Past a wall of mist and into the bleak morass of the shadowfell there is a dreary and foreboding isle inhabited by the spirits of those who could not relinquish their blades, so driven by persistence and duty that they could not even rest in death.
Their armoured shades wander the isle's endless halls or stand sentinel over its crumbling, hollow gates, obeying long forgotten oaths to nations and sovereigns they can no longer recall. Some others find a corner in which to collapse in torpor, while others crash through the cavernous ruins, exhausting themselves in battle after pyrrhic battle.
Valor's Refute is not a haven or a hell, it is a purgatory, a place of slow forgetting and inevitable dissolution.... or atleast it would be if over the ages a bunch of darkness dabbling gods and mages didn't independently arrive at the idea that a labyrinthine shadow world full of memory eroding mist could double as a great vault, just as its the ever vigilant and honourbound inhabitants make for incorruptible guards. And so dotted throughout the solemn halls of Valor's Refute are traps and puzzles intended to safeguard artifacts deemed too precious or dangerous to entrust to mortal or material hideaways.
Challenges & Complications
Suffused with the waters of the river Lethe, Valor's Refute is cloaked in a chilling mist that imparts those it touches with lethargy and forgetfulness. Effects are minor at first, but a party can easily take a wrong turn and end up fighting through a fogbank for what turns out to be hours or plunging into the icy water that saps them of a whole day's strength. These effects are best tracked through my attrition system, available HERE.
While exploring the evertwisting corridors, the party encounter the ghost of Ser Zagaver, a knight errant who died uncovering a terrible secret regarding a great evil working in the shadows of the campaign. Having been unable to warn anyone of the unseen danger, she needs the party to swear to carry on her message, and she's willing to force them at the edge of swordpoint. If the party renege on their deal, or get too distracted with ongoing matters, they can expect to be haunted by an enranged ghost-knight until they're steered back on course.
A voice stirs the dreams of those who sleep on the isle, compelling them to seek it out and teasing at their hearts' desire. This voice originates in one of the dungeon's deeper vaults, and belongs to a cursed item known as the "chalice of want". Once the weddingcup of a pair of prideful demigods who later betrayed eachother, it grants those that drink from it visions of how their ambitions may come to pass. Such tastes of future glory are addictive, to say nothing of how dangerous the foreknowledge it grants may be in the hands of the wrong entities.
Archaeological Society of Scholars, a group of adventurers stuck in the Dread Domain of Malgelus.
So far they have killed a crab guy, disrupted a massive drug operation, killed two dragons, befriended a tribe of kobolds and thought them about agriculture and are wanted in all but one city in the Domain.
Bremen Seaguard - Shifter Bard with a dog trapped in his soul. Used to be a robit, used to be a human.
Nishi Quillar - Half orc/ Half drow Wizard learning about the dark fate of her mother's people.
Devan Brightwatch - Aasimar Cleric in a place where healing his friends could lead to all their deaths, while a pyromaniac angel tries to take over his mind.
Larzal - Tiefling Warlock learning her true demonic heritage as it changes her body with every use of her magic.
A creature of avarice and paranoia, the fiend of safekeeping is employed by those with much to lose in order to guard possessions that cannot be trusted to mundane vaults and wards. Ever watchful and terrible in his wrath, Bruxoch will haunt thieves across worlds and even the veil of death in order to reclaim that which has been given over into his keeping
-Codex of the Hateful, a guide to hostile spirits and other malign entities
Adventure Hooks:
The party are caught up in a rivalry between two unscrupulous wizards, hired by the first to heist their way into the abode of the second and steal a book of their most precious spells. While their new patron has paid them well and gifted with magic items to overcome the defences, he’s elected to NOT inform them that the tome they seek is warded by Bruxoch and that any who steal it are liable to invoke the devil’s curse. It’s not long after they hand off the book to their employer ( who promptly vanishes leaving behind no trace) that the party begin to suffer nightmares of being trapped inside dark and doorless chambers, preventing them from getting any rest as fatigue builds and the feeling of the feeling of the walls refuses to fade. Hunted by the demon in their dreams and a very pissed off wizard in the waking world, the thieves must seek some means of warding their mind before finding a way to get the book back in order to slip their inevitable punishment.
