SESSION 40C: MALLECK’S LAST STAND

July 25th, 2009
The 22nd Day of Kadal in the 790th Year of the Seyrunian Dynasty

While Ranthir collected the books, the others were dumping the cultists’ bodies onto the lighted panels, which sucked the blood out of them and schlepped it down to the sewer.

“That’s gross,” Elestra said, watching the blood run in twisting rivulets away from them.

“Remind me not to stand on these things with an open wound,” Tee said.

They joined Ranthir in the library. Tee checked the doors, finding them all locked. Picking the nearest one at random, she flipped open her ring of lockpicking tools and set to work.

She had just gotten the door unlocked, however, when a piercing scream ripped its way through the complex. She sighed and relocked the door.

The scream sounded as if it came from the far end of the complex. They headed up a short flight of stairs and down a long hall that seemed to head in the right direction. Nearing the end of the hall, Tee caught the faint sounds of conversation coming from somewhere ahead and she waved the others to hold back and hold silent. Peering around the corner she looked through a door into what appeared to be one end of a larger barracks. There was definitely someone in there, but they were out of sight. In the opposite direction – the direction she felt the scream had come from – was another short flight of stairs leading up.

At Tee’s direction – and following Tor’s lead – they rounded the corner and headed up the stairs. These led into a large, open common room containing several tables, a few divans, several cushioned chairs, and a number of deformed stone idols.

Two cultists were on guard duty here, but they seemed lax in their duties: One was leaning lackadaisically against the wall while the other sat on a chair, sharpening his sword. Tor, still under the camouflaging effects of Elestra’s communion with the Spirit of the City, was able to sneak along the wall and kill the first without the other even noticing. When he went for the sword-sharpener, however, the cultist got a turn of good luck, narrowly dodging Tor’s thrust. But his luck lasted for only a moment: As he opened his mouth to give a warning shout, Tor cut him down in a gasping gurgle.

Another scream rended the air. They whirled towards the source, heading down a long flight of stairs that opened into a long, wide, sconce-lit hall. The staircase emerged above the floor of the hall and descended through open air, although along the nearest end it was flanked by two broad ledges which could be reached by independent stairs from the chamber floor.

The walls and the floor below were of black-and-red swirled marble. In the center of the lower floor was a large table of inclined stone. Strapped to this table was a young boy, his body wracked in the midst of some sort of horrible transformation: One arm had grown bulbous with rippling black muscles, his skin was mottled with a sickly green growth, and pus-filled sores were sprouting across his entire body and blood streamed from wounds that seemed to open and close of their own accord. His face was rictused in agony.

Standing nearby were two priests in white robes marked with the black hand of the Ebon Hand. They were manipulating syringes and checking injection tubes that had been plunged into the body of the transforming boy. Their work was being overseen by another man with mottled grey skin streaked with serpentine green wearing an ebony headdress.

Two more priests were standing near the end of the stairs. Their attention was given wholly to the grim proceedings before them. Tee – barely suppressing the rage she felt at the scene – was easily able to pass silently down the stairs. The priests weren’t aware of her until she sent one of their heads flying down the length of the chamber.

It landed near the feet of the man with the mottled grey skin. The priests stared down at it for a moment dumbly, and before they had a chance to process what was happening Tor had charged down the stairs and thrown them into complete disarray.

The grey-skinned man turned to one of the priests, “Give me your potion! Now!”

“Yes, Malleck.”

“It’s Malleck!” Tee cried with triumph.

Malleck swallowed the potion and disappeared.

“Dammit!”

MALLECK’S LAST STAND

Tee and Elestra laid down a volley of dragon pistol fire, forcing the remaining priests to backpedal rapidly as Agnarr moved to engage them. Tor, however, had shut his eyes, thinking back to the long hours of blind-folded training he had practiced back on his ranch. It seemed so long ago, and yet—

His sword lashed out. A spray of arterial blood spread across the wall and the venomed curses of Malleck could be heard clearly over the sounds of the nearby melee.

Tor opened his eyes with a grim smile. But suddenly a secret panel in the far wall slid open… and slid shut again. Malleck had escaped! Tor threw himself at the door, but was left searching helplessly for the mechanism to open it.

