Lost City of Eridu (Early Temple Period)

Up until 50,000 years before the present day of my new world campaign, the landscape of the new world was considerably different.  A basalt ridge left behind from a volcanic eruption and lava flow in the distant past divided the drainage basin of the jungle roughly in half, and what are now the two main tributaries of the Zamonas were separate rivers, the Maita to the north and the Ilyapa to the south.  The Maita fed into an immense coastal swamp, while the Ilyapa snaked through the southern hills before going underground and flowing through a series of lava tubes to the coast.

50,000 years ago a great rock demon of tremendous power was drawn forth from under the highest volcano in the range by a powerful sorcerer.  This was in the time of heroes when many men had great powers that rivaled the gods.  Still, Asag was nearly invulnerable to magic and harbored a great hatred for it and he boiled the blood of the sorcerer with his presence, killing him instantly.  The sorcerer's name has been lost but all the cultures of the jungle basin remember when Asag came smashing through the basalt ridge almost all the way to the coast, exploding it in a shower of lava as he went.  Much of the northern swamps were covered in a lava flow and a good portion of the central jungle burned. When Asag's wrath began to cool in the surface air he returned to his kingdom under the mountain, and the Maita and Ilyapa rivers flooded the wreckage left behind and formed a new river, the Zamonas.  The entire jungle basin was now drained by this one great river.

One of the earliest city states (~30,000 YA) to arise in the region was Eridu, situated along the banks of the Zamonas where it flowed nearest the southern hills.  The patron deity of Eridu was Marduk the Sun, whose avatar had been persuaded to reside in a large gold statue and led the Eriduan people to many military victories.  The priesthood of Marduk in Eridu grew extremely wealthy and influential, and many of the religious traditions that characterize the early temple period  first arose in Eridu, including the proliferation of many specialist priest types.  Priests for the purification of the temple (masmasu), priests to appease the wrath of the gods with song and music (kalu), female singers (naru), male singers (zammeru), swordbearers (nas patri), masters of divination (baru), penitents (sa'ilu), priests for individual purification against demons and magicians (asipu) and the supervising or watchman priests (sesgallu) who served as mouthpieces of the God-statue - these and other specialized aspects of the priesthood that arose in Eridu soon spread to the other fledgling city-states and the early temple period proper (25,000-20,000 YA) starts with the adoption of the stepped-pyramid or ziggurat as home of a patron god-statue in all of the city-states of the coastal region.

Typical early temple period ziggurat: god's house in blue at the top
 holding the god statue inhabited by the patron deity's avatar  (25,000 - 20,000 YA)

The demise of Eridu came about in the middle of the early temple period, around 22,000 YA.  Eridu was left literally high and dry when the Zamonas  changed course and formed a new path to the sea hundreds of miles to the north.  Not long after, Asag was summoned to the surface world again by a powerful sorcerer who dangled himself and his arcane energy as bait in an attempt to use Asag against an amassed army.  Asag laid waste to the greater part of the jungle basin, annihilating all life in his path.  A delegation of sesgallu priests from all the affected city-states met to take action against Asag, and it was decided that Asag must be summoned and bound with divine energy to prevent him from ever raging across the jungle again (Asag's magic resistance only working against arcane magics).  The priesthood of Marduk from Eridu saw an opportunity to stay relevant and offered Marduk's assistance to bind Asag inside the metal pyramid of the sun in Eridu.  This proposal was accepted, and with the power of Marduk and his consort Sarpanitu the moon goddess, Asag was summoned and bound without loss of life.

