GLOGTOBER '24: Old Apothecary

 For challenge 6 of glogtober I choose the prompt 'Secrets of the stones', and wrote what I think is my first dungeon. I think it sorta vaguely matches the prompt however. Content warning for implied suicide and unhealthy relationship dynamics.

Old Apothecary

The apothecary in the woods has been abandoned for the last 10 years. Before that, a couple by the names Claricia and Inezch were the ones running it, the wife would make the medicines and the husband would sell them. They arrived in town about 7 years before the place was condemned and even then they mostly kept to themselves. There were so many rumors.

1. When they first came into town they brought some heavy object, bundled in rugs and as tall as a man. “Just some furniture” they said, but my father says it was far too cold to the touch.
2. The oracle Distal haunts that house, if you approach it during the full moon it might even be in the mood for a chat. That thing must have been what did them in.
3. Claricia was obviously a princess from the vampire courts and Inezch her loyal knight. Now the place is guarded by a ghoulish thrall until they can rise again.
4. There is a yowling leshy out in these woods. I saw it’s bristling black fur in the branches. Each year it steals a few passing travelers or a sheep. Claricia must have had a pact to keep it at bay.
5. They were monsters who worshiped evil gods and mixed devil blood into their potions! That Inezch must have been bewitched by Claricia’s wiles! She always smelled of sage to hide her evil scent.
6. Claricia and Inezch were good people and saved my mother from certain death and fixed my gender. If you say anything nasty about them, I will hit you with a broom!

What we know for certain is that Claricia stayed at home with her cat Miette. Inezch would come into town to drop off medicines and buy groceries, and head into the woods to gather herbs or hunt game, but always eager to return home. Then one day he stopped coming, and everyone who went to investigate would get driven away by a scaly black boar. Clearly if there is a supernatural guardian there, then there is something worth stealing. Such as Claricia’s secrets of Low Alchemy.

A note on shorthand. Things labeled Search require 10 minutes of searching to uncover. Those labeled Expertise are freely given if one of the players has a relevant skill or background, and if nobody has something relevant can be discovered with a roll or resource expenditure. Advanced Expertise requires both relevant expertise and a roll or resource expenditure. Things labeled Secret should not be described to the players without them taking some action to uncover it. GM Notes indicates information that is not meant for the player, but helps the GM understand how this place works.

1. Garden

Before you stands a cabin slowly being overtaken by nature. It’s surrounded by a wicker fence and within which lies a  garden choked with weeds.

• Expertise. Most of the useful plants have died out due to neglect. The presence of Sage, Belladonna, and Mandrake indicate that an alchemist lived here.

• Expertice.Each Mandrake root is worth 1 GP. However when pulled out of the ground it screams, causing every living thing within 30 ft to save or die. When slightly tugged, the root produces an awful high pitched ringing.

• Search. Digging around in the garden reveals 2d4 mandrake roots for the taking.

• Looking south, the front of the house appears to have been untouched for the last 10 years.

• The front door is locked.

• The window is covered in ivy from the outside and dusty from the inside.

• Looking north, the back of the house has had some recent activity, including various foot prints.

• There is a wide open back door, leading into room 2:Cabin.

• There is a closed cellar door, with its lock clawed out. It leads into room 3:Cellar.

• Expertise, Search.The tracks here are not normal. Bare human feet, hoof prints, paw prints, boots. One fresh set of boar tracks changes halfway through into what appear to be mountain lion prints.

2. Cabin

A dusty old cabin. It smells of old death and is covered in cat hair. 

• There are drawers and cabinets with old clothes, household items and so forth. 

• Search. you can scrounge 2d6 bulk of stuff that will get you 1 SP per bulk. There is a 1-in-6 chance to find some specific thing.

• Slumped over on a chair next to that table with old liquor bottles is a corpse of a man in a nightshirt, past rotting and already dry. Casual inspection reveals bite marks around his throat, and key chain lying on the floor next to him.

• Expertise. The bite marks indicate that he was bitten by something as large as a bear or tiger. There are however no signs of struggle.

• Expertise. Looking into his mouth reveals d3 crooked teeth, they are too cold and too dry. These are Wizard Teeth, which can be ground up and snorted for temporary MD or sold for 1 GP a piece.

• Advanced Expertise. The teeth have no pity, and cast spells of divination.

