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Deeper Beneath the Finger
🕑 Added 2025-03-14 15:23:21 +0000 UTCNow deep beneath “The Finger” these substructures were used as tombs by the followers of the “Somnolent One”. But on these levels the weird lights in the walls fade away and the stonework appears much older. The map on the top half of the page is the third level beneath the surface structure, and the lower half is the fourth level – but it is not connected to the third by any traditional means (passages, stairs, ladders, etc).
The upper of these two levels was repurposed from prior constructions and is used as a tomb by the Reverie Collective. The main tomb chamber (the 30 foot wide chamber with niches on the north and south walls) is decorated with an intricate, sprawling web of fine silvery threads that glimmer faintly in the presence of a light source. Each thread vibrates with a faint, almost inaudible whisper – and touching them causes the whispers to intensify. Listening closely, the whispers describe forgotten moments from the listener’s past – or fictitious events that feel unsettlingly real and probable.
The chamber on the upper right side of level 3 has two large mirrors facing each other from across the room. They don’t seem to be quick in sync with our timeline though – things dropped in sight of the mirrors might drop normally in one reflection, while taking another 3-5 seconds to drop in the other. If a character touches their mirrored self, they feel themselves being pulled into a world where everything is reversed (colours, emotions, intentions) and if they fail a saving throw, may find themselves subtly altered by the experience.
Access to the next level down is either by crawling through the narrow tunnels created by some sort of giant rodent with black teeth that have distant stars in them like the night sky – not truly dangerous themselves, these rats can cut through stone (and most materials) at a prodigious rate with their strange teeth. The other access to the lower level are a pair of secret elevators. It seems the strange thrumming throughout the complex might not really be the magic of dreams, but the thrumming of machinery still deep beneath us. There are two such 20′ x 20′ elevators on level 3 – both only accessible via secret doors. The elevator on the west side of the complex descends past level 4 to level 5 (which will be detailed next month) while the elevator near the centre of the complex links levels 3 & 4.
Level 4 of the complex loses any sense that this is the domain of a dreaming god. This area feels like a long abandoned warehouse or other storage space. There are raised cut stone platforms that once held a lot of stock (and now mostly hold bits of stone and wood debris, and some empty wooden boxes), and a room divided by a large set of metal shelves with a number of empty barrels along one side. Access to level 5 from this level is only via a secret ladder on the south side of the level – the elevator between levels 3 & 4 does not go beyond this point.
These levels lead to their own plot hooks – a map to this ancient industrial site would now lead to the enclave of the Reverie Collective. Or perhaps a key to the elevators has been found and legend lore has directed them to this location to use it. And of course, the classic treasure map would describe how to find the elevator hatches in order to descend much deeper underground and find whatever the map leads to.
The 1200 dpi versions of the map were drawn at a scale of 300 pixels per square and are 8,400 x 10,200 pixels (28 x 34 squares). To use this with a VTT you would need to resize the squares to either 70 pixels (for 5′ squares) or 140 pixels (for the recommended 10‘ squares) – so resizing the image to 1,960 x 2,380 pixels or 3,920 x 4,760 pixels, respectively.
https://dysonlogos.blog/2025/03/14/deeper-beneath-the-finger/
Comments
ViggenCA
So much to do in this place, can totally see me placing it nearby and letting the players explore it (with incentive, if they don't immediately show interest).
Mark CMG Clover
Wow! More underneath!
