⚔ SHARPEST KNIFE IN THE DRAWER ⚔ (Morning Stars Dungeon)

 It was one of those ideas that seems good when you've been living on black coffee and Yonah white.

They obsessed over it. A dozen Giant laborers taken out into the wilderness, blindfolded and sworn to secrecy, but clearly not sworn enough because Saskia had heard one talking about the strangest job he ever had, some kind of dungeon or oubliette built around one spherical cell. Then there was that vault robbery, thousands of Moons of gold bullion taken from the Church like it was nothing. Everyone had heard about that, even ten years later, but only Jochem knew that it had been an inside job and with that bullion there was a certain gold-banded box that must have held something terribly valuable. He didn't remember who he heard it from, but he was never shy about making bets. Neither him nor Saskia knew how or where they had connected these two events. Maybe he whispered it into her ear, a sweet nothing to which she responded with how she'd kill anyone who caught on to their newborn score. Not that that mattered, because both of them would go on to tell about a dozen people their plans. It was set in stone. 

Five years later, their little scheme is still remembered. Everyone jokes that they retired to a life of marital bliss in the tropics just in time to miss the falling star. Of course they're dead. Hell, they probably killed each other. What were they going to find, anyways?

Exactly what they were looking for.

It's bored into the side of a rocky cliff, at the end of a short cave. There are still shoe prints in the dust. The slab sealing the entryway is broken, pushed aside- someone else got here first. Beyond the stairs leading down, it is dark and silent.

Deodand Vault

5' to a square, 10' ceilings. The interior walls, the ones that are just thin lines on the map, are concrete with a stucco veneer. The walls of the central room, however, have riveted plates of iron under the stucco.

1. ENTRY

Written on the at the foot of the stairs, copied once in Lingua, Eastern, Western, and Southern are the words:

YOU WHO WOULD COME HERE SEEKING

BEGONE LEST YOU BE SOUGHT

Two skeletons wrapped in burial shrouds have been laid out in the center of this room, covered in dust. One corpse is charred, its skull carbonized from the inside. The other has been viciously bludgeoned, bones broken in multiple places. The burnt body has nothing of value left on it, but the shattered one still has three tallow candles, a heavy sledgehammer, and a bottle of strong cherry eau de vie laid over its chest.

2. Vestry

To the northeast, simple priestly vestments on hooks. To the southwest, a wooden cabinet stacked with burial shrouds. In the pockets of one of the robes is a golden rotafix pendant with citrine studs along the rim of the wheel that grants a +1 to SAVE when worn.

3. Workshop

A damaged Iconodule with its head broken lays still on a low stone slab. A nearly empty amphora stands in the corner, a few handfuls of clay still sticking to the insides. This clay is warm and moist, like sweaty skin; if shaped into a living thing, the clay will dry out and behave as the thing it's depicting might. A snake will coil and bite, a bird will try to fly, and a human will be confused and terrified by suddenly coming into being, much like an infant.

If the Iconodule is repaired with an acoustic mirror face, it will act with hostility as others would. If given a proper face, it will gain a sense of free will, vision, and the ability to speak one of the languages of its "creator". Other than that, it's an easily-impressionable blank slate. Gaining its loyalty is as easy as asking.

4. LESSER VAULT

Three Iconodules slowly circle this room, tracing stony fingers against the walls. Putting an ear against the door before entering lets you hear the faint scraping of clay fingers across the stucco. Opening the door blindly has a 3-in-6 to immediately hit one of the Iconodules, alerting them to the intruder. Along the center of this room, three 3'×3' stone slabs cover three similarly sized recesses. Removing the slabs would take a prying tool or smashing the stone.

The central recess contains a strange chunk of stone, clearly chiseled from a cave wall, adorned with depictions of angels, all ochre-handprint wings and thumb-smudged eyes. Burnt into the stone, melted as if by a superheated fingertip, are a pair of spiraling pictograms which seem to infinitely recur on themselves. Someone studying this could begin to follow the path of the first of all Kings.

This stone counts as a Grimoire for class purposes. King Arum's "school" consists of the following Words. At Template A, start with the word Fire and roll 1d6:

1. Fear. 
2. Dogs.
3. Pride.
4. Tools.
5. Art.
6. Fertility.
7. Rebellion.
8. Authority.

The other two recesses contain the Wand (a piece of fulgurite) and Hammer (an aurochs femur) Implements. If you would seek Words beyond those Arum recorded, your best hope would be the divine vocabulary of the Angels: words such as Gravity, Inertia, and Entropy.

5. BAD AIR

The north and east doors have slightly more resistance when opened than the rest of the doors in the vault, and are on springs so that they will shut themselves automatically- clear signs of some kind of triggering mechanism. When either door is opened and shut, carbon dioxide floods the room from tiny holes in the ceiling. Flames will sputter and die, and it becomes impossible to breathe. The carbon dioxide will filter out in thirty minutes through small holes in the floor, or in only three if the doors are propped open. Four Iconodules lurk in the corners, and will try to grapple and restrain anyone who is suffocating in the dark. Otherwise, they will try to block the doors and stall until the intruders asphyxiate.

