The Old Lands - Session 16 - 8/4/2025
Descent into the Maw
Campaign: The Old Lands
Date Played: 8/4/2025
Location: Ca’nip – The Crater’s Edge
Descent into Ebrietas
The session opened with the party gathered at the edge of Ca’nip’s endless, pulsing chasm. The DM described the descent in unnerving detail: the walls were lined with voidglass veins shimmering like living nerves, the rock warm and smooth like the roof of a mouth, and an ever-present heartbeat thudding through stone and flesh alike. As the party leaned close, they could feel that pulse in their bones, a bass beat that was both alien and intimate. Stevia deployed her bellhop topper—a deep purple hat that flattened into a hovering platform—to help ferry them safely downward through the oppressive vertical tunnel.
The first hazards came in the form of burning sigils scattered along the fleshy walls. At first they seemed carved into the surface, but when Stevia touched one, the runes shattered and scattered like fireflies, swirling through the air in weightless arcs. Gravity itself became a threat as massive chunks of castle towers, graveyards, and city streets drifted in violent whirlwinds, threatening to tumble anyone caught in their pull. The party used their flight to weave through the debris, but the deeper they traveled, the more the walls shifted from rock to unmistakable living tissue. The psychic pressure grew heavier—angry voices whispering in countless tongues, all urging surrender to nothingness—and failed saves ensured several members would face the rest of the descent with disadvantage on mental checks. A sulfurous stench rose from below, thickening the air and signaling the next trial to come.
The Cadaver Collector & Basil’s Entrance
Without warning, the chasm convulsed in a deep, resonant “burp” that sent most of the party plummeting into a basin of reflective, churning liquid. The surface shimmered like a warped mirror, and looking into it for too long brought waves of nausea and flashes of unwanted memory. Rotten corpses lay strewn along the shore, but the true horror was the hulking construct patrolling the bank—a Cadaver Collector, its spiked frame bristling with freshly impaled bodies. The machine lumbered along, jamming corpses onto its frame with slow, mechanical precision. Oberyn acted fast, calling out, “Hello fellow corpse collectors! We’ve fallen and cannot get up!” while Grim improvised by clinging to a corpse like a grotesque flotation device.
A tense skill challenge unfolded as the group tried to keep up the ruse. The construct, limited by simplistic programming, hesitated just long enough for them to climb clear of the acidic water. But before it could identify their deception, a deafening explosion tore through the chamber, toppling the construct in a shower of burning debris. Standing at the blast’s epicenter was Basil, a robed Black Church member with the dazed look of someone displaced from time itself. When asked how long he’d been there, his answer—“six hours or years”—did little to ease suspicion. His gear marked him as impossibly ancient, predating even the Age of Ruby. Grim confirmed his legitimacy through the Black Church’s ancient 10-step handshake, slow and awkward but still correct after 1,500 years of divergence.
Basil carried satchels crammed with annotated tomes, scribbled notes, and hand-drawn diagrams. He revealed knowledge of the Prison Bottle, his centuries-long entrapment in Ca’nip’s depths, and most alarmingly, the presence of Astaroth, a massive green dragon acting as sentinel over the path to Delvahrum. Basil’s dry humor did little to mask the warning in his voice: if the party wanted to escape, they would have to go through Astaroth’s territory.
A Cadaver Collector picks up bodies in a great drop where many adventurers do not survive. It seems this machine and many others serve someone here.
Campfire Lore & Hypotheticals
That night, the group made camp amid the twisted architecture of the Maw, the faint heartbeat still resonating through the walls. Basil shared what he knew of Ca’nip’s perils: aberrations drawn from the Far Realms—aboleths lurking in the waterways, invisible “fears” that feed on dreams, and other horrors warped by Ebrietas’ influence. Conversation turned to campfire hypotheticals, providing a brief respite from the oppressive surroundings. Grim admitted that, under an assumed name, he would return to fighting crime as he once had in his century with the guard—“not Batman,” he clarified, though the intent was the same. Oberyn said he would gladly spend five years as an emperor even if it meant five years of poverty afterward, just to see the full spectrum of life. Stevia, unsurprisingly, declared she would commit a jewel heist and drag “Billy” along as her partner in crime.
