someone to whom they are not directly related by blood, then the next time they sleep they are tormented in their dreams by terrible faceless beings, gain no rest, and suffer -1 to all saves for 7 days. This curse can only trigger once per day, but it does stack with itself, to a potential maximum of -7 to all saves.

A Bless spell removes both the positive and negative effects of these blessings, but the recipient takes 2d6 damage as the dark forces within them burst bloodily out of their body, leaving gory stigmata.

In the southernmost corner is huddled a skeleton, its once-green robes black with ancient blood. Its bony hands clutch a silver talisman engraved with a horned figure (10 GP).

15: Immense vaulted subterranean hall, the product of incalculable labour. Rotting divans litter the floor. Walls engraved with bass reliefs showing robed men prostrating themselves between a horned female figure. Floor strewn with ancient corpses spitted upon one another’s swords, some in the drab clothes of dockworkers, others wearing rotted green robes. Corpse of the smuggler-chief lies at the foot of the stairs to 13, rusted cutlass still clutched in one skeletal hand. His leather backpack contains a miscellaneous tangle of looted coins and jewellery worth 370 GP. Before him lies a sundered skeleton in a green robe, a heavy gold chain glinting around its neck (140 GP).

In the centre of the room a huge brass brazier hangs suspended from the ceiling on an iron chain, and on this brazier the Winged Guardian – a great leathery bat-like beast with a single huge yellow eye – dozes over the bones of its dead masters. It will not attack PCs who hold up the idol from 3: otherwise it launches itself up with an ear-splitting shriek and assails them, buffeting them with its wings while spraying them with the searing, tar-like venom it drools continually from its maw. It will pursue fleeing PCs as far as the river, but not beyond. If routed it flies up to the ceiling and clings to the roof, but if the PCs continue to persecute it with missile fire it flies back down and fights until slain.

The Winged Guardian and the beast from 3 are mortal enemies, and if they ever encounter one another they will fight to the death.

Three pits in the east lead down to 16, coils of rusted chain heaped next to each one. In the south-west corner stands a broken-down divan: a green-robed skeleton sprawls beside it with a crossbow bolt wedged between its vertebrae, clearly shot in the back in the act of trying to crawl underneath it. Beneath this divan is a concealed trapdoor leading to 17 – anyone opening this can look down onto the Queen’s bier without awakening her, potentially allowing a round of surprise attacks.

16: Dank dungeon scattered with rusted chains, slumped skeletons in rags fettered to walls, a faint smell of ancient human waste. Two mutant shame children lurk here, wordless and feral, too warped to die, their mottled skin dotted with patches of scale and hair. Skilled trapmakers, they have set up a line of hidden snares across the room that snap taut when triggered, entangling victims legs in lengths of weighted chain: the children then leap forth to garrote their immobilized victims. If routed they run and hide in dark corners. Child-like in intelligence, they respond positively if shown any kind of affection, and will loyally follow anyone who feeds them or treats them with kindness.

17: Here the Horned Queen sleeps through the centuries on her bier of bones, resplendent in shimmering robes of green silk embroidered with golden thread (120 GP if intact, 12 GP if hacked and stained). She wears a golden circlet set with three cut emeralds (950 GP). Her two champions lie curled up on the floor beside her like dogs, naked save for a few rags of clothing, huge rusted greatswords lying on the ground beside them. All three are horned and clawed, their bones clearly visible through their leathery grey-brown skin. Their yellow fangs are very long and very sharp. On a stone table next to the bier stands an engraved silver flask (30 GP) containing nine doses of dreamwine, which – if swallowed – place the imbiber in a dreamlike and disorientated mental state for the next 3d6 hours, during which they are extremely suggestible. (Trying to make someone do something heinous or self-destructive allows them a save to break the effect.) Dreamwine is worth 50 GP per dose to criminals or cult leaders.

If the PCs enter the chamber the Queen will awaken instantly. She is unaware that her followers have perished while she slept, and will assume that the PCs have come to worship her if any of the following are true:

·        The PCs are all wearing green robes.
·        The PCs all have blessings from the statues in 14.
·        The PCs come bearing offerings of blood and/or wine in the goblets and chalice from 6.
·        The first PC into the room holds up the silver talisman from 14.

If the Queen believes the PCs to be worshippers, she will enquire after the state of her followers: whether their numbers are growing, whether their bloodlines are strong, whether their secrets remain secure, etc. If the PCs give plausible-sounding answers she will bestow a ritual blessing and dismiss them before returning to her sleep. (They can then attack with the benefit of surprise, if they choose to do so.) She will become increasingly suspicious if reawakened by the same group of ‘worshippers’ more than once. PCs who tell her that the complex is under attack may be able to trick her and the champions into a trap. She is unaware of the snares in 16, and will blunder straight into them if lured there.

If the Queen does not believe the PCs are here to worship her, she gives them a stark choice: follow her or die. PCs who submit will be relieved of their weapons, and required to drink one dose of dreamwine each: they will then be subjected to a nightmarish initiation by ordeal, which they will never subsequently be able to remember except as a confused nightmare of scorching flames, icy waters, and monstrous faces looming out of the dark. Any PC who is affected by the dreamwine for more hours than their Wisdom score will succumb, and become a dedicated cultist of the Horned Queen. Others may save once per day, with a cumulative -1 penalty for each day that passes: success means they emerge from their fugue state of terror and trauma for long enough to try to escape. Cultist PCs who are rescued from the Queen may eventually recover after 1d6 months of systematic deprogramming.

The Queen is utterly ancient, and believes in little save the sanctity of bloodlines and of secrets. In battle, her champions attack with their greatswords, while the Queen uses her curses. If her champions are killed, the Queen will offer the PCs her circlet and dreamwine in exchange for her life. If they refuse this offer, she fights to the death. 

Monster Stats

5 Skeletons (room 2): 1 HD (3 hp), AC leather, claw (1d3), morale NA.

The Beast (room 3): 8 HD (37 hp), AC plate, move as dwarf, morale 9. The beast has enough teeth, claws, horns, and coils to attack everyone adjacent to it every round for 1d8 damage. Its blood is deathly-cold and horribly poisonous: anyone wounding it in hand to hand combat must save to avoid being splattered, suffering crippling, burning agony (-4 to all rolls) until the venom is washed clean. Characters with no exposed skin are immune to this. (The robes from 2 may be useful, here.) If the beast is killed, 2d10 doses of blood may be collected from it, usable as blade venom or contact poison.

6 Murder-birds (room 5): 1 HD (4 hp), AC chain, beak and claws (1d4), morale 6. Anyone wounded by a murder-bird just keeps bleeding, losing 1 HP per round until they take a round to bandage their wounds. Magical healing instantly ends the bleeding.

Dryden (room 6): 2 HD (11 hp), AC unarmoured, poisonous fingernails (1 damage, but save or take 3d6 damage when the poison kicks in 1d10 rounds later), morale 5. Regenerates 1 HP per hour unless dead. Between 0 HP and -5 HP he will look dead, but will actually continue to regenerate until fully restored – only at -6 or below does he actually die.

Proto-Humans (3 in room 7, 1 in room 12): 2 HD (8 hp), AC unarmoured, bite (1d6), morale 6. If two proto-humans hit the same target in the same round then their victim has been swarmed and grabbed. They may make a Strength check to break free – if this fails they will be yanked off-balance and dragged off helplessly into the darkness.

Redmud Bill (room 9): 3 HD (13 hp), AC leather, rusty hatchet (1d6), morale 8. Has three Beads of River Rousing, which, if dropped into a freshwater river or lake, rouse it into furious, churning waterspouts for 1d8 rounds for 1 mile in every direction.

Winged Guardian (room 15): 5 HD (21 hp), AC chain, wing buffet (1d6), morale 8. Whomever the guardian is currently attacking must save each round or be seared by the rain of sticky, burning venom that pours constantly from its mouth, taking 1d8 damage – this damage is halved (rounding down) if they have a shield to shelter under.