Unfortunately for Eridu, Asag proved incredibly powerful once he had gathered himself and Marduk and Sarpanitu had to devote all their power to keeping him restrained.  Marduk's golden statue no longer strode at the head of the Eriduan army.  The name of Marduk no longer kept evil spirits and demons at bay in the night.  The people of Eridu revolted against the priesthood, accusing the sesgallu of betraying Marduk by forcing him to summon and bind Asag.  The priesthood stayed behind in the ceremonial complexes while the people of Eridu migrated to the coast.  Some people of Eridu married with the tribes of the southern jungle; men of these lines kept alive the secret cults of Eridu while women of these lines have passed on memory of Sarpanitu and still access the sacred moon grottos underneath the temple of the moon to conduct ceremonies in her honor.

The bulk of the people of Eridu made their way north along the coast toward the new mouth of the Zamonas where they had been promised land to farm near the emerging city state of Siss-Anor.  Shortly before the Zamonas changed course, the old fishing city of Anor-Anor had been sacked by foreign invaders called the Siss, led by sorcerer kings.  A new city known as Siss-Anor was built on the rocky outcropping above the ruins of the old city.  When the river changed course it flowed right up to the basalt outcropping of Siss-Anor, instantly making the city a new power in the region. When the people of Eridu neared Siss-Anor they were ambushed by a Siss army.  All the men of Eridu were killed and the women and children taken as slaves to work the fields.  Siss-Anor grew wealthy on the backs of Eriduan labor.  The women of Eridu in Siss-Anor also kept alive the knowledge of the moon cult through the ages.

After hundreds of years the priesthood eventually died out and the old city of Eridu and the sacred complex of the pyramids of the Sun and Moon were completely abandoned.  Marduk and Sarpanitu continued to bind Asag in the metal pyramid, locked in an eternal struggle.

Toward the end of the middle temple period, a sorcerer discovered that Asag was still bound under old Eridu and attempted to draw him forth.  The sorcerer was killed by cultists of Sharur, one of the old cults of Eridu still kept alive in the southern jungle, but the magic he had already set in motion made the metal temple of the sun glow so brightly it lit the night sky of the jungle like daylight.  A delegation of priests from the city states was called together and they summoned a landslide from the south hills that buried the old city and its pyramids.  All the way to the end of the late temple period (up to 10,000 YA) each city state offered a tribute of warriors and priests to guard the site against trespassers.  This tradition did not survive the upheaval that marked the beginning of the modern temple era, when the Siss gods of Siss-Anor replaced the old gods throughout the region and all the old temples were destroyed.  The cult of Sharur still persists and watches the site, and the moon cult of Sarpanitu is still active, the grottoes of the moon accessed through a larger cave network that they are connected to by a submerged passage.

Carl's Creatures pt.3 - Temple Toad Temon

This is your garden variety six legged toad demon bred by were-toad cultists in the mutating energy of the Huwawa complex.  It is large enough to swallow a man whole or carry two riders if specially constructed saddles are used.

pen and ink by moi

I am going to try statting up one of my 4e creatures in a more old school D&D style here:

Temple Toad Demon

MV: 12 (15' vertical 40' broad jump)
HD:11d8+15
AC: 3 (blessed weapons do normal damage; holy water deals 1d8; 1/2 damage magical weapons, fire and acid; immune to normal weapons, cold, charm, sleep, paralysis, lightning)
MR: 50%
THAC0: 9 (or as a 14 HD creature)
Attacks:  Kick 2d12 (can kick two targets simultaneously if both are behind the toad); Bite 2d12+10 (swallows man sized or smaller targets whole on 25+ dmg - swallowed victims take 4d6+10 acid damage each round, can only use small weapons and do 1/2 normal damage to the toad); Tongue (range 35') +4 to hit; target is pulled to the toad which makes a free bite attack at +5 damage)

Special:
Temple Toad Demons are partially obscured by thick noxious fumes which constantly spill from popping blisters and warts on the toad demon's skin.  Unless holding their breath, attackers in melee range suffer -2 to hit and damage.  At the end of any round that these fumes are breathed a save vs poison must be made or the victim is dazed for 1d4 rounds and cannot take any actions beyond falling to her knees (and retching if a Constitution check is failed).

