Appendix N 2026 Bonus Dungeon: Hung Over and Harassed

 

In His Majesty The Worm there are a lot of city events that, if taken seriously, would be an entire adventure in themselves. The book chides the reader not to play out these adventures because it could turn the campaign into a “town game”.

Guess what we’re doing today?

Appendix N 2026 Dungeon: Clerics of the Carmine Dawn

The Clerics of the Carmine Dawn have tidally locked the planet. The sunlit side will boil. The nightside will freeze. Only a band of twilight will remain habitable unless a scratch team of heroes can infiltrate the Clerics’ Tower.

Appendix N 2026 Bonus Dungeon: The Essence of Eblis

 

Before God taught man the divine art of water creation, the desert was ruled by the Djinn. They called storms as they pleased, bringing rain to their worshipers and drought to those who defied them. One such Djinni was Eblis.

 

BFRPG Field Guide Omnibus Test Drive: And May You Reach The Moon

Cabrera

 

Following the death of the Slave King, the resurgent Mountainhomes sent expeditions to restore the far flung fortresses of the old Dwarven civilization. HANGEDSCEPTRES wasn’t on the list. It was was remote, strategically useless, and based on the available records, poor in minerals. The Dwarves needed quick wins to show everyone the project had legs.

Early reclamations were a smash hit. The underkingdoms caught fortress fever, sparking a gold rush to reoccupy the remaining sites (and establish new ones). The first scouts to HANGESCEPTRES reported an infestation of Wyverns circling the peak, along with smoke and snowmelt indicating the site was already inhabited.

BFRPG Field Guide Omnibus Test Drive: Into the Cheese Cave

 

The Old King jealously hoarded his Wishes. He raised a head of Cow Dragons and accumulated a strategic reserve of their Wish granting cheese in hidden caves. When he wanted to make a Wish he gave precise instructions to an expendable cultist screened for absolute loyalty, then fed her bite after bite until she either got lucky or instantly died (at which point he called up the next victim in line). This proved unreliable because the cultists came from enclosed orders who revered him as a God. As much as they wanted to do what he said, they couldn’t resist wishing for what they actually wanted, which was usually “be impregnated by the King” or “be lifedrained by the King in a moment of timeless sustained ecstasy.” It took a lot of work and a lot of dead cultists and he only messed with it when there was no way to get what he wanted through cunning or brute force.

During the rebellion the Cow Dragons were slaughtered in their kraals by a strain of psychic encephalopathy brewed in the plague pits of the Goblin alchemists, bringing an end to the whole program.

Or so everyone thought.

 

Fighting Fantasy Introductory RPG: Into The Nest

Enormous burrowing insects have exposed the entrance to an ancient tomb. Only a greedy fool would descend into the bug infested hole to pillage the treasure therein. 

 

Riverboat Gambler: Shrine of the Dragon

 

 

I swim in the water. I swim and eat the things that fall off the island. The island floats in the water. I gnaw the underside. The island tilts. The things on the island fall over the side. The rays burn me. The things fall in the water where the rays do not reach them. I eat them. I eat the island. The rays cannot harm me. I swim deep in the water. So deep the rays cannot reach me. I forget which way is up. I swim in a straight line. I breach the surface of the water and leap toward the burning eye. My jaws snap shut.

I am in the tomb. I am on the floor in the sand. There is a sound from the hall of reeds. A scraping sound from the floor painted like the water. Something howls.

I roll over and skate silently toward the sound. I imagine I am swimming.

Riverboat Gambler: Hunter and Hunted

Djemaleddin held his mug hard enough to dent the metal. The bar didn't use horn or wood because it splintered too easily in the clenched fists of overpowered adventurers, but the metal mugs had to be light and cheap so they still crumpled. He was nervous because there was too much clang in the room. Too much power in the opposing force. Fighting men at the bar counter with dates and parties and crowds on their hips. If the sorceress at the riverside window started casting the whole room was within her area of effect. He could make it to the door before the cloud swallowed him but that would mean fighting his way past the group of Sugarmen hauling the idol up to the trade booth. He had to hit first, it was the only way. Get close so she couldn't zap him without catching herself in the blast. Put out damage, force her back. Her comrades would rush him but then she wouldn't FF them, and he could handle them until- 

 

Gordy arrived with the refill. Gordastasia Greengloves, whose green gloves never came off even when she was naked. She put a green-gloved hand on his shoulder from behind and he sank into his seat with an instant scruffed-kitten reaction. Gordy was here. The only "encounter" was with the tray of river fritters and hippo steak and pickles and sweet pink guavarrack and beer so light and crisp and cold you could bathe in it. If he fell before the death spell or the plus ones and twos and threes of the bunched dunecrawlers, she'd catch him.

