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Sunday, October 11, 2015

DUNGEON MIX- Rambling Collection of the Sky-Thieves


It appeared in the night, a strange ziggurat jutting up from the forest, beckoning like a gold-dripping finger. Many fear this sudden intrusion and assume the devil is involved but you know an opportunity when you see it. Anybody willing to spend a fortune on golden buttresses is packing some serious quality items inside.

or

The Foul One's work is afoot. You are awakened in the night by your local bishop, your order, perhaps even the booming voice of one of your strange gods itself. There is a task before you: repel the master of the moon-shewn cathedral and, if possible, raze her to the ground. It would also be meet to return to the local church any items of occult power or great value, purely for safety of course.

or

You have been after a particular item, for personal reasons or because you were contracted, for a long time, and have reason to believe it lies within Watchtower Rambling. You have traced its movements, the predictable devastation and horrible miracles it leaves in its wake, the unexplained vanishings of bandits and lessers across the countryside...You had all but given up, and now here it is.

or

You awake, fully vested with whatever power is available to you (MUs have spells and shit), whole and healthy, standing still alongside the rest of your party. You are all fully armored and armed, set behind a rope. On the rope hangs a tin-seeming, gold-looking metal sign embossed with some alien message. This all comes as an enormous surprise to you, and you may find some of the fellows you stand with to be strangers. None of you know how you got here. None of you know the way out.


                                                                          --------
 
An entrance may present itself when you arrive at Watchtower Rambling but on entering the structure it deposits you at a random point on the map, and no exits will present because there are none. Except in areas where it would make sense for the dimensions to be larger or more constricted due to an exhibit, assume 15' ceilings and 40' wide corridors. The walls are all lined with objects and specimens which take up roughly half this floor space. Someone who can Comprehend Languages will be invaluable to follow the signs and read the information provided for many BUT NOT ALL exhibits. Without this aid, conventional mapping is actively resisted by the structure; mapping must be made not by noting meters traveled and turns but relative position of exhibits, e.g. "Two rooms from the insect man, enter to the right of the horned shield, pass beneath the flying pond." If you find your way to the map room, of course, and assuming you find the map of the structure, then you're golden. It would suck if that's what you wasted your good fortune on, though.

Not everything in Rambling may be a fantastic, alien, or magical, and indeed most things will be old and mundane. There is nothing truly normal or boring here, though. Picture every room as if a 1980s movie's idea of a professional inventor became a hoarder.

