Alien Races for the Weird Horror Sandbox

Here's more work from my continuing exploration of Silent Legions - some sample alien races.  The book is targeted at helping the referee brainstorm, build, and run a modern-day Lovecraftian sandbox, but I'm going to use the material for something in the 17th century - either Colonial America or Gothic Yorkshire.  I went into the process knowing that I wanted to do something that reflected themes of folklore.  I'm calling the alien races "angels", "faeries", and "devils", although those tags were just to help guide some of the idea creation.  I'm pretty happy with how the book has been helping the development.

Race 1 - Angels

The "angels" are ethereal beings that have lingered on the earth since the prehuman past.  The earth-bound angels are exiles from their own species- perhaps from a crashed vessel from elsewhere in the galaxy.  They can possess humans as vessels and thus pass through human society perfectly disguised.  A handful of relics or artifacts from human lore and mythology are eldritch weapons from the time of the fall.  They've influenced human civilizations through the creation of organized religions, and they once controlled entire empires before they were actively hunted by the other alien races.  These days they focus on controlling small cabals and secret societies within human institutions, remaining aloof from the other alien races that hunt them.  They are Machiavellian in nature, admiring treachery in their human minions and controlling them through blackmail.

In their natural state, angels look like gaseous wisps of glowing white light, with many spider-like arms waving in the air (giving a vague appearance of wings).  Angel-possessed humans have great strength.  Open questions:  there is a terrestrial element that is quite deadly to them (what is it)?  And what are they doing here in the campaign area - perhaps a lone angel-possessed human (a captain of industry) is performing salvage operations to recover some vital mineral or ancient relic.

Race 2 - Faeries

The Fey are a gruesome, amphibian race that lives in caves and dwellings in fresh water.  In their natural form, they look like giant toads with a humanoid torso and head instead of a toad head.  Their skin is translucent and they have large over-sized heads.  If killed, their forms melt away, and their underwater structure dissolve away if left unattended, leaving little or no evidence.  The Fey have influenced human DNA and inadvertently activated psychic (or clerical) powers in humans through abductions and guided breeding.  They view humans like lab animals fit only for experimentation.

The Fey are divided into 'courts' and most of their energy is directed at avoiding treachery from within.  They use mind-control technologies to project glamours that hide their true forms from human sight, but folklore-myths like the nuckalevee, water horse, drowning fairy, or Rawhide Rex point to a deeper truth.  The Fey have accumulated vast mineral wealth in their underwater cities.  They still abduct humans and keep human slaves for debased entertainments.

Race 3 - Diaboli

The Diaboli are a cthonic race that escaped an alternate dimension - a place known to humans as Hell, Limbo, or Pandemonium.  Their activities are focused on cleaning up evidence of their presence on earth, and preventing incursions from their former masters (one or more of the elder gods in the pantheon).  Humans are disgusting and loathsome to them, but the Diaboli have taught sorcery to discrete individuals and train such humans to assist in keeping their presence on earth a secret.  Knowledge of the true nature of the universe is their greatest strength, and they wage a shadow war against the other aliens on earth (and the baleful influence of the elder gods).

The diaboli admire secrecy and deceit, striking at their enemies from the darkness.  Their gross appearance limits their influence over humanity, outside of the bizarre cultists and mad wizards who heed their fevered whispers or make 'deals' with them for knowledge and power.  Their physical form is that of a legless crawler with skeletal, telescoping arms and hands, and a circular mouth like a bladed maw.  They're able to burrow through the earth, and defend themselves with a poison stinger (in addition to their prodigious mastery of sorcery and magic).

A Pantheon for a Weird Horror Campaign

I decided a cool project this winter would be to work on a weird-horror sandbox style campaign.  Some of the ideas in a recent kickstarter, Silent Legions, inspired me to pick up with blogging again.  Silent Legions is explicitly based in the modern day, but I'll be using the sandbox creation ideas for a historical game featuring the LOTFP rules.  I'm not 100% sure on the setting, but I'm leaning towards Colonial America (mid-17th century, maybe 1650?) or Gothic Yorkshire, an area to which I'm inexplicably drawn.  Looking below, I think I can make the pantheons work in either locale.

I thought it would be fun to give the mythos some overtones of European folklore and Judeo-Christian mythology - many of the eldritch beings and alien races have been confused with demons, angels, faeries, that kind of stuff.  I'm starting with the pantheon.  There are two groups of elder beings - a loosely associated collection of demons, and then a handful of independent gods.  For now I'm making four of each.  These are just the briefest of sketches - they'll get developed further as I add alien races, cults, artifacts associated with them, etc.  I'm going to elaborate the pantheon organically as other setting elements come together.

The Demon Pantheon
The traits of the demon pantheon are "maltheistic and relics".  They are carryovers from an earlier reality, and are completely malevolent towards humans.  I'm thinking the beings of the demon pantheon are outsiders, originating beyond the world in another dimension, which has been confused or conflated with Hell through the ages (I'm going call it Hell until I get around to creating the alternate dimensions).  They are creatures of spirit that can only manifest in the physical world through possession of a vessel.  Here are the first four of them:

Descriel, Purple Seer of the 9th Circle
This being sits immobile in the frozen center of Hell, contemplating the heat-death of the universe.  It's portfolio is thirst, cold, and deprivation.  I imagine that mad wizards and sorcerers have been found in their sanctums, frozen solid, after reaching out to Descriel and failing in their ability to handle the contact.

Naziel, Murderous Arm of Torment, Prince of Malady
Naziel is a brutish demon of destruction.  It reeks of steaming jungles and the stench of blood.  It commands an army of lesser beings, and is frequently represented in stone idols as a blend of humanoid and bestial features.

Ohaniel, the Voracious Autarch
Ohaniel manifests as a spirit that possesses its cultists, turning them ravenous and insatiable.  Maybe those touched and abandoned by Ohaniel continue on as cannibals, like the wendigo myth.  The entity is associated with rage, hunger, and death.

Osetsopez the First Serpent, Crimson Dragon of Ruin
All of the primordial myths have snakes, dragons, and serpentine beasts of chaos, echoes of the first serpent.  Osetsopez is an agent of ruin and corruption, stalking the cities of men in borrowed flesh to foment destruction through war and vice.

The Independent Gods
There are four independent beings, not associated with the infernal pantheon.  Gnot and Bondaena are physical beings in the world, while Kehotek is a spirit of the barren wastes, and Kentharlzola descends from the depths of space.

Gnot the Sublime, Many Faced Destroyer of Worlds
Gnot is an embryonic being from the depths of space, crashed on earth in Neolithic times and regaining its power slowly over geologic time.  Its egg sac appears like a black, leathery geode, and has been steadily growing through the millennia.  If I place the campaign in England, Gnot is the being within the Black Cyst that lies in the depths of Harrow Home Manor.

It's traits are "immanent and wounded", and its portfolio is silence and pain.  Things to think about!

Kehotek the Sevenfold Seer, Opener of the Blind Gate
Kehotek is "indifferent and dissociated" and associated with visions and parasites.  I'm going to attach various cults of transcendence to Kehotek.  Cultists of Kehotek seek to transcend reality through mysticism and visions.  They infect themselves with progressively more disgusting parasites to achieve gnosis with Kehotek.  It grosses me out just thinking about the 'divine' worm infestations carried around by the cultists.

Kentharlzola, Winged Speaker of Flames
Kantharlzola is a deity woven through Middle-Eastern myths and the folklore of the deserts.  It is the phoenix, the efreet, the winged salamander, the fiery Ahura.  Contact with Kentharlzola is capable of imparting wisdom and knowledge of magic at the cost of years of life; cultists of the phoenix are withered beyond their years.

Bondaena the Hollow Sea, Anvil of Life
Bondaena is a monstrous leviathan in the ocean depths.  It is a forerunner of the life still yet to come on earth, protean and changeable.  It is a harbinger of mutation and disease.

Like I said, I expect these to change as I add other pieces to the setting.  I'll come up with better names, and elaborate the beings as I create some of the alien races, cults, and artifacts.  The tables in Silent Legion were fairly helpful in directing my imagination and brainstorming.  We'll see how it goes next week when I start developing some alien races.

Note:  I'm going to add a quick poll around what sounds more interesting for a horror-themed sandbox - Colonial America or Gothic Yorkshire.

Harrow Home Level 1 - The Thurman Gang

Here's the final bit of Harrow Home level 1.  The map is here:  Harrow Home level 1.  Technically, I still want to put together a wandering monster table and put notes together for "The Diary of Wil Fuller", but this completes the keyed sections of the map.

Thanks all for the lively discussion the past few days around random dungeon generation - it's given me a lot to think about!  Harrow Home level 1 is the polar opposite of the random approach.

==========================
The Thurman Gang

Thurman is an aging robber who made a pact with the masters of Harrow Home years ago.  In addition to payment for services rendered, he is supplied monthly with bottles of a unique potion - "Wolfsblood" - a concoction that enhances aggression, strength, and dexterity.  He calls his men "the Reavers" and has organized them into a warrior's cult.  Bandits, robbers, and ex-soldiers are recruited into the Reavers if they're intimidating, violent, and capable of following orders.  The Reavers are sent all over the north to arrange robberies, kidnappings, and black market purchases for the masters in the deeps of the dungeon.  One mission might take them to a distant vicarage, stealing a rare book; the next is in London, to kidnap the descendant of a wizard's enemy.

Thurman thinks of himself as a Viking lord of old, and treats the Reavers like the loyal retainers of a Viking jarl.  Membership involves oaths of service in return for a silver ring, a ceremonial silver dagger, and a brand (the Norse runes for wolf) seared into the member's chest.  Once a month, the Reavers return to the lair in time for the full moon, gathering in the chamber of ritual for the monthly consumption of wolfsblood potion.  Reavers that miss the ritual go through intense withdrawal and suffer debilitating weakness.

