The priest gently held the elf's face in his gauntleted hands. Then he began to squeeze. They screamed, face turning wonderful hues of red, white, purple, and blue as their blood vessels exploded. He dug around with his thumbs until they felt wet; vitreous humor soaking the maille as those beautiful cerulean eyes turned to jelly. The elf gurgled curse after curse, withering his body and mind. But Iron Hand girded his flesh and Oil Lamp lit the way. He brought his palms together and their bones broke like a bird's.
...
A stench woke the priest from his dream. Acrid and sharp, it struck his throat with a dull pain he found vaguely pleasurable. He lay on a filthy stone floor, bound with rawhide. Shame flushed his wrinkled face. He'd been paralysed, or charmed, or slept, or laid low by any other myriad of low-level tricks.
Then he saw his companions and had to choke back a laugh. The fighter snored, drooling into his beard. The thief was trussed up on a spit like a suckling pig, slathered in the eucalyptus oil that must have roused him. Best of all was the wizard, hairless and naked but still held aloft by his spell. Their captors, clearly baffled by the dwarf's persistent levitation, had anchored him to the floor with a length of rope.
Like the bloated corpse of a stillborn babe, leashed to its mother's womb.
The priest rose, breaking his restraints in one smooth motion. The room was dark and hazy, lit only by the fire beneath the roasting halfling. He made out a vague shape at the edges of his perceptions and surged forwards. Bright red eyes turned to meet his. A flash of recognition played out across the priest's brain. The ochre soil. The shade of the acacia. The crimson orbs staring at him from the sea of grass.
He closed his eyes and the spell harmlessly washed over him. He didn't need to see to kill. The form of the beast was strange, but close enough to a man for his practiced hands. His fingers found purchase in its filthy silk tunic, then dug into greasy flesh. The monsterman brayed like a donkey, releasing hot breath that reeked of eucalyptus. He heard its friends surround him, felt them stab their blades into his back. Through the armour all it did was bruise. The priest breathed in, savouring the moment. He wrapped his hands around its fat head. He felt around with his thumbs.
Then he began to squeeze.
Why? The dried benthic layer is rich in fire opals. Submarine volcanoes overflow with pink diamonds. Deeper down, nestled in tectonic fault lines, vast veins of gold quartz. All resources prized for their telluric power; all necessary fuel for the ongoing magical industrial revolution.
Most of the locals have been massacred, driven off, or turned collaborator. But one tribe of monstermen has chosen to cut their own slice of the pie from the colonial project. After they wipe out a half-dozen caravans, a consortium of mining concerns and adventuring guilds put a bounty on their heads.
Militarised parties of prospectors sally out beyond the fortified perimeter every morning, headed to the goldfields to strike the earth. Within the walls are the usual fair of outlet stores, gunsmiths, brothels and public houses, all built from adobe, acacia, and baobab wood. Dwarven mining guild Open Veins holds a majority stake in the colony and it is their representative, Trade Warden Eadweard, who offers the party a scalphunting contract over pewter mugs of cactus wine and plump helmet brandy.
The sweaty dwarf explains his shipments are being bushwacked. There's never any signs of a battle, caravans just disappear. They'll find their skeletons in a mass-grave weeks later, bearing marks of chewing and cooking. There's 5,000 SP in missing gold, which the party is welcome to if they recover it. The consortium is also offering 500 SP each for the heads of the culprits, be they man or monster.
Failing the above, the party can always perform a manual gridsearch of the surrounds. Each character gets a Detect Secret Doors roll, or your system's equivalent, to discover THE CAVE. If unsuccessful, the Sand Dwellers finish their feast and sally out to find a second course, ambushing the party at dusk. Assuming they survive the attack, they can follow the monstermen's tracks back to their lair.
From the outside, the cave is a tall hillock rising above the sea of grass. Chunks of sandstone protrude from its sides, bearing signs of ancient stonecutting typical of the prehuman ruins littering the basin. There's a smell of woodsmoke and roasting meat in the air, but it's not clear where it's coming from.
A thorough search of the mound finds the concealed entrance to S1 and the carved wall of S4. The cave interior is unlit unless otherwise specified. It smells awful, a heady mixture of animal spoor, eucalyptus oil, expensive perfumes, burning wood, and rotten meat.
S1: Cave entrance concealed by a glamour. Hard to spot at a distance, but up close this section of the hillock shimmers slightly, like the heat haze of a mirage. The illusion is projected by an Sun Lounger coiled around a giant piece of glowing quartz - an Elder Thing directed-energy weapon. The magical snake is also concealing the entrance to S2 with a separate illusion.
If the snake releases its grip on the crystal (i.e. after it is attacked), it releases a blinding flash of light. Everyone in the room (sans the snake, but including other dungeon denizens) must Save vs Spells as if they were targeted by the Light spell. If someone smashes it, it explodes as a Fireball would.
S2: A temple to Five-Pointed-Star, the Elder Thing ethnic equivalent of Strong Man, a culture hero that exalts their ideals of superscience over magic, enlightened technocracy over religion. The cave's current inhabitants have desecrated the echinoderm's altar and reconsecrated it to Crooked Palm, god of bankers, beggars, and all those who get something for nothing.
Their shrine is an acacia wood carving of a faceless man proffering a hand filled with pink diamonds. These jewels are illusory, anyone touching the secretly empty palm must Save vs Spells or be stripped naked; all of their equipment getting translocated to the treasure pile in S6.