2 Shame Children (room 16): 3 HD (11 hp), AC leather, chain garotte (1d8 – if max damage is rolled the victim passes out for 1d10 minutes), morale 5. Experts at hiding and sneaking – if you lose sight of them, you’ll never find them. Attack only from ambush.

2 Horned Champions (room 17): 4 HD (17 hp), AC chain, greatsword (2d6), morale 10.

Horned Queen (room 17): 5 HD (23 hp), AC chain, teeth and claws (1d6), morale 10. Once per round can call down a random curse on a PC, who must save or suffer (roll 1d4: 1= blindness, 2 = fear, 3 = madness, 4 = paralysis) for the next 1d6 rounds. Anyone wounded by the Queen starts bleeding secrets, and will uncontrollably start confessing whatever they most want to keep secret for as long as the blood continues to flow from their wounds.

The White Tower: an edition-agnostic adventure for D&D

I took an overdose of fin de siècle Gothic fiction and wrote this, more as a finger exercise than anything else. Put it in a hex somewhere near the sea.

Advance warning: some of the themes addressed here are pretty heavy, even if they are approached rather obliquely, just as they are in the fiction that inspired it. Please use with appropriate care.

The Tower: It stands on a hilltop, shining white in the distance, visible for miles around. The land around is thickly forested. No-one goes there now, though the forest is dotted with the overgrown ruins of farms and villages, showing that the hills were once densely inhabited. The woods have an evil reputation with the locals, who avoid the place, especially after dark.

The Rumours: In the villages that cling to the riverside, the people are happy to talk about the tower on the hill, though never without first making signs to avert the attention of evil spirits. They say a sad old lord used to live alone there, until the day he rode along the sea cliffs the morning after a storm and found a beautiful girl cast up by the waves on the beach, more dead than alive and surrounded by broken timbers. He took her home, and she became his ward, and then his wife. She seemed to give him new joy in life, and one by one he called his old friends to live with them: a priest, a doctor, and an artist. Then one midsummer the whole household was found dead and dangling from the rafters - all save the lady, who had vanished without trace. After that nothing went right in the villages around the white tower. Soon the farms were all abandoned, and the forest came.

The Woods: By day the woods are harmless enough, and in the spring and summer they are thick with wild roses. Often a woman can be heard singing in the distance, though no amount of searching will ever find her. By night travellers will repeatedly glimpse swaying, broken-necked figures hanging from the branches out of the corners of their eyes, though these disappear when looked at directly. When the wind blows through the woods by night, it carries the sounds of crashing waves, screaming men, and shattering timbers, as though a shipwreck was happening just over the hill.

For each hour spent in the woods by night, there is a 1-in-3 chance of an encounter with a random ghost. Roll 1d6:

1. Bianca, the maid, weeping uncontrollably as she dabs her eyes with an embroidered handkerchief, her broken neck jerking disturbingly with each heaving sob.
2. Giuliano, the gardener, and Alberico, the doctor, locked in a feverish embrace, trying to kiss each other with heads that dangle from broken necks.
3. Ortensia, the cook, dressed up in her best gown, roaming the woods and calling out: 'Lucia! Lucia!' Stiff coloured ribbons tied around her throat imperfectly conceal her broken neck.
4. Jacopo, the chaplain, striding through the forests in his black soutane, his shattered neck almost, but not quite, held upright by his high and rigidly starched white collar. He holds a sealed letter out stiffly before him, the word Lucia just visible on the envelope. 
5. Giustino, the artist, craning his broken neck and sketching feverishly with paper and charcoal at something only he can see. 
6. Lord Orazio, brandishing a bleeding dagger, rushing through the night wild-eyed and howling: 'She is MINE! Mine only! Mine always! I found her! She belongs to ME!'

If any attempt is made to interact with the ghosts, it will instantly become obvious that what seemed like human forms were nothing more than a trick of the moonlight, their voices merely the moaning of the wind.

Approaching the Tower: One stumbles upon it suddenly, right in the middle of the wood. Its white stone walls are still strong and clean, untouched by overgrowth, in marked contrast to the condition of all the other ruins in the woods. Its wooden doors have rotted almost to nothing. The stables, servant's quarters, and other outbuildings are now mere heaps of mossy stone.

• An immense serpent lazes on a rock nearby, huge and almost unkillable, covered in gorgeous, multicoloured scales. It will attack only in self-defence, but if any group of people try to enter the tower it will rear up and spit a stream of venom straight into the eyes of whichever of them has the lowest Charisma score. Unless dodged, this venom will cause permanent blindness unless treated with healing magic or washed away promptly with salt water and/or milk. (Any healers in the party will know this.) The snake can be distracted by giving it live prey to eat: the larger the animal, the longer it will spend eating it. A rabbit might buy you a minute, whereas eating and digesting a horse will occupy it for an entire day. 

A Note on Ghosts: Unlike the ghosts in the forest, the ghosts in the tower are completely physical. (They are not zombies: the actual corpses of all these people are still mouldering in their graves.) Their pale bodies can be cut down with mundane weapons, although they do not bleed and are weirdly resistant to harm. If 'killed', they reform the following midnight unless the tower's enchantment has been undone. Unless otherwise noted, none of them can leave their respective rooms.

A Note on Dreams: Anyone who attempts to sleep within the White Tower will be tormented by horrible nightmares of shipwrecks, serpents, stabbing daggers, strangling roses, hanging bodies, and staring eyes, and will wake up feeling more exhausted than they were when they first went to sleep. Sleeping under these conditions will not allow the recovery of lost hit points or spells.

Ground Floor: The main doors lead into a great semi-circular room hung with faded scarlet tapestries depicting hunts, tournaments, and battles, with a grand flight of white stone stairs leading up. A doorway at the back leads to a warren of kitchens, one of which contains a trapdoor covering a rusted iron ladder leading down into darkness. The sound of a woman weeping echoes down from upstairs.

First Floor: A single room dominated by a huge table and an immense fireplace. Seven frayed ropes hang from the rafters, swinging lazily back and forth even when there is no breeze. White stone stairs lead up to the second floor.

• The ghost of Bianca, the maidservant, haunts this room, weeping endlessly as she tries to wash the bloodstained floorboards with her tears. Her labour is useless: scrub how she might, the stained timber remains as scarlet as ever. Her skin is pale and her neck is obviously broken. She clutches an elaborately embroidered handkerchief in her calloused hands.
• If questioned, Bianca responds only with incoherent torrents of self-reproach: 'They made me! I'm sorry! I'm so sorry! I loved her so much! But they all forced me to! Oh, if only I had been stronger! Oh, this is all, all, all my fault!' 
• Bianca has a knife hidden up her sleeve, and will fight to the death to avoid parting with her handkerchief, the one token she has left of Lucia's love. If she can be persuaded that giving the handkerchief to the PCs will help Lucia find peace, however, then she will hand it over, although not without kissing it several hundred times first.

Second Floor: Three bedrooms branch off a central landing. A narrow flight of stone stairs continues upwards.

Master Bedroom: This room belonged to Orazio and Lucia, and is still haunted by the ghost of Lord Orazio. Its walls are lined with bookcases, weighed down with ponderous legal and scholarly tomes, some of them of great value. From the open window, it is possible to smell (although not see) the sea. Behind a wooden screen, painted with images of sea birds, stands a huge white marble bath.