Mere weeks before he is set to be married, the realm’s crown prince approaches the party in disguise to beg of them a favour. Famed for his many exploits and his seemingly divine invincibility, the prince reveals that when he was young and war threatened the realm, he prayed and prayed for something to take away the fear and weakness of his being, only to be answered by a voice in the dark that laid claim to his heart entire. Though he is known to be merciless towards his enemies, the prince does not wish to be so cruel as to trap his betrothed into a marriage without love, an act of which he has been incapable since his deal with the fiend. To that end he would have the party seek Bruxoch and steal back his heart, even if he has to pay them enough to make the journey to hell and back worth while.
Setup: making his home in a domain of dread in the depths of the shadowfell, Bruxoch was a being created with the intent of tormenting a single individual, a now forgotten master thief who sought to prove her legend by stealing from the god of secrets himself. She now wanders the halls of endless locks as a nameless wraith searching for something she no longer remembers, trapped in an unending cycle of desperately picking at tumblers and catches only to discover that what she sought was never there in the first place.
It didn’t take a genius to figure out that a hell dimension full of vaults and traps was the perfect place to hide away precious items, and that the box faced devil was blockheaded enough to abide by the letter of any agreement so long as the terms benifitted him. Everyone from liches to demonlords began to use Bruxoch’s domain ( Lukana Tower) as their own saftey deposit box, knowing that none would be able to find their treasures aside from the obsessive fiend who had every dead end and secret hideaway of his realm memorized.
Further Adventures:
There are no portals that reach the Lukana tower, and instead all transport to and from the strucutre and the inverted mountains it projects from must be undertaken with the aid of the trecherous nightguants that haunt the crags and shadowed valleys of the domain. Unlike Bruxoch, the nightgaunts have grown bored of the task to which they were assigned, and occasionally steal over into the wider shadowfell or into the dreams of mortals to amuse themselves. A party might inadvertantly stumble onto the tower when they’re abducted by nightguants, and must seek a way to escape the tower before its warden finds them. If you’re interested in a quick side story, have the party stolen while they’re all dreaming, giving them a preview of the tower before waking up in a cold sweat and returning to their adventure.
It’s a well known paradox among the criminal class that spending time in prison often makes you better at crime. Years locked away gives you nothing but time to hone your skills, pick up new ones, and make you desperate enough to take on risker and riskier gambles to avoid ever going back. Trapped in a prison beyond time and space, this effect has ensured that the nameless shade may infact be the greatest cracksman in the multiverse, an asset beyond all recognition for any team of theives ballsy enough to do a prison break as preulde for their actual heist. Ressurecting the shade is impossible, but binding her essence to a set of lockpicks, or letting her partially possess a member of the party might be their best chance of getting her free of her oubliette.
I want you to know I read your posts like the morning paper on my way to work- I love your writing and your material's tone and prose aligns a lot with the stuff I write! Wanted to request something to do with dead/forgotten deities- I've been thinking about a dead sun god from when people used to have a "principal sky deity" that has fallen out of favor, and what implications that might have.
Dungeon: The Empyreal Tombs
Setup: Phaetamir was an ancient god light and conquest, who rode out each day on his great solar chariot to survey his empire and encourage his devoted to acts of glory. To hear his priests speak of it, the empire of the faithful would push ever outward towards all horizons, just as the rays of the sun illuminated all corners of the world.
Needless to say, Phaetamir and his followers made a lot of enemies, and it was perhaps inevitable that someone would seek reprisal against them on a deific scale. The sungod's doom eventually came out of the desert, when great spirits of storm and dust knocked Phaetamir from his chariot and quenched his fire beneath an endless tide of sand, dousing his light and burring his capital forever.
Though centuries past and its players all but forgotten, the ghost of this calamity lives on in the shadowfell by way of a nightmarish labyrinth known by delvers of the dark realms as "The Empyreal Tombs". Resembling nothing so much as a city-sized monument to the sungod collapsing in on itself, the tombs are a quite literal metaphor of Phaetamir and his faithful being crushed by the weight of their own hubris.
Adventure Hooks:
As a dread domain there is no one entrance to the Empyreal Tombs, as crossing over the barrier into the shadowfell may be deceptively simple: A party seeking shelter from a sandstorm in a long abandoned temple may find themselves trapped in winding passages after the floor collapses. A historian researching ancient cultures may be riven with dreams of burning while being buried alive, and pull the party in as they try to help. A trapped chest may open filling the chamber with impossible sand, leaving the party to dig them selves free only to discover their environment has changed drastically.