In game terms, the Reavers are treated as "berserkers" - while they use firearms and missiles at range, once combat is fully joined they wade into battle and let bloodlust take over.  Their eyes flare red and their features take on a bestial cast, a side effect of the wolfsblood potion.  They don't check morale and always fight to the death.  They have traded humanity for power.  Each reaver carries a silver dagger with a wolfshead pommel (worth 50sp), a silver ring (worth 25sp), and 3-12sp in crowns and shillings.  For convenience, here's the bestiary entry on reavers:

Bandits, Reavers
AC as Leather, MV 12, HD 1 + 1, Atk 1, Damage 1-8, ML 12, AL C.  1-8 appearing.  Reavers are bandits who have joined the Thurman Gang and taken on The Mark of the Beast (a rune-like scar on the chest).  They never check morale and get +2 to hit in combat.  Thurman's Reavers prefer heavy melee weapons - axes, mauls, and archaic swords - and each carries an ornate silver dagger.  (1-2 in 6 carries a firearm).

The descriptions of the lair below assumes a daytime encounter, when members of the gang are sleeping in, under a low state of alertness.  The lair is more active in the evening.  3-12 additional members are present during the days preceding and during the full moon.  (If the referee isn't tracking the lunar cycle, make it a 1 on a d8 chance).

Members of the gang know some rumors about the dungeons.  The "big three" power brokers in the deep levels include a wizard named Gregorius - a cruel mage that appears like a child; the Mistress, creator of Harrow Home; and a creepy specimen they call "the Skull" - some kind of undead monster.  They're familar with the Conways, a gruesome gang of cannibals on the second level, and they frequently do side jobs for Nicoletto, also on level 2.  If asked about the Wretched, they know he was an apprentice to one of the Big Three that stepped out of line ages ago and was cursed.  His servant (the Freak) has been replaced a couple of times since Thurman has been around.

The group has a powerful enemy - the werewolf matriarch of Osmotherly (Osmotherly is a remote hamlet on the edge of the western moors).  Gregorious holds a progenitor wolf (an ancient European werewolf) trapped in the dungeons, and makes the wolfsblood draft from a mixture of the monster's blood and magical reagents.  Thurman has guessed the source of wolfsblood potion, and the ceremonial silver daggers carried by members of the gang are a hedge against lycanthrope attacks on the moors.  Gregorius has warded areas of the dungeon, but the werewolves always find a way down.

The reavers can travel by day and look like ordinary people when not raging.  Members of the gang are good trackers.  If the reavers survive an attack on the lair, they try to track the characters back to any nearby villages or towns.  The referee is encouraged to establish ambushes, assassination attempts, and similar reprisals until the lair is clear and Thurman is finally defeated.  Thurman gains reinforcements as agents on missions return to the lair.

Note:  Rooms 24 through 34 are not built from brick and plaster like other sections of the undercroft; the stone has the texture of limestone but is not constructed of individual blocks or stones - it was stone-shaped through magic.  The doors are wooden with metal hinges and are hand crafted.

22.  Stairs Down
-----------------
A large staircase descends down here.  It follows the brick and plaster construction of the rest of the dungeon.  The door to room 23 is barred from the other side.

23.  Bandit Entrance
---------------------

A wooden ladder descends into this room from the trap door in the floor of the gatehouse.

Note:  there is a permanent illusion placed on the north passage, such that the wall appears to be solid.  The door to the south is a false door.  Chimes on the back side of the south door ring when it's opened, revealing a blank brick wall.  The door to room 22 is barred from this side.

The illusiory wall is partially translucent when viewed from the north - like peering through a hazy curtain.  Guards in room 24 are aware of loud noises and light sources in room 23.

24.  Guard Room
----------------
Two guards are posted in the room, but there's a 50% chance they're asleep - one is slumped over the table with a tankard, the other on the cot.  Loud noises or the chimes in room 23 wake them up 4 out of 6 times.  During a response, one readies the musket to fire at anyone coming through the fake wall; the other heads into the complex to rouse the lair.

Room contents include a table and oil lamp, stools, cot, and a piss bucket.  There's a loaded musket on the table and 3 extra rounds.

Reavers (hp 5, 8)

25.  Jail
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Four pairs of shackles hang from the walls.  Roll to see if there's a current prisoner:

1  A winsome lass facing a fate worse than death at the hands of Nicoletto (level 2).
2  A violent convict destined for Meyer's arena (level 3).
3  A yeoman farmer slated for sale to a monster (Ryksna Sprosna, the undead scientist of level 4).
4  A dishonest merchant awaiting an uncomfortable reckoning on level 5 (with Gregorius).
5-6  No one at this time.

26.  Great Hall
---------------
The great hall has a three long trestle tables and benches running down the center of the room.  Nearly a dozen Reavers are sleeping around the room - slumped on the table or sleeping near the walls on bedding.  If the alarm is raised 1-3 awaken each round.

The tables are cluttered with drinking horns, tin utensils and plates, along with dice, knucklebones and some cards.  Wall hangings evoke a Viking hall of old - battered, archaic shields, axes, and Medieval tapestries.  The dim room is lit by smokey torches at intervals.

At the far south end of the wall is a high-backed wooden throne.  Thurman is present, but when invaders first enter the hall, Thurman retreats behind the chair along with two of the nearest reavers.  They disappear through the southern door (concealed by the throne) to make a stand in the gauntlet.

The western door to the stairs lead down to Nicoletto's lair.  It is barred from this side.  If players stop to notice, the outside of the door features heavy scratches and gouges.

Reavers (hp 6, 5, 2, 4, 4, 5, 2, 4, 6, 5)
Thurman (hp 12 - stats like the other reavers, but he fights as 3rd level)

27.  Barracks
--------------
6 Reavers are sleeping off their drink, although the room has stacked bunks to accomodate 30.  In addition to wood bunks with rope springs, straw mattresses and blankets, the room features trunks of personal effects and noisome chamber pots.

6 sleeping Reavers (hp 9, 3, 5, 6, 8, 7)

28.  Store Room
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The room is piled with barrels of low-grade supplies - 2 barrels of smoked fish (5sp each), 4 barrels of beer (10sp each), 1 barrel of hard tack (5sp), and 2 barrels of water.  There are also useful supplies - crates of torches, a crate of lantern oil, and other necessities the referee deems useful.

In one corner, a blanket is draped over 2 casks of brandy (200sp each) and crate of fine crystal glasses packed in straw (200sp).

29.  Kitchen
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A pair of terrorized servants dwell here.  Along the north wall is a crude stone hearth and a fire with a tripod and stew-pot.  The room smells of fresh bread and game meat in stew.  There are usually 40-60 man-days of fresh foods (game animals, flour, barrels of water) piled in the south half of the room - enough to feed the lair for 2-3 days.  Buried in the supplies is a crate with two large bags of imported coffee beans (150sp each).

The servants, a matron and daughter (Annie and Nattie Avery), were kidnapped from a farm near Pickering over a year ago.

30.  Gauntlet
--------------
The gauntlet is a series of physical challenges the Reavers use for sport and defense.  Shaded areas are 20' deep pits filled with refuse and the contents of chamber pots (2d6 damage and a 1 in 20 chance of picking up a disease).  Each floor area has a sconce with a dim smoldering torch offering meager light.

Assuming Thurman and a pair of reavers retreated from room 26, the two reavers are posted east of 30b with shortbows and 10 arrows each.  Hiding in deep shadows, they shoot at characters swinging to 30a.  As invaders get ready to swing to 30b, they retreat across 30c with bow and quiver and shoot from there.

30a.  A rope swing requires a character to leap off the ledge, grab the rope mid-jump, and swing to a narrow ledge.

In order to grab the rope and swing, the character needs to roll a 5-6 on a 6-sided die, with the following modifiers:

+2 for unencumbered
+1 for light
+0 for heavily encumbered
-1 for severely encumbered
+  strength ability modifier

A thief or specialist can make a climb check and add +2 to the roll if the check is successful.

Note:  Reavers are encumbered and get a +1 or +2 ability modifier due to wolfsblood enhancements, allowing them to easily traverse the gauntlet.  Over-encumbered dungeon explorers are another matter.

Characters that fail drop into the 20' pit.

Characters need to make a second check (substituting dexterity for strength) to scoot along the narrow ledge to area 30b.

30b.  There is another rope swing here requiring characters to jump to swing east.  Any reavers to the east with shortbows can be seen retreating to the south once characters reach 30b.  If they have arrows left, the reavers retreat beyond 30c for another volley, otherwise they move past 30d and prepare for melee.

30c.  Four 20' wooden poles are mounted here, requiring characters to jump from pole-top to pole-top.  Use the same modifiers as area 30a except only dexterity ability modifiers count.

30d.  Two crude stone-shaped statues of northman warrior stand here - conical helms and noseguards, with hands on axe helms.  Swinging back and forth behind them is a pendulum blade, requiring the same modifiers as 30a to jump past (substituting dexterity for strength).  Characters that fail take 1d8 damage.  The arm of the pendulum can be chopped with an axe in a few minutes of work.

30e.  The floor here is a checkerboard of dark and light 5' squares.  The dark squares are safe, allowing characters to walk diagonally along the hall.  Each light square requires a trap check (on a 1-2, the square swings down, dropping the character into a 10' hole.  Characters can save vs Paralysis to grab the edge and catch their fall.

31.  Ritual Room
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This large, vaulted chamber is supported by caryatids carved to look like fierce Vikings holding the ceiling.  The center is dominated by a 10' circular dais flanked by two burning braziers filled with oil.  A pedestal on the dais holds a rune-encrusted bronze bowl and a pair of stained, empty bottles.

If Thurman escaped to here, he'll don a chain shirt and helmet (improving his AC to chain) and come from behind one of the pillars wielding a double-handed maul, entering a berserker rage.  He wears a key around his neck.

