City of Spires part 3: Crungon Walo Wide

'The Ruin' is a fragmentary Old English poem in the Exeter Book, written by an unknown Saxon poet contemplating the ruins of a Roman city. Fittingly enough, 'The Ruin' has itself been ruined, its pages partly destroyed by some ancient fire. But what remains is pretty powerful stuff.

At the start of the pandemic, as the death tolls soared and the lockdowns began, two lines from 'The Ruin' became absolutely lodged in my head.

Crungon walo wide, cwoman woldagas

swylt eall fornom secgrofa wera

[Slaughter ranged widely, plague days came,

Death took all the brave men away.]

The subject matter is bleak, but the verse is wonderful. (Read the first line out loud, slowly. Notice the way the first three words reach out and fall back like dying men, and the way the word 'woldagas' looms up suddenly, like Death on his pale horse rising up over the horizon.) It's an excellent early example of the 'aesthetics of ruin' I described here, mingling awe at the achievements of the ancients with sorrow at the obviously catastrophic nature of their fall. As the year has gone on, it's also become a bit of a touchstone for me in relation to the 'City of Spires' campaign.

In a response to my 'aesthetics of ruin' post, Arnold K described 'Starfighter Samwise' as 'the ruiniest thing I've ever written'. Well, City of Spires is the ruiniest thing I've ever run. It's set in a ruined city built on top of another ruined city. The population is a remnant of a remnant. The trade routes are fading ruts in the desert. The priests are all dead and the local religion consists of things that people vaguely remember hearing about in sermons from their childhood. The clockwork machines are rusting and broken. The irrigation networks have collapsed from lack of maintenance and the wells are choked with sand. There are very few real villains: just a whole lot of badly damaged people groping their way through the wreckage of their lives, with figures who initially seem terrifying repeatedly turning out to be pitiable upon closer examination. If ATWC is about evil, then City of Spires has mostly ended up being about loss. 

(One of the most effective moments in the campaign so far came with the PCs barricaded inside a ruined house, while the Weeping Lady, a blind, flying monster who haunted the city by night, scratched and clawed at the timbers. As she scratched, she kept calling out in some ancient tongue, and at last the group's scholar was able to translate her words: 'Who's there? Is anyone there? What's happening? What's happened to me?' The party's shift from seeing her as a terrible threat to just a poor, maimed, lost thing hiding in the night was very gratifying to see, even if they remain rightly wary of her capacity for extreme and indiscriminate violence.) 

As well as giving the campaign a consistent aesthetic register - rust, ash, tarnished metal, rags, rubble, malnutrition, sand - the ruination of the setting has made it much easier to work with, actual-play-wise. In true post-apocalyptic style, the armed forces of the various factions are closer to street gangs than armies. The clockwork machines are all damaged and malfunctioning. No-one has much in the way of magic, or technology, or resources, or control over anything outside their own respective patches of turf. Everything is so smashed and broken that even a handful of opportunistic lunatics like the PCs are regularly able to make a real difference. 

It's also made the hexcrawl elements I mentioned in my last post much easier to run. In a setting where everyone is just barely scraping by at the bottom of the pyramid of human needs, strengths and weaknesses tend to be obvious, and the objectives of each faction are usually of an extremely straightforward and easily legible kind. We need food. We need protection. We need to destroy our rivals. We have a field. We have a castle. We have a well. Everything is stripped down to its most elemental forms, which makes it much easier for the PCs to interact with them. Complexity can be reserved for those rare groups and individuals who have managed to drag themselves a few rungs up above the daily struggle for bare survival. 

Crungon walo wide, cwoman woldagas / swylt eall fornom secgrofa wera. If you want to make a setting easier to game in, hit it with a dose of the old crungon. Take all the brave men away. Turn your PCs loose in the wreckage. The setting's loss may well turn out to be the campaign's gain. 

City of Spires bonus post: Naked Spiderman and the Crab Balloon

We played another session of City of Spires last night. Various things happened - barge sabotage, crop burning, resume faking, Crime Tribe diplomacy, the usual - but one incident in particular is going to stay with me forever. The incident in question was that of Naked Spiderman and the Crab Balloon. 

