The Tomb of the Fallen Gods

RPG system: D&D 5th Edition
Participants: 1 GM, 5 players

Description

Short Description: A challenging “old-school” style adventure where your wits and ingenuity as players will determine your survival, as you will be playing 0-level characters – cartwrights, brewers, cooks and gong-farmers!

Long Description: They came in the night, scores of cutthroat brigands with clubs and manacles and with them hideous ogres that bellowed in glee as they pulverised any who dared defy them. Last Harbour was emptied of all its souls as men, women and children trudged in chains through the rocky passes and the autumnal winds sung a dirge. Gods protect us, folk would go missing up in the high meadows on occasion but never anything like this!
Deep in the mountains you arrive at Castle Ember, a solitary ruin overlooking a valley with a stinking mire below and you are set to work gathering firewood, carrying water, herding goats, scrubbing floors & hauling stone to shore up the crumbling towers of the ruin. The human slavers keep a keen eye on you but you notice they scan the skies fearfully and when the alarm gong is rung twice everyone scrambles for cover from some great winged beast that circles above. One of you glimpsed it once, like a massive lion it seemed apart from its face like that of a man’s but with a great maw of jagged teeth and eyes gleaming with malice.
Whilst the slavers are unrelentingly cruel, the ogres are just terrifyingly violent but there is the witch Vyk whose cunning stare unnerves you even more. From your dungeon prison you sometimes hear his voice lifted to some dire spirit as he performs his blasphemous rituals atop the pillar of rock across the chasm. When you murmur a prayer to the Gods of the Vale he laughs and says, the Gods have no power here, this is Urdagog’s realm.
Each passing day your numbers slowly dwindle and the pile of cracked bones outside the kitchen tower of the ogre matron grows. You overhear the slaver leader Uncinus say they should pay the tribute before the ogres eat everyone and shortly afterwards half your numbers are led into the mountains and never seen again.
As winter starts to bite, your threadbare clothes doing nothing to keep out its chill fingers you are marched far down the valley to a camp on a cliff-top bluff and there you are set to work. Slithering down a hole worn by an icy stream you are led into an ancient tomb, the light of your torches gleam off a great bas-relief of beaten gold that the slavers direct you to hack up and haul away. As you labour under the earth you hear a commotion among the guards and with alarmed expressions they hurry off to another part of the tomb leaving you alone in the darkness…

Trigger Warnings: Violence, death & slavery

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