• Orazio's ghost paces around the room on an endless patrol, his grey old head swinging alarmingly from side to side on its broken neck. In his hand he clutches his grandfather's dagger, still stained with Lucia's blood. From time to time he mutters: 'Lucia! Lucia!' and 'Faithless! Faithless!' under his breath. 
• If he sees the PCs, Orazio will demand to know what they are doing in his house, and will ring the bell for the servants (who, obviously, do not come). He becomes agitated if anyone points out his unnatural condition, or that of the tower. If Lucia is mentioned, even obliquely, he accuses them of being her lovers and attacks in a frenzied rage. Any wounds he inflicts with his dagger, even the slightest scratch, will just keep bleeding and bleeding until proper medical attention is given or the victim dies.
• Orazio's power is this: if he gives a direct order to a single PC, they must save or obey it to the best of their ability. Orazio can only give orders that conform to his understanding of gentlemanly behaviour: 'leave my house' or 'restrain this trespasser' are fine, but 'murder your friends' or 'slit your own throat' are right out. Anyone whom he has wounded with his dagger receives no save against this ability.
• If the bath is filled with salt water (e.g. from the lake or the pit), then anyone bathing in it will regain half their lost hit points. Full immersion will also heal blindness caused by the serpent's venom or bleeding caused by Orazio's dagger. Its magic will function only once for each PC.

Second Bedroom: This room was occupied by Alberico, the doctor, and was the site of his illicit liaisons with the gardener, Giuliano, whose ghost still haunts the room. Its cluttered shelves and wardrobes are almost invisible beneath the masses of flowering rosebushes which grow across the walls, floor, and ceiling, filling the room with an overpowering floral scent, regardless of the time of day or year.

• Giuliano's ghost lurks unseen amidst the rose bushes, which grow through and out of his beautiful, pale body. He cannot speak for the roses that grow from his mouth. He hungers for warmth, and nourishment, and life.
• For every minute that PCs remain in the room, they must save or sink into a drowsy stupor, lulled by the scent of the roses. As they lie in this state, rose vines will stealthily curl around them and impale them with a hundred thorns, drawing off blood to feel Giuliano. The more blood he drinks, the more he will stir amidst the vines, making it easier for the PCs to spot him, and to see that he is clearly still too weak to break free from the roses that pin him to the walls. If attacked, he defends himself with clouds of soporific pollen, and with walls and waves of lashing thorns.
• If Giuliano drinks more than two gallons of blood in a single day, he becomes strong enough to break free. (This much blood loss would kill two ordinary people, but spread between six it would just leave them feeling woozy and weak. Alternatively the PCs could feed him an animal from the forest, or the hairy thing from the pit under the house.) He can also be freed by cutting through the roses that bind him using either Orazio's dagger or Ortensia's cleaver. (If severed with normal blades, they regrow as fast as they are cut.) 
• If freed, Giuliano will stagger upstairs to the Study, and seize Alberico in an urgent embrace. More rose-vines will erupt from both men's bodies, binding them tightly together, and soon there is nothing but a mass of roses to mark the place where they once stood. Cutting through them will reveal no trace of either man, and they will not reform the following midnight. With Giuliano gone, the roses in this room become normal flowers, and will promptly wither if out of season. 
• A trunk under the bed contains Alberico's medical supplies, including plenty of bandages (which will be useful if anyone has been cut with Orazio's dagger), and bottles of saline solution (which are handy for washing the eyes of anyone hit by the venom of the serpent).

Third Bedroom: This room was shared by the chaplain, Jacopo, and the artist, Giustino. It is easy to guess who slept where: one half of the room is hung with sombre colours, with a tiny shrine to a miserable-looking saint in one corner, while the other half is scattered with paints and half-finished clay models, with expensive clothes in extravagant fabrics flung heedlessly across the bed and over the backs of chairs. Giustino's clothes and Jacopo's holy icons could both be very valuable to the right buyer. Their ghosts are not here, haunting the chambers above.

• Hidden under the pillow of Jacopo's bed is a silk bag containing a stash of passionate love letters addressed to Lucia by Jacopo, interspersed by terrible (but obviously heartfelt) attempts at erotic poetry. Each page has been torn neatly in half.

Third Floor: This floor has the same layout as the one below, but instead of three bedrooms the central landing opens onto a library, a study, and a chapel. A set of spiral stairs, wound claustrophobically tight, twists upwards to the fourth floor.

Library: This room is full of bookshelves and cabinets of curiosities, packed with trinkets from far-off lands, some of them of considerable value. A writing desk sits by the window.

• One wall is dominated by a large painting of Lucia, signed by Giustino. It depicts her seated by an ornamental lake, surrounded by roses, with the White Tower itself clearly visible in the background. She holds an embroidered handkerchief - recognisably the same one used by Bianca - and looks very, very beautiful, if somewhat vacant. Anyone with an above-average Wisdom score will be able to tell at a glance that the painter was obviously in love with his subject.
• On the desk is an open book, a bestiary of strange creatures from many lands. It has been opened to a page describing 'syrens, wicked spirits of the ocean, beauteous of body but void of soul, whose songs draw men to madness and destruction.'
• In the locked drawer of the desk are legal papers drawn up by Orazio, petitioning a local (and now long-dead) magistrate for divorce from Lucia on the grounds of her 'infidelity and promiscuity', 'unnatural practises', and 'neglect of her marital duties'. The papers are complete, but have not been signed or sealed. 

Study: This room smells strongly of poppies. It is haunted by the ghost of Alberico, the doctor, who fusses endlessly with his books and potions as he tries, uselessly, to come up with an adequate diagnosis of Lucia's nature and his own bizarre condition. As he works he takes regular gulps from the bottle of laudanum that rests on the table, using his free hand to physically hold his head up by the hair as he does so to allow himself to swallow despite his broken neck.

• Alberico is extremely resistant to the idea that he is dead, and will come up with quite insanely convoluted 'rational medical explanations' to account for his situation. He will insist that he could leave this room if he wanted to, but that his work is much too urgent to wait. If confronted with irrefutable evidence that he is dead he will suffer a massive nervous breakdown, chug down the whole bottle of laudanum, and collapse in a narcotised stupor for 1d8 hours. When he wakes up he will carry on with his work as though nothing had happened.
• More rational than the other ghosts, Alberico will freely admit to having plotted to murder Lucia. 'Quite a disruptive influence, she was. Threw the whole household out of order. A thoroughly abnormal type - something wrong with her nerves, no doubt. Everyone agreed by the end. Desperate cases require desperate solutions!' His memory of the event itself is blurry, but he remembers hearing Lucia singing 'a song that sounded like the sea', and seeing Lord Orazio plunge his grandfather's dagger into her chest in a desperate attempt to shut her up. 
• Alberico's desk is covered in masses of case notes, documenting his fruitless attempts to diagnose Lucia's nature. He will happily allow the PCs to consult these, although he will not allow them to be removed. Anyone looking through the notes will notice that Alberico has idly sketched Giuliano's face dozens of times in the margins. Anyone who has seen Giuliano in the second bedroom will recognise the face as his, but if questioned Alberico will insist that the face is of 'no-one in particular. Just idle doodling, I'm afraid...'
• Alberico will violently resist any attempts to meddle with or remove his case notes, and if the PCs persist he will grab a large bottle from a shelf and smash it open, releasing a buzzing cloud of furious insects whose stings induce rapid swelling and unbelievable, crippling pain. They are hard to fight with normal weapons, but smoke (e.g. from the second-floor fireplace) or any kind of strong air current (e.g. the wind on the roof) will soon disperse them. 
• Alberico's power is this: during combat, he will look at a random PC each round, mutter a brief diagnosis of them based on their current behaviour (e.g. 'shouting too loudly - probably hysterical', or 'face looks flushed - probable heart condition'), and make a swift note in his pocket book. This diagnosis will then become the truth, causing those who fight against him to swiftly dissolve into a mass of physical and mental infirmities. (Note that Alberico can't use this power aggressively, by e.g. diagnosing someone with a fatal heart attack: he genuinely thinks he's just observing what's already there.) If Alberico is defeated, or his pocket-book is destroyed, these induced conditions disappear. 
• If Alberico is reunited with Giuliano (see Second Bedroom, above), the PCs will be free to read and take his notes at their leisure.

Chapel: This cold, severe-looking room is hung with icons depicting bleeding saints and martyrs, posed in various expressive attitudes of agony. The ghost of Father Jacopo, the chaplain, kneels in silent meditation before the altar. His bowed head makes his broken neck horribly obvious, making him look rather martyr-like himself. 

