This is post number seven in my ongoing series: an open-table West Marches campaign for Old-School Essentials. It’s taking shape, slowly but surely: we have a home base (Greyhold), the outline of a hexcrawl (the Drowned Lands), the megadungeon (the Drowned Labyrinth), a taster level (the Unfinished Halls), and some play procedures for wilderness travel. I’ve almost finished the Mist Galleries (a level concept I’m really excited by—I don’t think anyone’s done anything like it before, but may be wrong) but today I thought I’d do a bit of a ‘lore’ post and deal with something I’ve been kicking into the long grass.
Right from Part 3 I’ve described the Labyrinth as ‘an ancient prison of a dreaming god’. But so far, I haven’t really gone into detail about who or what this ‘dreaming god’ might be. There’s a faction called the Cult of the Prisoner, there’s the dreaming/sanity mechanic, and there’s a possible dungeon level named the ‘Gaol of the Prisoner’, but so far, that’s kind of it. I had ideas knocking around my mind but hadn’t put them down in words yet. So let’s do it!
As ever, spoilers ahead; some of this stuff will definitely be a bit of a ‘twist’ if you’re planning to play in this adventure whenever it is eventually finished. And as always, the usual disclaimer: this is draft material, might change, etc etc. Feedback always welcome.
The Prisoner: what is he?
Clockwise from top-left: Cthulhu (François Baranger); Zargon (the Lost City, Wizards of the Coast); Davy Jones (Pirates of the Caribbean); Jenova (Final Fantasy VII); Hermaeus Mora (The Elder Scrolls V: Dragonborn)
Let’s start with what he isn’t.
I don’t think he’s a demon or a devil. There isn’t anything hellish about him. And he isn’t a god in the normal D&D sense of the word.
He isn’t an elemental either. He’s not actually made of water. He’s more like one of the Great Old Ones: an alien, weird being with a connection to the sea.
I jotted down a lot of references when brainstorming this article. Yes, Cthulhu, obviously, and Tharizdun the Chained God. Davy Jones from Pirates of the Caribbean. Zargon, The Lost City. Hermaeus Mora in The Elder Scrolls V: Dragonborn, the Daedric prince of forbidden knowledge—I really enjoyed the reality-shifting realm of Apocrypha. What else? A bit of Jenova (Final Fantasy VII), ‘the calamity that fell from the sky’. Maybe Harryhausen’s Kraken?
So, what is he? Some kind of primordial being, older than the world? Or something that fell—something not of this world at all? I’ve decided not to decide. The cultists will tell you he is the first ocean, older than the gods who chained him; a heretical text in the Drowned Archives will tell you that he came from between the stars. The aboleths might say something else entirely. It’s all a mystery: deliberately, deliciously ambiguous.
The Drowned God is the Labyrinth
In Part 3 I presented the Labyrinth as having a shifting, almost sentient quality: corridors that collapse and reopen, doors that vanish into walls, an impossible maze, unmappable. The Labyrinth shifts because it is dreaming his dream.
The Drowned God is to the Labyrinth what Halaster is to Undermountain. As the Prisoner sleeps, his prison rearranges itself. It doesn’t plot against the party, it doesn’t want anything, it’s just . . . changing. The Drowned God’s mind seeps out into the stone and water of the Labyrinth, and bends it to his will.
The Cult of the Prisoner
In ‘the Unfinished Halls,’ I presented the cultists as communing with their god by plunging their heads beneath the water. It’s there that the god speaks to them, in a fashion. He might send them visions, prophecies, forbidden knowledge—not fire and lightning, but secrets, maybe rituals, wardings, binding magic, that kind of thing (very Hermaeus Mora).
But I don’t think it would be the same for all of his cultists. Sure, his most devout followers are genuinely communing with him in some way, but some of his lesser worshippers are lost to their own insanity and perform these rituals more as a compulsion than a meaningful act. I also plan to depict how his most faithful followers undergo a transformation ritual that remakes them into something fishlike and cold-blooded, not really people anymore, better suited for life in the water.
