The Monarchy ruled the known world. The Old King ruled the Monarchy. His depredations grew unbearable, slave raids and secret police and torture gardens and the magickal experiments that would go on forever if nobody did anything. That's why the Four Adventurers came to the dungeon at Heart-Of-The-World, to claim the ancient power that would let them kill the old ghoul and create something better.
- Dacian, Failed Monk and Adept of the Tower of Pain
- Fever River, Matachin and Self Taught Assassin
- Marrow Bone, Green Man and Avatar of the Knacker
- Rope Trick, Former Registered Wizard, Current Avatar of The Enlightenment
The story began with the Four Adventurers descending into Heart-Of-The-World. They didn't know how long they had before the veins and arteries of the underground place collapsed.
They knew Heart-Of-The-World was a trap. They knew the power it held was the bait. But if nobody ever survived, where did the stories come from?
The Four Adventurers walked down a long staircase for what felt like hours. On one side was a stone wall. On the other, a vast dark space with an endless pit below. At the bottom, finally visible, was a stone landing. A platform with a door leading into the rock face. The door was shaped like a face and there was a membrane over the mouth. The membrane was torn open, an eight foot rip revealing a corridor beyond. There was a dangling spike trap poking through the mouth, already triggered. Someone had been here before the adventurers.
The hall led into a hexagonal room, with corridors leading deeper into the dungeon and a pit in the center. A huge cockroach fussed over a dead man seated against the wall. The second the light fell on the giant bug, it scuttled into the pit in the center of the room and disappeared from sight. It was wearing a backpack and belt pouches, like every adventurer they had ever seen.
The adventurers turned out their lantern and played dead. After a few minutes, the roach came back out of the hole. Marrow Bone could see it in complete darkness, and Fever River could sense its approach without sight. The bug approached Fever River, the most skilled at pretending to be a corpse. She had a knife of strange resin in one hand, and went to kill the sword-dancer with a thrust to the heart through the armpit. Marrow Bone sprang up to tackle the bug, but slipped unexpectedly on the blood trail leading to the corpse. The roach got away. Rope Trick sensed protective magick at work, shielding the huge insect from harm.
The dead body had a wound to the throat, a crushed windpipe that would have been debilitating but not fatal. Cause of death was a knife wound through the armpit into the heart, the same mercy stroke the bug tried to do to Fever River. The dead man's arm was gnawed by a big pair of mandibles. His body had been looted and objects were clearly missing from the containers he carried. Dacian dragged the dead body to the landing platform and reset the dangling spike trap, hoping to catch the insect unaware.
The five unexplored doors from the hexagonal room all had carvings suggesting what lay beyond.
- A man bristling with weapons stuck into his body
- A man sitting cross legged inside a box
- A man reading a book
- A man gazing into a pool of water
- A man lying flat on the ground
The Four Adventurers started with the man gazing into the pool. The passage led into a well lit circular room, reflecting pond in the center illuminated by a painted image of the sky on the ceiling. A mosaic on the floor instructed the characters that:
The silvery liquid in the pond was perfectly reflective, moreso than water. Rope Trick surmised it was a magickal defense system for whatever artifact was at the bottom. Fever River lost a glove dragging their fingers across the surface, sucked under and devoured. Dacian took a shit into the pool, without achieving anything of note. The rest of the adventurers explored the rooms branching from the central chamber while he did that.
The first room was a painting gallery, depicting the story of a man and a genie. The man was possessed by the genie, which drove him to rule and dominate other people. Various life events weakened the genie's power over the man, until he was able to master it. An interesting clue, but with no obvious route toward accessing the bottom of the pond. The chamber after that had a full length mirror. The adventurers noticed a lever in the back of the mirrored version of the room, which wasn't there in the real room. Their reflections were off, slightly. They licked their lips and fondled their weapons, looking ready for a fight. Dacian whipped his head against the wall, generating a significant charge and causing his double in the mirror to injure itself. The real Dacian bled normal human blood, while mirror Dacian bled a silvery mirror liquid, exposing shattered glass where the inside of his skin should have been.
All the adventurers left the room except Dacian. He mimed pulling the lever, so his reflection did it as well. Pulling the lever broke the mirror, revealing a space on the other side from which the reflection-Dacian attacked. Since he was the only one in the room, there was only one reflection to fight. The Four Adventurers dogpiled it and clubbed it to death. Pulling the lever also drained a third of the liquid from the pool in the middle of the room.
The next chamber was a boudoir with a big brass faucet on the wall. A blob of ooze slithered out of the pipe and formed itself into a vaguely human shape. The Protean told the adventurers it would lower the water level in the pool, if one of them would have sex with it. Fever River stepped forward and volunteered. The Protean transformed itself into a clone of Fever River, clad entirely in red leather instead of blue. The rest of the adventurers vacated the chamber. Though the suit never came off, it was unpleasant for the gimp-suited assassin, and they only finished the job to spite Marrow Bone when the Green Man shouted encouragement through the door.
This one's Paizo but it wouldn't tell me which of their house artists did it
The Protean transformed back into a blob, slithered through a grate in the floor, and tripped a hidden switch beneath the stone tiles. The "water" level drained further.
