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Enchanted Trinkets Complete--a hardcover book containing over 500 magic items for your D&D games!

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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Joël of the FoS" data-source="post: 3169742" data-attributes="member: 17665">Something here from an lost netbook (Haunted Sites). I've always wanted to use it. The description and atmospheric is quite cool and eerie: Joël---CHILDREN IN THE ATTICby Margaret L. CarterAnnapolis, MarylandThis location occupies a phantom space attached to a hundred-year-old house.  This two-story structure is in good repair and appears to be an ordinary, comfortable home for anyone who decides to buy or rent it.  In a small upstairs bedroom, however, a massive, heavy chest blocks a long-disused door.  Upon moving the chest, anyone who investigates finds that the door is warped but not impossible to open.  Opening the door reveals a walk-in closet empty of all but dust and cobwebs.Anyone who steps inside the closet sees the back wall dissolve into mist, then change into another door, secured by a wooden bar.  Yet this room lies against an outside wall; there is nowhere for the door to lead.If this portal is unbarred and opened, the musty smell of the closet changes to the fumes of smoke.  Before the investigator’s eyes, a steep, narrow stairway leads up.  The house, however, has no floor above this one.The stairs bend around a corner, continue upward, and finally end at a narrow door, small enough to force a tall person to stoop to enter.Beyond this door, the odor of smoke becomes dense and unmistakable.  The intruder hears the cries of babies and the screams of children.Eighty years ago, the attic of the house was occupied by a young woman who practiced “baby farming,” providing shelter and food for orphaned and abandoned children under the slipshod oversight of the local town council.  She accepted more children than she could adequately care for, greedy for the stipend paid by the council.  She pocketed most of the money allotted for the feeding of the orphans, nourishing the infants on watered milk and the older children on cheap, meager fare.  In the overcrowded, poorly supervised attic nursery, one of the toddlers stumbled into the open hearth.  The fire quickly spread from his clothes to the rest of the room, blocking the exit.  The “nurse” and all her charges burned to death in the destruction of the attic.Anyone who enters the ghostly re-creation of the attic finds that the main room features a large fireplace, from which flames and smoke billow out.  The rest of the attic is divided by flimsy wooden walls into several cramped rooms.  The only furnishings consist of an overstuffed chair beside the hearth and straw-filled mattresses covering the floors from wall to wall.  Smoke and the stench of burning flesh, hair, and cloth fill the air.Upon stepping over the threshold, the intruder instantly becomes disoriented.  He or she stumbles through the tiny rooms, with their low, slanted ceilings, unable to find the way out.Dozens of screaming children crawl on the floor or roll on their pallets, vainly struggling to escape the flames that engulf them.  All the children capable of crawling cluster around the intruder, clutching at arms, legs, and clothes.  Upon being rebuffed, they clamp their teeth onto any exposed flesh they can reach.  They force the intruder to drag them along in his or her escape attempt.No attempt at extinguishing the flames has any effect.  If a visitor attacks the babies, one blow from a weapon causes the infant to fall “dead” and change into a heap of bones.  Within minutes, however, it reconstitutes its lifelike form and clutches onto the visitor again.A wailing woman, with her hair and gown aflame, rushes out of the thickest cloud of smoke with an infant in her arms.  She tries to give the baby to any living person she can reach.  If the intruder accepts the baby, the other children stop mobbing him.  He then finds himself in front of the open door to the attic stairs.  As long as he carries the baby, he can successfully descend the stairs and exit through the door into the closet.As soon as the phantom door is barred, it vanishes.  The baby transforms into a charred skeleton wrapped in the disintegrating ash of swaddling rags.If an intruder refuses to let the woman give him or her an infant to “save,” the visitor will never find the way out.  The children’s clawing and biting become more painful, as if they are growing more solid.  Eventually they rip the intruder to shreds.  His or her mutilated body will be found in the closet, should anyone else open it in the future.A successful exorcism by a powerful priest will reduce the woman and children to calcined bones and make the flames vanish.  To make the entire haunted attic (with the stairs) disappear completely, however, a more elaborate ceremony performed by several holy persons together is required.</blockquote>

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