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Sat, 12 Feb 2022 12:52:41

Dungeon: The Veiled Palace

Sorrow pervades this valley, the painful ache that remains after tears and screams have exhausted themselves and the body can only linger on in faltering surrender. You can feel it in the rain, in the rocks, in the chill of the wind as it pulls the mirth from your bones.

Setup: Forlorn and forgotten thought it may be, the Veiled palace was said to have been constructed by a besotted celestial and played home to a succession of demigod warlords before it and the surrounding lands were reclaimed by nature at the end of the last civil war, transforming into a vast hinterland ripe for exploration.

Hooks:

Though the warlords have been gone for generations, their most cunning servants, a coterie of assassins live on, location concealed by ancient enchantments that cloak their fortress and their movements in near impenetrable mist. They now sell their services to the innumerable nobles and merchants of the lowlands as the “Serpent-Unseen”, a group the party will only hear of after taking an innocuous job that sees their prospective employer killed half way through and the party hastily pinned for the crime.
In addition to the isolated human villages in mountains, there are also encalves of aarakocra and jaguar-tabaxi in the region, both of whom retain scraps of lore about the palace and its formation, but have become increasingly unfriendly towards outsiders of late. Someone has been wandering their territory and ensnaring their people through the use of a bewitching flute, and all those who try to rescue the ensorceled are never heard from again.
Tales in local roadhouses tell of Tamha, a long vanished village in the mountains that once traded in heavenly treasures, some beautiful or powerful beyond beleif. While these rumors may incite the party to start combing the rainforest for trinkets, they’ve also inspired the Serpent-Unseen’s latest leader, Janbek the collector, aspirations for his organization far above being petty cutthroats. Having found a few of these trinkets ( such as the flute), the collector realizes that the Veiled palace is a storehouse of powerful enchantments that could lead him and his people to true power far beyond the swords and poisons they currently wield.
Those traveling high into the mountains should be wary, as to hear the locals tell it a soaking wet ghost that appears wandering the roads in the area dazed and confused, bloodless save for the silvery ichor which drips down from a bone-bearing gash in his head. As the ghost story goes, should the specter clasp you in his deathly grip, you’ll start to drown on land, all while he pleads with you to help him find his way home, dissolving into tears should his victim fight their way free.

Background:As the story goes, the celestial noble Rindal’jar was traveling the mortal world admiring the beauty of the mountains when he fell in love with a mortal girl from a tiny little village by name of Sya. This was a problem, as Rindal’jar was already married to the local goddess of rain, and so cloaked the surrounding valley in a never ending mist so as to hide the affair from his betrothed. Rindal’jar likewise concealed his true nature from his beau, claiming to be a wandering noble in search of poetic inspiration as he lavished gifts upon her and her people. Sya for her part figured out Rindal’jar’s ruse when such gifts icnluded bundles of gold or a bridge over a valley she was forced to cross every time she went to gather fruit, but she and her people were poor, and she feared offending this fanciful stranger and all the power he seemed to wield.
The affair continued for years, and eventually saw Sya living like royalty in a palace conjured by Rindal’jar, waited upon by a staff of animals transmuted into servants: brilliant birds for her ladies and courtiers and a pack of leopards for her honor guard. Her people were forced to stay in the village below, but she smuggled them whatever riches she could to trade for food and proper tools.
Having long suspected her husband’s unfaithfulness, the goddess of rain eventually used her trusted agents to track him to the valley, giving them a bronze vessel empowered by years of bitter hurt and resentment to unleash upon him when he was alone in the valley. Unstoppered the vessel unleashed monsoon storms and flooded the valley in an instant, washing away the unfaithful Rindal’jar as well as Sya’s village in an instant of divine spite. Watching from above and hidden by the palace’s enchantments, Sya watched her people destroyed, and afterwords retreated to the depths of the palace, living out the rest of her life like a ghost. Her and Rindal’jar’s children, raised by magical convenience and their sorrow-broken mother came up spoiled and wrong, eventually declaring themselves as warlords and raising successive bands of jaguar folk and mountain bandits as they use their father’s gifts to carve out territory for themselves. This pattern persisted over generations, until Rindal’jar’s line got tangled up in a brutal civil war and ended up extinguished for their troubles, their territory falling back to the wild.

Further Adventures:

Once and orphan and petty thief, the aasimar Janbek (perhaps correctly) sees himself as the heir to the warlords’ legacy, feeling pulled to collect the trinkets and treasures a celestial noble carelessly bestowed upon a hapless village girl so long ago. While many of these trinkets are merely valuable, others possess powerful abilities that have gone long unobserved, but seem to blossom in the collector’s grasp allowing him to ascend the ranks of the Serpent Unseen faster than anyone in the organization’s history. His ultimate goal is to uncover the origin of these wonders, and bring the valley under his control as a new reigning warlord to which surrounding territories must offer their allegiance. To this end the party may end up doing battle with Janbek over treasures they do not know the true origin of, or even inadvertently passing a few into his hands in the early game.
Of all the magical items scattered throughout the hinterlands and the surrounding region, perhaps the most dangerous is the stormbearing vessel, which was washed downstream and into the plunge of a violent waterfall and stuck in the rubble beneath the crashing water ever since. The party may only come to know of the vessel thanks to the locals telling them the sad story of Rindal’Jar’s transgressions, and connecting it with their earlier ghost sightings.
If one held the wrathful vessel, one could bring rains in times of drought, or summon hurricanes to ravage armies and scour fleets at sea. One could even use it to summon the wrathful goddess, which Janbek may attempt to do if the party closes in on him. What this scornful rain-god will do with the descendant of her philandering husband is anyone’s guess, perhaps smite him on the spot or take him as a consort, elevating him to terrible power. The gods are inscrutable after all, and it would be impious to try to predict how they would act next.

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