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Release the Kraken on The Yellow Fane in Ruins
🕑 Added 2023-04-29 15:09:25 +0000 UTCEvery month we go through our back catalogue of maps and you vote on which two should be re-released under the free commercial use license. Our first release this month is this dungeon I made for an Empire of the Petal Throne game.
The underworld of Béy Su contains many old temples and other structures that are no longer connected to the world above. The Yellow Fane once sat beneath the shrine of Qón in Béy Su – a garden temple reminiscent of the Garden of Artékh in Thráya. But that shrine is ancient memory now, and government buildings now loom over the space that was once used to watch the movements of the celestial bodies. The “new” shrine of Qón in the city is mostly a small library attached to the impressive temple of Lord Belkhánu. Within the library are a few sets of shelves archiving the activities and research of The Guild of those Who Repel the Dark – a group that can be best described as demon hunters and exorcists – militant sorcerers who seem out of place in a cult dedicated to helping the spirit-soul to cross safely in death.
And within these archives are multiple references to their old headquarters, the Yellow Fane. Of course, the archivists who wrote these tomes never planned for the eventual Ditlana that would divorce the shrine of Qón from the Yellow Fane. But for those who look, the city’s archives as well as the shrine’s archives clearly note the position of the old shrine, and thus what part of the city’s underworld the Yellow Fane should be in.
And of course, there’s plenty of reasons to dig up the old base of operations of a cult of demon-hunters… who knows what arcane tricks are still hidden down there?
Finding the way through the underworld to old basements is a difficult task, especially since the government buildings above have built their own basements, destroying and blocking many accessways in the area. But a set of stairs (in good repair) still leads down into the old fane, much of which has collapsed. But few get much past the base of the stairs, as a massive ngoro covers much of the floor in the opening from the stairs into the fane (much akin to a Trapper, the ngoro is a massive 30′ x 40′ creature who’s top looks identical to stone and which can envelop up to 20 human-sized creatures and then crush them to death). Beyond the ngoro the fane’s beautiful white and yellow mosaics have partially fallen from the walls, statues of guardians have been toppled, and someone or something has dug small tunnels through the rubble where large parts of the structure have collapsed (or been filled in with construction debris from above before being re-sealed).
Of note is a small sub-shrine with three chambers each containing a pool that at one time was full of heavily salted water. A much older rite of Belkhánu and Qón had the priests float the bodies of their kin here as they prepared their spirit souls for the transit beyond.
Defences in the Fane beyond the ngoro are magical in nature – old curses, magical abjurations, and of course, there’s a good chance that something broken down here once held back a demon exorcised and then contained by the Guild. After all, aren’t the adventurers down here to find something to deal with a demon in the world above?
The 1200 dpi versions of the map were drawn at a scale of 300 pixels per square and are 8,100 pixels (27 squares) wide. To use this with a VTT you would need to resize the squares to either 70 pixels (for 5′ squares) or 140 pixels (for 10′ squares) – so resizing it to either 1,890 pixels wide or 3,780 pixels wide, respectively.
https://dysonlogos.blog/2023/04/29/release-the-kraken-on-the-yellow-fane-in-ruins/
