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Adventure: Blood in the Gutters

Pact or debt, price or bond. It makes no difference what you call it, or how long the words lay upon the page. The moment the ink dries we are bound by the agreements we have made, and those obligations will follow us so long as someone remembers what they are owed.

Adventure Hooks:

They say that if you can dream it, you can find it for sale in the markets of Idisimar, city of the deep wells. While the central markets deal in goods that everyone can enjoy such as spices and perfumes, there are innumerable shaded side alleys in which more niche (and less acceptable) business is traditionally done. That is before people started to go missing: Usually transactions in these out of sight locales is a mater of digression and alibis, but after both vagrants and tentpole black market dealers have begun to vanish, putting the city’s underworld on edge. Purveyors of flesh and illicit substances have begun doing business in the open market for fear of disappearing into the shadows, generating pushback from the more respectable merchants who’ve defended their spots in the bizarre for generations. In order to prevent a clash between the city’s criminal elements and trading guilds ( both capable of equal levels of staggering violence) someone’s going to have to go into the dark and figure out what’s causing those disappearances.

Construction in a local temple has unearthed a fissure in the foundations through which a foul smell has come wafting, clearing all but the hardiest workers and priests from the structure. While most are for plugging the hole back up and just getting on with their lives, the head priestess has a bad feeling about something old and rotten being allowed to rest underneath what is supposedly holy ground. Sending for a group of strong stomached adventures ( who might want to visit the city’s perfumers for something to block out the miasma), the party dives down into a refuse filled gallery that once made up a different temple structure. Every surface not covered in filth has hand carved scenes with an alien style that disturbingly imply that they’re supposed to be felt rather than read.

Public fonts are a sign of great wealth and charity in a desert city like Idisimar, but several of these elaborate and much needed water features have begun to flow with a red discoloration. Those who drink complain of tasting blood, and are soonafter struck with feverish rage which progresses to catatonic tropor. The city’s healers and wellkeepers are instigating a quarantine, but are worried about how many of the citizens and travelers alike rely on these fonts to deal with the desert’s scorching sun.

Setup: Animal sacrifice flourished in the earliest days of the city, long before it was ever called Idisimar, and where the blood flowed the vampires of the Naljeth were sure to be found. With the name of their clan taken from the archaic local word for “Attendant” literally flipped upside down, these pious undead installed themselves in hidden chambers beneath the altars of other faiths, drinking the blood offerings that flowed down to them while acting as immortal sages.

Time moves on however, and the immortals were left behind as their temple homes were destroyed by war or converted to adhere to new faiths. The offerings slowly dried up, leaving a cadre of hypertraditonlist blood priests simultaneously convinced of their own semi-divine status due to their consumption of godly tributes, AND starving into a state of half feral madness due to a lack of those exact same tributes. What option was left to them then? Leave? Reform? Nah: Just go ALL the way mad and attempt to rule the city from its foundations while simultaneously swearing never to go to the surface again. For the past few centuries that’s been the status quo: a bunch of self righteous holymen crawling about in the sewers whispering prayers in dead languages to those dejected and desperate enough to seek shelter in the undercity.

Recently however the lowest of the Naljeth clan has received visions from some unknown and sinister patron, driving him to seize control of their stagnant ranks and spur them into ruinous action. Expanding their territory, converting new members, sabotaging the city’s infestructure, this trash-heap zealot has ambitions to drown the city in plague and darkness till every street and grand palace above becomes indistinguishable from the gutters the Naljeth have ruled for centuries.