Five Minute Friday Map

This is my first Five Minute Friday Map, inspired by this meme on Google+.

It is a cross section of a spherical mini-dungeon.  The PCs start in the center, teleporting or gating or dimensional shifting or somesuch to arrive there in the first place.  There is a large window that looks out over a gap to a much larger window opening into a lush garden chamber lit from above.  The light that comes out the window of the garden room is the only illumination inside the structure, providing indirect lighting all around the central opening.  The only door out of the start room opens onto a log bridge over a gap.  A demon beast of some variety is lurking below out of sight.  Roll 1d6 1: Giant Demon Porcupine 2: Two Headed Demon Wolf with Human Hands 3: Demon Bear 4: Giant Demon Spider 5: Giant Demon Toad with Toothed Tongue 6: Demon Minotaur with Battle Axe from Hell

The light source is a miniature sun that hangs in the air in the middle of the room above the Garden Room.  It does not produce heat but inflicts 2d6 damage per round to anything inserted into it, melting metal in 2d6 rounds.  

All of the plants, bushes and trees in the Garden are contained in large ceramic pots glazed with magical symbols.  They are a rare mixture of medicinal and poisonous herbs, trees bearing magical fruit and bushes with shadow berries useful for summoning dark creatures.  Both the pots and the plants radiate magic.

Defeating the Demon Beast causes a portal to open up in the Start chamber that leads back to wherever the PCs came from.  This portal will remain open for 2d20+4 rounds.  It will begin flickering with blue light when 5 rounds remain.

The chambers directly above the start chamber are a wizard's comfortably furnished living room appointed with indestructible lounge couches and low tables (lower chamber with two doors and a ladder to a trapdoor above)

and a wizard's mostly looted and totally ransacked laboratory/library with a secret door to the wizard's back door, a teleportation chamber.

The secret chamber below the demon beast contains the magical machinery that generates the light source, controls the humidity of the garden chamber and links with the magical pots to keep the plants in perfect health, and summons a new beast automatically 1d4 days after the death of the last

Demon Resource

So I was making a really kewl boss creature for my 4e game (a shadow demon that has been slowly coming through into this world by taking over the body of Hammer, a warforged barbarian in my game, who brought this on himself by knowingly drinking what I had described as the "amniotic fluid of an elder frog god" just to see what would happen...) because the party has finally crossed the mountains and located a shabori (shaman) who can help them expel the demon from Hammer.

The party has been told that enough of the demonic entity has already crossed over into this world that it will be a horrific struggle when it emerges from the body of their friend.  I gave this baddie some amazing mind-bending and terrifying powers, and after the party faces it tomorrow I will post a little write up of the demon because I think it is an excellent example of how to make a 4e creature that is terrifying and fun to fight without it being a slog-fest of slowly chipping away hundreds of HP.

I decided I wanted a good "authentic" demon name, a name that the shabori could let slip in the village and all the natives would freak out and chase the party away and make them perform the exorcism out in the middle of the jungle.  I googled "indian names for demons" and found a resource that I am going to come back to over and over again, a Demon Dictionary.  Check it out!  Demontastic.  I came up with "Tchort", a Russian name for Satan, which apparently translates as "Black God".

Snuff Demons, Hekura, and little magic monkeys that grant you immortality if you eat their crushed bones

Yup, its been a while since I posted about my 4e campaign.  That does not mean shit has not been happening!  The party has finally made it across the imposing 30,000' tall mountain range to the verdant jungle beyond that slopes far away until it finally meets another ocean.  Along the way, exploring a forgotten temple they found 20 miles under the mountain along the tunnel they were following, they accidentally released a great elder being.