The bronze bowl radiates magic and is worth 50sp as a curiousity.  It belongs to the wizard Gregorius.

32.  Exit
----------
A heavy portcullis bars the way down the escape tunnel.  There is a winch just inside the hall.  The tunnel leads up after 300 feet and opens onto the moors.  Large "wards against werewolves" are carved into the stone of the tunnel not far from the outside entrance.

33.  Treasury
--------------
The large chamber here is a dump for all of the "valuables" the bandits have collected - ordinary equipment and gear like wagons, saddles, extra boots, shovels, and farm tools.  It also holds treasure.

In the south corner are a pair of heavy chests.  One of them is full of copper pennies - 10,000cp.  The other has 1,000sp in mixed shillings and crowns, 4 of the ceremonial silver daggers (50sp each), and 20 gold guineas (1,000sp equivalent in gold).  Both chests are locked and heavy to move.  The key to Thurman's room also opens the chests.

34.  Thurman's Room
-------------------
The door to this room is locked (the key hangs around Thurman's neck).  Compared to the reavers, Thurman lives in luxury - an actual cabinet for his clothing, a large wooden bed with comfortable mattress, his own table and wall pegs for cloaks, coats, and hanging weapons.  He keeps a fine set of wheellock pistols on the wall (700sp value) and a bandolier of rounds.  He has a sturdy chair with velvet cushion (100sp), an expensive violin he can't play (500sp), and a quality mirror (50sp).  There is a heavy coin purse on the table filled with 150sp.  The room has necessities and an oil lamp.

The Lair of the Wretched - Harrow Home Manor

Work is closed, it's a snow day in the north east, so let's roll out the next installment of Harrow Home Manor, my 2014 megadungeon project.  The section below details areas 11 through 21 on the first level map - mostly involving something I'm calling "The Lair of the Wretched".  I'm collecting everything on a Harrow Home page for ease of reference.

A few notes.  First, I'm posting these weekly as I write them.  The notes are more than the bare-bones I'd use for the home game, to convey enough info, but they haven't been play-tested.  I figure we'll have enough 'critical mass' for Harrow Home by this summer, and the players should be done with level 2 of the Black City by then, so it'll get some run on the table top then.  I'm sure the draft will change after an encounter with real players.

For instance, the Wretched is practically "ogre-powered", a tough fight for first level characters, and it uses extreme hit-and-run tactics.  My groups tend to be large, with plenty of henchmen, and I'm okay if they retreat after getting a bloody nose to regroup and come up with a new plan.  Or they'll have a Sleep spell handy, right?  So the toughness of that particular "boss" could ratchet up or down after my gang gets their hands on it.

I'm also trying to incorporate a "show-don't-tell" approach to the writing style.  I could put a whole background together explaining the story of Wil Fuller and how he came to become "The Wretched", but there's no way the players will learn that at this point in time.  Or what is the story behind the creepy mask in room 12 - besides an excuse to blast the players with the collected works of Clark Ashton Smith?  I'm trying to stick to those things that can be observed or learned by the encounters at hand.  It's tough not to blab blab blab and let the readers in on the juicy secrets.

Apologies to all who voted for Xibalba in the 2014 dungeon poll.  I realized upon reflection that Harrow Home has a ton of readily available depth, whereas my Xibalba notebook is going to take some time to get to the same point.  I'll keep plugging away at it.

In the meantime, grab some hot cocoa, stay warm, and enjoy this week's piece of Harrow Home Manor as we continue to explore a horror-themed dungeon.

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11.  Undercroft
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There are four stone crypts in the room, one near each corner.  They were looted and emptied of corpses long ago.  However, a small satchel has been stuffed deep into the crypt in the north east corner - it holds a pile of silver pounds (196 sp).  A large adder is hiding in the crypt as well.

Adder (hp 7)

In the middle of the south wall is a large painted eye (right in the middle of the secret door).  In the southeast corner is a jutting brick.  Pushing in the brick opens the secret door to room 12.

Note:  In the hall east of room 11 is another secret door - it leads to a narrow spiral staircase up to the chapel.  A disguised handhold allows the door to be pulled open.

12.  Secret Room
-----------------

A pair of stone pedestals in the south corners hold reddish light that illuminates the room.  The light is a continual light magic effect, and dissipates if the pedestals are moved or broken.  Hanging against the south wall is the effigy of wraithlike figure, heavy cowl and robes, with a ceramic tragedy mask hanging in the cowl (the Mask of the Caretaker).  Behind the robes, hanging off a peg, is a crystal scepter.

The mask is enchanted.  If a character puts it near his face, the mask latches on to their skin, and psychic tendrils burrow from the mask into the character's face.  The character writhes in pain, assaulted by otherworldly visions through the eyes of the mask, before lapsing into a coma-like unconsciousness.  The mask releases its hold in about 12 hours - but the others won't know that.  A Remove Curse also forces the mask to drop off.  The mask only works once.

A character wearing the mask is exposed to Hyperborean magic and visions of ancient Hyperborea - humans worshipping loathsome giant toads in cyclopean ruins, the first workings of magic inscribed on clay tablets, a black object streaking across the sky and destroying a hilltop temple in a fiery explosion, cataclysmic waves and the sinking of Atlantis.

A magic user or elf wearing the mask gains 2,000 XP from the visions and ancestral knowledge, and has a 1 in 6 chance of absorbing how to understand and read Hyperborean from their sojourns from beyond.  When the mask is removed, their eyes are permanently red-hued and bloodshot, reducing reaction rolls by -1 around ordinary people and frightening peasants.  They are hence spell-marked.  (Other character classes won't gain any XP, but still have a chance at learning Hyperborean and are spell-marked).

As a physical artifact without any further magic, the mask is worth 100sp.  The scepter is hardwood inlaid with gems and gold and worth 2,000sp.

13.  Chamber
-------------
The room is empty.  The doorway to room 22 uses a heavy post and lintel frame with runes and symbols engraved into the stone.  The runes act as a ward against lycanthropes (although players shouldn't learn this property without expending a Read Magic spell and deciphering the intent).

14.  Cistern
-------------
The vaulted room here is dominated by a murky cistern surrounded by a low circular wall.  On the far side of the cistern, a heavy ring is attached to the side of the water and a chain stretches into the murk.  When a character walks around the cistern (perhaps to pull on the chain), they step on a loose stone triggering a blade trap.  A scythe blade swings out from the south wall, sweeping anyone south of the cistern at ankle height.  The trap does 1-6 points of damage.  If a 6 is rolled, the character must save vs Death or lose a foot!  Dismemberment is mortal without quick first aid.

There are clues to the trap - discolored stains on the floor south of the cistern, and a long groove holding the scythe blade isn't hard to see if the wall is inspected first.

If the characters succeed in pulling up the chain, a heavy load is hoisted from the water - a bucket of rocks.

15.  Entry Room
---------------
This room is lit by a smoky torch in the southwest corner.  In the southeast corner is a wooden chest, opened, and piled with enticing silver coins.  Stretching across the east half of the room in front of the chest (north-south) is a tripwire; anyone approaching the chest has a 2 in 6 chance of triggering the trip wire, dropping a 20' net down that envelops the eastern 2/3rds of the room.  Metal bangles on the net make a loud racket when it falls.  The Freak in room 16 shambles forth to investigate the noise, wielding a heavy club.  He strikes to subdue, preferring to knock victims unconscious.  "Master prefers live food."

Characters trapped by the net can cut themselves free in 1d4 rounds if appropriately armed; they lose dexterity and shield bonuses, are +2 to be hit, and can't attack while under the net.

The chest is full of real silver coins, 235sp.

16.  Servant's Room
--------------------
The room smells rancid and subhuman.  It is the noisome lair of a once-human - The Freak.

The Freak
(AC as Chain & Shield, HD 3 + 1, HP 21, attack 1 club, D 1-6+1, MV 9, ML 9, AL C)

The Freak is a human that has mutated into an amalgam of ursa, man, and insect.  The left arm is chitinous with a bear claw on the end, the human head is bulbous, with antennae and mandibles making speech difficult, while the body shaggy and partially carapaced.  Despite these infirmities, the Freak is preternaturally quiet and surprises on a 1-3 out of 6.

Once a condemned prisoner named Gordon Davis, the Freak was saved from the hangman by the Mistress, and geased to protect her descendant.  Each time he breaks the geas, a different piece of himself has gone "monstrous", a curse nearly as bad as his fallen masters, and he's resigned himself to lurking in the dungeon, capturing meals for his master, and hoping that death is an eventual release.  He's not so sure.  An expert trap maker, many of the traps on level 1 that capture or maim victims were placed by the Freak.

If engaged in a drawn out fight with the characters, the Freak identifies his condition as the price of making deals with wizards and the true cost of magic.  He and his master are warnings - turn back now or face similar fates in the depths of Harrow Home!

The room has remnants of clothes and footwear that no longer fits, shredded bedding destroyed by the Freak's carapace, and buckets for water.  Buried amidst the detritus are keys to the shackles in room 17, and a golden locket (value 285sp) with a woman's painted portrait, a reminder of a life forfeited.

17.  Prison
------------
A half dozen shackles dangle from the walls here.  If characters are knocked unconscious by the Freak, they'll be imprisoned here.  The slain are dragged to room 18 for "the master".

18.  Scrawling Chamber
----------------------
Note:  Rooms 18-21 are the lairs of a creature that calls itself the Wretched (and named its servant the Freak, back when it cared about such things).  There's a 1 in 6 chance the Wretched is hanging around the ceiling of room 18 waiting for a meal, otherwise it's somewhere in room 20.