• Jacopo's power is this: if anyone enters the chapel, Jacopo rises and turns his stern gaze upon them. The intruder will instantly become overcome with feelings of hysterical shame and self-loathing, and will subject themselves to increasingly extravagant forms of self-harm until they are physically pulled from the room, while Jacopo watches silently with an expression of mingled pity and contempt. 
• If Jacopo is confronted with either the love letters from the third bedroom, or the erotic drawings of him from the studio, his composure disintegrates and his gaze loses all its power. He begins kicking up a storm of poltergeist activity, throwing the heavy bronze candlesticks around the room while howling about how Lucia bewitched him into vice and sin. 
• If Jacopo is defeated, anyone examining the altar will discover the true object of his veneration: a golden reliquary containing a nude drawing of Lucia, stolen from Giustino's studio. The reliquary is beautifully engraved with patterns of flowers and vine leaves, and would be of great value to any church with a relic worth putting in it. 

Fourth Floor: This wide-open, barely-furnished room was converted into Giustino's studio, on account of the brilliant light that shines in through its huge windows. It is littered with half-finished statues and paintings, and the walls are covered with layer upon layer of charcoal sketches drawn with a hasty, urgent hand. The older ones beneath are mostly of beautiful young men, but the newer sketches pinned on top of them are all of Lucia. A hidden folder in a locked drawer contains a sheaf of erotic sketches of Father Jacopo, obviously drawn from life. A flimsy-looking ladder leads up to a trapdoor on the roof.

• The ghost of Giustino haunts this room, labouring endlessly at a clay sculpture of Lucia. He begins work each day at dawn, periodically breaking off his sculpting to consult his sketches, until at midnight he looks his sculpture over, realises his failure, and tears it down with a howl of anguish. He starts again the following morning.
• If his work is interrupted, Giustino will become furious and order his unfinished statues to animate and attack. They are sad, clumsy, lumpen things, but there are quite a lot of them and they carry on fighting until they are smashed to pieces. 
• Giustino's power is this: whenever he looks at a person, the way that he sees them will become the truth of them for as long as his gaze remains fixed upon them. Giustino's gaze is not false, exactly, but it tends to simplify people almost to the point of caricature: so a strong woman would remain strong while he looked at her, but would become almost incapable of anything other than feats of strength. In game terms, whomever he is currently looking at keeps their highest ability score and halves all the rest until he looks away.

Roof: The wind blows strongly here, a continuous torrent of air that smells of salt and sounds like the roaring of the sea. PCs who don't tie themselves onto something risk being blown clean off the roof and falling sixty feet to the ground below. From up here the lake is clearly visible, sparkling like a clear blue jewel among the remains of what were once the tower's gardens.

Basement: This crumbling subterranean warren of storerooms and wine cellars is the hunting ground of the ghost of Ortensia, the cook. Quite the maddest of the ghosts, she roams the cellars with her cleaver in her hand, snarling to herself. 

• Upon seeing the PCs, Ortensia will mistake whichever of them has the highest Charisma score for Lucia (regardless of gender) and launch herself forwards to attack, howling a volley of misogynistic abuse - 'Whore! Bitch! Temptress! Slut!' - as she does so. 
• As she 'dies', she will stare up pitifully at the PC she has mistaken for Lucia, and use her last breath to whimper brokenly: 'Why? Why choose her? Why couldn't it have been me?'
• If the PC whom she has mistaken for Lucia shows her any kind of affection, she will throw her cleaver away and collapse into floods of helpless tears, apologising over and over again for her part in Lord Orazio's murder plan. Soon afterwards she will attempt to kill herself if not prevented.
• One of the wine cellars contains a small fortune in rare wines, although without Ortensia's help it will take a thorough search to reveal it.

Sub-Basement: Lord Orazio's grandfather, Giovanni, oversaw the construction of the White Tower and was buried down here, among its foundations. PCs who come down here will hear him tap-tap-tapping on the inside of his tomb with his bony fingers. If they dig him up, he will rear up in his ragged winding-sheet and begin clack-clack-clacking with his ghastly yellow jawbones. (Unlike the other inhabitants of the White Tower, Giovanni is very much a corpse, not a ghost, and he stays dead if destroyed.) By signs and gestures he will attempt to indicate his frustration with the current state of the tower, and his desire for its inhabitants to be put to rest. If asked how, he picks up a rock and scratches twelve words onto the wall: FREE THE GIRL FROM THE WOOD. FREE THE WOOD FROM THE GIRL. 

Giovanni is nothing but a literal bag of bones, and would be no use in a fight either as an enemy or an ally. If the PCs free Lucia after digging him up, however, then as he collapses back into death he uses his last conscious moment to ensure that he falls pointing to a particular stone in the wall. PCs who remove this stone will find a stash of antique gold coins buried behind it, hidden by Giovanni to be used in his family's hour of need. 

Under the Foundations: Beside Giovanni's grave is a deep, damp pit, descending down into the wet earth. It is inhabited by some awful scrambling creature with thin, hairy limbs and yellow gnashing teeth, which will come scrabbling from its hidden holes to cut ropes, douse lamps, and murder intruders. At the very bottom of the pit are three feet of salt water, a mass of hair and bones of indeterminate origin, and a rock on which someone with beautiful handwriting has scratched the words Still so very far above the sea. Hidden behind this rock is Lucia's wedding ring, which would bring quite a price if it was cleaned up a bit.

The Lake: It is surrounded on all sides by masses of dense undergrowth, making it very difficult to find unless the PCs have either worked out its position relative to the tower using the painting in the library, or seen it directly from the roof. Here Lucia stumbled, singing and bleeding and dying, after Orazio's attempted murder. Sea nymph that she was, she merged herself with the water of the lake, and gradually with the water table of the whole forest. The lake is obviously freshwater, fed by hidden subterranean springs, and yet it tastes as salty as the sea. 

Anyone who spends more than a few minutes by the lake will hear a woman's voice murmuring, softly: 'Give me back to myself'. 

To undo Lucia's literal and metaphorical murder, any five of the following objects must be thrown into the lake:

• Bianca's handkerchief.
• The painting from the library.
• The divorce papers from the library.
• Lord Orazio's bloodstained dagger.
• Alberico's case notes.
• The drawing from Jacopo's reliquary.
• Giustino's unfinished clay statue of Lucia.

When one object is thrown in, the water in the lake begins to churn.

When two objects are thrown in, the water in the lake takes on the colour of blood.

When three objects are thrown in, the outline of a woman can be glimpsed below the surface, although anyone diving down finds only stones and weeds.

When four objects are thrown in, Lucia's bleeding corpse can be seen lying at the bottom of the lake, very cold and very pale and very dead.

When five objects are thrown in, Lucia's eyes snap open and she rises, dripping and shuddering, to the surface.

The Rivals: If Bianca, Ortensia, Jacopo, Giustino, and/or Orazio are still 'alive' when Lucia rises from the water, they will instantly be aware of her resurrection and come rushing from the tower, screaming that she is theirs and theirs alone. If the PCs stand in their way, the ghosts will attack them furiously to get to Lucia: otherwise they will fight among each other until only one remains. Lucia will smile indulgently at her final 'suitor', and kiss them on the forehead, causing them to drop dead on the spot with a rapturous expression on their face. Then the serpent slithers over and eats them.

Unbroken Wings: Once the suitors are dead, Lucia will call the serpent to her, and merge with it, becoming a vast, undulating sea snake with a woman's face. As she does so, her necklace and bracelets will snap and fall from her body. Her coral-red lips open, pouring forth a song that fills the forest with the sounds of the sea. Then she dives down into the lake and is never seen again.

The left bracelet bears a green jewel. Anyone who wears it can breath water as though it was air.

The right bracelet bears a blue jewel. Anyone who wears it can drink salt water as though it was fresh.