Two of the remaining priests called upon dark gods in a sibilant, twisted tongue. Hands of crackling black energy appeared in the air before them—And Agnarr’s flaming blade ripped through them and turned the priests behind them into smoldering ruins. In their last instants, the hands actually tried to flee from the enraged barbarian as they flickered out ineffectually. Elestra summoned lightning from the air itself to immolate the last of the priests.

Ranthir waved a hand over his feet and set off with expeditious speed back up the long stairs, hoping that he might be able to cut Malleck off from his escape.

Tee, meanwhile, was racing in the opposite direction. She hit the wall where Malleck had disappeared with her ring and in a burst of blue energy the panel slid open. Passing through it, she found herself back in the library. The blood trail ended abruptly (Tee guessed that Malleck had magically healed himself), but Tee’s sharp nose caught the passing of his scent. With something of a wild guess, she directed Elestra to send a burst of lightning in that direction—

And struck the invisible Malleck!

Malleck howled with pain. He was still invisible, but Tor followed his voice and caught him in another spray of blood.

“May the Galchutt consume you!” Malleck appeared, his hand outstretched towards them. A pillar of fire erupted around Tor.

Malleck turned to make good his escape, but Ranthir – racing down the hall from the opposite direction – stretched out his own hand and enmeshed Malleck in an impenetrable web. Malleck managed to wrench his way free from the sticky mass, but found himself trapped and backed into a corner as Tor and Agnarr closed in on him.

“Help! Help! To arms! The compound is under attack! We’re under attack!”

THE FALL OF THE TEMPLE

Agnarr, having burned his way through the web using his sword, plunged his sword into Malleck’s body. Tee, meanwhile, had heard the commotion of reinforcements drawn to Malleck’s final rallying cry. She called for the others to fall back through the secret door… only to discover that her ring had, unfortunately, disabled its mechanism. They couldn’t shut it.

Tor, taking up the rear of their retreat back into the laboratory, heard a door slam nearby and the rush of footsteps drawing nearer. Then voices cried out: “Malleck is down! Get him!”

During Malleck’s last stand, Nasira had turned her attention to the boy. She found that his heart was failing him. The process that was transforming him was obviously botched and incomplete and now it was killing him.

Hearing this, Agnarr couldn’t contain his rage. He was furious over the boy. With a grim look of determination he charged back out through the secret door.

“Agnarr!” Tee screamed. “What are you doing?!”

Agnarr found two cultist guards trying to haul Malleck out of the web. He cut them down with a single furious sweep of his blade.

But there were at least a dozen more of the cultists charging down the hall towards him. Agnarr whirled towards them…

And was joined by Tor, who gave him an ironic nod. “Well, since you’re out here anyway…”

Side-by-side they charged up the stairs and into the long hall. Tee, meanwhile, had gone back up the long-stairs and circled around to the far side of the barracks. She was waiting for the waves of reinforcements to run dry, but they just kept coming.

Elestra joined Tor and Agnarr in the hall, using the last of her lightning to chew up the back ranks of the cultists. For a moment it looked as if their morale might break.

But then a woman in red and black full plate – a red cape with a black hand embroidered upon its swirling across her back – emerged from the barracks. She started barking orders and rallying cries to the nearest soldiers.

Agnarr held his ground to keep the cultists from converging on Elestra, but Tor began to cut a path towards the woman. As Tor drew near, the woman saw him isolated from his companions. She carefully circled their skirmish, trying to flank him… but she was caught completely off-guard as Agnarr surged his way forward and came up behind them with preternatural speed. She was cut down before she realized the danger that was upon her.

Tee, thinking the woman to be the last of the cultists coming from that direction, emerged from her place of hiding in an effort to circle around the others and flank them. But as she did, two cultist priests came rushing out of the barracks and caught her standing in the middle of the hall. They sneered at her. “Trying to flee, eh?”

They took two steps towards her and then glanced down the length of the hall… where they saw the devastation wrought by Agnarr, Tor, and Elestra.

They turned and ran back into the barracks.