A Crab Balloon. Please don't google 'Naked Spiderman'.

The situation was this: the Scaleboys, thuggish rulers of the City of Spires, were setting out on their horrible vulgar gilded barge to collect tribute from their vassals on the other side of the river. This tribute-gathering-cum-extortion expedition was led by none other than Zal, their chief enforcer, against whom the PCs harboured a serious grudge. The only Scaleboy to have passed twice through the mysterious House of Scales, Zal was a mountain of a man, a mass of bulging muscles and imbricated scales squeezed into a slashed silk peach-and-crimson doublet. Reasoning that anyone that big and heavy would probably sink like a stone in water, the PCs decided to try to sink his barge and drown him in the river mid-crossing.

Here was their plan: first, they made an improvised dogcatcher pole, using a thick wire lasso attached to the end of a metal rod. (They have plenty of wire because the Weeping Lady vomits/exhales massive impaling clouds of the stuff at them every time they fight her.) Second, they made an improvised snorkel using a long, thin wooden tube. Thirdly, their mutant crab-man cleric Crabface cast Levitate on himself and sank beneath the water of the river: his mutations allowed him to breathe underwater, and the Levitate spell ensured that he would neither rise or sink, simply being carried along at an even pace by the current. Fourthly, Barnabus the magic-user stripped down to his loincloth, put on the snorkel, stowed a sealed jar of corrosive sludge under one arm, and slid into the river until only the tube of the snorkel was above the water. The plan was that Crabface would hold Barnabus's legs, and the two of them would drift downriver on an intercept course with the Scaleboy barge, passing just under it and allowing Barnabus to reach out and cast two Dessicate spells on the timbers of its base before pouring the corrosive sludge over the side. The timbers would shrink, the sludge would eat a hole in the barge, water would pour in, and the barge would hopefully sink: then Crabface would be able to swim up from beneath Zal, grab one of his ankles with the dogcatcher pole, and Levitate right down to the bottom of the river, pulling Zal down to drown in what would hopefully appear to be a mere accident rather than a targeted assassination.

The first part of the plan went well. Barnabus cast his Dessicate spells and stealthily poured in his sludge, the timbers shrank, and the barge started filling with water: but there were a lot of people in it, all with crates and barrels on-hand for collecting tribute in, and they were collectively able to bale a lot of water, making the barge unlikely to sink before it reached the other bank. Deciding more sabotage was necessary, Barnabus popped up from the water and began using a Mage Hand spell to pull their buckets away, yank oars out of line, and generally fuck with them: several people on the barge saw a strange naked man sticking out of the water casting spells at them, but they were all too busy bailing to do much about it. With the barge sinking fast, the Scaleboys and their servants began grabbing onto crates and barrels and preparing to swim for the far shore: at this point Barnabus cast a Light spell on Zal's eyes, hoping to blind him, but the huge Scaleboy shook it off. Then Crabface decided that he would try a Light spell too... and that's when everything started to go wrong.

In order to cast Light, Crabface had to let go of Barnabus and float up to the surface. Barnabus knew how to swim, but he was really suffering in the cold of the water. He had spent the previous year at a continuous comfortable temperature thanks to a magical amulet: but he'd lent the amulet to his friend Lucius, who was currently sleeping rough on a hillside as part of his guerrilla war on the poppy fields used by the Scaleboys to make opium, and he was not coping well the cold autumnal river as a result. Barely able to move his freezing limbs, Barnabus was swept downriver by the current. 

Crabface cast another Light spell on Zal, but he shook that one off as well, and joined his minions in the water, swimming for the shore. Crabface swam up beneath him and grabbed for his leg with the dogcatcher pole, but missed, and soon Zal and the rest were in water too shallow for him to make another attempt without being seen. The Scaleboys clambered up out of the water, dripping and furious, and Crabface decided to swim downriver to see what had become of Barnabus. 

