Cosmic Lovecraftian ODND Maggot Dungeon
Level drain, "the Undercity sucks!" new world lore in the Callastor campaign!!!
Ok, crazy title, I know, but in this day and age you have to put your weirdest foot forward - it’ll make sense when you read the italic dungeon lore section in a moment!
In an effort to catch up and keep this campaign update manageable while still being able to write about other things (I have a stack of article ideas but regular campaign updates have been about all I’ve been able to manage in these crazy times!) I’m going to do a big post to bring things up to speed.
At last report, PCs had finished escorting a caravan to the southern mountain city of Doro, I realized I’d been duped into a video game reference with another city being player-named (Baten-Kaitos is now just Kaitos!!! Damn kids!), the magic user’s player who missed the session has taken to Braunsteining (hot-button word I know, I just mean he’s never “off” and is regularly messaging his plans as time passes in-game…
And we sat down at the table again with players opting to return to Zhol-Tarath, the big dungeon that currently sprawls at the center of my campaign.
A note on dungeons and world lore:
Callastor is very much set in the Law v. Chaos dichotomy of old DND, and as such, the lore of the world centers around that struggle.
Callastor is essentially a sword and planet world set far in the future after a cataclysmic battle between two super-powers - on one side the human hero and demigod Regulus, who came from the stars and ordered the warring tribes of eastern Callastor into the unified Bellenos people -
and on the other, Anesh, lord of the Algol, confusingly the name of both the star from which Anesh is from, and the empire on Callastor named after him.
My concept is that the entire star system is huge and involved in a great war between advanced humans like Regulus, who have attained godhood on the planets they’ve visited (nothing new under the sun, hints of Warhammer and Dune and all that), and the entities of Algol and other stars who are by nature the enemies of Regulus’ ancient people.
The gods of chaos like Anesh aren’t necessarily more evil than Regulus, as the methods of both are pretty objectionable, but the servants of Anesh are…well, let’s face it, pretty classic “evil.”
Cults, sorcerers, ritual slaughter and endless conquest and so on.
Anyhow, the powerful children of Anesh are known as Archons. He sends them to Callastor and other planets as seeds within huge meteors, which form cysts on the surface of the planet, which the followers of Anesh built huge fortresses around.
Blood ritual feeds the larval archons, and their chaos emanations create dungeon weirdness like undead, monsters, dread, hallucination and so on, wilder as it gets deeper toward the imprisoned archon.
Long ago, these would then power the fighting forces as the war raged on between law and chaos, ravaging the small planet in huge cataclysmic wars.
Fast forward an undetermined but extremely long time later, and some of these archons still exist in a larval stage, in kind of hypersleep. Their emanations are weak, and there’s no one feeding them blood…until now.
You get it.
Back to the action - the players head up to the dungeon but near the entrance in the mountain hex, the toss a random encounter with an NPC party of Belenos heroes looking to investigate rumors of the “cyst.”
Chaos ensues.
The PCs had a ton of retainers from the city with them, the NPCs also do (ODND rules for rolling up NPC parties are no bullshit!), and the PCs general lack of cohesion and diplomacy (the more chill ones rolling their eyes and sighing ‘goddammit’ as the crazy ones immediately begin rolling initiative) sends them straight into a huge fight.
I use a boiled down Chainmail system for the front lines retainers battling, throwing d6’s with chances to hit/kill based on armor and weapon type…things go sideways.
The enemies cleric (in this game referred to as Champions of Regulus) has tied up the most powerful PC fighter with a Hold Person spell, and their more heavily armed troops are making mincemeat of the PCs thieve’s guild hirelings, whose morale cracks.
PCs stay in the game as their archer gets high ground and snipes the cleric with help from two of the PCs expensive wardogs.
At the start of the fight, the PCs evil cleric dropped a darkness spell on the oppositions main leveled fighter, and they’ve already killed the NPCs archer type fighter.
Eventually, the PCs win the day with only 1 of their retainers surviving, a tough vet named Kar.
Well, almost. Three of the thieves who broke morale demand a huge payout, the party’s second MU (player was there as a one shot and had to leave) decides to attack them with his staff. He’s murdered in a single round, the remaining PCs kill the thieves (I make a note that the thieves guild will be pissed, especially since the MU charmed their captain to get them to along at all), and decide to continue into the dungeon after a night’s rest to replenish spells and get a HP.
The dungeon experience in brief:
After going back through areas they knew, and a few they didn’t, with some minor battles and discoveries, PCs go down a long flight of stairs to level 2 and quickly realize that, like Donnie in Big Lebowski, they are “out of their element.”
The first encounter rolled in the first room is with a wight and four ghouls.