Running the Campaign: Moral Dilemmas of Magic – Campaign Journal: Session 40D
In the Shadow of the Spire: Index

DISCUSSING
In the Shadow of the Spire – Chaos Lorebook: The Bloated Lords

Some among the zaug were transformed by the Galchutt and “turned to a new purpose”. As the zaug were made living receptacles for manifest corruption, the zaug soulharvesters became living prisoners for captured and tormented souls.

“Their very flesh burned with the fire of the souls which screamed within them.”

“Their hunger was without end, fed eternally by the torment of those who seared their flesh.”

This week’s campaign journal is The Bloated Lords, a lengthy chaos lorebook describing the zaug, one of the Servitors of the Galchutt.

In the Ptolus campaign setting, the Galchutt are lords of chaos and the Servitors of the Galchutt are demon-like creatures who, as their name suggests, serve them. Along with the strange arts of chaositech which are inimically tied to these entities, you can point to a goulash of antecedents Monte Cook is drawing from — Lovecraft, Moorcock, Warhammer, cenobites, etc. — but the result, particularly when blended into traditional D&D fantasy, is very distinct.

When I brought Ptolus into my own campaign world, however, the Galchutt posed a conundrum: I already had my own pantheon of Mythos-adjacent strange gods.

I thought about replacing the Galchutt with my own pantheon, but then I’d lose a lot of cool stuff. It would be a bunch of extra work for, at best, a neutral result.

Another option would have been to simply add the Galchutt to my pantheon: The more strange gods the merrier! For various reasons, though, they didn’t really sync. I’m a big fan of adaptation and reincorporation, but it’s not always a boon. Sometimes you shove stuff together and you’re left with less than what you started.

So what I eventually ended up doing was nestling the Galchutt into a lower echelon, as “Dukes” in the Demon Court. They brought with them the Dukes (powerful, demon-like entities) and the Elder Brood (demonic monsters who serve the Dukes). This worked really well, creating an unexpected bridge (Elder Brood → Dukes → Galchutt → Demon Court → even stranger depths of the pantheon) between the inexplicable and the mortal world. It’s a good example of how you can pull in influences from a lot of different places and gestalt them into something cool.

Another example of this was the Elder Brood: In the Chaositech sourcebook, only two examples of the Elder Brood are given (the obaan and the sscree). I knew I wanted more than that, so I hit up one of my favorite monster manuals: The Book of Fiends from Green Ronin. (Which also played a major role in my remix of Descent Into Avernus.) I pulled all the cool devils and demons from that book that had the right flavor for the Elder Brood and added them to the roster.

Along similar lines, the zaug — one of the Servitors and described in The Bloated Lords lorebook — were expanded in my campaign to include the Soulharvesters. These were adapted from solamiths, a monster described in Monster Manual V.

If I recall correctly, the specific sequence here was:

• I was looking for a miniature I could use for the zaug (since I knew that one would appear in the Mrathrach Machine).
• I found the solamith miniature and realized it belonged to a monster from Monster Manual V.
• I checked out the solamith write-up and realized thar it could be folded into the mythology of the zaug.

It’s been a while, though, so my sequencing on this may not be correct. (I may have found the solamith write-up first while scavenging monsters for the campaign and then tracked down the miniature from there.) In any case, it’s a technique I’ve used with monster manuals for a long time. It’s similar to The Campaign Stitch, but rather than melding adventures it takes monsters and asks: What if these are the same monster?

It’s kind of like palette shifting, but rather than taking one stat block and using it to model a multitude of creatures, this technique — let’s call it monster melding — takes a bunch of different stat blocks and brings them together.

Another example is that, in my personal campaign world, goblins, orcs, hobgoblins, and ogres are all the same species. (Which, conveniently, gives me access to a much larger variety of stat blocks to plug-‘n-play with while stocking goblin villages.)

What I like about this technique — in addition to utilitarian stocking adventages — is that, much like gods and ventures, the melded monsters can often be more interesting than using the two separately. (For example, the implications of hypertrophic dimorphism in goblins raises all kinds of interesting worldbuilding questions and the soulharvesters, in my opinion, make zaug society much more interesting to explore.)