Cracked human bones and skulls litter the floor, evidence the marrow has been slurped.  The walls are covered with chalk scrawlings and drawings, like cave pictures - but all of them are 8' off the ground, in the vaulted part of the ceiling.  They depict a spiral motif with a giant egg-like object in the middle of the spirals.  In some of the pictures, the egg is cracking and a horned man with a devil beard is coming out.

19.  Cistern
-------------
Another murky cistern sits in the center of the room.  Up near the vaulted ceiling, difficult to see unless actively searched, is a chalk scrawling:  "I left my life beneath the flagstone of the tower."

20.  Warren
------------
Niches in the walls are resting places for centuries-old cadavers.  Shortly after entering the warren, the party hears scuttling near the ceiling and might catch glimpses of a large cloak fluttering along the ceiling as something quickly darts around a corner.  They've entered the hunting grounds of the Wretched!

The Wretched
(AC as Chain & Shield, HD 4, HP 24, attack 1 bash (and see below), D 2-8, MV 6, ML 10, AL C)

The Wretched is tall and gaunt and insectile, scuttling along the ceilings out of sight, wrapped in a tattered cloak.  Beneath the cloak, the thing is a human changing inexorably into a giant bug, with oversized hind legs and new arms growing out of the ribs.  A second head, like a giant locust, is growing out of the shoulder, pushing the deformed human head out of the way.

In combat, it can launch itself 60' and bash for 2-8 damage, jumping away next round automatically and scuttling back into the dark shadows, or it can grab and bite with hooks and claws (damage 1-2/1-2/1-3).  The insect head can spit a stream of spittle 15' that forces a save vs Poison or become nauseated (incapacitated) for 2-5 rounds or until the glop is washed off.  The Wretched scuttles around the ceiling, attacking every few rounds from unexpected directions, speaking to itself about the tasty bits of marrow it's going to suck out of the character's bones.

The Wretched's hit and run tactics in the high ceilinged warren is challenging for low level characters.  There are opportunities to retreat in between bash attacks.  The Wretched is vulnerable to a Sleep spell, and clever players will think of something - perhaps trying to use the net from room 15 to catch it.  Calling the Wretched by the name "Wil Fuller" forces a saving throw vs Spells or the creature becomes confused and unable to attack for a few rounds as memories of its former identity rush back - perhaps it asks for death in a lucid moment before the insect brain takes over again.  If the Wretched fails a morale check, it retreats to room 21 (and flees down the stygian well if it fails a second morale check while in room 21).

Scavenging the centuries-old corpses in the niches takes 32 man-turns (4 searchers could get it done in 8 turns) and turns up around 200sp in incidental treasures - silver rings, necklaces, coins, belt buckles, and other salvageable loot from the forgotten dead.

21.  Sanctum & Well
---------------------
A dark circular hole (like the cisterns common on level 1) sits in the room, but there's no water within - the stygian well extends to unknown depths.  There is a large standing mirror in the northwest corner of the room, and a collection of personal effects near the well.  Chalk writing covers the walls.

A shadowy monster is bound to the owner of the mirror.  If the Wretched still lives, the shadow attacks from the mirror, surprising on a 1-5.  If the Wretched is dead, the slayer of the Wretched is the new owner of the mirror and lord of the shadow.  The creature can't detach from the mirror and is very hungry.  It is highly intelligent and offers nefarious counsel to its new owner.  Killing the shadow destroys the mirror and frame; otherwise the grotesque art piece is worth 2,000sp.

The Shadow in the Mirror
(AC as Leather, HD 2 + 2, HP 14, attack 1 slash, D 1-4 and strength drain, MV 9, ML 10, AL C)

Other items in the room include sheafs of papers, a book of spells, centuries old and tattered clothes and footwear that no longer serve a purpose, and a leather satchel of trinkets.  The sheaf of papers are fragments of the Dream Codex; before losing his faculties, the Wretched subjected himself to the Dreaming Angel in hopes of learning a spell to undo the curse turning him into a giant bug.  He's collected 7 sheets (7%) of the Dream Codex.

The spell book belonged to Wil Fuller (the Wretched in his prior identity).  The book contains the spells Read Magic, Feather Fall, Shield, Enlarge, Comprehend Languages, Change Self, Knock.

The satchel contains 40 gold coins, a set of keys (which once opened doors in the ruined castle), and the Serpentine Ring - an enchanted copper ring depicting an ouroboros that allows a magic user or elf to memorize an additional 1st level spell each day.  The ring was a gift to Wil Fuller and is recognizable to many of the wizards in the depths.  Lady Fuller reacts very poorly to anyone bearing the ring in her presence, since it was her gift to her descendant.

The chalk scrawlings on the wall depict a mind degenerating into insanity, and catalog the gruesome transformation - from "I am Wil Fuller, I am Wil Fuller..." to "...the thing growing out of my shoulder is forming eyes..."  A recurring theme involves this sentiment: "It lied to me.  The thing in the pit, it lied.  She lied to me.  The Kept Thing lied."

Harrow Home Level 1 - Entryways and Alchemist's Lair

Here's the next bit of Harrow Home, to accompany the level 1 dungeon map from the other day.  Harrow Home is structured as a series of related lairs and hideouts on each level, with a horror theme, so my approach will be to put together a lair or hideout each week - that seems like a sustainable pace for content on the blog while still doing some work on the Black City.

========================================
Crumbling stairs lead from the kitchen ruins to the dungeons beneath Harrow Home.  The chambers of the first level are ribbed vaults of brick supported by pillars.  Bricks show through where the plaster has cracked or fallen away.

Referee's Background:  Dungeon level 1 consists of the wine cellars and store rooms beneath the old manor.  Furtive visitors slip into the ruins by night, quickly passing underground and taking the stairs at area 22 down into the deeps, bypassing the rest of this level.  Unscrupulous traders, bandits, and grave robbers often come to the ruins to treat with the Thurman gang or the alchemist.  The lairs of level one belong to these debased profiteers who offer service to the deeper denizens.

1.  Undercroft
---------------
The plaster along the stairs and entry area is almost completely gone due to exposure to the surface elements.  A search of the room reveals a sheet of paper with a recent order for "Prodigioso".  The order covers exotic spirits from the continent ("wormwood wines") and food delicacies worth hundreds of silver pieces.  A merchant sigil on the page indicates the blue anchor (a Scarborough importer).

2.  Hidden Skeletons
--------------------
Crumbling plaster here reveals a different style of brick and mortar here, added later.  Age has weakened it enough to smash through with a hammer.  The room is piled with hundred-year old skeletal revenants that clamber through the hole to attack!

9 skeletal revenants
(AC as leather, HD 1, attack 1, D 1-6, MV 6, ML 12, AL N)

The revenants wear the tattered livery of church soldiers (men from the Bishop of York) from a century ago.  They wield non functional arquebuses as clubs, rapiers, or rake with their claws and teeth (1-3 damage each).  One of them carries a scroll case tucked away in a satchel - it is a writ of arrest for man named Wil Fuller.

After dispatching the player characters and anyone else that gets in their way, the cursed revenants continue the hunt for Wil Fuller.

Writ of Arrest:
Written in a fine cursive script, difficult to read in the poor light of a dungeon, the document describes a reign of terror between the years 1511 and 1522 stretching across western Yorkshire - kidnappings, accusations of witchcraft, harboring of fugitives from the church, and diabolism - the writ identifies a "Wil Fuller", master of Harrow Home Manor and erstwhile resident of Scarborough, as the accused, and empowers a sheriff to arrest him.

3.  Undercroft
---------------
Splinters of wood and debris along the west wall suggest the area was a storage at one time.  On the south wall is a Greek inscription chiseled into the plaster.  "Look left from the eye to open the way".

4.  Alchemist's Entrance
------------------------
Lurking in the northern corners (shadows) are a pair of living lead.  When characters approach the room, braziers flare alight along the southern wall and a magic mouth appears and speaks:

"In the footsteps of Albertus Magnus and Paracelsus, welcome to the laboratory of the great Oswald Boehm.  Toll the bell to conduct business."

A rope hangs from a bronze church bell hung in the southwest corner.  Besides rousing the alchemist's servant, Edward (see area 7), the bell forces an immediate wandering monster roll.  The locked door to room 7 has a sliding peep hole through which visitors can state their business - only characters wishing to do business with the alchemist are admitted.  Edward won't open the door if the characters are under attack!

The living dead are tethered by ankle chains but can reach the locked doors.  They only shamble forward to attack someone attempting to force their way past doors - otherwise they stand and drool, slack eyed and unresponsive.

Living Dead (hp 9, 8).  Dressed as yeoman farmers with ashen skin.

Note:  Rooms 5 through 10 represent the lair of the nightshade peddler, Oswald Boehm.  The area is lit by intermittent torches and the air is acrid with greasy smoke.

5.  Morgue
-----------
At any given time, there are 0-3 corpses laid out on the ground here (0-3 weeks old).  Oswald buys dead bodies from grave robbers in the area for use as ingredients.

6.  Supplies
-------------
A trio of living dead are shackled to the north wall by chains - they appear to be sleeping at first glance (and will surprise anyone who leans down to check on them with ferocious grabs and bites).  They're clothed in ragged dresses and bear a familial resemblance to each other - a matron, mother, and daughter.  Characters skirting the top half of the room can avoid their reach.

The south part of the room is full of supplies - barrels of wine and salt pork, lantern oil, greasy torches, and similar necessities.  The supplies could fill a wagon and are worth 200sp if recovered.  There are a pair of rat traps near the supplies.

Living Dead (hp 8, 6, 2).  Dressed as farm women.

7.  Workshop
------------------
The available wall space is blocked by workbenches and shelves, covered in jars and pots of every size and shape, exotic dried animals tacked to the wall and hanging bundles of herbs.  The center of the room is dominated by a pair of work tables similarly decked with mortars, pestles, alembics, and other accouterments of the alchemist's art, lit by candles spread around the room.

