Tuesday, November 29, 2022

10,000 Chambers of the Cnite King

Deep within the turgid reaches of the Samarkand Desert, a lone crag of withered sandstone presents a visage long scoured by time. 


Samuele Bandini


The Cnite King's immured scowl scrapes against the setting sun. His arrogance stocked each chamber of his tomb with riches and idols of lands conquered, a ransom for the King to let forth the rising sun each morn. Dust, raiders, and collapse have taken much of this ransom, leaving the sun churning in an pale sunrise until it rolls around to the other side of the sky, dropping downwards like a pebble in a well.

Within the darkened chambers of the Cnite King, his mirrored ceilings show any light back to its bearers, casting delicate sandstone carveries into overlapping shadows. Bring your torches, your lanterns. Bear a flicker of light into those dusty arcades. Strip old treasures and darken the day one room further. Or die to forgotten creatures, leaving your lucre as a tiny portion of the ancient ransom, and cast another ray from the dying sun.

Rumors Fools may Follow to their Doom (1d6):

  1. In the Ten-Thousandth Chamber, there Exists the King's Sarkophagus, within which Lies Gems and Trinkets as Multifarious as the Desert Sands.
  2. Many Devices to Capture the Light may be Found Within - Some Capable of Shewing Events yet to Pass.
  3. My Sister Told me Once of a Great Sphere of Purest Chalcedony, Relic of a Forgotten God, which yet holds Domain over Tracts of Wild Waters Untamed.
  4. Ancient Warriors still Slumber, Unbeaten in all their Years except by the King, Serving him as a Master. Their Decaying Minds hold Stratagems and Pracktices Unknown to any Alive.
  5. Within the Crumbling Walls, Strange Gurglings give way to Living Light, Ravenous, desiring a Taming from the King's Gauntlet.
  6. Travellers Speak of Indigo Mushrooms which cause many Effects Mystikal, some Beneficent, some Maleficent, but Descriptive and Locative of the King's Treasures.
This is a mostly randomly iterated and improvised OSE dungeon delve, in a spirit intended for me to be as easy to pick up and run as possible, with 5 minutes notice, some paper, and some dice. Spark tables and links are included below to serve as an index. The game will hew as close to the written rules of OSE as possible, for my amusement and ease of adjudication.
 This dungeon is intended to be open table, broadly FLAILSNAILS compatible, and to serve as one locus for play. It should slot into a larger assemblage of dungeons run by other masters as one blip in a hexmap. Credit to LichesgetStitches for coming up with the idea and encouraging me to talk about it.

Spark Tables:

Structure Seed Words:
  1. Sandstone
  2. Mould
  3. Faceted
  4. Arabesque
  5. Nested
  6. Delicate
Encounter Seed Words:
  1. Riddling
  2. Handsy
  3. Echoing
  4. Many-legged
  5. Reverse
  6. Shadowed
Special Rooms: (don't look if you want to play this dungeon!)
  1. Map of the 10,000 Chambers constructed from splits of wood smaller than a toothpick. Incredibly delicate. A random quadrant is mostly destroyed, but the rest can be used for rough mapping. Contents of rooms are indicated, but very outdated.
  2. Big drain, plugged up. If uncorked:
    1. Drains any liquid in the room.
    2. Drains the air at voracious speed for 1d4 rounds, then stops.
    3. Living Light bubbles up.
    4. Green Slime bubbles up.
  3. Trap
  4. Trap
  5. Trader
  6. Hall of Mirrors.

Index of Links:


World Map

This map should look familiar......

The 10,000 Chambers of the Cnite King is the black pentagram at 01,11.

Other Dungeons in the Assemblage:

  • To be filled out as people put their own out.

Discord Link

Upcoming!

Credits:
Phlox of Whose Measure for many of the helpful links I used.
Liches of LichesgetStitches for organizing this.

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10,000 Chambers of the Cnite King

Deep within the turgid reaches of the Samarkand Desert, a lone crag of withered sandstone presents a visage long scoured by time.  Samuele B...