I will have to do a separate post about this incident, or perhaps ask Mike (the player of Tilia the albino minotaur in the campaign) to write another guest blog post detailing his decision to drop a magical fungus (that he knew fed off of magical radiation and water and could grow with breathtaking rapidity in the right conditions) into a closed series of flooded tubing leading down to a contained elder entity that was doing very little else but radiate intense magical energy which was being trapped and siphoned by the magical wards and systems in place around it.  This thing was called Kariki Kalos by those who built the temple and here is what it looks like (the jellyfish like cap is 3000' feet across, the main body from tentacle tip to the top of the cap is 3500', and the long stinging (radiant and lightning damage) tendrils stretch out up to 15,000' behind).  A "light organ" inside the cap emits a burning beam of light and from each lidless eye (18 in all, in a circle around the gaping mouth) a ray of darkness is cast.

But that is not what I want to write about.  On the other side of the mountain now, the party has taken up with one among many independent, but loosely organized (by kinship, trading and raiding ties), bands of an indigenous human population that call themselves "the fierce people".  After an initial tense and frequently hostile confrontation with an overwhelming force of fierce warriors brandishing bows and blowguns, many with glowing red or black eyes and red or black slime oozing out of their noses, the party finally fell in with an older shabori (shaman) who had foreseen their arrival and was eager to question them.

The shabori, Titsi-Waa, somehow managed to intimidate the waitari (chieftain, literally "the fiercest") that was confronting the party.  The shabori puffed himself up as much as his lame leg would allow, and then something strange happened.  His chest began to expand and swell, as if something was inside it.  Then his eyes flashed and the waitari big man backed down, called to his men, and ran off up the mountain pursuing the original mission of glorious death while fighting an awakened god.

While this was happening, Tilia pulled down the Goggles of Arcana that she had made last session (from small black crystal disks she discovered behind each of the 18 eyes surrounding the central mouth of the larval form of Kariki-Kalos - the party was beset upon by many of the 30' larval monstrosities, which emitted beams of darkness from their eyes and a blast of burning light from their horned tail).  These give her a bonus to Arcana checks performed while attempting to diving the nature of a magical occurrence.  Looking with "magic vision", she saw four tiny humanoid creatures (hekura) living inside the old shabori's chest.  One of these was performing a magical incantation, growing and swelling and changing in form as it did so.  Tilia was able to divine something of the rough nature of each hekura; one was a protective charm spirit, one (the active one) was a malicious curse spirit, one caused sickness and disease, and one cured such ailments.

Later the party learned that the hekura are a race of spirit beings that live in the spirit world.  Places in the real world marked by large isolated boulders, or rocky mountain sides, are frequented by hekura in the spirit world.  You cannot persuade hekura to live inside you by going to them in the physical world.  You must visit them in the spirit world and sing to them and dance until they voluntarily enter your body, draining a small part of your physical essence but greatly enriching your ability to interact with the spirit world.

The fierce people visit the spirit world primarily through the use of a snuff made from the bark of the ebene tree ground and mixed with saliva and ash.  This mixture is then dried and pounded to form a snuff that is shot through a tube into the nose of the recipient.  There is no attack roll required to hit the recipient if the snuff is taken in this manner.  Part of the inhaler's soul (the noreshi) leaves the body and, attached by an umbilical energy chord invisible to the inhaler and unbreakable to all others, must reside in the spirit world for 2d4 hours.  If the noreshi wanders too far from the body and is lost, or cannot return in time, the noreshi can be come separated from the body and a serious and invariably fatal illness will set in unless the lost noreshi can be found and recaptured.

[mechanics sidebar:  the cosmologies of my campaigns rarely resemble any printed "official" version too closely.  In this case, you could think of the "spirit world" of the campaign as the shadowfell and feywild of 4e rolled into one, with a good dose of what the astral sea is supposed to accomplish in 4e as well.]






The party also eventually learned that the red and black eyes and snot of the warriors they encountered in the jungle (already ferocious looking with faces painted black and large plugs of tobacco in their lips) were caused by beings known as "snuff demons".  Summoned by snuffs artfully composed of ground seeds and powders, the snuff demon marked by red eyes and mucous is known as an aihal and the one marked by sunken black eyes and dark mucous is known as aihan.