The final room had a series of statues. There were six plinths, and the four statues on them depicted scenes from the paintings in the first room. Two of the plinths were empty. Rope Trick and Marrow Bone stood on the platforms and posed like the protagonist from the paintings. A mechanical sound beneath the floor indicated that a switch had triggered, draining the remaining fluid in the pool. A presence rushed toward the two adventurers on the platforms. The mysterious force tried to swap their identities, but Rope Trick resisted the magick using the power of The Enlightenment.
The pool was empty. At the bottom: a statue of fired white clay, varnished to protect it from the fluid. Around the statue: a pile of bones, bleached to a mirror sheen. Rope Trick commanded her magick rope to wrap around the idol, and the team hauled it out of the pit. Inside: the power of the Self. Fever River reached out to touch it with a gloved hand.
A presence rushed toward them. Fever River stood stunned for a second, then spoke out loud. The gimpsuited sworddancer normally communicated with and gestures and dance, but they used complete sentences to demand that the other adventurers identify themselves. When they expressed skepticism at their friend's sudden chance in personality, Fever River demanded that they bow their heads and swear allegiance. Fever River made a big speech about how they were the greatest being to exist and the others should bow before them. Dacian interrupted them to criticize a minor point, and Fever River felt a burst of rage at being interrupted. For a moment, they regained control of their body from the demon possessing them. Then they were submerged again. The rest of the adventurers caught on. Dacian exploited Fever River's fear of plague, using a Tower of Pain spell to assume a horrible diseased visage. Marrow Bone swung a fist at his friend, prompting Fever River to riposte. Indulging Fever River's lust for vengeance was enough to banish the demon, leaving them in possession of the Power of the Self. The power to command other beings, forcing them to obey or suffer a psychotic break.
The Four Adventurers returned to the vestibule. They picked the door with the guy bristling with weapons, hoping to seize the power of The Violence next. The first chamber of the Colosseum was an arena with a sandy floor, and a tattered banner depicting a red wound-man on a white field. They pushed forward down the hall and found a disused torture chamber. The equipment was in poor condition and it was clear that whoever lived in this place was too bloodthirsty to torture anyone for any length of time without just killing them.
The iron maiden at the end of the room thumped, like someone was trapped inside. The eyes wept blood. Rope Trick rushed forward to rescue the trapped victim. A pair of spikes popped out of the eye sockets and stabbed her in the arm. Prying open the statue revealed a spinning flywheel, slapping the interior to simulate the thrashing of a condemned prisoner.
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From Die Gartenlaube
The next room was an armory. Polearms, axes, maces and blades were strewn across the floor and propped against the walls, creating a forest of rusty edges. Four horned men were bashing each other over the head with pointy objects, screeching in a pantomime of language. The quartet turned to the Four Adventurers, and were suddenly united by their shared hatred of the intruders. The mob rushed forward, and Marrow Bone stepped forth to intercept them. Dacian and Rope trick lent support from the backline while Fever River tried out their new powers of coercion. The horned men were too far gone to be reached by persuasion or intimidation, but the leather clad assassin's interpretive gestures did get them to throw down their weapons and attack with their claws. Marrow Bone swept the whole crowd aside with his goedendag, pulping the horned men.
Uncredited public domain domain photo from the Esoteric Enterprises corebook
Rope Trick noticed a shining object discarded in the corner of the room. She commanded her living rope to retrieve it, wary of the weapons scattered across the room. The pikes and pollaxes and piercing swords were starting to move, attracted to the blood spilled in the fight. Rope Trick's magick rope retrieved the ancient and powerful cursed blade Sword-Drink from the corner of the chamber, and the gang fled into the next room.
The chamber beyond was full of blood and dangling chains. Marrow Bone pushed ahead, using his spear-club to push aside the swinging rusty links so he could see where he was going. He narrowly avoided a bear trap hidden beneath the ankle deep blood, which slammed shut on the iron bands reinforcing the thick shaft of his weapon. He probed the ground before him for the rest of the room. The abattoir at the end of the next hall was filled with squirming piles of meat, which thumped with a heartbeat despite having no visible heart or lungs. There were horned men in the piles, which Dacian examined using his medical training. The piled viscera was supplying the dead men with blood and nutrients, slowly regrowing their damaged tissue. Dacian took this as his cue to drop some healing magick on the injured Marrow Bone. Rope Trick refused any magickal healing, and used the massive power of Sword-Drink to shred the piles of unnatural living flesh.
A sound came from the next and final room of the Colosseum. Like a bare fist crushing a watermelon over and over. The sound came from a giant woman, seven feet tall, naked and pierced with a dozen weapons that drew no blood. She stomped on the bodies of two horned men, pasted on the ground. The Four Adventurers hailed her and tried to strike up a conversation. She was looking for something and she couldn't remember what. She was afraid she'd never find it. She was ready to kill the adventurers, just seeing the weapons on their belts made her nervous.
A fight broke out. Marrow Bone skewered the woman through the heart on
the end of his goedendag, pinning her in place. His plate armor and the
power of the knacker let him tank the return blow without exploding into a shower of gore. Fever River struck with a poisoned dagger. Rope Trick bound the monster-woman's legs with her enchanted rope. Dacian fused her hands together with a Tower of Pain spell. Being restrained only enraged the giant further, she nearly tore her own hands off trying to strike them. A second flurry of blows finished her off.
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Are you running a Dungeon Fantasy campaign in Unknown Armies of all things?
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