alchemiccyborg

[alchemiccyborg]

The Beguiling Boarding House; WIP

Setting: Homebrew (The Sea of Shifting Trees)

Based Loosely on the song Hotel California, the Black Lodge from Twin Peaks, and The Visser Building from Archive 81

Base Concept: At night, when the Players are about to take a long rest, they encounter an Inn during their travels through the Sea of Trees. The rates are cheap, the smells are enchanting, and staff are welcoming. They are supernaturally compelled to investigate (DC 18 Wis Save, on failure they are drawn to the Inn). They enter and are greeted by someone at the door that calls the place “The Beguiling Boarding House.” And says something about the staff’s specialty being comfort-ability. The greeter walks the players to the check-in desk, and they are given keys to rooms, no charge. The players are then escorted to their rooms, passing by three halls; the Casino Hall, The Buffet Hall, and the titled “Hall of Earthly Delights.” The entire time they are traveling through the Inn, they are getting more and more tired.

By the time everyone gets to their rooms, they are so tired they immediately pass out. When they wake up, they find that their rooms are no longer right next to each other, and whenever they try to get back to the Lobby, they end up either in another hallway of rooms, or one of the “Entertainment” rooms.

Secrets:

The Beguiling Boarding House is host to an entity that feeds on the pleasures of mortals.

The Entity is not the House.

All of the “Employees” of the house are former guests, but by this point they are empty shells, controlled by the Entity.

There are some guests that are not under control of the house.

If the players wish to escape from the Beguiling Boarding House, they must either purge the house of the entity, or destroy the house, and everyone else inside.

The House will physically rearrange itself, everything past the Lobby exists on a Demiplane.

The House is much much larger on the inside than it is the outside.

What does the entity of the house want? To feed. It sustains itself on the energy that is generated when mortals experience pleasure. It is a shell of its former self after millennia in pseudo isolation, it has grown weak, and while once it could maintain an entire plane for itself, now it has to rely on a connection to the prime material plane, and a demiplane that acts as it’s domain. It is constantly trying to get more and more powerful mortals to stay with at the House, so its strength can expand its domain. But with how isolated the House is in the Shifting Sea of Trees, it is on a decline, and is likely to burn itself out sooner rather than later.

Characters:

Hotel Staff

Randy Meisner: The Greeter

Don Henley: Bellhop

Bernie Leadon: Front Desk Clerk

Glenn Frey: Maintenance Don Felder: Room Service

Joe Walsh: Dealer at Casino Hall

Timothy B. Schmidt: Busboy at Buffet Hall

Guests

Main Halls

Casino Hall:

This massive room has tables set up every 20 feet, but only a handful of guests are gathered around a single table. At the table there is a clean cut man with wispy gray hair and an angular face dealing cards. After watching a few hands dealt, it looks like they are all playing blackjack, but something strikes you as odd, not one of the guests loses any of the hands they are dealt. Normally one would start getting disinterested in the game when they always win, but their excitement still seems to be building.

Buffet Hall:

Long tables line the walls of this room, covered in every cuisine you can think of. There are round tables in the middle of the room, and around a few of them are people gorging themselves. An Emaciated man with silver wavy thin hair wanders from table to table, clearing plates, and cleaning the floors. From what you can tell, no one seems to be maintaining the actual buffet, but tables are immaculate, and none of the serving dishes look like anything has even been taken from them.

Hall of Earthly Delights:

A large plush room filled with laying spaces, couches, swings, and stages. With women of all species offering an abundance of services. Moaning, and slapping flesh undertone the room.

Subsidiary Rooms

Boiler Room

The Heart of the building. No one enters the Boiler Room. If the players investigate this room, they find that on the surface it looks like a standard boiler room, but upon closer inspection, the room is colder than it should be, like it's not freezing, but for a room that has boiler in its name, it's quite comfortable. Further investigation reveals that the water heater is both cool to the touch, and is completely solid. This room is massive, and the boiler shouldn’t be the only thing that hints to the secrets of this house.