• Expertise,Search. Naturally occurring indents form runes on the inside of the skull. If properly extracted, the wise can decode them to learn the spells Scry, Detect Evil and Dispel Magic.

• GM Notes. This is the body of Inezch.

• The bed in the western half of the room is notable for a lack of dust, but plenty of cat hair. 

• GM Notes. This is where Mettie usually sleeps.

• There is a metal stove in the eastern half of the room. It has a chimney going up, and a pipe leading beneath the floorboards.

• Search. There is a blood vine coiling around the pipe. Full description of blood vines are found in room 5.

3. Root Cellar

The smell of blood, fresh and old hits you first. Then you see the pile of bones in the center of the room. This cellar has walls of packed earth and wooden shelves.

• In the center is a pile of bones, of varying ages. Picked clean. It seems to be mostly sheep and deer bones, but you find a human skull or two.

• Expertise. The tooth marks indicate that a variety of different animals have gnawed on these bones.

• GM Notes. Mettie hunts in the local woods and keeps her catches here.

• The walls are covered in shelves on which food used to be stored, it’s all rotten now. There are also some old household items.

• Search. you can scrounge 2d6 bulk of stuff that will get you 1 SP per bulk. There is a 1-in-6 chance to find some specific thing.

• Southern wall is wooden, unlike the packed earth of everything else. In the eastern half of it is a hole, with prickly blood vines coming out of it. The vines weakly snake towards the pile of bones, and twitch in reaction to hot breath.

• This hole leads to room 5:Alchemy Lab. The full description of how blood vines work is in room 5.

• Secret.Symmetrical to the eastern hole, to the west there is a hidden secret panel to room 4:Scrawl-Nest. If you are very quiet or press your ear against it, you can hear scratching and muttering.

4. Scrawl-Nest

A sectioned off expansion of the cellar. Each surface is plastered with paper or scratched with symbols. The air is too dry here.

• In the center of the room is a chair. 4-in-6 chance that Distal is sitting on it. Otherwise he is scribing on some surface.

• Every available surface here is covered in writing. Some of which is carved out of the wood, some of which is written on paper that’s been glued onto the walls. The phrase “Sphinx of Black Quartz, Judge My Vow” is repeated many times over. You feel vertigo if you try to make sense of it.

• Search. If you take the time to try to make sense of these symbols, take d6 non-lethal damage and the lingering sense that you almost understand it. If this non-lethal damage takes you to unconsciousness, you will have a vision of a great tragedy that will kill thousands.

• There are paper stars and moons hanging around the room, also covered in writing.

• If you eat one, you will get a splitting migraine that disables you for 1d6 rounds, and upset Distal.

• There are several chests in here as well. Opennable with the keys on the corpse. Distal does not mind if you riffle through them. But doing so would require Searching.

• They contain vampire slaying equipment. 1-in-6 chance any particular thing is in usable condition. Also includes a sword, crossbow and set of medium chainmail armor.

• The chests also contain books. If you're on friendly terms with Distal he will ask for the paper to continue the scrawl. The following books are in here.

• Vampire Slaying 2

• Curses 1

• Inezch’s Journal 2

• To the north is the secret panel into room 3:Root Cellar.

• To the west, is a door with vines sticking out from under it. The vines have been nibbled on to prevent them from going deeper into the room.

• GM Notes. Distal nibbles the vines that encroach upon the scrawl.

Destal

Appearance: A pale impression of a face, trailing off into a ragged cloak of darkness.

Voice: “Scratches, scratches, oh, how I miss her, how I miss her, sizzle, pop.”

Wants: To talk about the past, to avoid the Sphinx’s gaze, to stay out of the bright light, for Mettie to die (won’t kill her himself because he made a promise) and to write out his thoughts.

Behavior: He is generally too distracted to really care about the presence of others, but responds well to nostalgia. Might attack sources of bright lights, loud sounds or any who say that Claricia is not the moon.

Stats: Stats as a wight but he’s a corporeal ghost instead of an animated corpse. If harvested for reagents grants Earth or Order. If you reminisce with him, he will give you an Aching Omen.

5. Alchemy Lab

A sectioned off expansion of the cellar. Everything in this room is covered in prickly vines growing from a mound in the center of the room. You think you can make out the shapes of a hearth, a cauldron. The air is too dry here.