It was just as well he did. Barnabus had been carried downriver into the territory of the Crusties, near-mindless human/crustacean hybrids who nested in the flooded sections of the ruined, haunted mansion of the fallen House of Swords. As the Crusties closed in around him, claws clacking, Barnabus made a desperate choice: he cast Spider Climb on himself, held his breath, dropped under the water, and used Spider Climb to scamper along the bottom of the river and up the nearest bank. The Crusties tore at him as he went and he burst out of the river naked, covered in blood, and more dead than alive. It was at this point that Crabface spotted him. 

Seeing his friend being mobbed by the Crusties, Crabface tried to use his own part-crustacean nature to signal to them to call off the attack - but he only succeeded in confusing some of them, and others ripped into Barnabus as he tried to Spider Climb his way up the side of the House of Swords, causing him to drop bleeding and unconscious to the floor. Launching himself out of the water, Crabface grabbed him and used Levitate to fly straight up: the Crusties tore at him, too, and by the time he was out of their reach he had only 1 HP left. (Barnabus was on -1 HP and rapidly bleeding to death.) Collapsing onto a crumbling ledge, Crabface used Cure Light Wounds spells to drag them both off death's door. But Levitate only allowed him to move straight up and down, which was no use: only the sky was above them, and the furious Crusties were circling the building below.

But Barnabus still had Spider Climb active. And that, it turned out, was all they needed. 

Normally, Barnabus would never have been strong enough to carry Crabface. But Crabface still had an active Levitate spell, so lifting him wasn't an issue - he just needed something to pull him sideways. Adjusting his dogcatcher noose, he tied it around Barnabus's waist: then he held onto the pole, and levitated a few inches into the air. Barnabus, still dripping, bleeding, naked, and white with cold, then got down on all fours and began spider-manning his way across the tops of the walls, leaping from building to building, trusting to his Spider Climb spell to allow him to stick onto whatever surface he landed on. Crabface, tied onto him via the pole, floated behind him like a big, ugly mutant balloon, drifting over the ruined buildings until they had left the furious crusties far behind...

...and thus it was that, when the rest of the party came to rescue them, they were greeted with the sight of Naked Spiderman and the Crab Balloon, clambering over the rubble to meet them. It was a sight that would haunt them for the rest of their days.

* * *

Emergent nonsense like this is my single favourite thing about oldschool sandbox play. The threats were real: given the number of attacks he faced, I worked out later that Barnabus had only had something like a 16% chance of surviving his encounter with the Crusties. The solutions grew out of desperate improvisation, making use of whatever random tools the PCs had access to. And the result was something that just about made sense in context, but was so compellingly bizarre that we'd never, ever have come up with it on our own without the force of random results and enforced creativity to push us into action. Naked Spiderman and the Crab Balloon is now going to be the unofficial logo for the whole campaign. 

I'll get back to the 'lessons learned' posts soon!

City of Spires part 2: The city as hexcrawl

As I mentioned in my last post, one of my objectives for 'City of Spires' was to create a version of ATWC with a lower barrier to entry, suitable for running with new players with minimal introduction. 'You're in an animistic Early Modern Central Asian clockpunk setting' was never going to fly. It would have required hours of explanation - and whenever I'm gaming with new players, I always feel that I've failed unless we can be actually playing within about ten minutes of sitting down at the table. 

So I resorted to my standard level 0 opening gambit: 'you're displaced peasants who have been forced to leave your community for the first time in your lives'. This set-up ensures that the ignorance of the players is matched by the ignorance of the characters, allowing them to learn about the setting together, through exploration rather than exposition. (Always show. Never tell.) This, in turn, changed their relationship with the city, which for them became an unknown zone to be explored, hexcrawl-style, one district at a time. In the first session they wandered in through the ruins of the southern suburbs and just started looking around. They've never really stopped. 

The current player-facing version of the city map. Note that even after a full year's play, large areas remain unexplored.