Innumerable dangers fill the tombs, ranging from subterranain dust storms and crumbling architecture to paniced specters of those who lived in Phaetamir's capital screaming as they're stuck beneith rubble. Trying to help these pitiful souls only has them cling on to their supposed rescuer as the walls or ceiling begin to squeeze in, making every potential cry for help bait for a grisly death. While innumerable shadowfell monsters have made their homes in these halls, perhaps the worst are the echoes of Phaetamir's most famous warriors, literally burning with their desire to conquer and driven on by feral zeal.
In the deepest level of the tombs where the heat is sweltering and the air ripples like a marriage, there is a cenotaph: a great slab of stone that acts as both altar and grave marker to Phaetamir, massive so as to contain enough room to write all of the god's many victories. The stone lays upon the body of Phaemtamir crushing him for eternity, allowing his impossible heat and occasional to escape through the thin crack as his spirit pushes against its weight. Those that would seek to remove the altar or plunder the treasures that lay heaped upon it in offerings will have to contend with Diavadess, a formless demon of shadow that was destined to wrestle with Phaetamir at the end of time to decide the empire's ultimate fate. Denied its apocalypse, Diavadess merely waits.
The Cult of the Hidden Sun is known to appropriate Phaetamir's iconography and long abandoned sites of worship, seeking to tap into a shared cultural history spread across the breadth of the now fallen empire. The cult is not above hurling non-believers into the Empyreal Tombs, or in using its winding passageways as transport between their hidden places.
Your party presses through the veil of sleet, and every step you take feels like a struggle. You are fighting the very wind itself, and the frost covered bones and crumbling ruins you’ve passed serve to remind you that standing still in such weather is a death sentance. How did you get here? What need could be so great as to climb these perilous peeks? The hole in your memory shocks you enough that you nearly lose your friends around a bend in the path. Catching up to them, you see it, battlements only visable against the rock and the migrane colored sky by their sheer scale. A castle, and perhaps a chance to get out of the cold you’ve been trapped in for so long.
Setup: There are many dread domains, each one a nightmare prison built to contain a great evil. This one is a labyrinthian tangle of pathways through a jagged mountainside, reflecting the final hours of a bloodthirsty margrave who spent hours fighting though a winter storm to return home, only to discover that all his cruelty had been in vain.
Sorrow, war, and misfortune are the ruling elements here, along with the horror of exposure and a chilling wind that hunts the party with it’s own malicious will.
Challenges & Complications:
Wretched beasts ride the skies of this domain, striking without warning or circling like stormbitten buzzards. The remnants of soldiers mummified by the cold shamble their way through patrols or wait in ambush, and always return to their station after some time after their clashes with the party. Those that wear tattered officer’s uniform even manage to remember previous encounters, and will plan their defenses accordingly.
Leaving the domain will require the party to trace a shifting maze of claustrophobic caverns, icy canyons, crumbling bridges and narrow switchbacks that what. as the “roads” of this domain. They possess their own sinister intelligence, seeming to know the exact right time to close or fail and drop the party into a new form of peril. Scaps of maps may be found hidden along the road like treasure, but these too are full of misdirections, showing no true path and seemingly only able to agree that the mountains they depict are called “The Sorrows”.
The castle in the heart of the ragged web of pathways is no shelter from the blizzard, as the cold winds pour from its open windows and echo through it’s echoing halls. This fortress is home to many terrible beasts, none more so than a screaming windstorm known as the Resounding Agony, which prowls the domain the way a shark might a reef. While not exactly intelligent, it will harry interlopers by alerting their pursuers, causing avalanches, and causing maddening fatigue.
Sorrowsworn and other shadowfell beats are drawn to the Roads of the coldhearted en-masse, and can frequently be seen clashing with the soldiers. This is quite unusual for a dread domain, but whatever unseen architect is at work here seems to allow it.
