I'm excited about your open inbox! First off, love what you do and the content you put out. I'm looking forward to trying to integrate some of your stuff into a game I just started running.
On that note, I would be thrilled to see what you come up with for this: the 6 member 3rd level party is part of an expedition exploring a "new" continent in a very Europeans exploring South America kind of way, so lots of jungle terrain. There is an old stone quarry in the area that was used by the dragonborn nation that once ruled here about 1000 years ago to build some of their temples and/or cities. What manner of creature can you see occupying this place, perhaps turning it into a lair? What else might be living here and how might the dragonborn who still live in the area (reduced to nomadic tribes since the collapse of their civilization) make use of it? That might count as more than one request, so I'm ok if you only respond to one. Thank you so much for whatever you come up with!
Wilderness: Empire of the Eclipse
As long as the sun shines, Gaz-et-te-pulk will rule
- Translation from a crumbling monument
Setup: Civilization is a delicate thing, balanced on foundations that assume that tomorrow will be just like yesterday, and that disruptions to the status quo are fleeting. When things change, and change violently, then civilizations will either bend of break, and in the case of Gaz-et-te-pulk they broke irrevocably.
A thriving iron age culture that had mastered the arts of plantlore and aquatecture, the dragonborn of Gaz-et-te-pulk (”The City Everflowing”) transformed their rugged jungle home into a garden. Sustaining a wide population of warriors, poets, and artisans that spread their culture across the continent.
No army or crisis seemed to be able to challenge Gaz-et-te-pulk, to unmoor it from its place as a cornerstone of history, at least until an upstart cult-leader with a scheme decided to go and snuff out the sun. It was an ego play, a classic dark-lord scheme with too much pagentry and too little thinking about the consequences, and it ended up plunging Gaz-et-te-pulk and the surrounding continent into a half-millenium of darkness.
As is recorded in the histories of surrounding cultures, “The Devouring Dark” that settled over the region saw the death of the jungle and all the crops, followed by a mass famine and wars between the surviving cities over what was left. Then the rot set in, a fungal plague that fed off the mass-death of the once green land and poisoned the very air itself. It took five centuries for someone to find and defeat the cultleader turned demigod, and undo his magic to return the light to the sky above the region. It took five more to see life return to the land, growing over the ruin and rot that had once been a darkness-filled desert
Adventure Hooks:
The landscape remains scarred from the calamity of the Devouring Dark, and poses a hazard to any traveler seeking to uncover Gaz-et-te-pulk’s history. Though greenery is resurgent since the sun’s return, the strange fungi that flourished in its absence still blooms in darkened corners, creating spore-storms and parasitized predators to seek out new places to grow. Many of the great cities lay in complete ruin, and those not reduced to rubble are now flooded with no one to maintain the great aqueducts and cisterns that once fed them throughout the year. Most are inhabited only by raiders and sickness bearing insects, but a few are being reclaimed by the diaspora of the Everflowing city, seeking to restore a little of their homeland’s glory.
Things that love the shadows flourished during the half-century of eternal night, squirming up from the darkness below the earth or making the long pilgrimage to this seeming sunless promised land. Derro, Vampires, creatures born from the shadowfell, all saught to make the bones of Gaz-et-te-pulk their hunting grounds, only to be forced back into the caves and gutters with the sun’s return and the cult’s defeat.
Stongegiants, once enslaved as beasts of burden by the dragonborn, now roam the expanse of the empire hostile to all they encounter. The memory of stone is long, and most of these beings still bear the boreholes through their rocky flesh where their captors attached their fetters, while some others were remade into living monuments of their captor’s supremacy..
Among the ruins the party may encounter an eccentric old hermit, who has much to tell them of the region and its history, and conceals yet more of his role within it.
Art