Oswald, the Alchemist, invariably retreats to the far side of the room, hefting a heavy crossbow and interrogating customers at "gun point".  If aggression breaks out, his plan is to plunk the lead combatant with a poisoned quarrel, cast a Sleep spell the following round (if possible), and uses a pinch of smoke powder from a belt pouch to obfuscate his escape out the back door.  He has two sets of powder, a hallucinogenic dust that needs to be cast into fire, and a smoke powder that creates a 20' x 20' cloud.  If an entire group is subdued, they'll find themselves shackled in the store room while Oswald negotiates to sell the characters to Thurman's gang for shipment below - they don't have long to escape!

Oswald Boehm, Alchemist (Magic User 2)
(AC as leather, HD 2, HP 6, attack 1 crossbow, D 1-6, MV 12, ML 5, AL C)

Oswald typically has Sleep and Floating Disc memorized for daily use - he likes to impress merchants and corpse haulers with his ability to move things around through magic.  He keeps a heavy crossbow handy (loaded with a poison quarrel - Save vs Poison or fall incapacitated \ ill for 24 hours) and also carries a dagger.  The alchemist is a wanted man in Europe for his ghoulish experiments.  He's grotesque, nervous, and "name drops" powerful characters from the depths in an attempt to intimidate aggressors - he conducts business with Prodigioso (Ricardus), Petrus Magnus, and the Mistress (Lady Fuller).

Edward, Addled Servant (Fighter 2)
(AC as leather, HD 2, HP 14, attack 1 club, D 1-6 +2, MV 12, ML 10, AL C)
Edward's brain has been addled by years of Charm Person and chemical abuse by the alchemist, confusing him to the point that he's forgotten the outside world and is fanatically loyal to 'master'.  He has hulking size (strength +2), is bald, goggle-eyed, and walks with a limp.

The room is full of valuable reagents and ingredients, but it would take a trained alchemist to properly identify the materials for use - if collected and sold as a lot in the city, the lab is worth 1,000sp and fills a wagon load.  Oswald has a heavy tome full of recipes written in a personal cipher.  The types of things in the room include nightshades and mandrake, smoke and flash powders, alcohol, exotic specimens in jars, various poison mixtures (ranging from subtle ingestive poisons to blade coats), and many foul reagents crafted from human remains - ashes, bone powders, and candles.  One bowl of powder radiates as magical - this holds a dose of Oswald's zombie powder (see the new spell description).

8.  Ovens
----------
The east wall is piled high with firewood, barrels of kindling, and charcoal; the south wall is dominated by a brick oven, and the east wall features a cook pit with a large cauldron over it, casting the room in a hellish glow.  There's a large work table in the center of the room and a collection of knives and cleavers.  The room is hot and uncomfortable and reeks of rendering.  The alchemist uses the place to dry materials or render fats in the cauldron.  There are also cook pots and some water barrels in a corner.

9.  Servant's Room
-------------------
Edward, the heavily dazed man-servant, sleeps here on a cot.  He keeps a collection of adders kept in some empty barrels and feeds them rodents he finds in the halls.  The room contains his cot, a trunk with clothes, a barrel of beer, and a pair of chamber pots to clean up after 'master'.

A wooden box under the bed holds another adder, which attacks when the box is opened; it's Edward's gift to thieves.

10.  Alchemist's Room
---------------------
The alchemist's room features a glowing brazier surrounded by low couches and a few candle-stands.  If pursued, the alchemist throws a handful of powder from a belt pouch into the brazier, which quickly fills the room with a hazy smoke - characters in the area must Save vs Poison or suffer a Confusion effect.  Oswald hopes to recover his spell book and skulk out during the ensuing chaos (he's inured to the effects of the Confusion powder).  He stabs anyone that gets in his way, clutching his spell book with the other hand.

Besides a trunk with clothes and personal effects, the room features Oswald's pipes and smoking paraphernalia (he's addicted to Turkish poppy), as well as his spell book (containing Read Magic, Sleep, Floating Disc, Charm Person, and a new level 1 spell - Make Zombie Powder).  Beneath the clothes in the trunk, the alchemist keeps 1,000 cp, 300sp, and 4 gold pieces in the trunk.

Harrow Home - Dungeon Level 1 (Map)

Here's the map for level 1.  The first handful rooms of the key are done - I'll probably need to post each dungeon level over the course of a couple of weeks.

I've also added a page in the navigation to keep various Harrow Home related posts organized.

Harrow Home Surface Ruins (Map)

I'll be adding a page for organizing Harrow Home related contents.  Here's a placeholder for the surface map.  The description for the surface ruins has been updated to fit the map.

Harrow Home Bestiary

Here's the start of the Harrow Home bestiary file.  I expect to update this post as I add monsters.  It's starting with coverage for some of the random encounters in the surface ruins.

Acolytes
AC as Leather, MV 12, HD 1, Atk 1, Damage 1-6, ML 7, AL C.  1-8 appearing.  These unholy pilgrims from the far countryside have donned black robes and cowls as they approach Harrow Home, seeking the diabolic shrines in the dungeon depths.  If there's more than four of them, roll a D10 to determine the level of the leader ( 1-4 = 2nd level leader, 5-7 = 3rd level leader, 8-9 = 4th level leader, 10 = fifth level leader).  Any treasure they carry is incidental.

Angry Villagers
AC as Unarmored, MV 12, HD 0, Atk 1, Damage 1-6, ML 5, AL N.  1-20 appearing.  A mob of angry townsfolk here to find a missing villager.   -2 to reaction rolls as they assume anyone near Harrow Home is "with them".

Bandits
AC as Leather, MV 12, HD 1, Atk 1, Damage 1-6, ML 8, AL C.  1-8 appearing.  Bandits near Harrow Home are filling the role of robbers, kidnappers, or grave robbers.  They're happy to rob, kidnap, or kill anyone they run into (if they think they can take them).  They'll have a mix of clubs, crossbows, pistols, and rapiers.

Bandits, Reavers
AC as Leather, MV 12, HD 1 + 1, Atk 1, Damage 1-8, ML 12, AL C.  1-8 appearing.  Reavers are bandits who have joined the Thurman Gang and taken on The Mark of the Beast (a claw-like scar on the chest).  They never check morale and get +2 to hit in combat.  Thurman's Reavers prefer heavy melee weapons - axes, mauls, and archaic swords.

Living Dead
AC as No Armor, MV 6, HD 2, Atk 1, Damage 1-8, ML 12, AL C.  1-8 appearing.  Living dead always attack last in the round.  They are human "zombies" created by subjugating their will through a magical substance, Zombie Powder.  They can't be Turned by clerics and don't have standard undead immunities.

Traders
AC as Leather, MV 12, HD 1, Atk 1, Damage 1-6, ML 7, AL N.  1-8 appearing.  A trader is a merchant guiding a pack mule or horse and wagon; all other members of the group are bodyguards.  Traders represent smugglers and unscrupulous merchants dealing goods to the inhabitants of Harrow Home.  [ I'll need to come up with a typical trade goods table to identify what they might be carrying… ]

Samples Encounters
Encounters with low level humans tend to appear the same on paper - there's not much to differentiate them from a stats perspective.  The trick is to (attempt) to cobble together interesting characters.  Here are some sample encounters from the bestiary list.  (Reavers will be detailed with the first dungeon level).

Sample Acolyte - William Barrett (leader)
Charismatic and striking, "Bloody Bill" was a sea dog decades ago in the time of Drake and the Spanish Armada.  He trades on old war stories.  He wears an eye patch and has a limp.  He uses his personal magnetism to lead groups of naïve followers to Harrow Home to pay homage to Old Scratch with him.  They usually don't leave when he leaves.

Sample Bandits
Ludlowe and Potts, Esquires
Ludlowe is a bully and Potts his sycophantic side kick.  Anyone else with them is rabble looking to get paid for their gruesome labors.  They rob graves and drive a wagon of corpses to sell to the mountebank in the dungeon cellars.  They have improvised weapons and shovels, but Ludlowe owns a pistol.

The Watkins Gang
John Watkins is young and illiterate, but makes up for it in ruthlessness.  He takes commissions from the Thurmans to perform kidnappings around the countryside.  Luckily, other people in the gang can read the descriptions of the marks!  No guns here  - clubs and knives only.

Tim Bodger's Boys
Bodger is a freeloader and prefers easy jobs, ambushes, and shortcuts.  He and his gang tend to drink their earnings away at the first opportunity.  Knives, bows, and Bodger owns a sword.

Sample Traders
Samuel Parsons
Parsons owns the Four Bells Trader, a London shop specializing in strange ingredients and rare imports from the continent.  He enjoys the high premium paid by Harrow Home's masters, and stays in the nicer inns when he travels north.  His bodyguards will be well armed with pistols and muskets, riding horses while Parsons rides on the wagon alongside a driver.

Richard Childs
Slick Dick climbs into the moors from the northern coast, his wagons laden with goods smuggled through places like Whitby or Robin Hood's Bay.  He has the personality of a snake oil salesman and tries to trick or con during encounters.  His merchant sign hanging off his wagon is the Two Black Dogs.

Harrow Home Surface Ruins

Harrow Home is a ruined English manor house atop a lonely moor.  The stone walls, gatehouse, and chapel, stand like the bones of a discarded corpse; the ceilings have collapsed and any house goods are long gone.  Despite the desolation and remote locale, worn pathways into the ruins bespeak of frequent visitors.

The surface ruins are uninhabited.  However, each time the players arrive at the site, roll on the encounter tables below to see if someone else is traversing the ruins at the same.

Surface locations
===============
1. Gatehouse
--------------
The stone work of the gatehouse is intact, and there's evidence that the north tower has been kept in repair.  A stout wooden door bars entrance to the tower.  There's evidence that men occasionally stand guard or camp on the second floor of the tower - a stool, kindling, ashes and coals.  There's a heavy trap door in the floor leading to an iron ladder down.