 

Riverboat Gambler: Shrine of Sanctification

 

she threw a rock. she didnt want to throw rocks at him because he was her brother. he found a thing in the hard stuff. it was like the gold blades they carried but it was blue in color. he kept it because he had never seen anything like it and he didnt understand it was forbidden. he had no way of knowing because hed never seen it before. the others knew and they caught him swinging it at a cactus and they threw stones at him until he died and she had to throw too even though he was her brother. they were all brothers but they still threw the stones. a large stone fell on him where one of the older brothers threw it and he died.

 

the judges came and burned him and burned the blue knife. the body of her brother burned but the flames made the blue knife glow bluer. the judges sang a song and the tribe went away but when the sun went down the blue glow was still visible. it lit the glass around it so it looked like the little moon had fallen and got stuck in the bled. she thought of her brother and his blade and thanked god.

 

Riverboat Gambler: The Dent in the Shield

Stomp your foot
Flick your sword

Across the body

Of the fat

Thing from the

Jar and toss

With the same 

Motion your shining

Sword to the 

Man waiting to

Catch it so

The blade is

Not lost as

The pincers close

Around your head

You are not

The dancer you

Are the dance 

So if you

Miss one step

The part that

Matters will 

survive

 

Riverboat Gambler: Three More Tombs

David Roberts

 

The enormous statue had once stood over the river but the river had meandered in the ages since it was erected. The sages at first believed the features had been scraped away. A supernatural confirmation kill in one of the dynastic struggles on the ancient Plain. But it had simply been sculpted like that. Faceless except the open mouth. Without eyes and ears and nose the expression was unreadable despite the carefully sculpted teeth and tongue. It communicated fear or laughter or pain or hunger as the viewer wished. 

 

The engineers clustered around the statue at the neck and prepared to blow it up. The Bronze Head was going to open a new restaurant in Hylem-Xylem, which everyone just called Sugar City now that the rhyming slang of the chaotic argot was out of favor again. They couldn't find another bronze head, or they just didn't believe in doing the same thing over and over again.

  

Gorgojo had never been to Last Autumn. He had the architectural drawings. The sketches of the streetscape and planned exterior facade and interior decor. He knew how much space he had to work with and the maximum weight the structure would support. But he had no real sense of the place to which he would take his prize. He was from the pampa, the sea of grass where a single tree was a sight to behold. A city rising out of an ocean of trees shaded red and purple and yellow and orange sounded like something out of a dream.  

 

The charges would break the head free and the sorcerers would catch it with floating discs. They would bear it to the barge, and from there down the river where it joined with the river Hog. From there to the sea, and then back to the world. Once aboard the ship it was the responsibility of the captain. Gorgojo would, nonetheless, accompany it to its new home. He wanted to look up at it while he drank annix and ate purple worm in mole negro. Then look up further still at the trees.

 

The engineers verified, for a third time, that the charges had been set correctly. The mages promised, again, that they had triple checked the carvings at the base of the statue. Lorem ipsum. The same word repeated again and again without meaning. They had to move soon. The potions would wear off and they'd have to dip into the reserve during the trip back.

 

The heat haze made the tongue dance in the statue's mouth. Gorgojo thanked Logic and The Draftsman for checking his work and lit the fuse.

Riverboat Gambler: Three Tombs

Clearing a tomb of undead was routine. You approached by half light or by day and you used a weapon that burned everything inside. The average grave was no more than a few rooms deep. Enough flasks of alchemist fire generated convection sufficient to cook unliving flesh until it fell off the bone. Skeletons charred into heaps of cremains, wights came gibbering out the entrance to dissolve in the sunlight. Mummies made sounds like a man suffocating in a bag. The loss of scrolls and cloth and delicate artwork was regrettable. So was being chewed for an hour as the potion of troll blood surging through your veins kept you alive just long enough to feed the ghouls.

 

For living things it was the same. Set an ambush at the entrance, smoke them out and slaughter them. 

Tabor fondled his amulets and mouthed a prayer to the Hungry Dungeon before tossing the flask. Eda and Salvador had thrown theirs unlit, a "wet shot" to splash fuel into the corners before igniting. With the God propitiated, he threw.

 

A word came from the cave. He didn't understand it.

 

The burning oil went out. With it, the sun.

 

Eda kindled a Light spell but it would not spark. Without even the moons to light them the dunes looked like waves in some primal watery abyss, awaiting the creation of the world.

 

The sound came again. Tabor realized it was his name, spoken from the mouth of the tomb. 

Minidungeon: The Unquiet Tomb

In the distance, shimmering in heat haze so thick they may have been a mere illusion, a lounge of bright white lizards skated across the Plain. Their skin regulated the diffusion of heat and moisture, allowing the particles only to move one way and thereby letting them control their internal temperature in the lethal heat. By day they jogged across the dunes, legs thrashing like pistons driven by the strange energy of glowing crystals. By moonlight they climbed rock formations to sleep out of reach of the night creatures, and it was not uncommon for travelers on the plain seeking similar shelter to surprise such lizards and send them leaping out of rock fissures at top speed. Like the corpse leaping from the grave as the necromancer cast his staff in, soul returned to the place it once called home but thinking only of ruin and the necessity of flight.

