Me And My Game

A legendary warrior-king with an equally legendary enchanted blade, risen from deathless sleep after unnumbered centuries to answer their people’s hour of need, only to discover that the martial sciences have advanced somewhat while they’ve been napping, and by modern standards, “legendary warrior-king with an equally legendary enchanted blade” works out to “3rd level fighter with a +1 sword”  

A rogue wanted for multiple counts of regicide who claims it’s totally not their fault – they were just trying to run a petty grift, and one thing led to another, and suddenly there’s a dead king on their hands; though it’s apparently happened multiple times, all available evidence points to them telling the truth  

A sorcerer who’s the source of their own magical bloodline, owing to a spot of ill-considered time travel and a resulting “I’m my own grandpa” style predestination paradox (well, more like great great grandpa, which they contend makes it excusable – how many people can honestly say they’d recognise their own four-times-removed ancestor on sight?)  

A warlock whose pact was made quite unexpectedly when they and a bunch of their drunking buddies attempted to conjure a fictitious elder god they’d made up while absolutely hammered, and the god in question actually responded; it’s genuinely unclear whether some other entity is impersonating their fabricated patron, or whether they legitimately invented a Great Old One  

霞琳 - xia’lin!

Villain: The Snarlcart Witch

“ I have the most vivid memory from when I was younger, sent up to bed without supper for breaking all of my mother’s good crockery, just waiting to hear the baying of wolves and the screeching of crooked wheels that were coming to take me away. I resolved that night to be the best son I could be… but despite all that I have accomplished, I still have nightmares about that damned Cart.” 

-Anton Hennly, town magister. 

Setup: Every society has their bogymen, characters of terror that serve as methods of leveraging a child’s imagination into compliance, readying them for greater systems of reward and punishment that don’t rely on fear of being devoured to operate. 

The Snarlcart Witch is one of these, said to raise her grisly wagon from the swamp each year after the harvest and go racing across the countryside, looking for naughty children to carry down beneath the mud. In years when there are too many children to fit in the cart, it’s said that she feeds the excess to the braying beasts which pull her about, and so children are encouraged to not only be good, but ensure their friends behave themselves as well. 

There is truth behind these childhood terrors, far more elaborate but no less grisly. There is a witch, her name is Dennika Coldwell, and rather being some Hagga drawn from a feywild fable she is in fact a lich, shunned out of her previous role as a prestigious court mage and now forced to practice in the swamps. Her yearly ride is true as well, though far less of a marauding charge through the countryside and more a solemn circuit of the local farmsteads, seeking those who have had a poor harvest, and have too many mouths to feed. Dennika takes on those children she acquires as servants, though she often finds other uses for youths she finds too stubborn, squeamish, or stupid to survive her way of life. 

Make no mistake, though Dennika is not some cackling caricature, she is a villain, one supported by the cruelties of reality and with little patience for sellswords wanting to play at hero. 

Adventure Hooks: 

As autumn comes to a close, the party is approached by a teenage peasant by the name of Sofie, who desperately pleads for their help. While most people think the Snarlcart Witch is a myth, she remembers a visitation from the terror when she was very young. Sofie’s parents rebuffed the witch’s offer to take their daughter away, but she still remembers the way the witch looked at her appraisingly as she said “ I’ll come round again, some other time”. Ten years and half as many new siblings later, Sofie is wracked by a fear that she’s been cursed: her family’s floundering farm has officially failed the harvest, and the years of stress and strife have hardened her parents into a pair of quarreling, coldhearted souls. She’s worried that the snarlcart will appear once again, and her parents will give into the temptation to sell off one of her siblings.   Even if the party deal with the witch (there is no curse, sometimes land goes bad and people just go sour), they must face the reality that Sofie’s parents can’t care for any of their children anymore, possibly resulting in the party adopting a whole gaggle of farmkids back at their keep. 