Hexcrawls and cities make for a somewhat awkward combination. Hexcrawling in, say, a forest makes perfect sense: anything could be in there, and the only way you'll be able to find out what's where is to walk in and start looking around. But urban geography is purposive, designed to channel people towards the key landmarks and areas of economic activity. Only flâneurs and lost tourists just wander around a city block by block to see what they will find, but to experience a city in the way it's designed to be experienced means losing the 'one thing at a time' quality that makes hexcrawls so useful as a way of introducing players to settings. 

My solution was, essentially, to make the outer city into a wilderness. Only the inner northern segment with the market and the palace was still densely populated enough to function like an actual city: the rest was ruins, rubble, scavengers, survivors, outlaws, lunatics, and monsters, and had to be hexcrawled in exactly the same way as any other dangerous wilderness area. (In ATWC terms, I combined the Streets with the Rubble and stretched them out right around the city.) But everything in the outer city was still connected with things in the inner city, whether through trade, enmity, vassalage, or simple shared history. As a result, as the PCs bounced around the southern ruins interacting with its various weird and wonderful inhabitants, they learned more and more about their relationships with each other and with the still semi-functional city on the other side of the river. By the time they reached the city proper they came not as total outsiders who needed to have a whole setting's worth of information thrown at them at once, but as people who already understood most of what was going on there through seeing the effects it had had on the communities beyond. 

The most crucial bit of design I had to do in writing up the city was to make sure that everything connects, using a version of this method, thus ensuring that encounters with one group led naturally to learning about (and often meeting with) others. The stockade-dwellers pay tribute to the city's rulers, and resent it. They also want to drive the devil-worshipping bandits out of a nearby temple. The bandits seek the magic hidden in the seclusium. The seclusium contains a resurrected thief who wants to take over the nearby slaver gang. The slavers make their money selling slaves to the city's rulers. The power of the city's rulers depends on their control of a giant iron serpent. The pit the serpent rose out of is inhabited by subterranean rot farmers. The rot farmers are upset about losing control of part of their territory to some kind of worm cult. The worm cult came from a distant necropolis. The true mistress of the seclusium, trapped in suspended animation, originally resurrected the thief in the hope of robbing that same necropolis. And so on, and so forth... it didn't matter where the PCs started, because everything ultimately led to everything else. In consequence, one year on they are ludicrously networked, and able to deal fluently (and often manipulatively) with a range of NPCs and factions which would have been simply overwhelming if presented to them all at once. 

This might sound like a lot of work, but it really wasn't, because all the complexity is emergent rather than scripted. Each faction could be summed up by a few lines: who they are, what they have, what they want, who leads them, how they relate to other groups, maybe 1-2 extra NPCs, and a few bits of key imagery that will ensure the PCs remember them. (This last bit is crucial. One of my players has yet to remember a single NPC name, but he remembers 'the electric skeletons' or 'the girl with all the feral peacocks' easily enough.) And I think it's a methodology that could potentially have wider application. You start with your Fancy Complicated Location, the one you've been wanting to use for ages but never do because you know your players would get lost in all the infodumps. Then you put it in the middle of a hexcrawl, full of groups that relate to various different aspects of it and each other, and you start the PCs off right at the edge of the map. By the time their drunkard's walk through the surrounding hexcrawl finally brings them to the central location, your PCs will have picked up an understanding of it by osmosis, and should be ready to fully engage with it in all its over-complicated glory. 

Just don't overstock the hexcrawl. That was my mistake. Thank God for extremely patient players.

Next: crungon walo wide...

City of Spires part 1: Theory vs. Practise

There's a city over the mountains. The people call it the City of Spires.

In the days of your great-grandparents it was rich and proud and prosperous. Traders thronged its streets. Coloured lamps flared in every window. Gold poured through the silk-gloved hands of its laughing lords.

In the days of your grandparents the caravans from the west stopped coming. The roads were all closed, and could not be reopened. The city's markets fell silent. 

In the days of your parents the spires started to crumble. The wealthy fled. The poor whispered of strange sights in the twilight. People said that the city was under a curse.

In the days of your youth, war came to the city. Faction rose against faction, house against house. The palaces burned. At last a great iron serpent tore its way out of the earth and destroyed all before it until only its masters remained, preening self-crowned kings of a city of ruins.