6. PARROT GALLERY

This room is beautiful. Fractals are painted on the walls, floor, and ceiling, the red and gold still vibrant in dim light. Something about the patterns is evocative of a parrot, or perhaps an angel. It's an infohazard, of course. Anyone who inspects these patterns for more than a glance must test SKLL or immediately catch on fire. From that point on, any time that character is reminded of the parrot (if you're very cruel, this is any time the player mentions it,) they must make the SKLL test again. The only way to be cured of this infection is a quick wipe of the memory- the easiest way being getting blackout drunk.

A pair of Iconodules with heavy stone wings (2 HD, 12 HP, one extra slam attack per round, parry one melee attack per round to reduce the damage by 1d6,) flank the door to 8. Being caught on fire is almost certain to make a lot of noise.

Someone blindfolded or insanely reckless could scrape 200 SP of gold leaf off the parrot fractals, defacing them into ineffectiveness in the hours-long process.

7. HOOKS

Gut cords hang in thick curtains from the ceiling, rigged with barbed fishhooks and little bells. Moving through slowly requires a SNEK test to avoid jostling the bells, but runs no risk of getting hooked. Moving through quickly will always make noise, and gives the hooks three "attacks" at +2 to hit for 1 damage each. If at least one rolls totals at 20 or higher, the target must SAVE or be blinded in an eye.

Four Iconodules, a pair on each end of the room, wait in the corners until they detect noise. Their stone skin gives them immunity to the hooks, but could be easily disoriented or distracted by the bells.

8. WHAT QUIETNESS WAITS FOR ME

The door here is thick, solid iron, opened by the turn of a wheel. There is no lock, but someone with knowledge of mechanics would be able to tell that turning the wheel winds up a mechanism inside the door, and that turning it even slightly past the point at which the door opens will trigger it. If allowed to release, the mechanism activates a spring-loaded alarm bell (as one would find in a clock) that alerts all the Iconodules across the vault to come and attack not only the intruders, but the prisoner.

The inside of the room is a sphere of brass plates, strewn with golden wires taut as guitar strings- 1000 SP, easily. In the center of it all, wrapped up like an insect in a spider's web, is the dread sword WHAT QUIETNESS WAITS FOR ME. Break a single wire--and with it the ritual binding that holds the sword in place--and it will cut itself free in one terrifying instant with a sound like a string section being killed in an industrial accident. It will attack Iconodules preferentially, but will at least shriek "LAY DOWN YOUR WEAPONS" at the PCs if they seem like a threat. Those ignoring it are liable to become its next target.

Monsters

Iconodules

1 HD (6 HP), AC as unarmored, 11 morale 

Smooth clay statues dressed in moth-eaten robes, so well-made you could mistake them for humans if not for the acoustic mirrors they have for faces. 

Movement: Slow and quiet when they haven't detected anything, tracing a finger across the closest wall to keep track of their location. When they detect a sound, they stop, wait for a second, then charge at the source in a rattling sprint.

Morality: Robotic. Intruders must be removed. Whether they are alive or dead matters only for burial.

Intelligence: As smart as a person under the limited parameters of keeping intruders out.

Attacks: +2 to hit, one slam (1d6.)

Echolocation: The Iconodules are blind, detecting intruders by sound. They treat total silence as darkness, slight noise as dim light, and anything louder as bright light. If an Iconodule suspects there is something hiding in a silent room, it will start knocking on the wall to increase the noise level. They have a hard time hearing through walls- only a gunshot or something similarly loud could get their attention from another room.

Stone: Iconodules take minimum damage from anything not suited to breaking stone.

WHAT QUIETNESS WAITS FOR ME

5 HD (25 HP), AC as chain, 9 morale

A +2 medium paramerion, dark veins running through the blade from the blackened point. Its handle is polished ebony, the pommel an iridescent pearl the size of a quail's egg. Forged from a piece of the shattered Saint DEATH, this sword was made to be another killer of fallen stars, and ignores all immunities and resistances to damage- what a shame that it had a mind of its own. 

Movement: Doesn't quite hover- it's more like the sword is being held by an invisible person. Look close and you'd notice the six-fingered prints smudged on the handle.

Morality: Extremely exaggerated fight-or-flight instinct. Will dice apart anything it's threatened by, but must test morale if it is ever set against something it somehow cannot harm. Most of all, wants to be left alone but also appreciated.

Intelligence: About as smart as any average person, just driven insane by years of confinement like a tiger in a too-small cage. Speaks Western in a wavering, screeching voice.

Attacks: +7 to hit, two slashes (1d8+2, ignores all damage resistances.)

Sword: WHAT QUIETNESS WAITS FOR ME is a metal sword, but is strangely brittle owing to its patchwork construction. Any odd-numbered damage roll against it does 1 damage instead. Other magical swords ignore this effect and do damage as normal.

The Making Of

This dungeon was a birthday gift to Eos of Noblesse Goblige, with her prompt of "intelligent weapon prison". Seemed like as good a reason as any to actually flesh out one of the innumerable dungeon maps I make on a whim, and to be honest, it was a really good prompt. The parrot infohazard is stolen from the story BLIT, a certified infohazard classic. I just made it a little more extravagant in its effects.