Dungeon: Temple of Brazen Choir
You can hear it, down in the deep, a song that’s been echoing for a thousand years, from a thousand cold and fleshless throats
The party is contracted by a well respected court artificer to escort him high into the mountains to explore a set of ancient ruins. Usual enough as sellsword gigs go, until they near the delve site and discover stone plinths that have been erected by the reigning church, delcaring any further tresspass (and the existance of the site itself) to be an act of herecy. Thier employer scoffs at such superstiction, he’s here to study the science of a forgotten age not meddle in the affairs spirit. Surely the party will see his reason rather than turning around after hiking all that way, forgoing the majority of their pay, scorching thier reputation, and making an enemy of an influential figure among the nobility.
Fleeing a deadly encounter, or perhaps through dumb luck as the ground crumbled out beneith them, the party end up swept along an underground river and spat out into a large, partially water filled system of caves. Distant and dissonant music calls to them from deeper on, as does the fleeting glimpses of sky.
After delving a dungeon or raiding the horde of some rich villain, the party discovers an adorable little robot hidden away in stasis, which comes alive at their prodding. Remembering very little besides its designation R 0 2-L R, “Roller” is happy to provide whatever asisstance it can to the party given that its skills mainly lay in counting, organization, and calculation. At some point Roller will begin experiencing glitches, blanking out and attempting to “return to origin” in order to receive maintenance before coming back to consciousness. With their little metal friend in increasingly poor health, the party will have to undertake a journey to the far wilderness to discover just what they can do to restore their sidekick to health.
Setup: In the distant past, a shard of Mechanus fell to earth and buried itself in the foothills of a mountain, entombed for millennia before the slow forces of erosion managed to carve it free again. Sitting at the bottom of what would eventually be a large cavern complex, the long stilled mechanisms of brass and celestial cockwork began the slow process of repair, carving out tunnel networks and mines as rebuilt themselves into an alien cathedral.
No god was meant to be worshipped at this altar, as the creed-driven automatons that had survived the crash or were created afterwords sought only to impose order on their surroundings, and to recreate the long destroyed extraplanear structure they were once charged with maintaining. Then mortals entered the picture and spoiled things with their idolatry, stumbling upon what must have appeared to be a ready-made marvel of a forgotten era, a place of worship merely waiting for worshippers as if their coming had been fortold by divine edict. This wasn’t entirely their fault as the remnants of Mechanus “imposed order” upon all things mechanical or otherwise through supernatural means, and instilled those who dwelt too long within their halls with unnatural devotion, obedience, and rigidity.
Successive cults have made the Temple of Brazen Choir their home, whether descending down from the surface or venturing up form the underdark, living among the machines and filling the empty niches and naves of the temple with their own iconography. These cults inevitably meet with some disaster, be it bloody internal schism or attack by exterior faction, leaving the temple’s mechanical stewards to sweep away their bodies and leave the temple clean for a new group to discover.
dededos
germansingergirl
turnnoffyourmind
prguitarman
annaxmalina
theartofmadeline
tangentwithtanner
ellievsbear
