Scenario Seeds: Obelisks III

Obelisks III

One
Javver huddled in the dark. Shivering. Bleeding. Praying that that thing snuffling around in the cellar couldn't smell his blood. No one had told him that there were Snouters under the old Apothecary-Shop. No one had warned him that the obelisk was a sending from some sow-queen of Kalkendru. His teachers wanted to see how he handled their little test.


Two
What kind of a person carves an obelisk from the trunk of a tree dragged across the threshold from the Purple Forest? And in an attic no less. Why would they sacrifice all those penguins, bats and pigeons to the thing, smearing it all haphazardly with feathers and blood? Who is that behind you?


Three
Oneiroliths are notoriously unstable. Half-solidified phantasmal residue left behind by inattentive Dreamers or sloppy Oneirists. The Red Watch maintains a watch-list of recently-reported oneiroliths, just like they chalk-up unverified spottings of Black Smoke and keep tabs on any rumors of Red Weed or Scarlet Plague outbreaks. They used to consider such things potentially dangerous. Some academic was concerned that the Red Weeds might latch onto one of these things and somehow grow into the local Dreamspaces. It hasn't happened yet. Not that anyone's reported. These days the Red Watch tends to concern itself with real threats and actual dangers. They just don't have the budget nor the manpower to do much more than maintain a list no one cares about any more. So when the report came in of an oneirolithic obelisk it caused a bit of turmoil back at the Main Office. Suddenly everyone wanted access to the list...


Four
 Zoogruth trotted along leisurely, distracted by contemplation of abstract matters. The Fourth Theorem was troubling the old Phorain. She just couldn't reconcile it to her recent observations. Red dust coated her flanks, covered her taloned feet. It reminded her of dried blood. The old days. Not every mercenary managed to escape the mind-bondage most of the hard-line Zurian clans insisted upon. But then not every Phorain had her talent for sorcery. She turned West at the broken pillars of some ruin no one bothered with. Down the narrow defile behind the canopy of clutchy-thorns. Across the small trickling brook all milky-white with alkali-salts. Down. Around. Down some more. There was no path, save in her memory. No one else knew about this spot. This place. Her refuge. There. The obelisk loomed crookedly in the steep-walled crater. This was where everything changed for her. This was where she had learned her first spells. Each one deciphered and translated from the inscriptions on that obelisk. Her obelisk. She never heard Janeska's killing spell.


Five
The old warlords who ruled over Rushtalm had struggled long and hard to overcome the stigma of having a human taint to their blood. For six generations each of them had waged terrible, costly wars upon all their neighbors. Each one was immortalized by an obelisk commemorating their victories. The seventh obelisk remains unadorned, its upper third broken off in the course of the sacking of Rushtalm following the death of the last warlord. No one will speak his name in Rushtalm. It is considered a terrible curse. A reminder of his failure and their loss and the city's fall from preeminence. There are whispered rumors and muttered prophecies of an Eighth Obelisk, the arrival of some heir to the tainted lineage of the old warlords, a return to the greatness of the old days. The janissaries patrolling the muddy streets of this dismal place just wish whoever it was would get on with things so they could either execute them or leave once and for all.


Six
Here's the map. Like I promised. Thanks for the Black Mead. That'll help me sleep tonight. So look here. There are three islands. South of the third reef. Well past red-walled Viridang. They don't ever patrol this far South, so don't worry about them. Each one of these islands is less than a mile across at its widest. All three have a huge obelisk of heavy blue jade at their centers, surrounded by low-walled mazes and writhing vines and the like. The vines are harmless; the things will grab at your boots but they avoid fire. Don't leave any wounded behind, as the vines will take them. Slowly. The screams will last for hours. The bloat-fish with their massive, toothy maws are considered the worst of the prowling things one must keep on guard against. Especially the farther inland one goes. The waters surrounding these islands are fair infested with fist-sized poisonous crustaceans, green-shelled inedible things with stings and pincers. They'll avoid anything coated with mucous, so maybe you'd best see about making some sort of deal with an Octoscholar; they have a few spells along those lines that might prove useful. Just don't tell them where you're going. Not under any circumstance. Oh, and those trees drooping along the inner lagoons of these islands aren't trees at all. They're some kind of anemone. And they will be watching you every step of the way. Burn them. Or else. Damned things massacred my crew. I only barely escaped, far from unscathed, as you can see. Surgeon won't remove the thing. It is too deeply embedded into my flesh now. It's not a bad replacement-hand, all things considered, but it keeps me up at night with its sing-song warbling...

Obelisks I  Obelisks II  Obelisks III

Obelisks II (Scenario Seeds)

Obelisks II

One
A band of nomadic sphinxes have taken up residence in a burrowed-out nest beneath the Partially Unburied Slab. They didn't originally dig out these tunnels, but have driven off the small clutch of troglodytes who they found here when they first arrived. Little do the sphinxes realize, those troglodytes weren't the ones who dug the tunnels either. If one goes far enough back into the depths of these tunnels, there are ghouls lurking in the shadows, waiting for a chance to strike out at those who would intrude upon their domains...