Many exhibits are alive and will animate. This includes exhibits which seem as if they should not be able to animate, such as hanging plesiosaur skeletons, vivisected models of cyclopskind, and wax sculptures, which are a type of Gargoyle. Almost all will be hostile. There are many kinds of creature on display here, including the following...
  1. Walking marsupial dolphin
  2. Frogs with human faces
  3. Vacuum beetles who eat flesh and can propel themselves through suction, and form airtight seals.
  4. Blind albino cave psychics. They fight like kung fu masters, but their thoughts are drowned out by others, so they are almost reasonless.
  5. People filled with holes and spikes like iron maidens. Not like they've been in one, but as if they were living iron maidens, and they open their fleshy peel to envelop you, like a vampire squid
  6. A slime-like blob with lycanthropy, who transforms into a paste of wolf parts in the moonlight. If you escape its burning hunger, you are now a were-oozewolf. This effect keeps rolling over the more generations is undergoes.
  7. An adventurer suspended in sand who is many crabs. The crabs will hold hands and link legs to approximate a man, and he attacks with gentle hugs for 1d12.
  8. An ox turned to stone
  9. The mummies of a hundred nations. Most aren't undead. Most undead aren't able to animate unless you fuck with them. Most animate are not evil. All are fucking terrifying and dangerous to you even if they don't intend to be.
  10. Wax figures of spiders, cut in half
  11. Animated furniture possessed by demons, chained in place in a model room, treat all as wooden golems
  12. The original fly.
  13. Pit God. His jaw elongates the length of his body to snap from afar. Apelike with bloody mantis-like hands and small ratty legs and tail.
  14. Antimaggots who spin skin
  15. A green guy
  16. A purple guy
  17. A woman you cannot look at directly for her color swirls and whirls and is sickening and seizure inducing. No save
  18. The empty space left behind by dead cloud jellies
  19. Fuck apes. They will fuck you if they kill you. If they can't kill you, they will find things which can and lead those things to you. They will also try to destroy all your shit and make your life hell.
  20. A scorpion-like creature with a mirror on its tail, whose image reverses your personality
  21. A clockwork octopus which all good people call a clocktopus but which is actually a type of minor cherub
  22. Jars of eyes which blink messages using complex sequences. They tell much of recorded history but flit from subject to subject wildly and random.
  23. A skeletonless baboon. Twice as strong, will slither up the rafters and hang waiting if freed.
  24. A hairless opossum with seven foot limbs. Fights like a weasel but with a 15' reach.
  25. A freakish mutant wolfbat thing frozen in time. Too heavy to fly, if freed from time it will crawl along ground snapping at ankles and slashing with claws.
  26. Pieces of an immortal giant, separated by rooms and floors and bolted fast in place, which will crawl to one another if they can. Treat organs like mace if they batter past you, if giant reassembles your path is obvious
  27. Animate castings in brass of the ancient Pelephoroneanes Spear Kings. AC as plate+shield, +3 to normal spear damage, immune to normal weapons
  28. The paintings which crawl, and also btw eat, 1d6 each round until shaken, dead/consumed victims join the image of the painting
  29. A hairy caterpillar creature the size of a nurse shark, whose 'hairs' are all also legs, every surface is legs, just legs. 60HP, guileless, if forced to defend itself it will run over you like a car for 4d10.
  30. The final pig
  31. An ice golem
  32. A frozen cadre of cavemen, who all have John Carter style double strength and leaping powers
  33. Lightbending gravity eggs which can never hatch because of the weight of themselves, the forever babies within are PISSED about this.
  34. A tongue golem
  35. Living examples of all of the Kevarikan zodiac. Each carries a spell effect with its presence, which changes entirely in different combinations with its fellows. Assembling all of them lets you create a new star in the sky but no one knows this so no one has tried.
  36. Undying zombies (not undeads, but the cool kind of zombie) waiting to be freed, eager to resume their duties: constructing Watchtower Rambling
  37. Troll princess held in place by the steel grating she healed around
  38. Ultima Thoul. Double damage and triple HP of normal thoul, no save on paralysis
  39. Scale model and fully functioning city in miniature of ancient Lirrkusk, filled with tiny alive guys. 1hp 1 damage each.
  40. A hundred vampire kings dead and staked to the ceiling.
  41. A talking cat. A huge bitch.
  42. Disembodied head of a steel gorilla, floats seven feet above ground, occasionally alive, never useful