Yesterday the local lord rode into your village with a retinue of mounted soldiers. He said that your hovels were equally offensive to the eyes and to the nostrils, and had furthermore produced no tax revenue worth collecting for the last nine years, so he was going to knock the whole place down and turn it into a game reserve instead.

Where shall we go?' the people asked him. And he shrugged and gestured down the road that leads to the City of Spires.

 

As I mentioned in my last post, for the last year I've been running a (modified) B/X campaign called 'City of Spires'. We're currently thirty-something sessions in, with something like a hundred hours of total actual play behind us. It is not yet a campaign on the same scale as my previous 'Team Tsathogga' game, which ran for seventy-odd sessions over the course of three years: but it still represents a pretty considerable amount of gaming, and I'm very happy with the way it's run so far.

'City of Spires' was my attempt to put my ATWC material to use in an actual game, and as such it's prompted me to think about the differences between writing setting material and actually using it. When I started this blog, back in 2015, I was between gaming groups, and I wasn't really writing for anyone except myself: in fact, if I'm honest with myself, the reason I wrote about a campaign setting was because I wasn't getting the chance to run one. As a result, I wrote my early ATWC material without ever having to confront the key question: 'nice idea, but how exactly can I use it in this week's game?'  This isn't any kind of repudiation - I don't think any of the stuff I've written for the setting over the years is unusable - but it is an explanation for why what I initially wrote and what I ended up running ultimately turned out to be two quite different things.

When the 'Team Tsathogga' campaign finally ended due to some of the players moving away, the remaining players and I agreed that we should start a new campaign at level 0, in some other region of the same campaign world. I saw this as a chance to finally use my ATWC material, but I immediately faced several problems:

1. Some of my players had read the blog, meaning that they'd know all about the setting (including lots of things they really shouldn't know) right from the start.
2. ATWC assumes an animist cosmology with little or no standard D&D magic. But the world of Team Tsathogga, which the new campaign was going to be set in, was already established to be a science fantasy setting with standard D&D magic all over the place. 
3. ATWC is a fairly high-concept setting, and requires a high level of player buy-in. But I knew that some of the players would be new to gaming, and didn't want to shove them into the deep end any more than I had to. 
4. It's just too fucking big.

That last one was the real reality check moment. I'd spent years sketching out the ATWC setting, and the assumed campaign arc that went with it - go to the city, bounce around interacting with its various factions, make occasional trips into the outside world in source of resources or allies, and ultimately stage a coup or revolution, storm the King's Tower, and confront whatever lurked in the throne room of the Wicked King. What I hadn't confronted was the sheer logistics of it all. I'd given the city something like forty different factions: just meeting everyone could easily be a year's play. Its government was a massive, deeply entrenched tyranny, and while I'd deliberately designed it to be riddled with weaknesses, assembling a revolution capable of overthrowing it would still require immense amounts of investigation, organisation and diplomacy. Vast, complicated social worlds are great fun to write about, but can easily be a nightmare to GM. How many sessions would it take to play out a 'proper' ATWC campaign, with the PCs starting as complete outsiders and ending up as revolutionary masterminds capable of bringing down the Wicked King? Fifty? A hundred? More?

'Sorry - which faction are you guys from, again?'

So when I came to write City of Spires, I essentially did so by running a 'Condensation in Action' job on my own setting. My key principle was: 'like ATWC, but smaller'. 

The family resemblance is still very strong. It's still set in a ruinous city on a fantasy Silk Road somewhere beyond the eastern borders of fantasy Persia. There's still a tyranny, and the PCs are still trying to overthrow it, and the focus of the game is still on gathering networks of allies from among the city's strange and desperate inhabitants. But the city is physically smaller, and the population is much lower, and the government is just gangsterism writ large rather than the totalitarian nightmare of the Wicked City. Everything's a lot more ruined, in line with the principles I laid out here that the more thoroughly wrecked a setting is, the easier it is for PCs to exert real agency within it. There are fewer factions, and they're smaller, and most of them only have 1-3 significant NPCs each. As a result, after 'just' thirty-odd sessions, the PCs have been able to explore most of the city, meet most of the factions, and assemble plans and forces for an upcoming coup that just might actually work. 