Two
Driven from their home, a small clutch of troglodytes have been wandering lost and thirsty through these dry, mold-tainted lands dominated by ancient obelisks. Then they come across a Fallen Obelisk. In the shade of this broken monument they find a curiously carved ruby set into a ring of hammered platinum. One of the children carelessly places the ring upon their finger before anyone can stop bickering over who should get the shiny bauble. Before them a Tenebrous Scarlet Triangle slowly rotates into view, offering the way to somewhere else...it gives off an enticingly tangy scent...


Three
Valg the Wormhunter slumped down beside a cracked and pitted obelisk, one of several arranged before a larger one by some unknown, long perished people whom the desert had swallowed up even more thoroughly than Valg's long lost tribe. The square formed by the smaller obelisks shimmered just a little bit differently than the surrounding desert air. Wounded and weary, with only three wrigglers in his pouch to show for all his day's efforts, Valg stared at the shimmering, subtle disturbance before him. Something about the phenomena nagged at him. He had been warned about something out here amidst the Obelisks, some Damned Thing that he should be on his guard against. But he was tired. The worm-venom was making him slightly dizzy. The wine was all gone. A soft rain came over the area from out of nowhere -- the skies had been clear and brutally hot only a second before, then thousands of small, white frog-like things fell out of the increasingly heavy rainstorm. Within minutes it was over as suddenly as it had begun, leaving piles of the writhing little pseudo-batrachians mounded across the sand to dry-out beneath the cruel sun. They curdled and crumbled into dust quickly, with tiny moist popping noises, leaving a residue of bitter white ashes. Valg knew that those ashes were unhealthy, probably even toxic, like most of the things that were encountered in this place. But the ashes were everywhere, on everything, and he had nothing to wash them off of his skin with...


Four
Woodrum was a simple merchant. He traded in stirges. Not the feral, stupid kind that any yutz could gather from some fetid and dismal swamp, but real stirges. Trained stirges. But stirges are not well-suited to the desert and they were in danger of dying from the heat and the lack of moisture. The stirges were getting listless and torpid in the unbearable heat. Why, oh why had he ever listened to that liar of a thief back in Zallakand? Even if she had been a Bluescale with the violet eyes of a Vhonj-born serpentine. Oh but Woodrum had a weakness for scaled females. He was somewhat notorious for it. Now he would probably die for it. Lost amidst a never-ending array of cryptic Obelisks. Or perhaps not? For was that not a group of four camels coming this way? Perhaps there was hope after all...


Five
Bajaam dozed in the saddle of his stolen camel as it placidly walked on and on across this dreary wasteland dominated by Obelisks and still more Obelisks. He hated obelisks and looked forward to reaching the coast and booking passage on a sea going vessel. The four camels he had liberated from that idiot of a cultist back in the box canyon carried an impressive collection of loot ransacked from a small, forgotten tomb. The cultist had been right about the tomb. Bajaam was duly thankful for that. So he had cut the man's throat while he was still asleep. It was a sort of kindness. The kindness of a half-ogre from Bakush.


Six
Galb adjusted his grip on the trident. It was the only weapon he had been able to hold onto through the terrible sand storm that had separated him from his fellow slaves. He smirked grotesquely. That old skinflint of a slave-master had tried to cross the desert without maintaining his chains any better than he cared for the gladiators-in-training he was supposed to deliver to what was essentially one of the least spectacular destinations along the entire murder circuit. Ha. They'd probably crucify the croaking old toad when he came stumbling back into the port-town. Good. Galb would have liked to have seen that. But it wasn't important. No sense taking any of what had happened to him personally, not lately. what hadn't been bad luck was just business. No he had to get down to the business of survival. Facing-off against monsters of mutants in the arena was one thing he was damn good at. Facing tough odds and unfair conditions was just part of the way it all worked. Now Galb was set against the hot Sun above and the wide, smoldering expanse of the desert. He spotted some sort of obelisk in the distance, through the heat shimmer. Even if it was just a mirage, it was a direction and one way was about as good as any other, so he started walking...

Obelisks I  Obelisks II  Obelisks III

Obelisks I (Scenario Seeds)

Obelisks I

One
These Obelisks mark the perimeter of an ancient crash-site where an alien war machine has been imprisoned by the spells of a now forgotten civilization. As the hieroglyphs fade and the obelisks crumble away in the constant winds of this desolate place, who remains to preserve the seals and wards that forestall doom and destruction on a cosmic scale?