Kitchen

A huge room with stoves, sinks, ovens, and counters. The room has a strange odor to it, upon first opening the door, there is the distinct scent of cooking food and meats, but the longer you stay here, the more rotten the smells get. After spending about 15 minutes in the Kitchen, players must make a (DC 15 Con Save) else they throw up, and take a point of exhaustion. For every additional 15 minutes in the kitchen that save DC gets +1.

Guest Rooms

Other people are staying here. You know they are, you have seen them in the various halls. But every door you open, shows no signs of life. You know there are other people staying here, so why are all of the other rooms empty?

Maintenance Closet

Where you would expect to find brooms and mops, maybe even some tools, this room is not what it advertises. When you open the door to the Maintenance Closet, you see glass pods filled with liquid. It’s hard to tell what is inside the liquid, but there are plaques on their front that have names written on them. Looking

Office

Ambient Rooms

Retail Therapy Room

This room has shop stands that have all sorts of trinkets and baubles for sale.

Game Room

This room is surprisingly massive, with several outdoor games set up. There is a walled octagon with a handful of people bouncing a ball off the ground and at each other, when one of the players in the pit is hit, they grumble and hop out of the pit.

Other games in the game room:

Regular DodgeBall

Drop Ball

Hopscotch

Boxing

Knife Boxing

Children’s Room

A room with a big sandbox in the middle, with a set of swings, monkey bars, and a large slide. There are no children in this room.

Lounge

A female Elf dances without rhythm to a song no one recognizes. The walls are lined with red velvet curtains, and the floor has a black and white chevron pattern.

Veranda

Looking out on the garden, the Veranda has a bunch of lounge chairs and tables. A man with short blonde hair, and a time worn face, brings drinks to the visitors out here. The garden is at the bottom of a steep staircase, and looking out over it, you can see that the garden is ever so slightly shifting, the walking path twisting in on itself.

The Fractal Garden:

Open air, you can clearly see the sky, but the constellations are none that you recognize. The garden is surprisingly large. Plants like you have never seen line a walking path that seems to lead right back to the Veranda.

Exploring the Garden you find that the walking path spirals out like fractals, and as you travel a branching path, you notice that it continues in directions that you could have sworn would lead you back to the main path, but as you continue you find more and more branches. After eventually returning to the main path, you find your way back to the Veranda.

Plants in the Fractal Garden.

Fractal Fern: A long stalked plant that curls, and its leaves curl similarly to its stalk, upon closer inspection, the leaves resemble a smaller version of itself, leaves and all.

People Pods: A huge pod bearing plant, the pods themselves are about as large as a medium sized creature. If someone attempts to open a pod, they find that it is filled with a legume.

Spinal vines: A vine plant that has discrete wooden structures that resemble spinal discs. Between the discs leaves and flowers sprout.

[alchemiccyborg]

Campaign: Cryptid Chasers

Idea for a Campaign. Nonstandard D&D Format; Monster of the Week esque Not In Use Inspiration: Dungeons and Daddies, Supernatural, Hello from the Magic Tavern Setting: Forgotten Realms

A Paranormal Discovery/Research show falls through a portal to the forgotten realms. They have a connection to the internet, and are required to continue producing episodes. through a Comedic atmosphere, real world cryptids, as well as D&D monsters are featured. The Players have a beaten up Winnebago that has all of their production equipment, and they send the raw footage back to the earth realm for editing. Players need to fulfill a handful of show production roles. Host, co-host, camera guy, lighting, special effects and production. One character can fulfill multiple roles.

Immediatly upon falling through the portal, the Players find a group of goblins that are under attack by a manticore. The goblins were a traveling circus, they mostly worked in capturing, and showing off exotic/magical creatures. This was until one day the magical locks that kept their show enclosed fizzled out, and the majority of the performers/handlers were killed, including the Ringleader. When the players find the Goblins, it is just after most of the creatures have run off, and there is a manticore that has cornered the surviving Goblins in a caravan, whose drawing horse has been slain. If the players honk at the manticore it will charge the Winnebago, but that will give the goblins a chance to attack and drive the manticore off. If the players decide to ram the manticore, they will scare it off themselves. The Manticor needs to be scared off somehow, and once it is gone the goblins will want to thank their saviors. Enter Goblin stagehands.