So ask yourself:

• What if these are the same creature with slightly divergent careers, abilities, etc.?
• What if these are the same creature at different stages of its life cycle?
• What if they live in some kind of symbiosis or parasitic relationship?

Bring these creatures together and see what you get!

Campaign Journal: Session 40C – Running the Campaign: Moral Dilemmas of Magic
In the Shadow of the Spire: Index

THE BLOATED LORDS
(Chaos Lorebook)

They were the least of those that served. They were corruption given flesh; a corpulence of festering death and decay. Rebellious in spirit, yet forever bound to the power of their masters.

This tome describes the zaug – one of the “servitors of the Galchutt”. Physically the zaug were grossly obese humanoids with no hair. They had wide mouths full of teeth, claws for hands, and short horns on their heads. Some are described as possessing vestigial, rotting wings. A few passages describe their bodies as “corrupted receptacles”. Sores and oozing pus and bile covered their fat flesh. And much of their skin hung loose in rotting folds, pocked with holes from which intestines and other guts hung out – spurting vile fluids.

Several passages are given over to describing festering poisons and other vile alchemical substances that could be created from the “bile of the zaug”, although no true details of the required procedures are given.

The flesh of the zaug itself is ever-regenerating – allowing it to survive despite the diseases, poisons, and parasites that teem through its body. They are said to never eat or drink or breathe, and to speak only telepathically.

THE SOULHARVESTERS

Some among the zaug were transformed by the Galchutt and “turned to a new purpose”. As the zaug were made living receptacles for manifest corruption, the zaug soulharvesters became living prisoners for captured and tormented souls.

“Their very flesh burned with the fire of the souls which screamed within them.”

“Their hunger was without end, fed eternally by the torment of those who seared their flesh.”

Where the flesh of the zaug festered, the beruned and corpulent flesh of the soulharvesters was glistening and taut. And pressing out against the green-veined and pallid skin of their guts were the screaming faces of those imprisoned within them.

The “soulfire flesh” of the zaug soulharvesters is described as an immense, living power source.

THE LORE OF THE LATTER YEARS

And while their masters slept, the labors of the zaug were endless.

Later lore describes the zaug working with the “titans of the Purple City” in labors of “the technology of the taint” as they worked to “perfect the crafts gifted from beyond the Demonweb”.

Other passages refer to the zaug working in the laboratories of Ghul the Skull-King. “And their works turned to the binding and changing of the flesh, and the lesser races were turned into weapons of dark might.”

KASTRALATHAKASAL

And in the sleep of the Galchutt and the sealing of the Vaults of the Rhodintor, the zaug at last found their freedom. And in their caverns of the deep, their works turned inward.

Deep beneath the surface of the earth, it is said that Kastralathakasal – the City of the Zaug – “stands citadel upon the Throne of Darkness”. The city itself is described as a stronghold of alien metals and living, organic components.

Running the Campaign: All Your Zaug Belong to Us – Campaign Journal: Session 40C
In the Shadow of the Spire: Index

DISCUSSING
In the Shadow of the Spire – Chaos Lorebook: Lore of the Demon Court

Its face was like the mirror nothingness. Its gaze a river of fire that touched thought but not earth.

Above all Those Who Slumber was the power of the One Who Was Born of Destruction, the Song Render, the Ender of Souls, the Dweller in Darkness. And among those who would speak his name, his name was Shallamoth Kindred – the act of desolation given life and mutilation given flesh.

And he did move with the quickness of a razor.

In the palace of the Kindred of Shallamoth, the eyes of the Galchutt are shut.

In the Temple of the Ebon Hand, the PCs discovered a cache of lore books.