• It smells terrible here. In the middle of the floor is a pile of offal, with vines growing over it.

• Mettie throws the bits she doesn’t want to eat in here. Distal eats from them.

• The blood vines that coat every surface in this room are covered in sharp and thin needles. The vines look dehydrated and brittle.

• Expertise. These are called blood vines, they are vines that drink blood. They appear still, but can suddenly grab you.

• Blood vines twitch in reaction to hot and wet breath from living things.

• Unless you're wearing metal armor, you need to make a dexterity check to not get pricked, with difficulty greater the less layers you're wearing. Pricks don’t deal damage but cause you to bleed.

• When a blood vine tastes blood, they wake up and seek more of it. The mass of blood vines grapples like a person with 10 Strength and unthinkingly tries to strangle people to death. 

• Blood vines always act last in initiative.

• Collectively there is 3 HD of vines in here.

• These vines are highly flammable and will easily be destroyed that way. However this will also probably destroy the house.

• GM Notes. Mettie navigates the vines by being very careful, Distal doesn’t care because he doesn’t have blood.

• The mound in the center is where the vines are thickest.

• Search. If you find a way to remove the vines from the mound, you will discover that it’s the dried out husk of a woman in a chair. The vines have dug aggressively into her flesh. Her dried blood is as red as fresh blood.

• Expertise. The woman beneath these vines has especially potent blood. Intoxicating to the creatures of the night. If you have no respect, her heart is a reagent that gives one Air essence, and doubles the potency of any concoction that deals with blood or desire. It also sells for 100 GP.

• Advanced Expertise. She died of a subtle poison, with the essences of Earth, Air and Fire.

• GM Notes. This is the body of Claricia.

• In the east there is a hearth and cauldron buried under the vines. With a chimney leading up to the metal stove upstairs.

• Search. It’s a good cauldron, 5 bulk to carry and worth 20 GP. You do need to figure out how to get it out of the vines.

• There is a table and some shelves underneath the vines as well. Covered in alchemy supplies.

• Search. you can scrounge 2d6 bulk of stuff that will get you 1 GP per bulk. There is a 1-in-6 chance to find some specific thing.

• There are old books, many of them destroyed by the vines. Here is what you do find.

• A ciphered recipe book. If your able to crack the code, you will find recipes for the low alchemical concoction of Sanguine, Phlegmatic and Choleric Potions, Concealing Ointment, Humor Realignment Treatment (included at the bottom of this document) and Subtle Poison.

• Blood 1

• Alchemy 2

• Claricia’s Journal 1

• To the west there is a door to room 4. Scrawl-Nest. It appears that it does get used ever so often.

• GM Notes. When Distal goes outside to look upon the full moon, he passes through the Alchemy Lab because he doesn’t remember about the secret panel.

• Laided into the southern wall is a boarded up door. Unlike everything else in the room, no vines have crept up towards it, approach close and it feels several degrees colder. It leads to room 6:Pit.

6. Pit

Deeper than the cellars, the shadows are deeper here, the air is too dry and too cold. In the very deepest part of this place, something sits under a sheet.

• The room is bare, except for a statue with a sheet over it. Throwing off the sheet reveals it to be a Sphinx of Black Quartz. There are letters at its base in an ancient chthonic language.

• 
  The statue requires at least two people to carry due to its size. It has 10 bulk.

• It is worth 1000 GP. From the way your stomach churns to look at it, it’s clearly magical.

• Expertise. It’s so dry and so cold because it is from the underworld. This is a thing of Earth. Sphinxs guard thresholds, and pronounce judgements. This is a thing of Order.

• Expertise. The letters on its base translates to something like “Swear on me, be judged and accept what you deserve”.

• The statue may grant power. Simply declare a vow to it, demand a spell to enact that vow, and proclaim the phrase “Sphinx of Black Quartz, Judge My Vow”. Omit a demanded spell and Sphinx chooses something for you, omit the vow or the key phrase and you will simply be ignored. The Sphinx judges on the three criteria of cunning, refinement and pitilessness.

• All Three Criteria: You pass with excellence. Gain the spell and an MD if the Sphinx hasn’t granted you an MD before. This MD is cold and dry.

• Two Criteria: You merely pass. Gain your rightful spell.

• One Criteria: You barely pass. You still gain the spell, but you also gain the doppelganger curse. It is the doppelganger's sacred duty to teach you the criteria which you're lacking.