I've reused many parts of the original ATWC setting, albeit in modified forms. Versions of the Cobweb, the Blue Necropolis, the clockworkers, the snake men, the merchant houses, the street gangs, the Rubble, and the Streets have all appeared in City of Spires. But they all shrank. The Cobweb shrank to a single tower. The clockwork armies shrank to a single huge automaton. The merchant houses shrank to a single merchant and his household. The Hortlaks of the Blue Necropolis shrank to a single undead princess. And so on. Over and over again, I looked at something that could potentially take a whole campaign to do justice to, and decided instead to condense it into something that could be dealt with in a single session. 

I should be clear, here, that I'm not saying that every campaign needs to do this, or that sprawl and vastness is always a problem for games. In a pre-plotted 'adventure path' campaign, it doesn't matter how big or complicated the setting is, because the plot will always ensure that the PCs interact with exactly the right parts of it to bring their story to a satisfying and level-appropriate conclusion. At the other extreme, in a totally wide-open sandbox, it doesn't matter that the PCs may only have scratched the surface of the world around them by the campaign's end: the story is just whatever happened to happen, and that's OK. But if you actually want your PCs to gain a decent level of knowledge of and mastery over their sandbox environment over the course of the game, then it's important to tailor its scale to the likely length of the campaign, and to be realistic about how quickly complexity starts to snowball as the number of interconnected factions grows. If I was starting this one over again, I'd put in less rather than more, at least to begin with. (Did the city really need six noble houses?) It's much easier to add things into a sandbox than it is to take things out.

Next post: the city as hexcrawl!

A Journal of the Plague Year

I am not dead. 

It was never my intention to abandon the blog for an entire year. Last September I took on some new responsibilities at work, and I thought, OK, maybe I won't be posting much of anything for a few months. Then in the new year I got more into miniature painting, which ate further into my free time, but I continued to tinker with half-written posts and to tell myself that I'd get something written up properly any day now. (The perfect, as ever, being the enemy of the good.) And then, in March, Covid hit and everything fell apart. The last six months have been a kind of ghastly blur. I still can't believe it's already September. 

One thing I have done is carried on gaming, because seeing friends over Roll20 once a week and rolling virtual dice together has been something of a lifeline in these troubled times. I've been running my current campaign for thirty-something sessions: it's called City of Spires, and it's basically an adapted version of ATWC suitable for players who've already read the blog. It's set in a ruinous city on the fantasy Silk Road, ruled by cruelty and injustice, and the PCs are peasant refugees turned aspiring revolutionaries. Over the course of about a hundred hours of play they've pieced together an alliance of the fallen, the marginal, and the desperate, and any session now they're planning to launch a coup and seize control of the city. It's been wonderful to watch, and I hope to write a bit about the campaign and what I've learned from it in the near-ish future. 

As things settle into some kind of 'new normal' I plan to resume this blog, by posting at least some of the things I meant to write and never did. More Condensation in Action. More Wicked City. More ramblings on art and art history. More photos of my terrible miniature painting. (It's better than it was.) I expect I will be doing so irregularly, and to a much reduced audience, both because this blog has lost so much momentum and because the broader OSR blogosphere appears to have suffered a massive die-off while I was away. But as long as someone out there gets some use out of the things I write, I'll be happy.

I hope everyone reading this (all three or four of you) has managed to stay safe during what I'm sure, for many of you, has been a very, very difficult year. More actual content should be coming soon!

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.

Gaslight and Shadow: urban folklore of the mid-nineteenth century

All of these are authentic. Most are from Karl Bell's The Magical Imagination: Magic and Modernity in Urban England, though some come from other sources.

Cutting crosses into the backs of your ears will protect you from harm. Unfortunately it's very difficult to know when they've healed up. Get your friends to check them every day.