2. Great Hall
-------------
The main building consists of a great hall and a twisting warren of half fallen walls and passages.  Rubble covers the floor from the remains of the rafters and collapsed ceilings.

3. Chapel
---------
The chapel is cleared of any religious trappings,  A large stone angel, 10' tall, cradles a book in her arms, and dominates the center of the room.  There's evidence that people camp here from time to time - litter in the corner and further evidence of small indoor fires.  The statue radiates magic if detected and is a powerful artifact - The Dreaming Angel.

There is a slab in the floor that can be pried with a crowbar.  Beneath the slab is a narrow spiral staircase down to level 1.  Finding it requires a activity like searching for a secret door.

4. Kitchen
----------
In the southeast corner of the great hall, near the old kitchen, there is a staircase leading into the undercroft.

Outside the kitchen is a stone-circled well on the property not far from the servant's entrance.  The well is false and the shaft is another entrance to the dungeons.

5. North Tower
--------------
Underneath a loose flagstone is an iron box holding an oilskin wrapped journal - the Diary of Wil Fuller, and a silver amulet with sapphire in the shape of the family crest - a half moon (the amulet is worth 488sp).

6. Standing Stones
----------------------
A set of 5 weathered megaliths circle a nearby hilltop.  A runic script like Ogham is chiseled into the surface of four of the stones - the runes list a series of wizard names (major characters from within the dungeon).  The fifth stone is covered in chiseled magical symbols, decipherable with a Read Magic spell.  A character can learn a new first level spell, Join the Covenant, from the megalith.

The stones surround a walled shaft in the center of the hill.  The shaft descends hundreds of feet into the depths of Harrow Home.

[ The Covenant is a larger topic I'll address in it's own post ].

Site Encounters
==============
Each time the player characters return to the site, roll a d6 for the day.  On a roll of 1, another group is accessing the ruins as well (leaving, approaching, or waiting in the ruins - 33% of each).

Daytime Encounters
1 Bandits
2 Bandits
3 Traders
4 Traders
5 Acolytes
6 Angry Townsfolk

Bandits
These are violent members of the Thurman gang (dungeon level 1).  They'll have a mix of swords, clubs, and pistols.  If they're leaving the ruins, they've either received a commission to kidnap someone, or perhaps it's a few rowdies off to the nearest town.  Returning bandits are escorting a victim.

Traders
Unscrupulous merchants know the inhabitants of Harrow Home pay dearly for provisions, rare ingredients and reagents, and foreign artifacts smuggled in from the coast.

Acolytes
Pilgrims from around England make infrequent trips to and from Harrow Home to worship at the temple of Mammon.

Angry Townsfolk
Dark rumors have always swirled around the site of Harrow Home.  When family members go missing, it's not unusual for angry peasants to storm the ruin looking for their loved ones.

Nighttime Encounters
[ coming later ]

Blog Notes
I'm on a business trip, so I can't scan in the map of the surface until next week.  I have a ton of notes for Harrow Home, so I'm pretty sure I'm going to develop it here on the blog.  I'd like to develop a terse style and treat it as a series of one-page dungeons - not sure I can achieve that level of brevity, though - I blab a lot.  There are four entrance into the dungeons from the surface ruins - the well, the main stairs, the bandit's trap door, and the shaft at the standing stones.

Personalities of Harrow Home

Harrow Home Manor and Xibalba have pulled way ahead of the Greek mega dungeon in the poll - as of the time of writing, there are 88 votes, with Xibalba leading at 42%.  I don't get a ton of traffic, so if we clear 100 votes I'll be pretty happy.  Did you know you can change your vote, too?  In the interests of stirring the pot, here's some of the design philosophy behind Harrow Home (and why it's a mega dungeon like no other).

I've mentioned before that I think of it as a "character-driven mega dungeon".  Harrow Home is a place where various mad wizards, sorcerers, and occult initiates have congregated to research an otherworldly phenomenon (the Black Cyst) deep in the depths.  The various levels and sub levels of the dungeon are the lairs, sanctums, and hidden laboratories of these mad men (and ladies).  It opens up a degree of strategic play during exploration as the party has options how to knock over some of these lairs - they can plan them like heists, or use political approaches and make alliances - different from just kicking the door down and stabbing the monsters.  Although that works too.

There are arcane covenants between the wizards of Harrow Home that limit their ability to act directly against their rivals - and the consequences for breaking the covenants are quite awful!  For that reason, the presence of adventurers is part inconvenience, but part opportunity to the inhabitants.  Adventurers make excellent cat's paws and proxies to get around the strictures of the covenants.

In a post on the design philosophy of Harrow Home, I mentioned how the character-driven approach plays out by taking a look at the lair of one such wizard, Nicoletto the Reanimator:

Consider the lair of Nicoletto the Reanimator.  Hook-nosed and ill cast, Nicoletto sits on a crooked throne, wearing a metal cap and rough fur cape.  His warrens are filled with alchemical homonculi imbued with the lustful spirits of outsiders (demons).  (I realized after writing up the character, he sounded a bit like the Moleman with his Moloids).  Nicoletto's lair is full of spacious, well-appointed living spaces with high peaked halls.  Isolated and paranoid, he's filled his living areas with traps and chutes that drop intruders down into the warrens of his misshapen creations.  The ever-present traps makes it tough on his servants and guests!  Because Nicoletto needs a steady stream of reagents and victims for his experiments, he's one of the first magicians that can be targeted when players defeat some of the bandits and thugs that camp in the cellars of the old manse and learn of Nicoletto's contact with the surface world.

What follows is a survey of the other malefactors that can be found in the depths of Harrow Home.

One of the main figures goes by the witch-name Cassandra.  Cassandra is decadent and vain, the chief architect of the covenants, and the mastermind behind the current state of affairs in Harrow Home.  Just about every other witch or wizard is gunning for Cassandra (or her true name).  She has a fantastic oven that allows her to make a wide range of potions and magical ingredients from beings that she burns to ash within it.

Mordeleg the Blood Drinker was once a human, member of an early druid cult that revered the Black Cyst (back when it was much smaller).  Over the ages, he's mutated into a bloated, grotesque, vampiric monster with a ropy tongue - Jabba the Hutt with fangs.  He's served by cave hobs, primitive and violent fairies.  In Harrow Home, the Black Cyst has been slowly sinking, so the earliest levels are also chronologically the oldest, and Mordeleg's cave-like lair is ancient.

Perhaps the oldest inhabitant is The Caretaker, a robed and cowled figure that communicates only through gestures.  It's said the Caretaker's physical form beneath the robes is comprised of worms and insects and that his tenure dates back to the Hyperborean wizards of old.

Gorm Norsen is a violent, blood drinking Viking berserker (vampire).  Gorm's gang of Viking fang-men are imprisoned at the start of the campaign, but it's possible\likely that adventurers end up freeing them, letting Gorm run havoc on the countryside.  Adventurers are "bulls in the china shop" after all.  The poisonous exhalations of the Black Cyst warp and mutate beings exposed to them, so a number of figures that have directly confronted the cyst through the ages have ended up like Gorm's gang.

Yusuf Al-Kindi is a scientist and philosopher; he has the most complete notes and archives on the cyst.  He's also a mummy.  We already met Nicoletto the Reanimator in the excerpt above.  Ricardus Venator and Isabel de Avila are both body thieves, maintaining their immortality by jumping mortal shells when age becomes a problem.  They're rivals, and both of them have expensive tastes.  Neither is terribly interested in the cyst.  They came to Harrow Home fleeing the Inquisition.  Isabel's project is to gather the fragments of the Key of Solomon.  Ricardus is just shallow.

The Conways are a cannibal ghoul family that live in the upper levels.  They help keep the various "masters down below" stocked with subjects and victims.  Doesn't every dungeon need hillbilly cannibal ghouls?  I don't know what the Yorkshire equivalent of the American hillbilly is, but I'll have to ask one of the Brits out there for guidance.

Gerrit Arrentz is a foppish, devil worshiping warlock attempting to open a hell-gate.  He runs his sanctum like a pyramid scheme.  Tryfena Vosper lost her body to possession by a demonic outsider, and her sanctum is now haunted and demon infested.  Teresa Medeiros is a life stealer who lives off stolen youth; Meyer Schultheis is essentially a brain-in-a-jar, obsessed with the fae realm, who entertains himself by hosting violent blood sports in a gladiatorial pit.

Ryksa Sprosna seems like an articulate, fashionable old lady, if you overlook her withered limbs and death rictus.  Although polite, she has a tendency to view the living with clinical detachment that can land them on the specimen table.

Gregorius was reincarnated in a child's body, but don't underestimate his level of viciousness and cruelty.  Petrus Magnus is a lich obsessed with a book called the Dream Codex, and maintains the Scriptorium of Sighs.  He'd love to get his hands on Cassandra's oven and use it to collect more dream fragments.

There are a few more characters as well, but the more interesting ones are The Descendant and The Severed Sorcerer, both victims of the covenant curse.  The Descendant is one of the few characters that knows Cassandra's true name, though it's sealed away by a powerful geas.  He was one of her descendants who brought her back from beyond when he explored the ancestral property, but made the mistake of developing cold feet, and plotted against her.  (When Brendan called Harrow Home "Charles Dexter Ward: The Megadungeon", his arrows flew straight and true).

The Severed Sorcerer was also overthrown by the curse, and his sanctum lies open and empty.  His screaming head is in a sealed box at the bottom of a well, but the rest of his parts crawl around the dungeon endlessly, and show up on the wandering monster tables.  One of the side quests could be getting all the parts back together again.  Wonder what he has to say?

So that's an overview of the mad inhabitants of Harrow Home.  Some werewolves used to lair there as well, escaping the fires of the church in Europe, but they've long since relocated to the wild moors, maintaining tenuous ties with the inhabitants of the dungeon.  Harrow Home the campaign setting definitely involves the moorlands as a hex crawl.