In Zhol-Tarath, the ghouls are undead guard dogs who eat the flesh of the sacrifice victims after they are exsanguinated. In the campaign, once the PCs “woke up” the dungeon by breaking the seals, and bleeding in it, the undead had begun to hit the countryside at night, dragging victims back to their fortress and offering the blood to the archon through specially designed channels.
The wights act as intelligent “commanders” for the lower level undead, and the PCs come face to face with it - the first hit it does 2 damage and I calmly explain to the player to remove 200xp from their sheet.
Oh, man. Their face. From there, a ripple of fear across the table. “Run for it!”
(I have always had a hate/love with level drain. I know maybe I’m just too soft, but losing entire levels from characters when you only get to play a few times a month is just…too cruel for me. I settled for 100xp/point of damage as being nasty enough, and the feeling was shared by the players.
They flee, triggering multiple random encounters and leading to a Benny Hill-esque roundabout of the dungeon as they use hallways they know to get round undead “birthing pools” and so on.
Back in the city, they learn a few things that will likely become critical later - their original patron, Berein, for whom they ventured in Zhol-Tarath first to acquire a rubbing from a sarcophagus - has been missing since then.
They also learn, by way of night time encounter (I’m using Gabor Lux’s Nocturnal Table and Lankhmar and sort of discarding what I don’t like), that hooded officials are removing lots of bodies from tenement houses. Later, they’ll find out why, maybe.
The session ends with PCs encountering two of my solo campaign characters (was hoping to be able to bring them in at some point, how exciting!), Tiwo and Teera, who propose a somewhat complex heist to get hot jewels out of the city.
I’ll spare you (or myself the job) all the details, but there’s a lot of factions at play for the jewels: the estranged daughter of Lyran Voros, one of the more powerful merchant princes of the city, the corrupt city watch paid to secure them for her, the thieves guild who heard about it, and the criminals who actually stole them and are trying to avoid all aforementioned parties.
The route:
Into the courtyard of Vør prison, down a big well access line, and into the tunnels of the Undercity - Tiwo has a map he swears by, and thinks they can make it outside the city where an old runoff line comes out at the ruined tower.
That next session wound up being super short, due to work constraints and kids and all that fun grown up stuff, the upshot being:
Tiwo’s map sucked.
The Undercity sucks.
Bat people with plague rats under their wings and a paralyzing scream.
Zombies of old prisoners who tried to escape this way and ran afoul of… something.
Gigantic stone burrowing maggots that emit some kind of green phosphorescent bacterial colonies that feed on blood.
Through a lot of crazy encounters, backtracking, fighting about the map, and running low on torches, they get lost, encounter an NPC party of heavies led by Soren Voros, brother of Lyran Voros the merchant prince. They are in a bad way, and make an accord with the PCs to get everyone out.
The big battle happens in some kind of crazy underground hall - like an audience chamber with elaborate carvings that remind the PCs of the tattoos they’ve seen on the Dessian raiders. They are close to the surface exit, and are accosted by a group of warriors, pale, tall, accompanied by zombies on chains like dogs, and a Noctilian (the bat people) seemingly all under these strange subterrannean human’s (?) command.
It’s a great fight, PCs make it out alive, get pretty wealthy, earn some new friends, and decide to push their luck with the last hour of game time available to us to set up a kind of command center in Zhol-Tarath.
They load a mule, head up into the mountains…
And encounter a group of 7 gnoll berserkers. I took some inspo from Luke Gearing’s monster book on this, and decided gnolls are just insane, violent, cannibalistic humans who’ve been outcast from their own tribes for being too uncontrollable and evil. They put on the dog mask and leave humanity behind.
There’s a grip more of them nearby. A long and punishing battle results in another couple of dead PCs, but also the gnolls traveling group has some amazing treasure (I rolled under 15% on pretty much every percentage for treasure tables), so overall the PCs are happy, except the lost veteran retainer Kar (RIP - we’ll always remember you by your index card character sheet on the wall!) and return to the city.
Final note on this rather lengthy report is that the Algolian magic user agreed with me to use corruption tables beginning at level 3 and once each level thereafter.
Each random entry is something like:
Local animals freak out near you.
You have an aversion to daylight (-1 to all checks in sun)
You cannot enter a private domicile without invitation…
You get where it’s going, and now vampires have a “built in” origin for Callastor.
Next time:
Delving into the underground civilization of the Drau…
Keep your blades sharp…
Let me know if there’s anything in particular you’d like to see me cover in an article! Solo stuff, old systems, worldbuilding, “seat of my pants” DMing. Whatever floats your boat!
I love these updates. Will check out your mass combat system on itch.
Do you have a link to those modified Chainmail rules you're using? I've always wanted to do a mercenary troop campaign, sort of like The Black Company or Barbara Hambly's Sun Wolf books.