These are specifically part of what I refer to as the chaos lorebooks, a collection of roughly fifty different lore books in the campaign dealing with:

• chaos cults
• chaositech
• the demon court
• servitors of the Galchutt
• the elder brood
• Wuntad’s plans for the Night of Dissolution

The root of this collection is the Book of Faceless Hate, which looks like this in my version of the lore book:

THE BOOK OF FACELESS HATE

No title marks the tattered, dark brown cover of this book. Its contents are written in a nearly illegible scrawl that could only have been born of hopeless madness. The first several pages of the book are covered in repetitions and variations of a single phrase: FACELESS HATE. (They wait in faceless hate. We shall burn in their faceless hate. The faceless hate has consumed me. And so forth…)

CHAOS: True chaos, or “deep chaos”, is a religion based on the fundamental aspects of hate, destruction, death, and dissolution. The philosophy of chaos is one of constant and endless change. It teaches that the current world is a creation of order and structure, but that it was flawed from the dawn of time due to the lack of foresight into what living sentience truly wants and need. The gods of creation – the gods of order – are untouchable and unknowable. They are aloof and uncaring, says the teaching of true chaos.

THE LORDS OF CHAOS: According to the book, the Lords of Chaos – or “Galchutt” – are gods of unimaginable power. But they are “mere servants of the true gods of change, the Demon Princes”. It is written that the Galchutt came to serve the Princes during the “War of Demons”, but while the Princes have “left this world behind”, the Galchutt still “whisper the words of chaos”.

VESTED OF THE GALCHUTT: Although they sleep, the Galchutt still exert some influence upon the world. This influence can be felt by the faithful through the “touch of chaos” and the “mark of madness”, but it can also be made manifest in one of the “Vested of the Galchutt” – powerful avatars of their dark demi-gods’ strength.

CHAOS CULTS: The book goes on to describe (but only in the vaguest of terms) many historical and/or fanciful “cults of chaos” which have risen up in veneration of either the Galchutt, the Vested of the Galchutt, or both. These cults seem to share nothing in common except, perhaps, the search for the “true path for the awakening of chaos”. The book would leave one with the impression that the history of the world has been spotted with the continual and never-ending presence of these cults – always operating in the shadows, save when bloody massacres and destruction bring them into the open.

As originally presented in Monte Cook’s Night of Dissolution (p. 93), the Book of Faceless Hate was a much more comprehensive player briefing of the entire cosmology of chaos in the Ptolus setting. I knew that I would need to create my own version of the book because I had moved Ptolus to my campaign world, and was therefore adapting this cosmology and melding it to my cosmology.

But I also knew that I wanted to make the Book of Faceless Hate more enigmatic, creating a much larger conspiracy and mystery that the PCs would need to unravel: How many cults were working with Wuntad? What were their true intentions? What was the true nature and secret history of the “gods” they worshipped?

My motivation was partly aesthetic: I just thought the chaos cults would be a lot cooler if they were drenched in mystery.

But it was also practical. Doing a big data dump to orient the players in the opening scenario of the published Night of Dissolution makes sense, because it was a mini-campaign with five scenarios, but I was planning a much larger exploration of the chaos cults that would involve a couple dozen scenarios. If I gave the players a comprehensive overview of who the cults were and everything they were doing, then the rest of the campaign would just become a rote checklist. It would be difficult to maintain a sense of narrative interest and momentum, and things would likely decay into “been there, done that.”

I also knew that if the players were forced to piece together disparate lore, slowly collecting different pieces of evidence to eagerly weave together while collecting the leads they need to continue pursuing their investigation and pasting all of it onto a literal or figurative conspiracy board, that it would get them deeply invested in the chaos cults. It would make them care.

(And when the players started holding lore book meetings and discussing the chaos cults even when we weren’t playing the game, I knew I’d pulled it off.)

DISTRIBUTING THE BOOKS

So I broke up The Book of Faceless Hate into a bunch of pieces, adapted the content to my campaign world, and reframed everything using lore book techniques so that the players would feel like they were “really” reading these strange tomes and oddly moist pages. Then I started adding even more lore books to flesh things out more, ending up with, as I mentioned, roughly fifty different books.

Okay, but what did I actually do with all of these lore books?

The short answer is that I seeded them into all the adventures in the campaign, spreading them around so that the PCs would collect them book by book.

I had about twenty chaos-related adventures where these books could be found, so this meant that many of them would be stocked with multiple lore books. Sometimes they were clustered together in a secret library; other times they would be scattered throughout the adventure.