• No Criteria: Abject failure. You get no spell, only a doppelganger to replace you.

Mettie

Appearance: In her natural state, like a nightmare of a housecat scaled to the size of a tiger. With black fur and shining yellow eyes.

Voice: “You KICK Mettie? You kick her body like a football? Oh! Oh! Death for adventuer! Death of a thousand deaths!”

Wants: To relieve her boredom by tormenting interlopers, to protect Claricia’s remains, for Distal to die (won’t kill him herself because she made a promise), secretly scratches behind the ear.

Behavior: Mettie has lived for a long time, so she’s rather clever, but has never had the patience for book learning. Won’t go out if her way to kill interlopers if she can just scare them away. Will target isolated individuals first.

Stats: As a fully mature Caterwaul it has the stats of a tiger, but with the following supernatural abilities. If harvested for reagents grants Air or Perdition essence.

• Can turn invisible except for her mouth.

• Can stretch and morph like a rubber hose cartoon character.

• Can shrink to be as small as a rat.

• Can stretch out neck, limbs and tail up to 30’ to make melee attacks at range or move at 4x normal speed.

• Can morph her shape to mimic other creatures in the size range of rat to tiger, but only the shape. Her skin, fur and eye colors remain consistent and wounds won’t vanish. She can disguise her fur as clothes as well. Disguises are much more convincing in dim light.

The only wandering monster here is Mettie, when an encounter is triggered here, roll on this table for Mettie's approach.

1. Disguised as a scaly boar with antlers and way too many teeth. Tries to scare people away by being large and scary.

2. Disguised as a little girl. Tries to scare people away with creepy warnings.

3. Disguised as a sphinx. Partially to scare people away with the terrible reputation that they have, but also to belittle the Quartz Sphinx.

4. Disguised as a devilishly handsome business man. Tries to sell the party some old junk to get them to leave. Mettie has a very poor grasp on economics.

5. Invisible, tries to whisper spooky nonsense into people’s ears to convince them to leave.

Concoction Recipe: Humor Realignment Treatment

A person carries in themselves not only their own final cause, but the efficient causes of their parents and their parents before them. With a carefully applied treatment requiring two distinct concoctions and precise control of the patient’s environment, you can change a person’s outward appearance or inner nature.

Based on the balance of humors in a person, different efficient causes express themselves in a person. Each alchemical essence affects one’s appearance as such.

• Earth: Makes you look more like a woman from your father's side of the family.

• Water: Makes you look more like a woman from your mother's side of the family.

• Air: Makes you look more like a man from your mother's side of the family.

• Fire: Makes you look more like a man from your father's side of the family.

• Order, Perdition, Cognition: Brings out traits from the occulted efficient causes. Spirits, antediluvian ancestors, who knows.

Changing Elixir:

Requirements: Perdition and a secondary essence.
This sensitive elixir that encourages the body to change and mutate.

• If the appearance of the drinker matches the secondary essence, they enter Metamorphosis.

• If the drinker is in Metamorphosis, they get a random mutation and reroll a random attribute.

• If the phenotype of the drinker does not match the secondary essence, they take [R]d6 damage and save or get a random mutation.

Metamorphosis

When a patient enters the Metamorphosis state, their physical form becomes incredibly sensitive and mutable, causing the following effects for as long as they are in this state.

• Their HP can not be higher than 0.

• Any fatigue will instantly make them unconscious.

• They automatically fail saves against mutation.

Keep a tally of which essences the patient is influenced by during the Metamorphosis state. The GM assigns three tallies to reflect the environmental factors of Climate, Food and Company. For each of these factors the GM adds a tally to the essence that best represents what what the patient experinces. For example, if your trying to make the patient to look like their mother, you want to get them to stay somewhere cold and dark, drink plenty of water and speak mostly with phegmatic people, to add three tallies to the Water essence. For each concoction consumed, add a tally for each reagent that the concoction is made of. After a day and a night Metamorphosis runs its course, and the severity of the transformation is determined by the total tallies.

• 5 or less tallies: Surface changes. People who know you well can still recognise that you're the same person. Can change the shape but not the fundamental nature of your organs.

• 6 or more tallies: Deep changes. Only people who know you really well will recognise it’s still you. Can cause you to slough off unfitting organs or grow new ones.