  43. Sphinx without jaw, rendered powerless. If you let it to a surface it can scratch glyphs into then it will pose you a riddle, regaining its power.
  44. Haunted forest trapped in a dragon's eye
  45. Rat kings
  46. Alligator king
  47. Elder tapir. Eidetic memory. Voiceless.
  48. Hollowed out wasp god
  49. Pangaean crawler. The ultimate blob.
  50. Pedestrian mimics, as themselves
  51. Secret mimics, posing as (roll again), sometimes several together to achieve the illusion
  52. Hidden mimics, not on exhibit but a component of an exhibit, like a pedestal
  53. Ancient children with no belly buttons or gender. Alignment-changing gaze.
  54. Isopods
  55. Monsters who resemble what incorrect Victorians thought dinosaurs looked like
  56. Accurate dinosaurs
  57. Jurassic Park dinosaurs
  58. Normal men sawed through at the waist, whose innards slop and writhe against the bars of their enclosure, otherwise dead
  59. All tortoises
  60. Teacup pigs with teakettle boars
  61. Pantaloon bird
  62. Manticore fly, a cat who inflates and hackles up false appendages to appear as a manticore
  63. Lichen which talks, growing on bloody canvases
  64. The ashes of an extinct simian kingdom
  65. Firefish, walking catfish who burst into flame when dry, unharmed. Burn as a torch.
  66. Arm baby
  67. Plants made of light
  68. Ossified gelatinous cube
  69. Petrified dryad
  70. Fossilized cat dragon skeleton covered in aware slime mold
  71. Invisible screamer, in infrared soundproof glass.
  72. The greatest party ever held, under vacuum glass, perfectly preserved forever, waiting to pick up mid-toast should air be restored
  73. Kaiju butterfly collection
  74. Vegetable amphibians
  75. Fire-eyed raccoon. Steals all food from you magically when you look at it.
  76. Questing beast
  77. Reassembled ur-virgin
  78. The shadows of destroyed heroes, which look like art but animate and approach you in magical light or magical firelight
  79. Archdeacon in formaldehyde
  80. Dolls made from mutant human children, moving with coal-fired hearts
  81. Anemone-like semihominids.
  82. I guess a Thark
  83. Githyanki cat. Stoic.
  84. Nowhere spider. Catches and eats imaginary things, useful in spell research.
  85. Rabbit sex god. Treat as Level 14 Magic-User.
  86. Orangutan mermaid
  87. Elf but red
  88. Dwarfly proportions but truck sized
  89. Canopic oracles, opening a jar utters a prophecy, 'salright? 'salright.
  90. Wandering faces, who crawl like spiders and flap like bats and cover your face in the night, smothering you and taking control of your body with long nerve tendrils, on model figures of hosts and indistinguishable from the same
  91. Manmade hyena
  92. Spidergoats
  93. A race of archers frozen in time, who awaken if you interact with them
  94. A race of scholars frozen in time, who awaken if you say something wrong nearby
  95. A race of ravenous furry muppety creepydoodles frozen in time, who animate in darkness, their eyes glowing like light bulbs
  96. An adventuring party made entirely of races and classes not represented in the current adventuring party
  97. An adventuring party made up entirely of unseen races and unheard of classes
  98. A mist, purple as madness, which roams this wing but nowhere else. Shows you how everything around you died.
  99. Plants which follow you if you notice them
  100. The living thing whose footprint is the form of dragons in the world of men, Birishaptore, peeking out from a room far too big for the space allowed it, through an opening he cannot escape from
There's a lot of cool, weird crap here, objects you may not even know the use of, things made by hands inhuman. Examples of the materials found here include...
  1. Seven runestones, each which represent a word. Arranging these in any order creates a completely new expression. Some of these are magical (roll 2d100, on two 100 results the phrase is magical)
  2. Nails which disappear when driven into a surface, but they make a thing whole. These may be used to heal a tree or to turn a castle with a wooden door into one solid wooden piece.
  3. Boomerang shoes, which retrace your footsteps to where you woke up today.
  4.  Longship made of fingernails, can be Resurrected into 10,000 men
  5. Chasity belt which de-ages you to the point you lost your virginity
  6. Barrel of apples from another dimension
  7. Pouch of gnome dust
  8. Fingers of many nations
  9. Shrunken heads of star giants, piled loosely in middle of the room
  10. Fountain of mortality
  11. Shirt made from werehog skin, in moonlight turns to human skin
  12. Altar to a sea god which absorbs endless amount of seawater.
  13. Amontillado
  14. Tom Swift's electric rifle
  15. Clay like the Puppet Master had in Fantastic Four
  16. The Crusher of Hoon, a great man killer used by the executionists there
  17. A clock which stops time when music is playing
