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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Tom B1" data-source="post: 7582132" data-attributes="member: 6879023">Crypt of EarthHook: People have been disappearing from the local village and surrounds. The party has an NPC they have met and had a positive relationship with disappear. The party sets out to locate the missing NPC.They find earth at the scene that differs, eventually they can identify the earth as 'grave earth', particular in that it has residues of embalming chemicals and may have a bit of a dark aura. A bit of plant material mixed in suggests a local abandoned graveyard (now fairly boggy). The party heads there to look for their friend.Room 1: Graveyard ProperAppearance: Standing and fallen headstones, some half-way from one state to the other. An earthy, rotting vegetation smell mixed with the smell of some embalming chemicals. There is a creepy feeling - the area is too quiet. Encounter: Bodies rise, half decayed, and attack the party. These zombies are fairly normal, except the stench of them makes the players make a difficult save vs. becoming Nauseated when within 10' of them. Aftermath: The players find one of the zombies is one of the recently missing villagers, but this cemetary hasn't been in use since it got flooded two decades ago...2. The CryptA bit more searching reveals a stone crypt that appears to stand a foot out of the bog on a stone base. The front doors are chained shut. The rear reveals a set of doors that are also locked, but the lock appears to be missing. The noise of the entry alerts the threats hereafter. The Crypt features many drawers and sarcophagi holding the dead. Here again, the zombies rise when the party arrives. However, the zombies are simply the anchor. When they are fully engaged with the party, a section of the floor will become permeable, and dark tentacles will grab one of the PCs and drag them below the floor with the floor solidifying afterwards. Every third round, one of these abductions will repeat. If the players finally slay the last zombies, they will recognize that one of them appears to have been the former heir apparent to the family in the crypt (family images are graven around the crypt). What will also become apparent from the body is that it was marked with unspeakable runes tatooed onto the flesh - horrible, dark magics that man was never meant to know. Looking in his sarcophagi, they will find a broken silver chain and lock. There is a secret door in the chamber....3. Under the CryptAppearance: The narrow stair opens into a low ceiling room. The room walls squirm in dark torrents... the floor looks like the darkness of a starlit sky... and a pit at the center seems to be filled with dark sludge. The missing PCs are currently slowly sinking into the dark sludge fairly quickly, encased in a blackish hard resin casing. As the party tries to drag their party members out, they will find themselves poisoned by the sludge, a tough save or become very sluggish (lowered DEX, Initiative, and doubled casting times). Those not rescued will sink into the sludge and be gone at the end of the 4th round. Players can test 1/round and extract the victim 25%. Each failed test loses 25% (sinking!). When 4 failures have happened (a round with no attempt is an auto failure) the person is gone. 4 Successes in succession extracts the victim. Meanwhile, the disembodied spirit of the corrupted heir, driven mad by study of knowledge man was not meant to pursue, will attack the players, appearing and striking first if he wins initiative and then disappearing (those that act before him may try to damage him). When he disappears, he phases between dimensions and is not vulnerable. In the time between the start of the round he begins to emerge, to the point of his initiative (when his attack is resolved and he fades out), he is vulnerable. He should be a challenge gauged to the number of characters. He should constitute a hard encounter for the all of the players who enterd the graveyard. That ought to make him deadly versus those who have not been encapsulated in resin for delivery to the eldritch dimensions.His attacks are a mix of tentacle strikes (high strength, can knockdown, can disarm) and twisted effects (fear, nausea, exhaustion) for those within 5' of him (save to avoid). He fades out every round to reappear the next round (reappearing up to 30' away) and always trying to come at an isolated or unaware party member. Unless everone has their back to a team-mate or something solid, he'll get a chance to surprise. If he is defeated, the horrific aspects of the under crypt area disappear. He leaves no body. Characters sunk beneath the sludge are lost to horrible fates. In a dark corner of the room, a stone moved reveals a tome bound in human skin. It is full of knowledge man was not meant to know (necromantic, mind bending, you name it). It can grant an arcane caster an extra spell of each level from the list of freaky, horrific stuff it contains. The cost is a slow corruption of the character that will culminate with madness. In the third round</blockquote>

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