The goblins will hitch their caravan to the back of the Winnebago, and after a finding out that the players host a show about recording monsters and showing them to the world, they refer to the players as the “Witnesses”

The goblins will act as the players main source of information about the world, there are very few of them, and it would make most situations funnier if they had very partial knowledge of the world around them, mostly knowing about the creatures and monsters of the world.

[alchemiccyborg]

Elhorn; The Devil of Cremation Creek

Character Type: Personal (PC)

Starting Level 5 (3 Fighter 2 Warlock)

In Use: Yes

Setting: Homebrew

As a child, Elhorn's parents worked on a farm, on the outskirts of Adalan. While they did not own much, they did own the land their house was on. His father, Arwen, managed meat processing at a local farm; slaughtering cows and fowl, butchering them and drying them for the Bicker Wars. And his mom, Vo, ran their books. Without the two of them the farm would surely have been run into the ground.

While exploring the wilderness outside of their town, Elhorn and one of his six siblings had a close encounter in the burrow of a giant spider. He survived with just a scar, but his sister, Lilia had succumbed to the spider's poison, dying five days later. Elhorn felt an intense guilt, it was his idea to check out the "abandoned" spider burrow, she wouldn't have gotten bitten if he just listened to her, "a burrow is always home to something." In an effort to redeem himself, he vowed to follow in her footsteps, and join the Adalan Army.

Until Lilia's death, Elhorn had been apprenticing at the local blacksmith. He had only just started working the anvil, when Lilia had come home from her most recent tour. Not many soldiers get multiple tours, but from the sounds of it, Lilia was like a hero, out there saving lives and killing the dirty Northerns! She was his hero, and his dream was to make the weapons that she would use to defend their people.

After shortcutting basic training, Elhorn immediately signed up for a combat tour. And he quickly learned that war was hell. His first tour was a siege on what could have been his own town. He hated it, but it was what his sister did, so he must persevere. Eventually years pass, and he is promoted to officer, and with a command rank, comes a company, eight soldiers, hand selected for infiltration and sabotage. Truth be told they were a distraction for a weapon that Remeral’s forces were very close to discovering. Elhorn's team did, in fact, manage to draw the Remeral forces away from the weapon, but at the loss of 5 of his soldiers. When the weapon was finally deployed, it had killed thousands, and disfigured just as many.

The fallout from the weapon had thinned the veil between planes. This thinning allowed for various fiends to spread their influence to the prime material plane. Some of those that were affected by the fallout suffered hideous mutations, causing them to grow horns and a tail, and sometimes changing their skin color to a deep red. Others were forced into pacts with these fiends. The unlucky ones got both. Elhorn was unlucky. He kept his skin color, tan olive, and grew two spiral horns that curve down to the either side of his head. He also grew a tail that starts in his skin color, and turns to a deep black at the tip. His eyes remained the same malachite green, but his sclera had taken on the color of his iris.

Mutated by the magical fallout, Elhorn tried to return to his home land of Adalan, only to be chased out of wherever he landed. His horns and tail earned him the nickname the Devil of cremation creek. With no home to return to, Elhorn wanders the continent, trying to keep the new voice in his head silent. Heading north, Elhorn was making a new name for himself. He joined a guard company of former soldiers that were affected by the cataclysmic explosion that had mutated him. They went by the name “The Devils” embracing their new appearance, in a way that can only be done in the north. They were based out of Remeral, and specialized in getting VIP’s to and from the front lines of the war to the far north.

Plot Hooks: Dead Hero Sister Former Members of His company Parents are still alive Has a nickname that can come back to haunt him Was disfigured Pact with an unknown entity