The necklace bears a white jewel. Anyone who wears it will never be harmed by any sea creature except in self defence.

Aftermath: With Lucia gone, the White Tower begins to crumble. Its unquiet ghosts dissipate. Decades catch up with it in a matter of months. Within a year it is nothing but a heap of tumbled stones.

Once word spreads that the forests are no longer haunted, a distant relative of Lord Orazio will ride in and assert her ownership of the whole area. She visits the site of the tower, and takes a strange liking to the lake beside the ruins. Soon afterwards, she adopts a rose and serpent as the symbol of her house.

For years afterwards, fisher-folk along the coast claim to sometimes hear a woman's voice singing over the waters, especially on the mornings after storms. But Lucia does not return. 

Condensation in Action 8: Mummy's Mask

Welcome back for another installment of Condensation in Action, where I take hopelessly bloated Pathfinder adventure paths and try to turn them into something lean and open enough to actually use. Like all adventure paths, Mummy's Mask is a 600-page monstrosity of filler dungeons, blatant railroading, incoherent plotting, and pointless bloat. Let's rip it open and mine out the good stuff.

Previous Condensation in Action posts can be found here:

Kingmaker
Rise of the Runelords
Curse of the Crimson Throne
Council of Thieves
Cults of the Sundered Kingdoms
Iron Gods
Skull and Shackles

Backstory is a Necessary Evil: Thousands of years ago, Fantasy Egypt was ruled by an evil pharaoh called Hakotep. Hakotep had heard of a magical flying city far to the south, and he both feared and coveted the power of its creators. He worked thousands of his people to death constructing great geomatic earthworks that, if activated, would be capable of pulling the flying city to the ground: then, confident that he was safe from retaliation, he sent his agents to abduct some sky wizards from the flying city and put them to work building him a giant flying pyramid.

Hakotep died just after the pyramid was finished, and as soon as he was safely dead his people - who by this point were pretty sick of being worked to death building insane magical vanity projects - rose up in revolt against his dynasty. His mummified body was desecrated by rebel priests, who trapped his ib (higher soul) and ka (vital spark) within his preserved heart and his funerary mask, respectively, in order to bar him from the afterlife. But the rest of his preserved corpse - which still contained his ba, or personality - was stolen by loyalists and carried back inside his pyramid, which they then launched skyward. The Flying Pyramid of the Sky Pharaoh has been hovering in geosynchronous orbit over Fantasy Egypt ever since.

Feeling rather embarrassed by the whole affair, his successors ordered his name to be struck from the records, and today almost no-one knows that Hakotep even existed. Unfortunately for everyone, however, a band of scholar-conspirators recently worked out from discrepancies in the old king-lists and chronologies that the legendary 'Sky Pharaoh' must have been real after all, and decided to try to claim the power of his Flying Pyramid for themselves. Their leader eventually located the preserved heart of Hakotep beneath the ruined tower of an ancient wizard... and was promptly possessed by his ib, which ate her mind, stole her identity, and took over her organisation. Now calling themselves the Cult of the Forgotten Pharaoh, they seek to reunite Hakotep's body, heart, and mask, allowing the Sky Pharaoh to be resurrected and reign over the land once more from his flying pyramid of death...

Hakotep.

Wati: This ancient city is where the adventure begins. Centuries ago, it was abandoned after being ravaged by a magical plague of such virulence that, when settlers eventually returned to the region, they built a wall around the ruins of the old city in order to avoid disturbing whatever ancient contagions might lie within. Today, modern Wati is a bustling city, three times the size of its ancient counterpart: but the walls still stand, surrounding the crumbling ruins of the Old City. The locals regard the place as taboo, but adventurers hoping to unearth valuable relics within the ruins can purchase exploration licenses from the local authorities, which permit passage through the gates to the Old City. However, would-be treasure-seekers must beware the ancient undead who lurk there, still furious at being left to rot without their proper funerary rites all those centuries ago.

Nebta-Khufre: This ambitious young necromancer was raised by his grandmother, Neferekhu, a seeress plagued by prophetic dreams. In her last years she was haunted by visions of a terrible sky-king and a golden mask, and the specific details in her visions convinced Nebta-Khufre that an object of great power was hidden within the Old City of Wati. When she died before he found it, he reanimated her head and took to carrying it around with him in a golden bird-cage, so that she could continue prophesying to him. Eventually, guided by the visions described by his grandmother's animated skull, he located the mask of Hakotep, with which he hopes to transform himself into the all-conquering sky-king whom she foretold. The adventure begins when he finally works out how to activate it.

The Hook: The PCs are in Wati when Nebta-Khufre activates the Mask of Hakotep, triggering a zombie outbreak which devastates the city. After they hopefully survive (and perhaps help to contain) the resulting chaos, the ravaged city authorities beg them to investigate who or what is responsible for all this horror, promising lavish cash rewards and lifetime looting rights in the Old City if the threat can be identified and destroyed.

Night of the Living Dead: On the night when Nebta-Khufre activates the mask, a pulse of energy ripples across Wati, animating the ka or vital spark within every human corpse in the city. The consequences of this will include the following:

• Zombie mobs clawing their way out of their graves and roaming the city streets, mindlessly devouring the living.
• In the city market, the severed and preserved hands of thieves are hung up from a central pillar as a warning to criminals. When the mask is activated, these hands will tear themselves free. The freshest ones, which still retain some instinctual memory of life, will set off across the city to find the people who bore witness against them and strangle them to death, while the older hands simply roam the market in a scuttling swarm, leaping up to throttle anyone who approaches.
• A local antiques dealer recently acquired a real prize: the intact sarcophagus of an ancient noblewoman, complete with her mummified corpse. Naturally, he's halfway through selling the mummy and sarcophagus as a job lot at auction when the mask is activated, causing her to lurch out of her casket and start clobbering people to death. 
• Magistrate Sotenre, a long-dead judge infamous for passing out sentences of blinding upon the criminals tried in his court, arises from the dead and stumbles to his old courthouse. Still driven by his passion for eneucleation even after death, he establishes instinctive psychic control over a gang of skeleton 'bailiffs' and sends them out to start dragging random people into his court, where Sotenre presides over bizarre trials before inevitably sentencing them to be blinded - a sentence that often proves fatal, due to the clumsiness of his minions. The streets outside his courthouse soon fill with eyeless corpses and wailing, blinded victims. Sotenre is quite mad, but it's very important to him to maintain at least a semblance of legal procedure, so PCs entering his courtroom should be able to stall him for quite a long time by quoting random precedents and shouting 'objection!' a lot. 
• A gang of Silver Chain grave robbers (see below) are transporting a cartload of corpses through the city, concealed under a fake cargo of cloth, on their way to a laboratory where the corpses will be wrapped and embalmed prior to their sale as 'genuine ancient mummies'. As the mask is activated the corpses start thrashing around inside the cart, ultimately breaking out of their boxes and attacking anyone nearby while the driver flees in panic.
• The ancient dead of the Old City arise en masse and besiege the gates to the New City, trying to smash their way through. Many of the gate guards desert their posts: the ones that remain are rallied together under the leadership of a young priestess, Bal Themm, who pleads with anyone who approaches to fight their way through the streets to her temple and return with all the holy symbols and holy water they can carry.
• A sorceress named Sehhosep Naahn is mournfully preparing the corpse of her husband for burial when the mask activates and he 'returns to life'. Convinced that her prayers have been answered, she ties a rope around him and starts dragging his zombified corpse through the streets towards her workshop, where she hopes to use her magic to restore his mind, too. She makes very slow progress, forcing her to blast the zombies that attack her along the way. Barricaded within their houses, the locals swiftly conclude that this obviously-magical woman dragging a zombie on a rope is to blame for the whole situation, and start forming hurried plans for how best to ambush and lynch her.

For maximum impact, try to arrange things so that the PCs are either in the marketplace, at the sarcophagus auction, or close to Sotenre's courthouse when the outbreak begins. Note that the animation of the dead is a one-off event: anyone who dies after the pulse will not rise as undead.