Once a woman of power and influence, Dennika all but ruled the realms of the nobles she advised before her dabblings with dark magic were exposed by the church. Of course everyone KNEW you could go to Mistress Coldwell to curse your enemies, bewitch your servants into obedience, and summon evil spirits to entertain at parties, but it was a pretext that allowed the faith to move in and claim the network she’d built for herself. Forced out into a toxic mire filled with arcane runoff, Dennika plots bitter revenge against those who forced her out, in particular an ambitious bishop who got a promotion out of the deal, and the nobles ( or families thereof) who once relied on her services but shunned her during her exile. She’s been stockpiling ironic punishments for years, and as with any volatile arsenal (maintained by enslaved children) it’s highly likely that one of these will go off unexpectedly in the near future. 

“Oh hello detective, you caught me just as I was winding down for the morning. Do you have any news about my husband? I do worry about him so.”

felt like drawing even more vampires so this is Emerald, Ruby’s sister. she’s seven and a half feet tall, loves murder mysteries, and is on her third mysteriously missing rich human husband. nice lady. very charitable. loves a good cloak over expensive lingerie.

The Flayed Court

A new set of monsters is now available on my patreon. Get your hands on Bhelrath, the accursed King, his history, and the ill fate that befell his kingdom! Get the full PDF including more monsters, tokens, and HD handouts on my patreon (link in the reblog and comments!)

Dungeon: Old Crow Tower

“Nobody has any business going up there save for days where the headsman plies his trade. Why not let that place and all those birds be, eh? ”

Setup:  As one of the settlement’s oldest fortifications, this watchtower and it’s walled square have collected all manner of ghost stories, tales of rumored torment for those imprisoned inside over the years, and the many dying curses spat from the lips of the condemed as they awaited the drop or the last swing of the ax. Even to this day the area still plays hosts to a massive clan of crows, still waiting to feast on the flesh of the guilty. 

Perhaps the most memorable and unnerving of all these stories is that of the so called “Stricken Prince”, a bastard of noble lineage who was none the less so wicked as to have his name and entire existence erased from all records by royal decree. Surviving only as a rumor, there is some debate between tellings as to whether he was some offshoot of the royal line or the prevailing duchess’s illegitimate heir, but all agree that he was an accademic of some kind, indulged with a life of learning to keep him from the public eye. Debate rages on whether the Stricken prince was born wrong, or it was the things he learned while away in forign courts that broke him, but the consensus is that after he came back from study abroad, the prince made no secret of his occult dabblings, working wicked magic on members of the court and holding audience with dark spirits. 

Regardless of the (lurid, likely indulged) details of his crimes, the Prince lived out the rest of his life in the Old Crow Tower,  ten or so years a prisoner before they finally dragged him out and severed him from his obviously troubled head. Since then there have been no prisoners kept in the tower, and fewer and fewer executions in the square, truly making it a place for the birds. 

Adventure Hooks: 

While the promise of loot or a drunken dare might get some parties to explore the old execution grounds, some others might need a little convincing: A noblewoman visiting friends in town has managed to lose her wedding ring, snatched out of her jewlerybox by a crow after the window slipped open at night. Everyone knows that almost all the gallowsbirds in town roost in the tower so surely the party would be able to find such a large and well-decorated bauble there, yes? She’d hate to have to return home without it. 

Among the wealth of trinkets gathered by the crows over the years, the party manages to find a yellowed old journal hidden away between the bricks in one of the uppermost chambers of the tower. Having heard stories of the stricken prince, they decide to take it with them to read, thinking that there may be arcane or political secrets within. Thereafter the party will be followed by an unusual number of corvids every time they come back into town, though whether this is the birds seeking a return of their shinnies, or something more sinister is unknown. 

The journal does indeed belong to the infamous bastard, though seems more of a philosophical ramble on the nature of imprisonment than any tome of occult knowledge. Still, the secrets are there and bleed through in time, with a few spell formulae scribbled in the margins as well as a map or two of different levels of the prison long thought berried but accessible through a secret passage highlighted within the pages.  The last few pages seem at first glance to be nothing but incoherent ramblings, but upon closer investigation reveal that a message has been hidden in invisible ink: more spells are revealed throughout the journal, along with several entries addressed to the anonymous reader, claiming that the stricken prince hid his greatest treasure behind a magic door in the prisons lowest level, and through the ritual forging of a particular key, they might gain access to this trove.