  18. Tapestry of classic alien abduction scenario
  19. A pen filled with angel blood, which only writes the author's sins, though they are always oblivious of this
  20. Lexicon of fourteen dead languages with a translation guide between them, also inscrutable
  21. Hive mound of the fire fairies
  22. Sarcophagus adamantine
  23. Flesh magnet, which draws you inexorably, -1 to your saves for every HD you possess.
  24. Goblin crown jewels
  25. Ice-9
  26. Senmurgh skin rug
  27. Horrible masks which give you Charisma 0 and +10/-10 AC
  28. Reverse Last Crusade Room: one of these pitchforks belonged to the lord of Hell. The right one will burn away in your hand but will transform you into a vicious demon.
  29. An powerful orb which shows scenes of sweaty men chopping wood and only that
  30. Giant dental tools, rusted
  31. The grave marker of a great king
  32. Da Vinci submarine
  33. Sculpture of a fox which is only there sometimes
  34. The only really bottomless pit
  35. An organ which summons bats
  36. A pipe organ which summons vampire bats
  37. Bottled thunder
  38. A medicine which soothes all burns and heals all burn scars
  39. Children's toys of a strange and outworld kind
  40. Trumpet which blows quiet, silencing the din around you
  41. Cloak of visibility, which makes you look as a being of shimmering daylight
  42. Metal ring which shapes other metal that hand touches
  43. A red paste which is iron strong but voice controlled
  44. A stove which cooks everything but witches
  45. Tripod walker craft
  46. Clone tubes
  47. Body vats
  48. Kirby Fork, striking it swirls the fork with kirby dots which remain while it vibrates, anything the dots touch dissolve like sand through your fingers
  49. Goggles which let you see Hell
  50. Teleporter circle on the ceiling
  51. A Downball
  52. Wax figure of the Fear Father
  53. Stuffed world turtle
  54. Gnoll pornography folio, save or vomit, gnolls -2 to save because they get off on that
  55. Treasure map to a solid diamond garden which lets you walk out of worlds
  56. Small star, turned into lead
  57. Recipe which makes you hunger for flesh of your own kind
  58. Cuckoo shield, where the bird emerges to chime the hour
  59. Powdered mountain, just add water
  60. Candles made from immortal tallow
  61. Pure war (concentrate) 
  62. Invincible string, which can never be cut burned or knotted
  63. Ever-Miss Arrow
  64. Always-Tie Tiles
  65. Magnetic chalk
  66. Eggshell bracers
  67. Fear flavor. Anybody tasting something coated in fear flavor becomes abjectly phobic of that thing, be it mashed potatoes, agua, or Jeff.
  68. Anything compass, which points to what you ask it to
  69. Beer goggles, let you see like the Predator but for alcohol content/how drunk someone is
  70. Everlocked cabinet, large enough to hold a man, impossible to open with normal means, there is music inside
  71. A bowl which fills itself with blood, endlessly, bottomlessly, spilling over the sides, slowly, forever
  72. Ancient underground war walker, coal powered
  73. A mounted collection of elf horns
  74. A white pool of cloud blood
  75. A magical gate to the Rocketway of the Sky-Thieves
  76. Bonsai hells
  77. Apollo spacesuit, +2 to AC
  78. Complete dinner set of the Noxivores, devilishly proper sound eaters from beyond two suns
  79. Toys of all cultures (NSFW)
  80. Castlevania laser whip
  81. Book of Alien Erotica
  82. Book of Alien Mathematics
  83. Book of Alien Biology
  84. Book of Alien Languages
  85. Book of Alien Cooking
  86. Personal letters from a man who never lived
  87. Documents from war trials over crimes which occur as you read them
  88. The walls that once held in all of the time, riddled with graffiti
  89. A collection of Magic Mouths that share last words of the universe's bastards, but they rarely cite their sources
  90. A sculpture garden which grows like a regular garden. You can pick a bouquet of Venuses.
  91. An oral history of the Sky-Thieves, trapped within a conch shell
  92. The complete history of Watchtower Rambling, updated magically
  93. A complete catalog of all within Watchtower Rambling
  94. The Library Which Walks
  95. The Skeleton Key of Watchtower Rambling
  96. Ghost exits, ripped from the exterior of the building and put on display
  97. A scale model of Watchtower Rambling
  98. The Great Glass, which sees across time, space, and thought
  99. One of the 100 Plague Cards of the Godly Game, capable of bringing about horrible catastrophe if united and drawn from
  100. Tome of the New World, a book which allows you to create a new plane by writing into it. Its pages are nearly full and may be stepped into, representing countless dream worlds ruled by fearsomely and destructively satisfied masters
In addition to all these, Watchtower Rambling is home to six great treasures, artifacts of storied power and dire consequence.