Between these lighter moments, Basil recounted lore about Astaroth. Once a dragon of joy whose laughter could make mountaintops bloom, Astaroth’s nature was twisted during the Nephilim-God war, turning his breath to poison and acid. Now, he guards his hoard with obsession, aided by the ability to dimension door without warning. The mood shifted abruptly when Stevia, idly prodding at a vein of “blood diamonds” embedded in the wall, triggered a seismic convulsion. The ground bucked violently, and the tumbling shadow of a full castle tower loomed overhead. The group barely escaped the impact, racing through corridors as the Maw gurgled and heaved in what felt like a coughing fit.
Nestor’s Hall & The Amphitheater
Exploring further, Grim crept down a side hall and found Nestor—a floating skull with skeletal arms, whistling “Don’t Worry, Be Happy” and referring to himself in the third person. The party slipped past, wary of drawing his attention, and emerged into a grand, wood-paneled corridor that grew increasingly fractured until it ended in dust. Beyond lay a massive arcane amphitheater, its grandeur cracked but still imposing.
Here, the group faced the Marley Triplets, three spectral old men whose heckling could cut deeper than any blade. A colossal moon-faced entity appeared above the stage, booming “Show me what you got!” Stevia stepped forward, pulling out her bagpipes and launching into Smoke on the Water. Her performance rolled a stunning 26, and the amphitheater erupted in applause from an audience of 20,000 robots. Basil and Grim attempted a duet, but their combined effort faltered until Stevia—seeing bricks and debris begin to telekinetically pelt them—danced into the fray, redirecting the barrage and saving them from heavy damage.
Impressed, the Triplets awarded each party member a gilded sigil plate worth 500 GP and declared them “Union members” of the amphitheater. The floor began to collapse, but Stevia spotted the “stage door” in the chaos and led the group out through a trapdoor into another twisting corridor, the laughter of the Triplets echoing behind them.
Stevia gives it all she’s got and performs a bagpipe solo for the ages.
Fork in the Road & The Golden Hoard
The new hallway split in two directions: left toward a treasure chamber, right into shadowed halls. Choosing left first, the party discovered a hoard worthy of a legend—piles of gold, gilded artifacts, and an Aladdin-sized blood diamond worth an estimated 20,000 GP. Grim’s keen senses caught something moving within the pile, its shifting perfectly timed to the deep pulse that still throbbed through the chamber. Casting Detect Magic, Oberyn confirmed that every piece of treasure was enchanted. The room radiated enchantment magic so strongly that even the air felt heavy.
Recognizing the trap for what it was, the group backed away, deciding no diamond was worth triggering whatever lurked beneath. Their caution proved wise, and they returned to the fork, taking the right-hand path deeper into the complex.
The trap that waited for the party in the treasure vaults - another body collecting zone for someone who resides here.
The Library of Vats
The corridor opened into a vast genetic library, a cathedral of endless shelving interspersed with towering specimen vats. Some were intact, their contents shifting in shadow; others were shattered, spilling the remains of aborted creations onto the floor. The air was thick with whispers, each voice emanating from a different vat, some pleading, some cursing. Basil, browsing the card catalog, uncovered a storage room containing a barrel of strong acid and alchemical schematics for an anti-matter bomb—dangerous relics from Ca’nip’s last days. Oberyn’s own research revealed troubling overlaps between Dumbledolf’s journals and the ancient cults that once ruled here, both obsessed with fate manipulation and catastrophic magic such as Cataclysmic Fire.
The uneasy quiet was broken by the sound of weeping. At first distant, the cries grew rapidly closer, accompanied by the scrape of metal against stone. From the shadows emerged a half-formed Nephilim in tattered scrubs, tubes dangling from its body and eyes burning with a feverish light. Stevia acted fast, summoning Ferdinand the Battle Goose to distract the abomination, drawing it away in a flurry of wings and hissing. This lowered the stealth DC enough for three members to slip past unseen—yet Oberyn stumbled, the sound of falling books betraying his position.
Cliffhanger
As the session ended, the malformed Nephilim turned toward Oberyn. Its movements were jerky yet impossibly fast, its cords and tubes swaying like a grotesque parody of life support. The red-orange blaze of its eyes locked on him, and with a scream of incoherent rage it charged. Each footfall made the shelves quake, and the whispers from the vats rose to a frantic chorus. Three party members remained hidden, powerless to intervene, as Oberyn stood alone in the aisle, the abomination closing the distance in seconds.