Magistrate Sotenre. Tough on eyes, tough on the causes of eyes.

Dawn of the Dead: The night of the initial outbreak is likely to be one of total chaos, with the PCs stumbling around the city being attacked by zombies, chased by severed hands, pursued by the mummy, 'arrested' by skeleton bailiffs, etc. By dawn some level of order will have been restored: the zombies aren't very bright, so once the people of Wati work out what is going on they will mostly be able to protect themselves by simply barricading themselves inside their houses and dropping heavy things on the undead outside. The gates of the Old City remain under siege, however, and Sotenre's bailiffs represent a much more organised and intelligent threat. Isolated bands of zombies will continue to thump around in basements, back alleys, and abandoned buildings for days to come.

By mid-morning the city authorities will issue a desperate plea for help, and if the PCs have in any way distinguished themselves - by killing the mummy, for example, or dealing with Sotenre, or defusing the situation with Sehhosep, or bringing help to Bal Themm - then they will be particularly keen to obtain their assistance. Their first priority will be to secure the gates of the Old City, and their second will be to find out what has caused the dead to rise. Many will suspect (incorrectly) that the answer has something to do with the scattered reports they have received for years about a 'voice in the darkness' sometimes heard in the city streets by night, trying to lure people into the Old City, and will suggest that the PCs begin their search there. Others suggest that they investigate sporadic reports of people transforming into ghouls in the slums of the city - investigations which will ultimately lead them to the Silver Chain.

The Silver Chain: This criminal gang are based in an old brickworks in Wati, which they use as a base for smuggling, grave robbing, and trading in fake and/or stolen antiquities. They maintain a network of secret tunnels that extend under the walls of the Old City, allowing them to creep in and out unnoticed by either the city authorities or the undead currently besieging the gates. They also distribute the addictive drugs created by Bheg (see below) in the Ghoul Market of the Old City, which are brought to them through the tunnels by his ghoul minions. Repeat customers who start turning into ghouls are bundled off through the tunnels in the opposite direction.

Not long ago, the Silver Chain were taken over by the Cult of the Forgotten Pharaoh, who set them to work searching the Old City for Hakotep's mask (although Nebta-Khufre got there first). Their new leader, Meret-Hetef, is swift to realise that the zombie outbreak means that someone has beaten them to finding the mask, and as soon as the initial danger has subsided she will send her men out to try to find who is responsible. As a result, PCs investigating the same thing are soon likely to cross paths with the Silver Chain. They may also learn of them by investigating the ghoul transformations, or by asking around about alternative ways into the Old City, or by trying to find out who was transporting a secret cartload of preserved corpses through Wati by night, or just by investigating why a supposedly semi-derelict brickworks by the Old City walls was defended so furiously during the outbreak.

The gang's senior leadership are all cultists, now, but most of the rank-and-file aren't keen on their change of direction, and are kept in line only by their fear of the cult's magic. PCs who bribe, threaten, or capture the gang's members will soon learn about the cult's take-over, and its quest for the Mask of Hakotep. Meret-Hetef will happily assist the PCs in finding and fighting Nebta-Khufre as long as they promise to hand over the mask afterwards: alternatively, the PCs may help the gang's street toughs launch a coup against the cultists and restore the power of the old guard. If befriended, the gang can guide them through the tunnels to the Old City, and put them in touch with Bheg in the Ghoul Market.

All members of the gang know that the cult is based somewhere in the desert, but they're not sure exactly where. If the PCs manage to capture or interrogate one of the cultists then they can learn that rest of the cult is currently exploring an ancient monument called The Faceless Sphinx (see below) deep in the remotest part of the desert. The cultists will talk a good game about how the Sky Pharaoh will be coming any day now to rule the world from his flying death pyramid, but they're pretty new to all this - the whole cult is only a few months old, after all - and will crack quickly once any real pressure is applied.

Old Wati: Once PCs have travelled over (or under) its walls, the Old City is actually less dangerous than one might expect, as the vast majority of its undead are currently besieging the gates of Wati. There are four significant locations here: the temple, the lair of Imanish, the Ghoul Market, and the observatory.

The temple: This was the hiding place of the funerary mask of Hakotep, until it was stolen by Nebta-Khufre (see above). The temple is currently swarming with mindless undead left behind by Nebta-Khufre to cover his tracks, but the very concentration of these creatures at this site should signal to alert PCs that there is something unusual about this particular building. PCs who explore the temple will find ample evidence that it has been recently explored and looted, including a broken-open secret chamber which clearly once held something very valuable and very secret. The walls of this now-empty secret chamber are covered in hieroglyphics warning intruders to leave its contents intact, lest 'the Forgotten Pharaoh' devour their souls.

The lair: Imanish is a wicked spirit who takes the form of a flying head, with six ram's horns framing a bestial face. He is the 'voice in the dark' that concerns the city's rulers: for many years he has been in the habit of flying over the walls of the Old City by night, concealed by illusions, and whispering plausible lies to anyone he finds walking the city's streets after dark, using offers of gold, sex, or secrets to tempt them back to his lair in the ruins. He has nothing to do with the zombie outbreak, although he does find it pretty funny. PCs can find his lair by talking to people who were tempted by his whispers but turned back at the last minute, or just by wandering around the ruins of Old Wati, which aren't really all that big.

Imanish holds court in a ruined house, built around a central dining room. On the ancient table sit polished human skulls on tarnished silver plates, taken from its previous victims: whenever anyone enters the room, these skulls fly up and attack intruders in a clacking, biting swarm under Imanish's command. Imanish creates these skulls by means of a cursed headband, which he will try to trick or force his victims to wear before killing them. If someone is wearing the headband when they die, then at the moment of their death their head will tear free from their body and float off to the table to join the others under Imanish's command.

The Ghoul Market: In what was once the marketplace of Old Wati, a ghast alchemist named Bheg has set up a laboratory, manufacturing drugs made from the flesh of ancient mummies. The drug has sedative and curative properties, but is addictive, and long-term use eventually turns users into ghouls. A band of these unfortunate addicts now serve as Bheg's guards, minions, and go-betweens, giving the market its name. Distribution to the city beyond is handled by the Silver Chain. (See above.)

Most of Bheg's ghouls are feral and ravenous, but Bheg himself is pretty reasonable, and is not keen on seeing his primary drug market reduced to a depopulated graveyard. He can tell PCs that he and his ghouls have spotted a number of strange men in golden masks roaming the ruins in the days leading up to the outbreak. Most of these are sightings of Forgotten Pharaoh cultists from the Silver Chain, combing the ruins looking for the mask while wearing their ritual regalia, but if his sightings are cross-referenced with the movements of the Silver Chain - either revealed willingly by allies within the gang, or extracted from them via interrogation - then one sighting, of a man entering a ruined observatory, remains unaccounted for. This was Nebta-Khufre, wearing the Mask of Hakotep, on his way to activate it.

The observatory: PCs can find this building by following Bheg's tip, or by noticing the amount of unusual zombie activity within. This is Nebta-Khufre's hideout, where he is using his necromantic powers to turn the mindless undead raised by the mask into his personal army, one zombie at a time. He'll have about a dozen zombies under his command for each day that has passed since the outbreak, plus the undead head of his seeress grandmother, Neferekhu, which he keeps in a golden birdcage guarded by skeleton warriors. Neferekhu deeply resents being kept in this horrible half-life, and will turn against him in an instant, revealing his plans, routines, and the passwords of his magical defences, if the PCs promise to let her truly die rather than keeping her around as portable prophecy generator.

The Mask of Hakotep: This enchanted mask grants the wearer limited power to raise and control undead. The 'ka pulse' effect used by Nebta-Khufre exhausted its power reserves, but a patient PC willing to spend several years waiting for it to recharge could use it to stage a local zombie apocalypse of their own. The Cult of the Forgotten Pharaoh will do anything to obtain it.