Background: Nothing mattered to Margrave Orlan Esterna more than legacy. He was a proud patriot who’s family had defended the borders of the empire for generations, and he was bred, raised, and trained for the singular purpose of holding that border against those he thought to be little better than beasts. Savage cruelty was what was expected of lords like Orlan, and he differed from his predecessors only in that he did not confine that cruelty to wartime. The Margrave was of the opinion that the continued existence of his ancestral enemy was provocation enough to ride out into the lowlands to burn villages and poison wells, or to put his own peasants to death for too closely resembling those peoples he hated. Thus did the margrave Esterna carve a moat of death and terror around his lands, ruling it from the lofty heights of his ancestral keep.
Orlan’s one joy in life was his extended family, a panoply of siblings, aunts, uncles, and cousins that shared in his storied legacy, and lived dotted out through neighboring lands. Favorite among these favorites were a pair of nieces, who Orlan and his wife raised as daughters and heirs, as they could not have children of their own.
The Margrave’s bloodlust came back to haunt him one day as news reached him of an incoming raiding force, led by the sister of a commander he had captured ( and gorily tortured) in the last border skirmish. Riding out with his men, Orlan realized too late that the “raiding party” was merely a faint, and that the avenging sister’s true intent had actually been a direct strike at his home, perfectly timed with a winter storm to delay his soldier’s march back to the keep. Caring nothing for his own troops, Orlan marched them anyway, and lost most to a day and a night of freezing wind and snow-slicked paths that were never meant for so many travelers. Even with his haste, the Margrave was too late. His household had been slaughtered, and the cruelties he had inflicted upon that foreign commander had been returned to him threefold. Discovering his wife and nieces in that state broke him, and in that moment he and his keep were taken by the mists, as the dark powers caught scent of his suffering.
Further Adventures:
Margrave Orlan remains frozen in the moment of his greif, petrifed into an ever-screaming statue fromwhich the howling storm emerges. The Innermost chamber of his keep has become a frigid gallery of his own mistakes, in which the gory cruelties of his life play out in the flickering ice-sheets, though whether they are visions sent to torment him or his own memories, none can say. This gallery is haunted by a shadowy reflection of the avenging sister, who rules over the castle and its denizens as if it were her own.
Scenes of Orlan’s wanton violence are echoed throughout his domain, from the poisoned wells, to the destroyed villages, to grim chambers of torture slick with half frozen blood. As with many men addicted to violence, Orlan was also a consummate duelist, and his victims wait in dramatic locations waiting for their chance at a rematch.
The only way to calm the storm and temporarily escape the dread-lord’s attention is to bait the Resounding Agony into pursuit across the mountains and draw it into the statue chamber in which Orlan sits. The scream meeting its origin will create a feedback loop and shatter the vision-displaying ice, calming the howling statue for a short time along with the tempest outside. At this point the Margrave’s statue will begin to weep (the dread domains are not subtle), and the puddles that result will collect and form new vision ice in time.
Rewards:
Perhaps the only reason to willingly travel the Roads of the Coldhearted is to reclaim the Margrave’s famed weapon: Forebearance. created by a heroic ancestor who earned the family their noble investature for services granted to a sainted king. The weapon itself is rumored to have possessed great power, as some might call it a vestige of divergence
Dormant:
The weapon is a paired set, a +1 silvered longspear ( 1d8, 1d10 versatile), and a +1 shield that share an attunement slot. Both are intricately filigreed, and can act as any kind of spellcasting focus.
These items also possess the “trick” quality, allowing the bearer to combine (or revert) them as a bonus action to transform them into an oversized battleax. In this form the weapon is still silvered, but has the heavy property, a +2 bonus to attack and damage rolls, and has a damage die of 2d8. The unwieldy nature of this weapon in this form causes it to get stuck into a nearby surface on a roll of natural 1, requiring it to be pulled free in place of an attack.
Awakened:
The weapon gains a pool of “zeal” points equal to the wielder’s proficiency bonus. When wielding the spear, they may spend one point to cast wrathful smite. While wielding the shield, they may spend a point as a reaction to reroll a failed save, taking the second roll even if it is lower. If wielding the Battleax, they may cast dispel magic as part of an attack roll, using the attack roll in place of the spellcasting ability check. These zeal points refresh on a long rest.
Exalted:
Familiarity with Forbearance allows the user to swap between forms on their turn, including in between attacks or as part of a reaction. The longspear’s bonus becomes +2, the shield grants +1 to saving throws, and the battleax’s bonus improves to +3. The zeal points now refresh on a short rest.
