Dungeon: The Crumbling Catacombs
Adventure Hooks:
Some beast has been moving unseen through the city at night, slaying vagrants and those people that conduct business at night. The authorities are hesitant to get involved, at least until the beast slaughters an entire family safely abed in their home and flees through their cellar into a previously unknown series of tunnels that seem to stretch across several borrows.
Strange folk have been congregating in the ruble slums, leaving dozens of candles and other fires to burn on through the night as they enact strange rituals in the flickering light. They call themselves the Lucent Creed and apparently they’re recruiting. Several restless youths and other outsiders have disappeared from home after attending meetings with the Creed, and their families are looking to hire someone to investigate.
The Players are on the hunt for an apostate member of the clergy guilty of conspiracy and embezzling church funds. The powers that be will pay well to have this bounty resolved quickly and quietly in order to avoid scandle, though to do that the party will need to track the awol abbott through a maze of structurally unsound tunnels he’s gone to ground in.
Setup: Long abandoned after a terrible earthquake struck the city and destroyed the temples it once serviced, this rubble filled labyrinth of empty altars and collapsed vaults has become a domain of urban monstrosities and an esoteric cabal that seeks to unearth old relics in the pursuit of their occult ends.
Challenges & Complications:
Obviously the most pressing hazard of the crumbling catacombs is its structural instability. While it once had designated places for the interment and veneration of bodies, damage to a pillar or simple bad luck could turn any chamber or hallway into a tomb for an unlucky traveler.
The shifting of the earth and the cessation of ceremonies have woken the dead, who now creep from their loculi in a blind rage, looking to repel intruders and kidnap godly practitioners to perform the rites required to ensure their silence.
Silent and foreboding, a guardian wanders the mazelike halls of the catacombs, shrouded in ancient priestly vestments and carrying a silver hammer stained by the blood and ichor of tomb robbers. This is Irahel, a minor angel of warding that was set to the task of defending these tombs from robbers. Unable to stem the tide of ruin, the angel has been embittered by their seemingly endless labor, spending unsleeping hours repairing what damage it can and hunting for intruders to reduce to a grisly pulp with their polehammer.
A rift to the underdark opened in the catacomb’s deepest levels, allowing all manner of subterranean horror to creep out and begin propagating in the dark spaces. Explorers can expect to find invasive fungal blooms, eyeless vampiric bats, and chittering spiderthings making a home for themselves among the lower caverns.