• Unless the Settling Elixir is taken near the end of Metamorphosis, the patient also gets random mutations equal to total tallies divided by 3.

The patient’s resulting appearance is based on the relative tallies in each essence, not just the one with the greatest tallies. Generally the family resemblance is kept and the patient’s new form is like that of another child their parents could have hypothetically had. An androgynous appearance can be achieved by carefully balancing each essence. Novel combinations of essences may result in gender presentations otherwise thought impossible.

Settling Elixir:

Requirements: Order.

This sensitive elixir who’s effect is highly dependent on the drinker.

• If drunk by someone in the tail end of the Metamorphosis state, that state is concluded safely and without unnecessary mutation.

• If drunk too early by someone in Metamorphosis, Metamorphosis is ended early and the drinker loses [R] maximum HP.

• If the drinker is not in Metamorphosis, the Settling Elixir can be drunk to automatically succeed a save against mutation at the price of taking [R]d6 damage.

What happened here?

It is true that Claricia and Inezch come from the lands under the vampire courts, but they were simple towns folk. They may have happily married and lived quiet lives if not for Claricia’s blood. Claricia was rarely let out of the house due to her weak constitution, and whenever she was let out it was perfumed with a concealing ointment of sage. Her mother knew no better way to defend her. Inezch was one of the few children her age that Claricia was allowed to see, because their mothers were friends and nobody knew he was a boy back then. When they were teenagers, Inezch snuck Claricia out of her house one night, took her down to the river and proposed under the full moon. Since they neglected the ointment, Claricia was kidnapped by the local dracula lord. Through luck and guile the two managed to escape his mansion, with the fiend burning inside. Needless to say Claricia and Inezch aren’t their birth names, those were also cast aside into the flames.

Now fugitives, they were forced into a life of adventuring and crime. Always on the run from both civilized and feral vampires. They learned to go by aliases and to hide their identities. It was while disguised as soldiers that Inezch discovered that he felt more himself when addressed as a man. They did what they could to survive, scrounging for any scrap of advantage to even the odds. Starting from the recipe for concealing ointment that her mother taught her, Claricia studied alchemy in hopes that they would hold an explanation for her blood. Inezch became a paranoid but capable fighter, always calculating, always trying to anticipate future dangers.

He hated how their most consistent work was monster slaying. Claricia would bait creatures out for Inezch to ambush them. It was on a monster hunt that they met Miette the Caterwaul. A newborn Caterwaul is a grave threat to humans because they need to steal breath to grow. Mature Caterwauls however do not favor humans over other prey. Claricia saw something of the cat that Miette once was and tamed it in the way that only someone with her blood can. Inezch and Miette did not like each other at first, but eventually the Caterwaul would sleep in his lap. The three had other companions over the years. Most drawn by Claricia, many of them tried to eat her, a fair few tried to romance her, and a concerning amount were beheaded by Inezch. Those three turned out to be the idea arrangement. Claricia got a 400 lbs deterrent against other night-monsters, Inezch got a friend who wasn’t also a romantic rival and Miette got regular scratches behind the ear.

The most significant treasure they ever found was the Sphinx of Black Quartz. They would have sold it off to the highest bidder,if it were not for the power it granted. Inezch was confident that he could kill any beast, but he was always short on information. So he swore vows of vigilance for spells of divination. None of his vows were quite to the Sphinx’s standards even if some got close, so they had to use Claricia’s blood to empower this magic. One was bad enough that he got afflicted with a doppleganger.

The couple did not want to live the rest of their lives on the run. Using Humor Realignment Treatment they were able to make sure no one would recognise them. They kept the Sphinx however, Inezch couldn’t part from the power and Claricia wanted to find a way to destroy it. The best she managed was subvert it. She gave the doppleganger the name Distal and caused him to love her more than he hated Inezch. Distal was not made to feel love, it left him confused. He remembered Inezch’s riverside confession as his own, but conflated Claricia with the moon. This strange family lived in peace for a while.

Then one day Distal pronounced the omen that Claricia would die of her own poison, without any ill intent. It happened in the dumbest way too, she accidentally drank some instead of her nausea medication. When Inezch found her lying dead, vines already wrapping around her skin, he went into denial. That evening he did his chores ignoring the caterwaul’s wailing and fell asleep drunk. When the next morning he woke up without her, Inezch asked Miette to kill him.