The Mask of Hakotep.

The Great Library of Tephu: The town of Tephu is a short way downriver from Wati, and is famous for its ancient library. PCs who want to learn more about Hakotep will be advised to check there first.

Any individual of good social standing can gain access to the main library for the payment of a suitable fee, but research there turns up nothing about Hakotep. In fact, it turns up suspiciously little, to the point where scholarly PCs are likely to suspect that all relevant documents have been deliberately suppressed. There is an Inner Library, which can be accessed only by breaking in, by lavishly bribing the librarians, or by obtaining a letter of recommendation from the governor of Tephu, Muminofrah, a lascivious woman whose head is easily turned by a pretty face and a muscular back. Even in the inner library, however, information about Hakotep is conspicuous by its absence.

In fact, the library does house some relevant information, but in a third collection: the secret 'Dark Depository', hidden at the bottom of a deep shaft and guarded by a bone golem with a crocodile skull for a head. This is where the librarians hide all the materials they wish to suppress, but cannot bear to destroy. Its walls are lined with sarcophagi containing the remains of scholars who trespassed upon its secrets, and were punished by being embalmed alive. Rumours about the place abound among the library staff, but getting in will require the PCs to either persuade the head librarian of the necessity of their work, or getting Muminofrah very sweet on them. Either way, they will probably have to fight the bone golem, which continues to murderously enforce all kinds of obscure regulations laid down by some long-dead archivist or other.

Diligent research in the Dark Depository will reveal the following:

• Hakotep the Sky Pharaoh was a real historical figure, and not just a folktale as generally supposed, and he really did build a flying pyramid. Information on him is scarce because his name was stricken from the histories and king-lists after his death.
• Hakotep's pyramid was said to contain a king's ransom in gold and jewels. It was last seen flying skyward, and apparently never came down again.
• He was responsible for building the infamous Bone Trenches, a mysterious network of haunted earthworks whose origins have long puzzled scholars. Apparently they were meant to serve as some kind of magical weapon.
• His spirit was divided between his body (lost inside his flying pyramid), his mask (hidden in Wati), and his heart (hidden beneath an ancient spire - once the home of a powerful wizard, but now nothing more than a pile of tumbled stones).
• Both his pyramid and the Bone Trenches were designed by an architect named Chisisek, who was buried deep in the desert, beneath a great stone sphinx without a face that Hakotep also commissioned for some reason. Chisisek was said to have taken all kinds of secrets with him to his grave, and his tomb has never been discovered since.

The Spire: Thorough PCs may wish to check the spire where the cult found Hakotep's heart. Until recently there was a proper dungeon down here - ancient deathtraps, undead guardians, the works - but the cult cleared the place out, and now nothing remains except some recent excavations and shallow graves to show that the cult has got here first.

The Faceless Sphinx: This long-forgotten monument lies deep in the desert, in a region known as the Parched Dunes. Hakotep ordered it to be built for his wife, Neferuset, in honour of the monstrous gods she revered. Beneath it extend a vast network of crumbling tunnels, which presumably served some kind of useful purpose several thousand years ago. For most of the last century it has served as the home of a band of maftets, desert-dwelling hybrid creatures with the bodies of men, the legs of lions, and the wings of hawks, who turned the sphinx into a shrine to their ancient monster-goddess. More recently, it was found by the Cult of the Forgotten Pharaoh, who hope to claim it as their base of operations and to plunder it for information relating to the life and works of Hakotep. The cultists and the maftets have been fighting for control of the tunnels beneath the sphinx ever since.

A Maftet.

The Parched Dunes: The deserts around the sphinx are plagued by sand krakens and gnoll slavers, and consequently avoided by just about everyone. They contain four significant locations, as follows:

• A 15' tall automaton built out of corroded bronze, coeval with the sphinx itself, protruding halfway from a sand dune. Close examination will reveal a hatch on its back, which leads to a cockpit full of pedals and levers - but none of them do anything, because its engine is missing. (It's in the lair of the efreet - see below.) If its engine was reinstalled, it would rise once more into life, crackling with magical electricity and ready to be piloted. It's too big to fit into the tunnels within the Sphinx, but would be a major asset to any fight outside it.
• A wide expanse of deserts full of carefully-arranged piles of rocks. This is a zen garden maintained by an obsessive-compulsive blue dragon, who roams the area looking for stones of just the right size and shape to be balanced on top of other stones. Anyone intruding within the 'garden' will incur his wrath, but he will try very very hard to kill them without disturbing or damaging the stones in any way. His lair (and his hoard) are hidden in a sand-choked cave nearby.
• A fortified encampment of maftets displaced from the Sphinx, which has been their ancestral home for generations. They will tell anyone willing to listen how they were cruelly driven into the desert by ruthless humans wearing golden masks, and will beg the PCs for assistance. (They'll keep very quiet about being monster-goddess-cultists themselves.) They know of secret entrances into the tunnels beneath the sphinx, which they use to launch guerrilla raids against the cult, but are increasingly coming to despair of defeating them as long as they command the loyalty of their scorpion-man mercenaries. (See below.)
• A ruined temple, now the lair of a fearsome efreet. Amidst the various rusted treasures heaped up in the efreet's treasury is the magical engine of the bronze automaton, which the efreet has just been using as a source of electricity.

Beneath the Sphinx: The tunnels within and beneath the Faceless Sphinx are now the stronghold of the Cult of the Forgotten Pharaoh, although the hard work of driving out the maftets has mostly been done by a company of scorpion-man mercenaries hired by the cult before they moved in. Now the cultists painstakingly comb through the ruins, looking for the ancient secrets of Hakotep, while the scorpion-men keep an eye out for maftet raiders. The tunnels are vast and half-collapsed, and the cult is not even close to mapping them all, let alone searching and excavating them.

The scorpion-men are professionals, and believe in honouring their contracts: after all, their reputation is at stake. Ultimately, however, they're here for the money, not because they actually care about resurrecting Hakotep. They are willing to fight for the cultists, but have no intention of dying for them, and will abandon the cult if someone makes them a better offer.

The cultists themselves were mostly scholars and treasure-hunters until a few months ago. Their only real fighter, a man named Rathos, got hit by some awful curses while looting one of the shrines beneath the Sphinx: he's now a warped monster with stone arms and the head of a crocodile, who flings himself into battle in the hope of ending his horrible, agonised existence. The mind of their leader, a sorceress named Serethet, has been overwhelmed by the ib of Hakotep: she now wears a golden mask engraved with Hakotep's bearded face, and insists on being referred to as The Forgotten Pharaoh. Hakotep's preserved heart has imbued Serethet with a lot of magical energy, and it's really only her power that holds the cult together. Any PC who takes the heart will find the deathless will of Hakotep rapidly overwhelming their own, and even the most strong-willed of PCs is unlikely to be able to carry it for more than a few days before becoming its slave rather than its master.

Rathos.

Many parts of the complex were turned into shrines by the maftets during their time here, and the cultists avoid these when possible. One such shrine is guarded by the animated corpse of a giant mummified crocodile. Another contains ancient undead horrors slumbering within sarcophagi, who burst out and attack anyone who gets too close: the cultists figured this out after the first one, and will try their best not to awaken any more, but anyone who wants to create a lot of indiscriminate chaos within the complex would just have to run past each sarcophagus and then out again. These undead are, in turn, powered by the unholy life-force of an even more ancient zombie queen bricked up in the walls. If all of them are destroyed then all her energy will return to her, and she'll kick down the wall and start murdering everything in sight.

In the extreme depths of the tunnels lies the tomb of Chisisek. The maftets know perfectly well where his tomb is, and would be willing to reveal it to the PCs in exchange for their aid against the cultists. The Cult currently don't know where it is, but if they remain in possession of the Sphinx then they'll find it eventually, and Serethet will start interrogating his ghost. His grave contains a wealth of ancient papyri describing the construction of the Bone Trenches, including instructions on how to activate its mechanism, and plans for the Sky Pyramid, including enough information on its original position to allow PCs to 'aim' the power of the Bone Trenches at it once they have gained control of the mechanism.

