Shadowland of Ashlar | Kildrak the Mad | The Screaming Death Stone | The Whispering Angel | Cave of the Dead
Welcome to the Sunday Supplement, Raging Swan Press’s weekly email for GMs. This week, we have one free download, one piece of legendry, one piece of lore and three miscellaneous campaign components for your game.
Should we develop any of these idea further? Comment below.
01: The Sunday Supplement Compilation Sample
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This compilation comprises all the material we posted in March in one handy file. The download includes PDF and epub files so you can enjoy the Sunday Supplement on the go—or send it to a GM you think would like it!
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02 Shadowland of Ashlar
Ashlarian Legendry
The Shadowland of Ashlar, otherwise named the Ghostland of Ashlar, the Shadow Realm, or the Realm of Shadows, is a place of illimitable horrors, lurking doom and deathless evils. It festers like a suppurating wound in the foulest depths of the duchy’s adventuring lore.
The Shadowland is a grim place, brutally cold and thickly dark, choked with shadows and tenebrous mockeries of the world. It is a faded, blasphemous echo of the duchy and its people. There is little light, hope or goodness within.
In the Shadowland, everything—the buildings, the people, and even the land—is hideously warped, and there is a maddening eldritch wrongness to things that defies coherent, lucid description. Some travellers are driven mad by their time in the Shadowland. Others emerge changed as if the ever-present gloom of the place has burrowed deeply into their souls. They speak of nameless graves of heaped grey soil, leprous-stoned buildings that seem to press ever in on one another as they decay and the vile and enshadowed denizens of the place who invariable worship fell powers of the most aberrant and foul sort. Great numbers of undead—many intelligent—dwell therein alongside the living, making the place a realm of uttermost peril.
Visiting the Shadowland is uniformly unpleasant and often fatal, and yet a trickle of brave folk dare explore the benighted land. None who go there voluntarily do so on a whim; all have good reasons for journeying therein. Some seek lost friends, while others quest for knowledge, a dark-forged weapon or some other prize worthy of risking their life—and perhaps their very soul.
The Shadowland of Ashlar exists apart from the duchy, yet the two realms “touch” in many places. In Ashlar, where the darkness gathers thickly and fell deeds of the most indescribably aberrant sort have been wrought, the barriers between the two realms weaken, and a portal coalesces. Some portals allow travel back and forth, while others only allow passage in one direction or exist for only a short period of time.
03 Kildrak the Mad
Ashlarian Lore (Infamous Villain)
Infamous for his mercurial rages, deviant lusts, and daring escapes, Kildrak the Mad Dwarf is one of Ashlar’s most wanted criminals. Guilty of a slew of vicious, unprovoked killings in Dunstone, the dwarf is personally hated by Aavo Oskanen, the town’s de-facto ruler, for the brutal, public murder of a beloved childhood friend.
Renowned for his animalistic, feral cunning, foul depravity and ability to smell out a trap, Kildrak remains at large. He has eluded both his own boon companions, who hunted him after his perfidy and character were revealed, and numerous others who sought to claim the large reward placed upon his head by Aavo Oskanen.
Kildrak was last seen aboard the sleek and dangerous *Amma*.
Captained by the blackguard Ambro Kontio, the ship—widely thought to be a smuggler and pirate—numbers the sea witch Kaija Kiekka and Otava Himottu, “the Strangler,” among its crew. The ship has a well-deserved foul reputation. Clearly, Kildrak’s mad rampage across the known world is not yet at an end.
04 The Whispering Angel
Campaign Component (Supernatural Being)
The uncaring messenger of the gods, the Whispering Angel is a being of pure, unadulterated neutrality. It exists in, but apart from, the world and only delivers messages, prophesies and warnings of the greatest import. To the Whispering Angel, the message is all. It cares not what the message is or to whom it speaks. It does not offer advice or guidance and it does not meddle in events. Thus, it has earned its other names—the Uncaring Whisperer, the Whispering One, and the Watcher Who Whispers.
The Whispering Angel has appeared before high priests of the goodliest religions, necromancers of the foulest and most irredeemable sort and to all stations in between. It favours no one and nothing.
05 The Screaming Death Stone
Campaign Component (Magic Item)
Carried in the van of Amon Var’s undead legion as a battle standard by the skeletal hill giant champion Borak the Invincible, the Screaming Death Stone is a potent weapon of terror and death.
This fell object of power comprises a finely wrought sarcophagus lid decorated with an intricate carving of a screaming elven woman. The insane, hateful banshee Allyanna Eilser is bound within, and it is this life-hating spirit that gives the stone its terrible powers of terror and death.
With the Screaming Death Stone at its head, Amon Var’s undead legion has never known defeat.
06 Cave of the Dead
Campaign Component (Dungeon)
This shunned, legend-shrouded cave lies just outside town at the head of a narrow, shunned valley. A great mass of local legend, superstition and rumour hangs over the cave.
Few from the nearby town have even entered the valley, let alone gazed at the cave’s forbidden mouth. A sense of palpable dread hangs over the valley and intensifies the closer one gets to the cave mouth. From that mouth issues a faint, noxious breeze carrying suggestive hints of nameless and unplaceable odours of the foulest sort.
Only those of the stoutest hearts reach the cave mouth itself. Within, the cave slopes steeply downward from a rock-strewn entrance chamber. A carpet of ancient bones greets any supremely brave explorer reaching this point. The feelings of palpable dread intensify, and the masses of yellowing bones grow deeper the further one descends into this subterranean hell.
Eventually, the sloping passageway—choked with bones and fallen rock—terminates in a deep, lightless grotto heaped with mounds of bones. A lake, its surface sometimes disturbed by strange ripples, fills the grotto, and at the centre of the lake, a low building of disturbingly wrong and hideous proportions squats upon a low isle of bare rock. Terrible glyphs decorate the building’s walls and its curiously wide and hingeless bronze portal.
The fragmentary written accounts of the few adventurers to have escaped the Cave of the Dead with their sanity intact speak of amorphous black shadows lurking among the bones, glowing balls of eldritch light drawn to suckle upon the living and of the ever-present feeling of otherworldly dread permeating the whole place.
Link: Link the Caves of the Dead to the White Dwarf Tavern (Sunday Supplement 23rd March)
Ashlarian (proper noun) of Ashlar; Campaign (noun) a connected series of adventures; Component (noun) a constituent part; Legendry (noun) a collection or body of legends; Lore (noun) knowledge and stories about a subject
Thank you for reading the Sunday Supplement; I hope some of the above material makes it into your game or sparks your creativity.
Remember, Everything is Better with Tentacles!
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