Characters

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Untitled

Strong Start

The animated hooks. A big hook grabs Skrink and drags him into the room whereon the Gaoler puts him on a table and draws a big sacrificial knife.

Scenes

• Ushulx – Worshipper of Charun might be willing to give the characters a couple of potions of greater healing if it steers the battle away from The Gaoler – Dungeon Torturer of the Scarlet Citadel.
• Scar the Crimson Ogre shows up and cuts off their escape.

Secret and Clues

• [ ] The western side of the first level of Scarlet Citadel is made up of the crypts of the Holzanger family.
• [ ] The Holzanger catacombs are rife with undead, thanks to a weak spot in the dimensional barrier between Midgard and the Dry Lands.
• [ ] The Dry Lands, also known as Evermaw, the plane of the dark god Mot (and the equally notorious Vardesain and Anu-Akma, fellow gods of the dead), is notable for its silence—a plane of enormous deserts of bones, dunes of dust, and rivers of blood and tears. These are the Dry Lands, the plane where life extends past its appointed span, where fate itself is thwarted with regularity, and where liches, vampires, and ghouls gather in enormous numbers to praise their patron and the font of vileness, to cheat death, to praise their protection against a certain voyage into the hells and the joy and strength of the god of the undead and his near-infinite legions.
• [ ] Evermaw, Plane of Undeath (MWB 46) - Evermaw is confused with the Eleven Hells, since it is an afterlife of ghouls and vampires, cannibals and gluttons. A road like a lolling tongue sprawls through a waterless desert of blood dust, passing towers that sprout like crooked white teeth, until it’s swallowed by the gulletlike sinkhole that houses the city of Vulture’s Beyond, osseous capital of the Hunger God Vardesain, as well as the Eternal Palace of the dry undead lord Mot and the Crystal Necropolis of the guardian god Anu-Akma. Here ziggurats flow with the blood of daily sacrifices, liches study new necromancies of flesh and bone, and the cooks claim they can skin and butcher anything, from ghosts to gods.
• [ ] Many believe the halls of the Scarlet Citadel are dead or stagnant or stationary. They couldn’t be more wrong. Things are happening on every level of the vast ruin. It is a living world down beneath the ruined keep.
• [ ] Closing the portal requires more than just traditional magic or arcane manipulation. A darkness deep below the Scarlet Citadel is responsible for the open wound leading to the Dry Lands.
• [ ] Ushulx is a blood cultist who venerates Charun in the domain of death.
• [ ] Charon is the God of Death, Master of the Rivers Styx and Lethe, Guardian of Souls, Watcher at the Door, Patron of Sailors and Gravediggers (MWB 385)
• [ ] Charun oversees the passage of souls: at birth, at death, and in the afterlife, maintaining the proper steps along the natural roads. He protects planar travelers, especially mortals, from demons and celestials alike. Charun uses the undead as tools and servants, though he sees them as the damaged shells of his charges, holding only a few scattered memories.
• [ ] She perceives the river as a metaphor for blood flowing through arteries and believes Charun is connected to the Dry Lands because of the proximity of this shrine to the crypt (Areas 116–120) and its connection to the Dry Lands.
• [ ] This philosophy is heretical both in mainstream views of Charun and in most blood cults, which is why Ushulx skulks here beneath the Scarlet Citadel.