With Harrow Home and Xibalba in the clear lead, it comes down to a choice between the gothic themed Harrow Home (with it's bevy of trope-based wizards and witches) or the strange blend of Xibalba - pirates and buccaneers exploring a mysterious island, home to Mesoamerican ruins and evidence of the ancients.  I'll post more about Xibalba in a few days, after I get caught up on some recent Black City game reports.

Design Approach for Death Mountain and Harrow Home Manor

I'm finally getting around to answering a reader's question in a comment (Dwimmer Gan) who posted some questions on the Death Mountain post - I got distracted by game reports and the notes on megadungeon topology\design philosophy.  Here's the question paraphrased:

How do you handle conventional dungeon dressing in the megadungeon?  In other words, why would the god of death, Hades, put a kitchen, lounge, armoire or laboratory in his dungeon?

The node-based approach I use to create the dungeon topology allows for smaller areas to explore, with fairly narrow themes.  A level may end up with a similar number of rooms to the traditional approach (where a huge sheet of graph paper is filled in with rooms and corridors), but the varied themes make it easier to create interesting rooms that complement the theme.  I'll still use random tables to help with inspiration and to get some directional guidance, even if I stray from the strict results of the dice.

Death Mountain, the Greek-styled megadungeon, involves a series of unrelated mini dungeons on each level, along with a signature area featuring a "boss" fight, and a trap-laden gauntlet.  Hades created the plentiful levels of Death Mountain to challenge (and preferably slay) adventurers, so it makes sense for each major level to have a "tomb of horrors" style gauntlet that ramps the challenge level.  Each gauntlet is hard to enter, separating the 'inhabited' areas of the dungeon from the artificial challenges of the gauntlet.  Beating a gauntlet earns the adventuring group some special keys, but it's possible to descend without them.  The boss area  represents a tough zone where the inhabitants are directly connected to Hades' agenda.

Level One of Death Mountain has The Entrance Halls, a series of monumental chambers near the entrance to the mountain housing vast statues and trophies extolling the greatness of Hades; there are some secret shrines of the  Olympians hidden there, a bandit camp, some 'safe areas' for new adventurers to buy and sell, and the fantastic shrine to the Moirae, the Fates (a wheel of fortune type of place with random boons and banes).

There's  a deep chasm overlooked by a series of caves; a wayward artifact of Demeter fuels monstrous growth (the Food of the Gods) so this cave complex is crawling with the giant insects and other monstrous vermin that plague low level dungeons.

One of the distant passages leads out to the mountainside and the Mountain Caves.  Raucous satyrs beat their drums to Pan and lure the fierce Oreads (mountain nymphs) to their wild parties.  Satyrs are the ultraviolent, rowdy troublemakers of the dungeon - I'll use them as Greek-style Orcs.  There's even a scenic cave grotto with an underground waterfall, home to a cave Naiad and the tormented artist inspired to sculpt and paint her image across his workspace.

The main dungeon areas are the Legion Halls, home to a small army of skeletons that patrol much of the first level.  There is a vast necropolis where flesh eating scarabs devour those interred, preparing them for future service in the Legion.  You don't want to die anywhere near the Legion Halls.  The "boss" of the first level is an Eidelon of Hades known as the Ambassador of Bones.  There's a Well of the Dead, a dark howling hole that extends all the way down to the shores of the River Styx.  Beyond the Legion Halls is the MoonGate and the entrance to the first level gauntlet.

I think I have the first 3 levels of Death Mountain sketched out in this way, with 4-5 dungeons on each level, and a list of sample or representative monsters.  Death Mountain isn't meant to be too serious, just a fun way to hew fairly close to the tropes of standard D&D, but I also wanted to make a dungeon that would be fairly interesting some day for the kids and family.  They love the Percy Jackson young adult books, and the theme is rife with possibilities.

Another megadungeon taking up space in the brainstorming notebook is Harrow Home Manor.  I don't think I've talked about it much recently but there are plenty of labeled posts on the blog; Harrow Home is a ruined manse on the Yorkshire Moors.  Escaping the fires of the inquisition, sorcerers and wizards from around Europe came to Harrow Home and carved out vast underground palaces and lairs beneath the desolate heath.  There's a dark presence deep beneath the ground there, a growing cyst containing a Neolithic horror.  Many of the magi have made it their life's work to study the otherworldly emanations of the cyst and use it to fuel their experiments.

What's been so interesting about the design of Harrow Home is that each mini-dungeon is the lair of a different mad wizard.  They're all paranoid and chaotic, providing opportunities for enterprising (and unscrupulous) adventurers to prey on the weak, make alliances with the strong, and act as agents for some of the powers.

For example, consider the lair of Nicoletto the Reanimator.  Hook-nosed and ill cast, Nicoletto sits on a crooked throne, wearing a metal cap and rough fur cape.  His warrens are filled with alchemical homonculi imbued with the lustful spirits of outsiders (demons).  (I realized after writing up the character, he sounded a bit like the Moleman with his Moloids).  Nicoletto's lair is full of spacious, well-appointed living spaces with high peaked halls.  Isolated and paranoid, he's filled his living areas with traps and chutes that drop intruders down into the warrens of his misshapen creations.  The ever-present traps makes it tough on his servants and guests!  Because Nicoletto needs a steady stream of reagents and victims for his experiments, he's one of the first magicians that can be targeted when players defeat some of the bandits and thugs that camp in the cellars of the old manse and learn of Nicoletto's contact with the surface world.

Harrow Home is intriguing to me because each mini dungeon is essentially character-driven; the design task is to identify the mad wizard and their project first, figure out how they fit into the wizard politics of Harrow Home, and then start sketching out their personal dungeons and lair.  It would be interesting to tackle the setting as a group of players, because each new mad wizard's lair offers so many opportunities.  Consider the smarmy alchemist above, Nicoletto - do you treat Nicolleto's lair as a heist, learning about him from others, and figure out how to break in, infiltrate, and loot his treasury?  Do you knock down the door and try a frontal assault, like any other dungeon delve?  Or do you attempt a political approach, and find out how he can provide information to take down an even bigger fish?

The Witches of High Helmsley - An Encounter Discussion

Between the idea
And the reality
Between the motion
And the act
Falls the Shadow
--TS Elliot, The Hollow Men

A desperate, pox-ridden man stumbles out of the underbrush and into the lane ahead of the party, crying out for help.  Aged and covered in diseased sores, the exertion is too much for his frail state, and he dies after gasping out… "three… they did this to me, they tricked me…"  The dead man has a distinctive hunting knife and sheaf stuck into his loose-fitting belt, assuming anyone overcomes their disgust to get close enough to search him, along with a hand-made fetish around his neck.  Looking down at the map, the main track continues to skirt the moors towards the old abbey and the village of Helmsley down in the river valley, but an underused trail leads off towards the moorlands and the small hamlet of High Helmsley in the direction the man came.

There are big differences between different "versions" of an encounter:  how the encounter area looks in my raw notes, how I'd use those raw notes at the table to bring a scene to life, and how it could be presented as a written piece for an audience.  These variations - it's surely worth some Friday conversation!

For instance, the little excerpt written above would never actually be written out by me as game prep.  I'd probably improvise that scene  (or something similar) as a random encounter for a group that happened to be trudging towards the market town of Helmsley as a combination teaser / plot hook to investigate the witches of High Helmsley.  The encounter teases just enough to indicate there might be something fishy going on in the small community further on.  If they continue on to Helmsley proper, they might learn the hunting knife belonged to a robust young man from a neighboring farm, someone not at all resembling the horrible pox-ridden corpse left behind on the lane.  Following the lead out to the remote farm where "Oswyn Hardaker" recently went missing, they discover he left behind a morose young bride and a now ill-tended farm.  "He was spending too much time climbing up toward High Helmsley, he was, he had eyes for a girl there, I just know it, and now he's left me for her", bemoans the abandoned wife.

A written description of Helmsley as an encounter site might go like this:

The Witches of High Helmsley:

Subtle fear of curses and malevolent spells allow a trio of beautiful witches (Agatha, Rhea, Clara) to rule over the misty Hamlet of High Helmsley from within the small traveler's inn there, The Hanged Man.  The trio long ago signed their names into the Black Book in return for their eternal youth; the Horned Man taught them the Scapegoat Ritual, a piece of dark magic to transfer their illnesses, years, and imperfections onto a sacrificial victim through a hand-crafted cursed fetish, which quickly ages and overwhelms the host.  It's been a few years since they last enacted the ritual, and Agatha is beginning to show a few wrinkles near the corners of her eyes again… 

High Helmsley is a tiny settlement on the edge of the moors, home to clannish shepherds and folks that mutely ignore outsiders and close windows and doors to strangers.  The vicarage has gone abandoned and the church lies in disrepair; only the small tavern shows a sense of upkeep and displays any welcome on a dark evening.

[ I'm omitting the actual game stats and descriptions for the 3 witches since they're not pertinent here]

My actual handwritten notes are even more sparse, since it's mainly sentence fragments and jotted thoughts with a few ideas on how a wandering group might learn all is not well in that remote Hamlet of High Helmsley.

The OSR is as much about publishing (either via blog or book) and sharing creative thoughts as it is about rules and the old games themselves.  We're a movement with many facets, but doesn't it always come back to the table top?  It's difficult to convey the nuts and bolts of the DM's craft via the written word; the presentation of the material can vary based on the decisions and interpretations made during "run time" by an imaginative DM with a bunch of energized people around the table.

Another way of offering the question is the problem of Voice:  how much authorial voice is necessary to convey meaning?  I find it's analogous to presenting an oral play, a drama, with or without the staging or reading directions.