The Vestment
 

A brittle-seeming thing, like pages of an old book or translucent deathflesh of old insect molt. The whole thing seems ready to crumble, as it has for decades, remaining permanent as stone. To the eye of a craftsman it is inexpert work. To the eye of a tailor it is bulky, formless, like a small ceremonial tent. To the eye of the naturalist it seems that what it was cut from belonged to some insect thing nature has no truck with, with altogether more limbs and orifices than Godly beasts. To the eye of a drunk it looks like the wearer is being shagged by an enormous flea and hummingbird simultaneously.

She calls, constantly, not just to one but to any who are wise men, whose pride lets them consider themselves so, or whose shame drives them to aspire to wisdom.

The Vestment is a fixed, permanent thing in Creation, and flytrap of minds. It copies the minds of those who wear her and keep them within her folds. These copies whisper to each other and become wiser, more powerful, devising their own magics. The copies create new minds to test their theories. They speak to minds from centuries ago, from eons ago, across planets, across stars. The new minds also make new minds, and copies of the copies, and echoes of the oldest and strangest and most dangerous voices, whose thoughts have no tongue, whose urges are all stronger than any magic made to express them.

Within the Vestment are also the minds of her kind. There were others like her once, her children, long since consumed. To touch her own mind, the oldest mind, which constantly calls to everyone around her, is to wake that mind, which, fat with power, will begin a new seeding. Then the wearer will undergo a physical change using secrets known only to her, and begin issuing eggs from its mouth to gestate in the apostles and rivals surrounding the wearer.

The lure of the Vestment builds over time. Every day someone spends in its presence makes them more certain they must possess it. They will try to wear it at the same time as the wearer, if they must. Saints will kill to possess it after a number of days equal to the character's Wisdom. Even knowledge of the Vestment and the rumors about it are strong enough to compel one to seek it, which is why its records were once burned.

What would you die to know? You have but to ponder it and, wearing the Vestment, and you will know it. However this knowledge comes with voices and urges you must overcome in order to even act of your own will, with a penalty to the save equal to how many times you've relied on the Vestment, and the difference by which you fail equaling the number of rounds/actions it may take using your body before your mind reasserts itself. Wearers quickly lose themselves in the Vestment, slaves to alien and extraterrestrial desires. The more you use it, the older the voices, the more of your mind you lose, and the greater the danger of waking her: the hungry, sleeping locust mind within, who tumbled through galaxies.

 The Closet

It looks like an antiquated magician's cabinet, the kind a charlatan uses to falsify the power of the beyond. It has a painted moon on it. It is a lie twice. Stepping into the cabinet, shutting the door, and setting his assistant to task, the trickster waits within for swords to skewer him alive! It's a trick, of course. The showman is perfectly safe, and the swords never come near him. The crowd applauds.

It's a trick, of course. The swords pierce his brainpan, spill his insides, sever his spinal cord. The trickster is a dangling puppet of meat and impulses. When the swords are withdrawn, he crumples like a toy with its strings cut. When the door is opened, he stands up and walks out unharmed. The magician is fine.

It's a trick, of course. The magician can no longer tie his shoes. He no longer sees the color red. He no longer clots. He no longer sings. He cannot sleep. The cabinet protected him from mortal danger, but it did not protect a part of him from being killed. All injuries sustained in the cabinet bear out in some fashion. Every time you hurt the cabinet takes a part of you, kills it, and uses that to heal you.

Nothing persists indefinitely, and everything comes from somewhere. The cabinet does what it was built to do, exactly, and only.

It is worse when magic is concerned, because magic knowledge which changes the world. Not only will this alter the magician's mind, it will alter their relationship to the world. The huckster has forgotten his children. His native tongue. The concept of mercy. The taboos against cannibalism. He cannot touch glass, physically, as he repels it like a magnet. Each strand of his hair is alive and behaves independently. He hears prayers from another world. His soul has forgotten its home, and a dark thing just took it.

If these effects are known, they cannot be controlled. At first, the act of using the cabinet feels empowering, like a drug. You lose all fear. You shed all pain. But all we have is necessary, and the lack of them is soon keenly realized. By then of course the ache sets in. The lure. It is like a drug to shed a part of yourself and be made whole, strong, vital.

It's a trick, of course. Death is preferable.

The Machine

It doesn't have any obvious source of power. Its levers don't seem to have an effect on its work. It shows no rivet or toolmark. It is filled with fire, but it is never fed any fuel. There is a great ringing piston which rises slowly and clangs down with a horrible peal. When you find it, it is switched off, and the floor around it singed from its heat.