Snuff Demon Aihal

After being summoned inside the nasal passages, an aihal snuff demon grants the inhaler the ability to see in the dark as if it were daylight, +2 to hit and damage with basic ranged attacks and the ability to make an extra basic ranged attack once per round as a free action.  Until the aihal is expelled in a dark red mass of goo, the inhaler take a -5 penalty to Will defense.


Snuff Demon Aihan

After appearing in the nasal cavities, aihan radiates a fear aura 2 in which all enemies take a -2 penalty to hit.  The inhaler also receives +2 to hit and damage with basic melee attacks and the ability to make an extra basic melee attack once per round as a free action.  Until the aihan is expelled in a black mass of goo, the inhaler take a -5 penalty to Will defense.

Little Magic Monkeys that grant you immortality if you eat their crushed bones:


Let me say here that my players have a nasty habit of rolling critical successes at all the critical times.  Nat 20's, and even natural 30's on the once a session roll of the d30 that every player gets (check out my sidebar to the upper left, Order of the d30, if you don't know what I am talking about), abound in my game.  Dunno how or why, this has just been one of the luckiest groups I have ever seen.  So the group had just managed to somehow avoid a sure confrontation with an angry allosaurus that had ambushed them when they found themselves in the midst of a wildlife stampede.  The fierce people had united when the side of the mountain blew off, and thousands of warriors beat drums and spears against trees as they marched to the mountain to do battle with the great god that was supposed to rise up during the end of the world.  They drove the animals and dinosaurs of the jungle ahead of them.

Tilia, ever interested in collecting, examining and cataloguing the flora and fauna of the new world, took this opportunity to collect some animal species.

So Tilia rolls a nature check (I usually use checks like this as a rough barometer to see how well a player succeeds, rather than a simple yes/no, succeed/fail target number skill check) and gets a natural 20.  I decide on the spot to introduce an interesting creature to the scene that I hadn't figured the players would run into for quite a while.  Nearly impossible to catch, blindingly quick and possessing the ability to run on air as if it were solid ground, the tiny tsoru-tsoru (fast fast) monkey is as intelligent as a human but has a nearly immortal lifespan.  Cooking a tsoru-tsoru in a stew, boiling it down until there is nothing left but bones, and then grinding those bones and eating the resulting paste grants near immortality and great resistance to physical and mental damage.  The party learned this when the host village that they were staying at began loudly demanding that Tilia cook the tsoru-tsoru and share its bones.

A nature-lover through and through, and already aware of the creature's intelligence, Tilia was loathe to acquiesce to her hosts' demands but also wanted to avoid upsetting them.  Tilia began questioning the monkey (with the aid of the comprehend languages ritual that has come in handy so many times for Beautiful Bob the face man of the group) and soon found out that the tsoru-tsoru (like all young adults of its species) had to remain in the jungle until it had caught enough "lightning bugs" to "last it a lifetime in the cloud city" where the tsoru-tsoru had "sorcerers more powerful than you can imagine".  Some back and forth questioning with the village elders revealed that the lightning bugs spoken of by the monkey and a very valuable spirit creature called a spirit beetle by the elders were the same thing.  Tilia arranged a deal where she would let the monkey go if he would promise to deliver a weeks catch of lightning bugs, which could apparently be used as one-use magical batteries, to add potency to a magical attack or effect or to create and power a one use magical device.  This was made much more poignant by the presence of the pregnant mate of the capture monkey, who had followed the party through the jungle and was hiding out at the smoke hole rim of the thatched roof which enclosed the circular village.  Reunited at last, the couple dissapeared into the jungle and the party turned their attention to more pressing matters...

Much more to come.  Trying to even MENTION all the plot threads that are out there, just tempting the players with all their juicy glory, would take quite a while, let alone fully describing them.