The Orestone is a forlorn, windswept and wave-lashed bare chunk of rock jutting out of the sea roughly 500 feet from shore. Cliffs encompass three of its sides with the fourth comprising a series of high rock shelves rising out of the surrounding, treacherous waters.
Many vessels have come to grief on the Orestone; their wrecks litter the surrounding sea floor. When a ship strikes the Orestone, every boat-owning peasant descends on the location to both assist the unfortunate mariners and to recover as much cargo as possible.
Atop the Orestone’s highest point stands a pile of jumbled rounded boulders. Worn smooth by the wind and rain, the stones conceal a small sinkhole that penetrates deep into the living rock before intersecting a large, partially flooded tidal cavern. Here faded alien carvings cover many of the walls. Several passages tunnel deeper into the rock; most are little more than dead-ends, inundated by the sea at high tide. One, however, plummets ever deeper over a series of treacherous escarpments until far below the sea bed it follows a circuitous route northeast. Eventually, the passage breaks into a partially flooded ancient mine several miles south east of Wolverton.
In ancient times, fell creatures lurked within the caverns, creeping forth when a gibbous moon hung in the sky and strong winds whipped the foaming sea into a frenzy to perform terrible, sanity-shattering, half-forgotten rites. Remnants of those folk – degenerate troglodytes – yet linger in the tunnels and still faithfully serve their aboleth master, Irfel-Thoth (LE advanced giant aboleth), among the squat, cyclopean ruins of the ancient troglodyte city of Kar-Loth.
Add Your Own Dungeon Dressing
Help your fellow gamers by adding a piece of dungeon dressing suitable for the Orestone into the comments below!
Want to Learn More?
The Orestone originally appeared in Raging Swan Press’s second ever product, The Lonely Coast, which is a free download from Raging Swan Press’s website. Alternatively, you can grab it anywhere Raging Swan’s products are for sale. The version presented here has been slightly scrubbed to make more sense to the reader not conversant with The Lonely Coast setting.
Deep within the ruined byways of Kar-Loth, there lies a wide expanse underneath a low-hanging cavern, where can be found multitudinous hostile slimes, jellies and molds. The ancient troglodytes once farmed these vile substances for use as weapons hurled at their enemies. but this effort went long neglected, and now spreads on its own, with strange hybrid creations forming in the center of the farm. On its periphery can be found a meager colony of myconids (mushroom people), who have only recently begun to tend to the farm once more. Why they do so, or from where they came remains unknown, but their strange appearance, even by their kind’s standards, suggest that somehow, improbably, they have arisen from within the strange putrescence of the farm itself…
I love this. The atmosphere is great and I love the feel of old-school pulp. Thanks so much for sharing!