To be continued…
Lore: Kalé & Astaroth – The Last Pact
During the First Age of Kol, Kalé stood at the pinnacle of Nephalem power — a philosopher-king, warmage, and architect whose vision shaped entire continents. The Nephalem were colossal, god-touched beings who embodied both physical might and profound sorcery, walking as titans among mortals. Of them all, Kalé was revered not only for his strength but for his unmatched intellect and ambition. Yet with each passing century, his dreams grew darker. He foresaw a paradise built by the divine rotting from within, its perfection breeding complacency, decay, and inevitable collapse. To Kalé, the gods’ promise of eternal peace was a slow poison, one that would leave Kol unprepared for the cosmic threats lurking beyond its veil.
Refusing to wait for disaster, Kalé resolved to act. He delved into forbidden magicks, hunting knowledge in places where even gods hesitated to tread. His conclusion was drastic and irreversible: to shatter the stagnant paradise, he would summon an entity from beyond Kol’s reality — Ebrietas, the Outer God of un-being, memory erasure, and silent oblivion. It was an act he knew would destroy both mortal and divine empires, but in his mind, it was a necessary wound to save Kol from a worse fate. His plan was not to kill the gods outright, but to force them, through catastrophe, to confront the vulnerabilities they ignored.
In a moment of terrible clarity, Kalé sacrificed his own sanity to tear open the veil. He poured his soul into the summoning, obliterating his own mind to anchor Ebrietas in Kol. The event, remembered as The First Fall, tore the surface world apart. The land heaved, seas boiled, and entire empires were reduced to ash and voidglass in seconds. The Chasm of Kalé — a wound in the world deep enough to reach into other realities — yawned where his paradise had once stood. By the time Ebrietas arrived, Kalé’s mind was already fracturing, but the summoning shattered what remained.
Kalé ascended into the divine realms not as a god in full, but as something half-born: a Fragmented God. He became a tethered echo of himself, divine yet incomplete, trapped in a perpetual tide of unreality. No longer wholly Nephalem, not quite Outer, he lingered as an immortal shard — screaming across eternity in disjointed thought. His mind, like his body, had been split into pieces, each fragment carrying both the brilliance and the madness of the whole.
Only one being remained at his side: Astaroth. Once an ancient green dragon celebrated for his joy and warmth, Astaroth’s laughter was said to make mountain flowers bloom and rivers run clear. His unique nature made him a rare kind of green dragon, one whose breath was not corrosive but life-giving. Astaroth and Kalé’s friendship was legendary, their bond one of true kinship between Nephalem and wyrm — rare in any age, and unshakable in theirs.
When Kalé descended into madness, Astaroth did not flee as so many others did. Drawn by loyalty and the faint hope of saving his friend, he pursued Kalé into the depths of the Maw. There, in the writhing darkness, he found only a shard of his friend’s scream — the psychic echo of Kalé’s agony. In his desperation, Astaroth offered his own soul to Ebrietas, not in exchange for freedom or power, but for the chance to guard what remained of Kalé. Amused by the act, Ebrietas twisted Astaroth’s wish with cruel precision. She bound him to the shard as its eternal warden, warping his body and spirit into a creature still draconic, yet altered beyond nature.
The joy that had once defined him curdled into obsession. His laughter became a hiss, his breath turned to acid and poison, and his once-bright eyes burned with a predator’s watchfulness. Still, some vestige of the dragon who loved Kalé endures: Astaroth’s guardianship is absolute, and his rage is reserved for those who would seek to exploit or destroy the shard. To this day, he circles the depths like a grieving sentinel, defending Kalé’s fragment from thieves, cultists, and would-be heroes alike. Yet within the shard’s whispers, the madness of Ebrietas stirs, and each year it grows harder to tell whether Astaroth guards Kalé — or the thing Kalé has become.
Kalé & Astaroth during the War of the First Fall.
Pull-Quote & Trivia Sidebar
“Show me what you got!” – The Moon-Faced Entity, moments before Stevia’s legendary bagpipe solo.
Trivia:
Stevia’s bagpipe performance of Smoke on the Water rolled a natural 26, earning her a standing ovation from 20,000 robots.
Basil and Grim’s awkward reunion handshake bridged a 1,500-year gap in Black Church tradition.
The Cadaver Collector scene was resolved without combat via Oberyn’s “fellow corpse collectors” bluff.
The party refused a 20,000 GP Blood Diamond after Detect Magic revealed the entire hoard was enchanted.
Ferdinand the Battle Goose made his first in-Ca’nip appearance, heroically baiting a half-formed Nephilim away from the group.