Setheret.

The Bone Trenches: An immense network of ancient trenches dug into the earth, arranged so as to spell out enormous hieroglyphs when seen from above. They're in the desert, but not nearly as deep as the Faceless Sphinx, so their rough location is pretty well known. However, they're also well-known to be protected by horrible monsters, so most people leave them well alone. There's been some scholarly speculation about who could have built them, and why, but most people who go in for a closer look end up getting eaten by Dusk-Taker (see below).

When the trenches were built, dozens of air elementals were bound into obelisks within them. When activated, the collective power of these elementals would have been sufficient to drag down to earth whatever the great mechanism at the heart of the trenches was pointed at, up to and including a flying city. Today, many of the obelisks lie in rubble, and the system is operating at far below full power - but if the mechanism was turned on and pointed in the right direction, it still has enough energy to drag Hakotep's Sky Pyramid down to earth. The Cult of the Forgotten Pharaoh are counting on this as their means of recovering Hakotep's body, although they don't currently know how to activate the mechanism. (This is why they're searching for Chisisek's tomb beneath the Faceless Sphinx - see above.) 

Hakotep had these trenches built in a hurry, driven by terror of the wizards of the flying city. Thousands of slave labourers were worked to death during their construction, and were buried wherever they fell: today their ancient bones litter the trenches, protruding from their shallow graves. The combination of thousands of angry ghosts haunting the trenches with dozens of half-bound elementals radiating magic into the air and soil has given rise to weird composite monsters that the cult call 'ossumentals': raging animated bone-storms that crash, howling, along the trenches, driven by a mixture of elemental energy and ancient grief. The continuous motion of these ossumentals endlessly sweeps the trenches, thus preventing them from being covered by the desert sands that would otherwise have choked them thousands of years ago. 

An ossumental.

As if the ossumentals weren't enough, the trenches are also protected by Hakotep's unaging pet roc, Dusk-Taker, which still waits patiently for its master to return. As its name implies, the bird prefers to attack at dusk, swooping out of the sky to seize and devour anyone who comes too close to the trenches. However, if anyone approaches bearing Hakotep's heart (and thus possessed by his ib), or wearing his mask (and thus radiating his ka), it will leave them alone, confused by the appearance of someone who apparently both is and is not its long-absent master. 

The Mechanism: Buried beneath the heart of the trenches is the command centre, which houses the ancient mechanisms used to aim and 'fire' their collective power. The building has been sealed since the death of Hakotep, and is still guarded by animated statues, though anyone possessed by Hakotep's ib will know the command words to make these stand down. Without the notes from Chisisek's tomb, it would take months of patient study by a team of experts to work out how to activate this mechanism.

Besides killer statues and rusting machines, the command centre also contains a vault packed with small sealed jars that, if opened, each contain an odd-looking preserved insect floating in fluid. These 'insects' are, in fact, magically preserved thoughts pulled from the minds of Hakotep's subjects, which he stored here in case he needed them later: some contain moments of insight or understanding, while other house experiences of fear and trauma. Eating a bunch of the former will grant great wisdom and understanding, possibly allowing the working of the mechanism to be intuited in minutes rather than months. Eating lots of the latter will send you mad with horror. Whatever cataloging system once organised them was lost millennia ago. 

There is also an animated mummified spinosaurus down here. Because fuck you, that's why.

The Sky Pyramid: Hakotep's pyramid has been floating in orbit for thousands of years: a vast mass of weathered stone bristling with black iron rods that arc and crackle with electricity. It's very high up, making it effectively unreachable by any but the strongest flyers, but the Bone Trenches will be able to pull it down if aimed in the right direction. When it lands, its sheer weight is so great that it sinks several feet into the earth. 

Unlike most pyramids, which were built as tombs, Hakotep always intended his pyramid to be more of a flying death fortress. The loyalists who launched it into orbit mostly died of intense cold shortly afterwards, but enough of Hakotep's minions have survived intact to make the pyramid intensely dangerous to intruders. These include the following:

• Bound lightning elementals. These mostly exist to power the lightning rods outside the pyramid, but in some places they have come somewhat loose from their magical moorings and now roam the halls.
• Keshenepek, a horrible fish demon whom Hakotep summoned to act as his royal admiral. He's been stuck inside a frozen pool of water for thousands of years and is extremely eager to take out his accumulated frustrations on anyone who comes within range of his harpoon.
• An arena containing dormant brass golems and bone golems, which will creak to life to attack anyone who sets foot within.
• The tormented ghost of Princess Nailah, who was executed for attempting to depose Hakotep in a coup, and her six drowned handmaidens. She will attack anyone entering her chamber, but if the PCs manage to communicate with her then she will do everything she can to help them in destroying Hakotep and his legacy. She cannot leave her burial chamber, but the dripping, waterlogged corpses of her murdered handmaidens can.
• The spirit of General Tarawet, the Hakotep loyalist who dragged her master's desecrated corpse into his throne room and activated the pyramid before freezing to death. Her ghost still roams the halls in her phantom chariot pulled by spectral steeds, attacking all who defy her beloved pharaoh. 
• The undead body of Hakotep's wife, Queen Neferuset. In life she was a cultist of dark gods, and in death she has become something hideous and strange, crawling along the ceilings as she creeps from room to room. She has all sorts of horrible magic, and if killed she simply dissolves into a miasmic mist and starts reforming inside her canoptic jars. Only if the jars are destroyed can she be truly defeated.
• The awful sorceress Kentekra, whose body is composed of thousands of skittering scarabs.
• Rank upon rank of skeletons, mummies, and animated statues, still waiting for deployment orders that never came. They'll defend themselves if attacked directly, but will not otherwise act unless ordered to do so by the risen Hakotep.

Hakotep's Throne Room: The hallway leading to this room is decorated with images of people abasing themselves before Hakotep, or offering him great treasures. It is enchanted with spells that strike down all who approach with unbearable agony, unless they are holding out an item of great value as though in tribute, or crawling forwards on their hands and knees. The room itself is defended by a fearsome mummified sphinx. If General Tarawet has not been defeated already, then this is where she will make her last stand.

Hakotep's mummified corpse is still slumped on his golden throne, with an obvious hole where his heart should be. If his heart is returned, then his personality is reunited with his will and he essentially becomes an awesomely powerful ghost tethered to a vulnerable and inanimate body. If his mask is returned, then his personality is reunited with his vital spark and he becomes a raging undead powerhouse, crashing around the pyramid beating people to death with his ceremonial flail. If his heart and his mask are returned then he is restored to full unlife, sends out his minions to smash the mechanism keeping his pyramid earthbound, and flies off to start retaking his kingdom. 

Behind Hakotep's throne room lies his treasury, which contains enough gold, jewels, and ancient artifacts to make all the PCs very, very rich.

If the PCs do nothing: 

• Five days after the ka pulse: The Silver Chain find Nebta-Khufre, assassinate him with the aid of Bheg, and take the Mask of Hakotep. The next day, Meret-Hetef will leave Wati with the mask, heading for the Faceless Sphinx.
• Two weeks after the ka pulse: Meret-Hetef hands the mask over to Serethet, boosting her power and allowing her to finally drive the maftets from the tunnels beneath the Sphinx.
• Five weeks after the ka pulse: Serethet finally finds the tomb of Chisisek.
• Nine weeks after the ka pulse: Serethet leads the Cult into the Bone Trenches. Most of them die horribly, but she manages to activate the mechanism and call down the sky pyramid. Horribly wounded, she crawls inside, only to die a short way beyond the main entrance. 
• Ten weeks after the ka pulse: Queen Neferuset finds Serethet's body, and carries the heart and mask back to her husband's corpse. Hakotep rises from the dead. The Reign of the Sky Pharaoh begins again.