Activating it will always draw blood. Lose 1 Constitution.

Its cycle takes a long time, the better part of a day. When the piston slams home, it presses a shape into the world. It is a printer of nightmares, and its work is slow but it is constant. It will first make a memory of a thing, an image or a sensation. It will next make a fear in you, a terror of this thing. With the next ring of the piston you will dream of it when you next sleep.

From there it is inevitable. You will experience fantoms, minor illusions here and there. No one else will see them and they will think you are mad. Clang. You feel its presence everywhere. You may see it in your reflection, if it is a thing which can be seen and not only a sound, an absence, a dread. Clang. You are sure it is here now, bodily, following you, even if it does not have a body. This is a constant concern, and if you go a round without this affecting your actions the DM will remind you it is out there, right behind you, waiting to strike.

Clang. It is strong enough to come for you now. You can drive it away, or even kill it, but your death knell now tolls. Clang. The world is changed. You are gone, claimed by the thing while still in your childhood. Time rewrites itself without you. Your great achievements now belong to another. Your magic spells are only fortuitous miracles. Your children call another person mommy, because she was. The thing is still out there. Now, it always has been.

The Machine progresses through this chain for every living creature who has seen or heard the Machine. It advances this track of horror randomly, so that everyone is at different stages of this experience. It can be switched off, but its heat grows the longer it runs. Turning off the machine means you suffer 1d8 damage from the heat, compounding additional d8 for each time the piston hammers home. This heat will wilt plant life but will not ignite flammable objects. It is not a true heat. It is the heat which unmakes life for fuel and solidifies fear as its product. 

When every living creature who has seen or heard the Machine is dead or replaced, the Machine turns itself off. It waits.

The Skin

This is an enormous ancestor of a tiger, stretched out and turned into a luxurious rug, hung up on the wall. Those who lay the skin out on the ground and step onto it experience a sensation like falling down a deep tiger-shaped shaft forever, though they stay exactly where they are. They cannot trust their perception of the world around them, for all their senses are getting their input from somewhere else.

Atop the tiger it seems as if one has been taken to a night with new stars, red sky and redder rock, which they are plummeting toward. It takes roughly three minutes for them to fall. If only the fall were the only problem. Strange trees, swaying, reach up toward you. They're getting a lot closer a lot faster and you know they mean you harm, that their boughs are laden with death. If you get close enough to see that those are not trees, they are faces, then it is too late to step off of the rug.

Otherwise, you have complete power over yourself and everything else which is on the rug with you. This does not apply to the world of your senses, falling and faces. But for the body you left behind, which you pilot blind, you have an omnipotence. The problem is, none of the effects and abilities you will into being leave the outline of the tiger skin rug. You may flicker afire, transform into a living tiger, gain eyes that shoot daggers, but none of those daggers fly farther than the edge of the rug. Any spell or beam or weapon you would cross that threshold with vanish, and are visited upon your falling body in face space. You may defend yourself accordingly.

If your body in any part crosses over the line set out by the shape of the tiger skin, you are wrenched violently from your place. You forget all your experiences, anything you said and did or saw, and you lose all your abilities. I do mean all: if you had spells left today, you don't now. You certainly forget the strange vision of face space.

If you stay on the rug for three minutes, where your perception of time is decidedly skewed, you fall far enough that the faces can reach you. Your body here explodes violently from within, with far more blood than you should have. The skin will remain immaculate.

You can will yourself off of the rug magically while in its effect, but you cannot control where you end up, and there is a 50% chance you will appear wherever that is as a tiger.

The Gun

This weapon is a small bit of metal which fits in your hand. It is shaped like a toilet paper roll. There is a dial at its base which can be turned right or left. Turning the dial right means that the cylinder shines a wide beam and a target unattended object in the beam vanishes. This is keyed to the wielder's will, so the cylinder may be slightly telepathic. This may be used on living/undead/animate/whatever creatures, but they get a save.

Turning the dial to the left shines out a different-colored beam. In the light of the beam, one thing which the cylinder causes to vanish reappears, exactly as far away as it was when it vanished, wherever the beam is pointing. At this point living/whatever creatures must make a save vs Death to survive reappearing.