The Sand Dwellers can teleport to this room at will, unless the shrine is desecrated.
The door to S2 is the usual Elder Thing affair, a massive stone edifice that requires five limbs to open. Generally left closed, the Sand Dwellers only opening it to circulate air on humid days. Thanks to starfish material science, though heavy and incredibly old, the door opens without so much as a squeak.
S4: Sandstone covered in ornate pictograms. Those with expertise in archaeology, fluency in the Elder Thing's tongue, or Comprehend Languages realise it denotes a secret door. Press the right areas in the correct order and an impossibly intricate stone mechanism activates, opening a 10' hole in the rockface.
Ignorant of their meaning, the Sand Dwellers covered the symbols with clay that's since washed away.
S5: A 15' deep pool of fresh water, fed by an ancient artesian well. Three Sere-Ghuls swim around in the clean water, bellies bloated from drinking their fill. Unable to charm undead, the dwellers bribed them with access to the pool in exchange for guarding their lair. Unfortunately for them, the ghouls are supremely lazy and ignore intruders unless their pristine waters are directly threatened.
At the bottom of the pool is a forgotten Elder Thing cashbox with 1,549 SP in fat discs of green gold.
S6: Sand Dweller lair. Horribly stained spider-silk textiles, walls smeared in expensive dyes, censers of expensive perfume, brass pots filled with a truly eye-watering rotgut brewed from eucalyptus leaves.
The seven Sand Dwellers sit around a cooking fire built from the wreckage of a wagon, marinating the corpses of dead caravaneers before spit roasting them. The smoke is ventilated out of the dungeon through highly advanced air-filtration systems built by the Elder Things.
Their pile of stolen loot is piled haphazardly in the corner of the room. Amidst the trash is 1,337 SP in unsoiled Cave Elf luxury items, plus 5,000 SP in gold quartz stolen from White Fountain caravans, a +2 Sword of Sandblasting, a Wand of Fireballs, and a Ring of Ooze Repelling.
The doors to S2 are partly ajar, the dwellers having smashed the locks after getting tired of opening them. The hallway is trapped with a 10' pit trap covered with loose tiles and tree branches. It's not well hidden, but the floor is so filthy you might not notice. The bottom is lined with rusted metal that deals 2D6 DMG, alerts the Sand Dwellers in S6, and infects the victim with lockjaw on a failed Save vs Poison.
Bipedal hairless koalas with huge crimson eyes. Stats as Dryad (Monster Overhaul), but no movement restrictions and only able to teleport to S2. These malevolent nature spirits were a minor inconvenience for autochthonous tribes, stealing the occasional unattended child or ensorcelling an unprepared hunter.
But these monstermen have learned much from the adventuring guilds rampaging across the outback. The wonders of action economy, surprise rounds, and focus firing Save-or-Suck spells on single targets.
Their new modus operandi is simple - abuse infravision to get close to nighttime travellers and then unload a battery of Charm Creature until everyone is ensorcelled. Between them they've got 20+ castings, which is plenty for most caravans even if a few targets succeed their initial saves. The one snag is the requirement of eye-contact, like any gaze weapon, but this hasn't proved an issue so far.
Victims are forced to drive their caravan to THE CAVE, where they bring their goods inside and then tie themselves up. The dwellers used to just slit their throats and be done with it, but they've since branched out into selling 0th-level victims to Cave Elf slavers in exchange for luxuries like silks, perfumes and dyes. The drow are too canny to purchase levelled characters, so the Sand Dwellers keep them for eating.
Those killed by this cocktail magical runoff rise again as Sere-Ghuls, dehydrated revenants with teeth and nails filled with concentrated metallic toxins. Stats as Ghouls (Monster Overhaul).
These undead are cursed with an eternal thirst near-impossible to quench - the polluted waters that first doomed them only offer the barest relief. It's unsurprising they turn to waylaying travellers, guzzling their stockpiles of water and leaving them stranded without a drop to drink (inadvertently ensuring their kind's reproduction). Other times they simply kill their victims outright as to drink their blood.
Stats as Giant Snake (Monster Overhaul), with the ability to cast Hallucinatory Terrain at will. If killed cleanly (e.g. not hacked to pieces, melted with acid, set on fire...) and carefully dressed, the flayed skin of a Sun Lounger functions as a Displacer Cloak, so long as the wearer is brightly lit.
Like the previous entry, the monsters are adapted from Dry Red & Ochre Hills and statblocks are sourced from the Monster Overhaul. Also like the previous entry, I chose the main antagonist based on a desire to use a cool piece of art I found. The map is DysonLogos' Caves of Azure Blue. The title is from the Stephen Crane poem, which has featured on this blog before.
This scenario is arguably more of an extended combat encounter than a true dungeon. I judge my 'crawls on their ability to be revisited - for the players to launch an expedition into the depths, escape with their lives, and then return to delve another day. That's not the case here, either you get past the barrage of Save-or-Suck nonsense the koalas throw at you, or it's a TPK. I think it would be very fair to rule the Sand Dwellers only have a handful of Charm Creature castings left between them, depending on how you interpret the period since their last raid.
This post also includes the first piece of microfiction on this blog. It's technically preceded by a piece I released for Pelts for XP, but I didn't like it and deleted the post shortly after. But writing this one was a lot of fun, so I'm tempted to revisit it. Either way, I'll definitely be doing more short fiction in the future.
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