What do the cult really know about the Prisoner? I think it depends what circle you’re in. Those in the outer ring are basically dupes: they think they’re freeing a god who was unjustly chained, and they don’t know what waking him would do. But the inner circle do know, and these are the zealous nihilists who want to bring about the end times, believing that they alone will be spared. And they steer the dupes without telling them the truth. It will be fun to watch the players gradually uncover this, I think.
One other thing: this isn’t one of those world-spanning evil organizations. The cult is geographically quite localized, and somewhat precarious; if the Drowned God were ever defeated or silenced in some way, its followers would scatter to the winds.
The Drowned God’s influence reaches only as far as his dreams, and his dreams leak into the waters from his body—and his body is bound to the deepest, darkest abysm of the Labyrinth. So the wider world feels very little of his influence. There are legends of a drowned god up and down the coast—everywhere sailors set foot, really—but most folk see them as little more than old sea tales. But for the occasional pilgrim—those rare souls who hear the whisper and come looking—they are something more. For now, the Labyrinth is less a doomsday device than a quiet pilgrimage site for the faithful who can hear it. For now.
The Gaol of the Prisoner
I’ve given a little thought to the Prisoner’s lair, as this will presumably be the final boss of the dungeon in much the same way Halaster is for Undermountain.
Getting there comes in three stages, and I want each step to feel like crossing a ‘point of no return’.
First, the shaft. The Gaol (what I’m calling it for now) sits at the very lowest point of the Labyrinth: the bottom of a vast drowned pit, which every flooded hall above eventually drains into. You go down past the point where any sane party should be, into the crushing, lightless deep, the part of the dungeon that was never meant for air-breathing things. (I swear there’s something like this in one of the Final Fantasy games but can’t remember which one . . . remind me in the comments if it rings a bell.) Then, the threshold. At the bottom is a barrier that should not be there: an inky black membrane that doesn’t mix with the water around it. And then, the final lair, where space stops behaving normally. Think of a dark, drowned, ceilingless void, endless water, and him held somewhere within it—a bit like where Eleven goes when she’s projecting in Stranger Things. Maybe not a demiplane exactly, but it should feel wrong—a place completely under his influence.
The forgotten jailers
Somebody built all this. Not a god: an earlier people, an extradimensional, spacefaring race known only as the Ancients (yep, stealing from the Might and Magic series here) who came, found they could not kill this thing, and so built a machine to hold it instead. Then, silence. Where they went and why is a mystery. But the Unfinished Halls are unfinished because the builders downed tools mid-work and never returned.
Their relics remain, scattered through the Labyrinth and the wider world, and the locals treat them as magic because they don’t know any better. Some of it is effectively magic (see Clarke’s Third Law). Some of it is stranger than that. (And yes, I’m thinking blaster rifles. Again, Might and Magic.) These relics aren’t just window dressing, either, as we’ll see.
What would waking mean?
The Prisoner—the Drowned God—cannot be killed. The Ancients couldn’t manage it, and I don’t think an adventuring party should be able to either. It would . . . cheapen the thing. So the campaign’s metaplot isn’t a boss fight in the true sense. It’s that the old bindings are wearing thin, and he is beginning to wake.
If he wakes fully, the dream stops being contained. It spreads through water—first the coast, then wherever water reaches, so, everywhere—and eventually the world is corrupted to follow the same shifting, drowned, unreal logic as the Labyrinth.
That’s not a fight the party can win. But what they can do is bury him—like a tomb. The endgame I’m thinking about is that the party must use the Ancients’ technology to bring down the entire Labyrinth on top of him—kind of like how you have to blow up the reactor at the end of Might and Magic VI. It won’t kill him, but it will buy them centuries of time, and that’s about as much as a victory as they’re going to get.
The ticking clock, then, is simple: either the party entombs him in time, or the cult wakes and the long drowning of the world begins. But hopefully the players can play for many months or even years before that threat comes to fruition!
Food for thought?
I have a few things I haven’t quite decided on. The mechanics of the binding: what state they’re in, what they look like, the signs that they are breaking down. And the Ancient’s technology: what the party need, where the pieces are hidden, how the party learns what they’re for. But those are questions for another day.
Hopefully the Drowned God no longer feels like a placeholder. But what would you most like to see next? Let me know in the comments below.
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