In practice, I had even more options (and was adding even more chaos lorebooks) because most of these books weren’t unique volumes. They were books and religious scriptures. Secretive, yes, but still meant to be copied and disseminated. Thus, for example, the PCs could find a copy of The Touch of the Ebon Hand in Pythoness House in Session 22, but also, unsurprisingly, later find a bunch of them in the Temple of the Ebon Hand.

Note: And because I wasn’t worried about duplicating them, the PCs went off into an unexpected direction and I ended up adding new scenarios, I could easily reach into my stock of chaos lorebooks, grab a few, and sprinkle them around.

I was also able to add them to other scenarios, unrelated to the chaos cults, to make the entire campaign world feel like a unified whole and create the impression that the chaos cults were a pervasive, ever-present influence.

Along these same lines, I realized it was generally ideal if a cult’s primary lorebook could be found OUTSIDE the cult’s headquarters. In other words, if it was possible for the PCs to learn about a cult (setup) and then later discover where they were operating (payoff).

Consider, also, this diagram, also found in Pythoness  House in Session 22:

It depicts the symbols for a variety of chaos cults working with Wuntad, giving a default structure of:

• Who does this symbol belong to?
• It belongs to X!
• We found where X is / what X is doing!

You can see the simple progression of setups and payoffs that lead to a satisfying conclusion, and in this case we’ve complicated things through the simple expedient of having seven iterations of this progression happening simultaneously and overlapping with each other.

In actual practice, though, I muddied things up a bit more by

• including a couple symbols on the diagram that the PCs would never actually encounter in the campaign (where are they?!); and
• writing up lorebooks describing several additional chaos cults that weren’t part of Wuntad’s scheme at all (how many of them are there?!).

But I digress. Let’s get back to how the lorebooks were distributed.

What I quickly realized was that I needed a plan. You need to remember that I wasn’t prepping the entire campaign ahead of time: I had created an adventure track that indicated what the individual adventures were and how they were linked to each other, but I was prepping the keys for those adventures as they became relevant. Although I started off by simply adding whatever chaos lorebooks made sense in a particular adventure, it became clear that

• there was a bias towards some of the lorebook topics, causing them to be over-represented; and
• with so many lorebooks in play, there was a real risk that I would lose track and fail to place some of the lorebooks.

I started by putting together a simple checklist (i.e,. Have I placed this lorebook yet?), but realized I could still end up writing myself into a corner. (Where the PCs would get to the end of Act II and I would realize I still had way too many lorebooks to place and not enough adventure to place them in!) So I swapped to a spreadsheet with a list of all the lorebooks and a list of all the adventure cross-referenced.

This let me see and shape the totality of the chaos lorebooks: Where were they concentrated? Which books still needed to be placed and where could they go for best effect? Was it possible to find the book outside of the cult’s own lair?

Note: On this worksheet, I also made a point of distinguishing between which lorebooks had actually been placed – i.e., I’d keyed the adventure and they were in the adventure key—as opposed to which lorebook locations were only planned and had not yet been executed.

While doing this work, I also realized that there was a principle similar to the Three Clue Rule: Most of these lorebooks weren’t structurally essential, but they were — if I do say so myself — really cool, and I’d also put a lot of prep work into them. So for most of the books, I made a point of including them in at least three different adventures. (And if, for some reason, it wouldn’t make sense for a lorebook to be so widely disseminated, I would try to include multiple copies in the adventures where it could logically be found.)

As seen in the current session, this obviously resulted in the PCs often finding copies of chaos lorebooks that they already had. You might think this to be repetitive, pointless, or even disappointing, like a someone saying, “Aw, man… I already have this one!” when opening a pack of baseball cards. In practice, though, that really wasn’t the case.

First, the primary effect was fare more along the lines of, “Oh no… The cult has been here, too.”

Second, because it did, in fact, make diegetic sense for multiple copies of these books to exist, the presence of multiples made the world feel like a real place. It made the books “real,” rather than being a collectibles achievement in a video game.