The description of the Witches of High Helmsley encounter is bland, although there's probably enough there for a referee to give the hamlet a foreboding, ominous character when a group wanders into the place.  But if I absolutely wanted someone at home to have the same patented "Beedo Experience™ " as me and mine, I would need to recommend \ encourage \ dictate that they stage the whole thing nearly the same way as me - including that lead-in encounter with the recent victim of the Scapegoat Curse in the prologue, who stumbles out in front of the party,  dripping with corruption like Dorian Grey's secret portrait.  And even then, you can't commoditize an experience or guarantee it would work the same at your table.

There was a kerfuffle some time last year when the drafts for Dwimmermount started to surface after the successful Kickstarter - I think it was Tenkar's copper pieces group that ran one of the levels, sans any kind of embellishment or DM creativity (as a kind of experiment), and then said players complained about how flat and boring was the game.  "But James Mal's sessions lead to such interesting game reports!  We wanted that patented James Mal™  experience at our table, too."  It ended up being hollow.

This is a fascinating dichotomy for me - the contrast between strong, directive encounters vs bare bones - since I favor megadungeons and similar material that's usually meant to be improvised off of sparse notes; contrast that with the micro-setting approach where numerous encounter details are often plotted, scripted, and/or scheduled using timelines.

Dream Codex of the Oneiromancer

In the crumbling surface ruins of Harrow Home Manor is the statue of a forlorn angel, shielding a heavy stone book behind her folded wings.  After viewing the statue, characters skilled in magic will suffer a visitation from the dreaming angel the next time they sleep.  Flipping to a random page of the book, a fragment of incantation and formula is highlighted to the dreamer in unnatural clarity.  Upon waking, the dreamer can transcribe the magical symbols into a nearby spell book, the fragments representing a small piece of a great master spell, glimpsed only as wisps of dream.

Other magic users have tried to collect all the dream fragments into one whole and recreate the spell.  The lich-like Petrus Magnus, who lost the ability to dream when he crossed into death's kingdom, has created a scriptorium populated with enslaved dreamers to whom he subjects visitations by the dreaming angel.  His human agents purchase rare opiates from the exotic near East in order to keep his thralls in enchanted slumber, scribbling their disparate pieces of the spell if they receive a somnambulant gift from the muse.  Magnus became obsessed with completion of the incantation after a rival, the sorcerer Absalom, solved the formula and escaped to Deimos Oneiroi, the land of dream.  Petrus no longer dreams or sleeps, engendering a homicidal obsession with completing his own version of the dream spell.  He murders rivals who are compiling their own codices, absorbing their fragments into his growing translation.

Players may learn about the lich while encountering members of the thieves' guild, who might be selling kidnapped victims to join the lich's "Scriptorium of Sighs", or smuggling the rare opiates up from the coast that keep the dreamers in their deep slumbers.  Player magic users that begin to keep their own dream journal become targets of the lich if he learns of their efforts; Magnus brooks no competition.

Eventually, a player learns the title of the dream codex, the Oneirocon, and begins to understand the true nature of the dream spell - an incantation to grant the caster's every wish, to reshape the world, to become "the lathe of heaven".

Unfortunately, the dreaming angel is both persistent and insidious.  Once a magical character views the angel, there's a 10% chance each evening of a dream visit where a page fragment is revealed.  The character must make a Save vs Spells upon waking to avoid spending the next day obsessively writing out the dream-glimpsed formulae, representing 1-6% of the completed spell.  Each time a character adds to his dream codex, the completion percent is the chance the character duplicates a previous night's effort - so if a character has 9% of the dream codex transcribed, and they roll 8% , then their dream has duplicated existing pages; anything over 9% adds 1-6% more to the compilation as they see a new page in their dreams.  In this way, the Oneirocon becomes more and more difficult to complete because they have to roll above the current compilation percent.  Other characters within the dungeons of Harrow Home have taken up the quest to complete the  Oneirocon in centuries past, so dream fragments jotted in spell books can be found from time to time as treasure.  The percentage factors can be used to determine if someone else's dream book covers new material or the same transcriptions already possessed by the character.

A Remove Curse spell causes the visits from the dreaming angel to cease, forever.

(Harrow Home Manor is a gothic-themed megadungeon in something akin to the Yorkshire Moors; I was dusting off the notebook where I was keeping the Harrow Home ideas as I start up more creative work, and pulled this one out for sharing).

Work in Progress - Harrow Home's Moors

Two weeks stretch before me, with unprecedented creative writing time.  My family was able to make the annual pilgrimage to the grandparent's lake house for a two week vacation, while I'm stuck here over the upcoming holidays due to work commitments and a large project going live this weekend.  Without kids and a wife to dote on, what to do with all my time?  More writing.

Two projects jump to the forefront - compiling the Black City notes into a manuscript, and laying the foundation for a future game, Harrow Home Manor.

The Black City is the megadungeon we've been running for the past year and a half (at least up until the recent excursion into Call of Cthulhu).  The elevator pitch is like this:  what if Vikings found Lovecraft's City of the Elder Things somewhere beyond the North Sea?  It's fairly gonzo.  It has ancient aliens, creatures of Norse myth, and extraterrestrial computers masquerading as Asgardians.  These next two weeks are a good time to get my notes into a cohesive manuscript and decide how to move forward to make it shareable/publishable.

The other one is Harrow Home Manor.  The manor is a crumbling ruin on the Yorkshire moors, in an alternate (gothic) version of England, Dread Albion.  The star-fallen cyst of a sleeping god was carried onto the moors and enshrined there by ancient people; the site has been inhabited by Picts, Celts, Romans, Britons, Norse, Normans, and even the Templars.  Structures sink into the earth, pulled down by the cyst's awful gravity.  A journey beneath Harrow Home is a trip back through time, where the deeper one delves, the earlier are the ruins and styles of the architecture.  When players eventually find the cyst of the sleeping god, it's a cracked, egg-like structure the size of a truck, an oozing miasma.  Cave paintings in the lower levels show how it was the size of a grapefruit when it was first carried to the site, getting progressively larger over time.  What's going to come out when the egg hatches?

Whereas the Black City is gonzo and high adventure, I want Harrow Home to borrow more ideas from Call of Cthulhu and have a strong horror theme.

Before I develop too much tunnel vision on drawing and stocking dungeons, I'd like to sketch the sandbox first.  (See what I did there -- tunnel vision, drawing dungeons?  And they say I'm not funny.)  Here is the first take on the hex map for the moors and surrounding areas.  Time to make sketch notes on the locales and remove any of the modern settlements - or find their 16th and 17th century names.

The Caretaker of Harrow Home

“The nethermost caverns,” wrote the mad Arab, “are not for the fathoming of eyes that see; for their marvels are strange and terrific. Cursed the ground where dead thoughts live new and oddly bodied, and evil the mind that is held by no head. Wisely did Ibn Schacabao say, that happy is the tomb where no wizard hath lain, and happy the town at night whose wizards are all ashes. For it is of old rumour that the soul of the devil-bought hastes not from his charnel clay, but fats and instructs the very worm that gnaws; till out of corruption horrid life springs, and the dull scavengers of earth wax crafty to vex it and swell monstrous to plague it. Great holes secretly are digged where earth’s pores ought to suffice, and things have learnt to walk that ought to crawl.”
--H.P. Lovecraft, The Festival

One of the ubiquitous figures met throughout the dungeons of Harrow Home is the enigmatic Caretaker.  Clad in dark robes like a Medieval monk, only a bland porcelain mask stares out from beneath the hood.  No voice has ever issued forth from beneath the mask; when the figure communicates, if at all, it's through simple hand gestures, or scrawlings on the stone wall in a script unrecognizable to a 16th century explorer.

The Caretaker takes no sides in the internecine struggles between the Houses; it only visits those seeking deeper truths about Harrow Home itself, aiding their quest for knowledge.  This may even mean assisting parties of adventurers from time to time, particularly when its aid will place them in a position to learn sanity threatening knowledge and lore.  An example might be pointing out the location of a secret door, behind which lies an eldritch library that could draw the players closer to using the same kind of dark magic that defines the inhuman residents of the dungeon.

Beneath the robes, the figure is made entirely of roiling vermin; worms, beetles, and spiders, that clack and rustle with each step it takes.  The Caretaker has been attacked and dissipated before, leaving behind dead bugs and an empty robe and mask, only to reemerge at a later time from the dungeon's depths completely restored.  The sorcerers of Harrow Home don't cross the Caretaker; they remember when the Caretaker opened its robes to completely consume a victim beneath a tide of devouring insects, when an unwise sorcerer forcibly tried to extract answers from the Caretaker.

It's quite possible the Caretaker is the oldest inhabitant of the dungeon, the one figure that has learned to commune with the thing in the pit through the black dreams experienced only by the dead.  The reasoning behind this theory is simple; whenever the Caretaker's gloved claws take up chalk to scrawl a bit of writing on a dungeon wall, it's in the language of the antediluvian Hyperboreans.

The idea of "the Worm that Walks", was created by Lovecraft in the story (above), and then developed in early Call of Cthulhu adventures.  It was brought into D&D with 3E's Age of Worms campaign, although one could argue 1E's Fiend Folio first had the Sons of Kyuss as worm-dripping undead and then Kyuss was built out as an elder evil for 3E.  It carried over into 4E as the "larva mage".

I see the Caretaker as a harbinger of madness and a corrupter, a figure more like the King in Yellow wearing the pallid mask, or Nyarlathotep in the Mythos.  It guides seekers towards greater and greater knowledge and power, as long as such knowledge will bring them spiraling into depravity and madness.

Note:
I'm on vacation now, so I don't expect to have much time for blogging - see you all in a week or so.


* I believe that pic, found on the interwebs (wikipedia), is 4E's larva mage - can anyone confirm if that was 4E or maybe from the 3E Age of Worms campaign?