from the GGWs hoard
- Legion – Staff of Health
- Legion – Shard
- Merian – Banner of Storm Giant Favour
- Merian – Cloak of Recovery
- Nidalru – Sash of Suppleness
- Nidalru – Indomitable Weapon (dagger)
- The passageway down to the Heart is via a gaping tear in the dungeon.
- Climbing down, stolen stone gives way to something more like… meat. The walls and floor of this region are made of a reddish substance that’s hard as rock, but it bleeds when touched. The adventurers leave a trail of bloody footprints behind them as they descend.
- Veins of dungeon ectoplasm flash angrily through the red stone, marbling it with white light, and the PCs all feel a sense of oppressive fury.
- They are trespassing in the heart of the Stone Thief, and the dungeon is very aware of them.
- The bloody passage opens near the ceiling of a much, much larger chamber. From this vantage point, the PCs look down onto a volcanic inferno. A set of stairs leads down into the unmoving flames.
- Long ago, the dungeon stole a volcano just as it was about to erupt. The dungeon’s essence flowed into the explosion and the molten rock, freezing them in the moment of eruption. The rough-hewn stairs run down the side wall of the cavern, before connecting to a narrow bridge of stone that joins with a spiral path that runs down into the volcano’s mouth. In the distance, half-hidden by frozen clouds of sulphurous yellow gas and smoke, the PCs can see that the spiral path ends in the entrance to a passageway.
- The only way down into the Heart is to pass through the frozen eruption.
- All of a sudden, the dungeon unfreezes the eruption for a moment, letting a wave of heat and a rush of superheated poisonous air flash over them.
- The volcano boils and churns with growing intensity when the PCs move again.
- The message is clear – trespass any further into the dungeon’s heart, and the Stone Thief will unchain the volcano right in front of them.
- In addition to fire, flying debris, and the upcoming explosion of molten rock, the PCs have to contend with fire giants and volcano dragons!
ENGAGE!
- The passageway in the mouth of the volcano is blessedly cool and sheltered despite the eruption just behind the player characters.
- Beyond, a set of stairs leads down into a crypt; it’s made of the same disturbingly bloody stone as the earlier passageway.
- Bones lie scattered around the floor of this crypt in their thousands.
- Some are parts of complete skeletons; others are just shards of bone.
- The more intact corpses betray their origins: armor, backpacks, piles of gold, shattered potion bottles, motley crews of mismatched races – these are all the corpses of adventurers who died in the dungeon.
- They’ve been torn by claws, crushed by falling blocks, burned by fire traps, chewed up by ghouls, etc.
ENGAGE!
- Small chips of stone begin to move, rolling over one another and accreting to larger masses.
- Tendrils of ectoplasm sprout from the larger pieces of scattered masonry, pulling together.
- A new form is built from the ruin of the dungeon, as the essence of the Stone Thief creates a new body for itself, a last stolen shape to mask its formlessness.
- Out of the ruins of the dungeon, it makes a dragon of stone, with scales of corridor flagstones, with wings of flying buttresses, with claws of rusty swords; a dragon-gargoyle, with bones of castles and the flesh of compacted cities, with a volcano in its heart to fire its breath weapon and gravel drips from its portcullis-jaws.
ENGAGE!