Finally, because the campaign was being played out over months and even years of real time, the second or third encounter with a chaos lorebook would simply remind the players of what they have, often prompting them to pull out their copy of the handout and review it. Thus, the lore of the campaign was being constantly and organically reinforced until the players knew it in their bones.

Which was, of course, the point of the chaos lorebooks in the first place.

Campaign Journal: The Bloated Lords – Running the Campaign: All Your Zaug Belong to Us
In the Shadow of the Spire: Index

LORE OF THE DEMON COURT
(Chaos Lorebook)

And in the darkness of his prison, the Nameless One spun the first strands of the Web of Demons. And the web was laid between and beside the world, building upon the corruption that he had laid. And so he became the Weaver.

And in the world which he had lost, there were those who felt the touch of his web. And they were like unto gods. And chief among them were the Four Princes of the Demon Court: The Nightwalker, the Blood Goddess, the Scarlet Lord, and the Bane of Fire.

THE ORDERS OF THE DEMON COURT

And in the first rank of the Demon Court there were the Princes of Chaos.

And in the second rank of the Demon Court there were the Dukes of Chaos. And their chief was Shallamoth Kindred. And among them were Bhor Kei and Dhar Rhyth and Jubilex and Kihomenethoth and Ravvan the Beast.

And in the third rank of the Demon Court, there were the servitors of the Dukes – rhodintor and zaug, carach and shaddom, vreeth and the teeming hordes of the Elder Brood.

And in the passing of the Demon Court, there were left the Vested and the Cults – the seeds of chaos.

THE SHADOW THAT NEVER SLEEPS
(Chaos Lorebook)

Above all Those Who Slumber was the power of the One Who Was Born of Destruction, the Song Render, the Ender of Souls, the Dweller in Darkness. And among those who would speak his name, his name was Shallamoth Kindred – the act of desolation given life and mutilation given flesh.

This volume is a collection of lore regarding the Galchutt known as Shallamoth Kindred. It is a mixture of texts: Some poetical, some religious, some scholastic, some bombastic.

RANK WITHIN THE HOST: The Galchutt are not given to any order or hierarchy, and yet Shallamoth Kindred is often seen as their leader. No other Galchutt has ever been known to disobey it, and one of the ancient texts cited tells that “the Dweller in Darkness shall lead the Natharl’nacna host into the heart of creation, there to deliver all unto oblivion”.

THE FORM OF MAN: Shallamoth Kindred is described as being of two forms. The first of these – the form of man – takes the shape of a tall, lithe humanoid with indistinct features. This entire form is black like the deepest part of a bottomless pit, with the exception of its dagger-shaped eyes, colored the yellow-brown of diseased teeth.

THE FORM OF SOUL: The second form – the form of soul – is that of a squirming mass of ropy tendrils surrounding a bulbous, obese, pox-covered, decaying body with a vaguely humanoid shape. In some of the grotesque illustrations contained within this volume, vestigial bat-like wings hang limply around this form.

THE SUDDENNESS OF DESTRUCTION: “And he did move with the quickness of a razor.” “And in that moment he both came and was gone, leaving a wake of black madness in his tread.” These and similar quotations attest to Shallamoth Kindred’s ability to move with blinding speed and agility. It is literally capable of being there one moment and then gone in the next.

THE FACELESS FACE: “Its face was like the mirror nothingness. Its gaze a river of fire that touched thought but not earth.” Shallamoth Kindred never displays emotion. It never grows angry and it never shows fear. It does not gloat. It does not rejoice. It is impossible to manipulate or even to reason with.

THE CITADEL WITHOUT LIGHT: “And in the palace of the Kindred of Shallamoth, the eyes of the Galchutt are shut.” This phrase stands alone in the lower left hand corner of a page otherwise covered in a strangely warped mandala. Other passages refer to this place as the Citadel Without Light, and some speak of an inner sanctum: The Tourbillion. The Vortex of the World. From this Vortex, one can “step forth into the world”.

Another fragment describes the palace as being built entirely of mirrors which sometimes reflect less than can be seen, sometimes more, and sometimes something entirely alien.

Running the Campaign: Distributing Chaos Lorebooks – Next: The Bloated Lords
In the Shadow of the Spire: Index