The severed hand of a hanged man has healing properties. This is why the authorities always hand the corpses of executed criminals over to the doctors, rather than returning them to their families.

The Book of Murder is an evil book that describes how the poor can and should be murdered by poison gas in order to reduce the surplus population. (Its official title is On the Possibility of Limiting Populousness, but if you refer to 'the book of murder' everyone will know what you mean.) Its author, a wicked clergyman known only as Marcus, roams the country in secret, murdering the children of the very poor with the connivance of the authorities. His Malthusiast followers could be coming to a slum near you any day now, armed with official warrants and barrels of poison gas.

Lucky amulets affixed to the side of a stall or barrow will bring good fortune in business.

A drunken man with a torn umbrella is the very luckiest customer you can have first thing in the morning. Tear the umbrella yourself if you have to.

Graveyard soil and holy water can be used as all-purpose protections against bad luck and evil magic.

Dragon's blood (red guam) can be burned to ensure the faithfulness of an absent lover. If they betray you, then mix more dragon's blood with brass pins and urine and bury the resulting mixture inside a glass jar, and they are sure to come to harm.

Steel Jack is a monstrous ghost or demon who roams the city by night, wearing brass armour with clawed gauntlets. He can breathe fire, is impervious to bullets, and can take the shape of a bull or bear. He escapes by springing away over walls or rooftops once he has suitably terrified his victims, although sometimes he also pulls their hair out in bloody clumps or marks them with his horrible claws. Some speculate that he is actually a wicked aristocrat who is trying to scare people to death as part of a horrible wager with his equally wicked friends.

Books of Fate can be used to tell fortunes and predict lucky and unlucky days. If you can read at all then you should own one - and if you can't, then ask someone else to read one for you. Only an idiot would attempt anything important without first consulting their Book of Fate.

Cunning men and wise women can carry out divinations, cast spells to protect you against witchcraft, and help to locate stolen goods. Every community has at least one of them, and if you have been the victim of crime then they are much more trustworthy than the Detective Police, who are probably just looking for an excuse to have your family gassed by Marcus. Don't trust a cunning man who doesn't have a magic book, or a wise woman without a magic mirror.

A boggart seer can help to protect your community against boggarts and evil fairies. If your town has boggarts but no boggart seer then you're going to be in trouble. You might be able to borrow one from another town in an emergency.

Evil spirits can be driven out by an exorcism performed by a clergyman. If you're being troubled by evil spirits, demand an exorcism from your local vicar. If he objects, threaten to get one from a dissenting minister, instead. That usually brings them round.

White pigeons tapping on windows are an omen of death. Someone within the household will die soon.

Workhouses are always looking out for ways to kill the children entrusted to them, so that they can butcher their bodies and sell the meat for pies.

Innkeepers sometimes rig their beds with spring-loaded blades, allowing them to murder and rob lone travellers by night. Always check your bed when travelling alone.

Bread baked on Good Friday has healing powers.

Nunneries are simply used as brothels by the Catholic clergy, who murder the resulting infants and bury the bodies in the grounds. Never allow your daughter to enter a nunnery.

Doctors are infamous for viewing their poorer patients as opportunities to practise the latest surgical techniques, whether their surgeries are needed or not. If you value your internal organs then you should have as little to do with them as possible.

Resurrection Men are grave robbers who secretly dig up the bodies of the recently dead in order to sell them to medical students. When they can't find enough fresh corpses they abduct and drown the living, instead. Everyone knows that the medical schools don't ask any questions.

Mesmerists can heal both mind and body with their powers, but beware: some misuse their gifts to exploit, enslave, or sexually abuse their patients. Some cruel mesmerists even mesmerise their patients into believing that they are dead, or made of glass.

Captain Swing is coming to burn down Parliament any day now. The day of reckoning approaches. Be ready.

Folklorists are an extremely dangerous breed. They will listen to your ghost stories, and pretend to believe them, but as soon as your back is turned they will write them down and print them, and ghosts hate that more than anything. Never talk to a folklorist unless you want the wrath of the whole spirit world brought down upon you.