Two
The priests of the twenty-third dynasty were clever. They knew all too well that the earlier tombs of the great queens and mighty kings had been plundered and defiled by tomb-robbers, adventurers, and even some of their own colleagues. But they were determined to not have their own graves despoiled or broken-into, that they would never allow. Clever, scheming priests who knew many dark secrets, they arranged for shafts to be sunk, tunnels to be dug, and secret tombs to be arranged below the shifting sands. No living slaves dug these places out, nor did anyone outside of the clandestine secret society know of these works. Slowly, patiently, discretely, as each slave working on the vast monuments fell victim to the inhuman conditions and ruthless demands of the hybrid overseers of the Great King, the priests gathered them up and brought them to this place where they imparted unto them an unholy sort of non-life so that they might serve yet longer in terrible bondage. Some were incorporated into the very walls of the tunnels and galleries that they might form a macabre lattice-work of bones that held the walls in place. Others dug deeper, ever deeper into the dismal depths, carving out niches and sepulchres and catacombs for each new generation of priests to join in the sorcerous conspiracy. This continued for hundreds of years until finally the conspiracy was crushed by a radical sect of reformers who brought about their own ruin in their zeal to wipe-out the burrowing necromancers...and thus these secret places of the dead priests have been mostly forgotten, mere footnotes in musty tomes or barely decipherable accounts transcribed from decayed scrolls that sages and scholars only whisper about in hushed tones, lest they draw the ire of some unmentionable wrath upon themselves.

Your group just found an opening no one knows anything about in-between some old obelisks...


Three
For more than ten thousand years It has lurked deep beneath the tainted greenish sands of this place, dreaming and inspiring acts of depravity and bloodshed to amuse Itself. Now, finally, the sands have ebbed and worn away enough that It is close enough to the surface to begin to extrude tiny tendrils of madness and corruption upwards, outwards into the world outside the soil within which it was long, long ago trapped. But this blasphemous advent has not gone unnoticed. Cultists from across the world and from places rumored to be beyond the world have begun to make pilgrimages to this vile, Chorazin-like place amidst the ruins of those who once sought to imprison their dread mistress deep beneath the crust of the world. Already the faithful are showing signs of tumorous stigmata. It has begun.


Four
On an archaeological expedition into the cratered wastes of Altair 5 funded by the Orne Foundation, one overly curious young girl, Gabrielle Adams, the daughter of Commander Adams and Alta Morbius, finds herself separated from the rest of the expedition by a freak sandstorm. Wandering blindly, lacerated and running low on oxygen, the all too perky grad student from Centauri University stumbled against a peculiar obelisk that seemed to glow eerily in the storm's weird fluctuating light. Suddenly she was dropped down a hidden rampway and deposited deep below the surface. She awoke an indeterminate time later, half-buried in gritty greenish sand and with no obvious way out. Her comms-unit was defunct, but there was oxygen to breathe in this place. Being a headstrong girl, not given to hysterics or fear, Gabrielle Adams slid the hidden blaster she always carried out of her belt-pack and started to explore this strange alien underworld...


Five
Garonk squatted menacingly at the head of the deeply scored and scarred table of hand-hammered meteoric stone. His people had entered into undeath millennia ago, not like these upstarts from other, later races. He scowled pensively. These bickering fools were the cast-offs and abandoned dregs of the ones who had all but exterminated his kind. They had nearly taken over the entire world. Mighty in their sorceries, ruthless in their pursuit of their ambitions, they only pretended to respect Garonk and his kind. They thought that they knew everything. But they also harbored doubts. Deep down they feared that Garonk and his kind still possessed secrets that they had not revealed or shared with the newer generations of ghouls.

Garonk smiled evilly in the flickering glow of corpse-tallow tapers and compressed oil lamps. He knew many such secrets. His people were accomplished dreamers and had plundered the oneiric reservoirs of countless worlds for many centuries of centuries before the others found their way into the deep vaults and became transfigured and transformed into ghoulish versions of their own kind. Unlike these modern fools with their dependence upon the vagaries and cruel whims of sorcery and superstition, Garonk and his people had long ago learned to harness the secrets of scientific knowledge and the strange technologies dreamt of by the slumbering prodigies and suppressed savants of hundreds of worlds.

The Congress of Ghouls was being called to order by the bone-masked necrotects who had originally built these places deep, deep below the chambers and passages that they intended for robbers to find. Garonk composed himself and rearranged the draping of his ceremonial robes. It had been a bit of a wait, but it was finally time to take the next step in his people's great plan...


Six
Griswold checked his slide-rule and the abacus one more time. The green-paged ephemeris that he had acquired back in that festering stinkhole from the jaladari trinket-peddler was authentic. He was sure of it now. Once he stepped out from under the flap of his tent he was more than sure; he was certain. The flickering outlines of a vortex-like gate were forming in-between the ancient obelisks. He could see some hint of what lay beyond through the coruscating energies of the gate. It looked like...

Obelisks I  Obelisks II  Obelisks III