The green men who called the Plain home showed the first adventurers how the skin of such a creature could be made into a heavy cloak that would protect the wearer from the heat, or a half-shelter or a tent to rest inside during the day. The adventurers built vast reeking meatcamps and slaughtered the lizards in the thousands to make garments that would permit their further expansion into the deserts of the frontier. The camps tinted the river red and blue and iridescent shades as the menu of creatures disassembled for parts expanded and the effluent from that biological pillage flowed ankle then knee deep. 

Coxinha stomped toward the jagged cliffs at the edge of the plain, wrapped in such a cloak. Her eyes were shielded by protective goggles made from the eyecaps of a Rhagodessa and smeared with a thin layer of smoke colored oil to dim the sun and stop them fogging. The cloak was wrapped around her face below the goggles to stop the superheated air from scorching her lungs. It cooled the air but the feeling of suffocation went nowhere. Slow death in a jar. A capsule confined to the airless void of space.

She couldn't see the ranger up ahead. His cloak was bright white like hers but never seemed to shimmer. Never gave up his position. Ahead of where she thought he was, the entrance. Low tide in the desert pulled the dunes away from the mouth of the cave. A tunnel without ornament but clearly artificial. Unplundered.

Monster Mash Test Drive - The Tunnel Under the Tundra

 

A Dwarven exploratory mining expedition disappears beneath the permafrost layer of the ancient tundra.

OSE Encounter Activities Test Drive: Fumigation of the Escheated Wizard Tower

After the death of the Monarch, the assets of his supporters were seized and redistributed to benefit the victims of his tyranny. The tower of the wizard Cloudkill, one of the Old King’s archmages from the College of Wands, was given to a pair of mutants who fought alongside the rebels. The retired partisans hired mercenaries to clear the “squatters” out of their dream home. The magical monsters are more than the hired guns can handle.

OSE Encounter Activities Test Drive: Shadowdance of the Lizard Corsairs

Walter Martishius

Lizard pirates sail to a secluded cove and hatch a sinister plan at an ancient temple. The local wildlife doesn’t cooperate.

Creature Cache Test Drive: Honey Trap of the Planeswalking Soulmaster

The Hanged King cynically founded numerous enclosed orders of nuns, drawn from the widows and orphans created by his endless wars, whose sole purpose in life was to be sacrificed to him and increase his magic power. The Elixir of Life religion was created as a ploy by the Tower of Pain, one of the newly founded Commonwealth’s largest religious corporations, as a ploy to absorb these directionless death cultists who no longer had anything to die for after the King was killed. It was impossible to talk that many religious fanatics into moving on with their lives, the best the Tower could do was offer them a more prosocial cause to die for.

Creature Compendium Test Drive: Volcanic Vent of the Pukwudgie Potentate

Our story takes us north of the Thousand Lakes, to the great ice sheet which covers the Cursed Mountains. These enormous spires lie frozen under vast glaciers, summits periodically exposed by magical fire events, deliberate excavation, or natural geologic activity. The melted peaks draw explorers to the extraordinarily hostile frozen wasteland in search of the ancient treasures concealed therein. As magic and science advance, so to do adventurers into the frozen north, drawing ever closer to the heart of the ice.

Monster Overhaul Test Drive: Silent Swamp of the Stoneskin Jaeger

 

The Chocolate Coast at the edge of the Lost World. So called because of the vast quantities of chocolate which flow from Iron Cup’s inland plantations out to the trade fort at Isle of Sweat, and from there to the rest of the world. Further inland: Forest fens of giant cycads and ferns. Flooded pampas infested with enormous dinosaurs. Canyons filled with monstrous insects. Volcanoes that periodically disgorge great lava flows. Further still, the Gunpowder Empires of the Giff.

This is the context in which we place the Silent Ranch, a patch of swamp on a minor tributary of the River Sweat. Surrounded by prehistoric forests where hadrosaurs splash and giant sloths graze on primitive trees. Far away from sneering nobles and idiot wizards and trading companies and ravenous greed and murderous armies, for now. Nested atop a hideous secret that, if she’d known about it, the owner would have thought twice before locating her ranch there

Creature Compendium Test Drive: Widow's Grove

A trio of Elf Druids has broken away from the See of Trees and built a hideout in a mesa overlooking Hogman's Plain. To the sorceresses of Widow's Grove, the scalphunters and sandbusters and shipping magnates and self righteous Clerics sent by industrialized civilization are nothing more than prey animals to be devoured.