This item has 1d100 uses remaining, and no one can know how long they have when they find the cylinder. Attempting to use either beam after the charge has run down traps the user in the cylinder (they may save at -1) and then renders the cylinder inert. Its power source is from another time and universe.

The Carriage

This is the Smokey and the Bandit car. 77 Trans-Am. It gives you shield bonus to your defense while riding in it, its own AC is like Plate, and it has as many hit points as a Gold Dragon. It never needs fuel. Otherwise, it behaves exactly like a car, and if a car can't do something or drive somewhere safely then neither can the Pontiac.
 







The Sky-Thieves

Magpie-minded men from another world, the Sky-Thieves have journeyed across a dozen worlds and realities gathering gems and weird, pretty shit. They have kept a lot of trophies from those who opposed them. They are relatives to terrapins, perhaps. They extend their head and limbs from large carapaces churning with bio-fire. The Sky-Thieves have adapted organic jet packs for short distances. They do not speak, even to one another, but they are incredibly clever. They can read, everything. They work together. They are fierce warriors, if slow on the ground.

They will let you live if you give them a treasure, but they will not let you leave. Eventually you will run into them again, and again. Eventually you will run out of treasures. Eventually you will go on exhibit, or, worse, into storage where no one will ever find you again.

The Sky-Thieves may pass through the great clock face on Watchtower Rambling like a rippling pond, but they may not take anyone or anything else OUT with them. They are slaves to enchantments from their old home. Dispelling this effect simply traps them as well.

Escaping Watchtower Rambling

There are no exits at all, and the building actively resists just blowing out the walls, putting another room impossibly in your way. There are undoubtedly ways to use the things found within Rambling to escape from it, but there is only one sure-fire way to ensure an exit: Setting a lure.

Turn the big crank at the top of the tower, in the clock room, to change the time and strike the hour. This slips the tower to a different time and place in the universe. Then, with all your haste, make for the entrance. The tower plays fair here, freezing in anticipation of new arrivals. Entrances present themselves, but cannot be opened from within. Only beings coming into the tower can allow anyone to exit through normal means. You've got to get to the door before they enter and the exit is done. You've got to stop them from closing it, and from entering the tower which automatically shuts the door. This may mean killing them.

Docents

HD: as Fighter
Saves: as Halfling
Attacks: as Thief
Advances: as Elf.
  • If you die in Watchtower Rambling, you have two options: wait for your party to stumble upon and awaken a creature suitable for PC use, or have your character reappear after 1 day as a Docent. If they die again, another Docent replaces them.
  • Docents collect spell slots like a MU or Elf but they do not cast spells. They use spell slots to heal either a number of d10 equal to the spell slot used, or to exercise Expertise.
  • Docents have omniscient sense of Watchtower Rambling at all times, but they may only answer questions if they are specifically asked. When asked, they will burn a spell slot and speak mechanically (the DM speaking through them) in detail, with no tricks or double speak, about what was asked. They will do this and then open the floor to questions. The level of spell slot burned is equal to the number of minutes the players may engage the Docent's knowledge directly. If the knowledge requires knowledge from outside Rambling, the Docent may not know it. If questioned on anything wholly belonging to the outside world, the Docent has no knowledge of it and the spell slot is not used.
  • A number of times per day equal to the Docent's level, it may decide it is unaffected by one of the exhibits. Basilisks won't petrify, sabretooth tigers won't attack, black holes will not destroy.
  • If a Docent crosses the boundaries of Watchtower Rambling, they are killed. They may only be raised as a Docent, and if outside of Rambling they will immediately die again.
  • A Docent begins play with no weapon or armor proficiencies.
  • A Docent speaks all languages.
  • At level 5, a Docent gains proficiency in all weapons and armor in Watchtower Rambling.
  • There is only ever one level 8 Docent, known as the Curator. Docents may not attack or disobey they Curator, but if he is killed, then your Docent may reach level 8 and become Curator. Curators can order all Docents as if they were under the effect of an unbreakable charm spell, and may animate any dead being as a Docent. Docents retain the wounds they had in death but are otherwise fine, and may magically speak intelligibly.
  • Docents may reach level 8.