Somewhere, In The Middle Of Nowhere

04 Mar 2021

Somewhere, at the edge of the world exists a town, forgotten, even by its own people. Edintore. Its features are non-important. Fragments of town floating in the collective immagination of such places: small and lonely.

The Sunken Light is an adventure for players level 3 to 4 compatible with most OSR systems and statted for OSE. It can be played with lower level characters as well, dice is oracle.

The adventure begins as soon as the party arrives at Edintore.

This is just a draft of an adventure I’m writing. Everything will be subject to change. Sorry for the typos.

Describe them what they see.

• Clouds hanging like a curtain on the sky
• A pale sun
• People
• Tentacles, ropes, coming from the clouds. Ending in holes in the ground
• The ground is dry, arid
• Wind that, sometimes, brings debree with him
• Light coming from the holes in the ground. Flebile during the day, stronger at night
• Old corpses, rotten, forgotten, permeating from the earth. Raised by the movements of the earth

Dramatis Personae

• Kapare Lew: The Thane. No one cares about his charge but him. Afraid and anemic he knows little about the events but more about the town and surroudning lands

• Petr Oleg: A strong man, one of the tentacles destroyed his house and half of it fell down, killing his wife Paule, dropping everything inside the hole. He might accompany the party if they agree to search for his wife (he’s convinced she’s alive)

• Mara Terribile: The local lumberjack. She’s lesbian and addicted to oppium and kokaine. She’s convinced that the holes hold a terrible secret and great treasure and will accompany the party if given the chance. She will have trouble staying underground for multiple days because of her addiction.

• Thelonius Airy: Priest, secretly hates this place but was sent here by the Court Of Thoughts after stealing money from the donations. He venerates Lenir, god of mists and uncertain futures.

“If the future can be predicted, people would’ve done so already”

“Mist and clouds are blurred like our next move in this sea of events”

• The Pale Thieves: This is a group of three people: Leon Kope, Swazikiel Del Mar and Tom Reietom. They’re a group of thieves, they steal dreams. Since they moved here 3 years ago people living in Edintore stopped having dreams, only nightmares. The thiefs would get close to a home and sit there hidden for ten minutes, eyes closed. Only nightmares exist now. Until the Thieves are stopped players recover only 1 hp from a full night’s rest in town. They sell a drug called Brudar Kokain to the inhabitants of the village, they make it using the dreams they steal.

Dramatis Locis

• The town of Edintore: Describe only what’s needed. Details are usually superfluous and deleterious. Houses, fields, roads. People sitting on the roofs, watching, afraid. The tentacles still, like hands from the sky. No tavern, closed, might be opened if the party befriends Herpa Mare. The wind destroyed some houses, the tentcles others. Debree everywhere, sometimes thrown off by gusts of wind. Food is only for friends, not for strangers. Dead animals on the streets.

• The Mill: The base of operations of the Pale Thieves. The mill has been closed for months as it’s in an unusable state. Now it became a drug house. The thieves have a machine that allows them to extract the dreams from their bodies and Swazikiel uses them to create a red powder that is highly addictive. Bruadar Kokain. Then, they sell this substance to the whole town.

• The Balm: An unremarkable house, home of Rosaline Herts. She has a corpse fetish. Whenever she can find someone dead on the streets she takes the corpse home, cleans it, and hangs it on the basement wall. She will go as far as to offer fake medical help just to get the chance to kill someone and take his body.

• Sunken Tunnels: The tentacles go down deep into the earth, a net of tunnels passes trough them. Those areas are described in greater detail in the next chapter

Dramatis Gestarum

One or more of this events will happen during the stay of the characters. Use them sparingly.

• The Great Madness The Brudar Kokain stops arriving, the Pale Thieves have run out of fresh dreams. The village, that has already trouble rebuilding itself, becomes crazy. People will start accusing eachother, killings will become almost routine. Depending on the DM’s discretion the Pale Thieves may either run away (or be killed by the population), this will slowly return the ability to dream to the inhabitants (but the addiction will still remain) or they could stay and keep producing the drug but on a much smaller capacity. In any case this event should make it difficult for the party to interact with the inhabitants in the short term.

• An earthquake! The earth violently shakes as the light from the holes in the ground gets stronger and stronger. More buildings are destroyed, making people homeless. More corpses rise up from the ground, as well with some closed sarcophagi and weird artifacts (detailed later). This could be used to accentuate the fact that there’s something more underground, something both terrible and precious.

• The Inquisition Arrives: The information about what happened here shouldn’t escape the village. An army of 50 trained soldiers is sent here from the Great Dvorakak Plains. Their intention: to kill everyone and remove this event from history. Can their be reasoned with? Probably. Timeus Puritan is a man of little worlds but will agree to wait a couple of days if the PCs seem strong enough and promise to end the catastrophe. He’ll probably try to kill the group anyways after everything is resolved though.

• It snows It’s July, but it snows. Strong winds suddenly brought even more clouds, and big feathery flakes with them. The snow is gray, cold, difficult to melt. The temperature drops to -10C and summer clothes are no longer enough. Around the holes in the ground the ice is completely melted and black flowers grow.

More will be published at a later time, this is just a draft