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    Canonfire :: View topic - Who Built the Ziggurat
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    Who Built the Ziggurat
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    Apprentice Greytalker

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    Sat Aug 29, 2015 8:56 pm  
    Who Built the Ziggurat

    I've scoured the net for every bit of lore I could find on the "Lost City of the Suloise." I've the general premise that the city is in ruins, party swamped in the Suss Forest. At its center is an ancient ziggurat, a older structure built by some unknown race. Legend has that it contains either the Crystal of the Ebon Flame or one of Theoparts.

    But I've found nothing to suggest who built it and why?

    I'm using 5e and here are my candidates:

    1. The progenitor human culture enslaved by the mindflayers that produced the grimlocks.
    2. Kuo-Toa- the world was different, and the area was once flooded.
    3.Sahuagin-an alternate to the Kuo-Toa with the same premise of how this particular race was the original builder.
    4. Slaad- perhaps they were worshipped? Or simply offered sacrifice to appease them or it was more symbiotic with Suel mages bargaining with the Slaad?
    5. Yuan Ti. Ziggurats! Swamps! Snakemen!

    Any suggestions?
    Black Hand of Oblivion

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    Sun Aug 30, 2015 5:26 am  

    There is a ziggurat in Dwellers of the Forbidden City (I1) in Hepmonaland (Pelisso Swamp area) too. I turned it into a shrine of Tharizdun. The visible ziggurat was just what was above ground. What was below ground was the other side of it- an inverted ziggurat. The Forgotten Temple of Tharizdun (in the Yatil Mountains west? of the Lost Caverns of Tsojcanth) is another location featuring a ziggurat (the temple itself). As ancient ziggurats seem to be "a Tharizdun thing", I carried it over to the other far-flung locales, which I like the idea of.

    If you are sick of Tharizdun, you could instead link the ziggurat to an ancient serpent race like the yuan ti- who are also present in the Dwellers of the Forbidden City adventure, and say that the Suel were/are drawn to areas of magical power, both the Lost City in the Suss Forest and the Forbidden City much farther away (where a Suel group, the Black Brotherhood, had sent minions as well). Whichever of those ideas you prefer, they can be tied in nicely enough.
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    Last edited by Cebrion on Tue Sep 01, 2015 1:44 am; edited 1 time in total
    GreySage

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    Sun Aug 30, 2015 5:55 am  

    You could go even older and make Tharizdun's ziggurats legacies of the faranth.

    You could just use the ziggurat from module B4 The Lost City, too, and have it inhabited by Cynidiceans and Zargon.

    Apprentice Greytalker

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    Sun Aug 30, 2015 8:07 am  

    Tharizdun/Elder Elemental God works perfectly and my overall campaign arc deals with the threat the recombined Theoparts pose to existence. My intent is to have either a Theopart or the Crystal of Ebon Flame (maybe they're actually one in the same thing?) in the ziggurat. Conceptually, I intend to have an ancient green dragon using the ruins of the city as its lair (per sources I've found). The area is warded and guarded by a clan of woodelves (perhaps grugach). Their intent is to keep whatever is in the ziggurant "in" as much as they want to keep explorers "out." They understand there's some ancient, existential threat in the ziggurat.

    The Faranth, I'd never heard of. I'll have to check that issue of Dungeon and consider it. They don't seem like they'd be worshippers of the Elder Elemental God/Tharizdun, that's the only wrinkle.

    I contemplated the Lost City, while I like its pulp homage, Zargon and the Cynidiceans just don't fit as written. It's a bit of Granbretan citizens meets Conan bad guy from Conan the Destroyer. I like the idea though, of the Cynidiceans as the former inhabitants of the now destroyed city. The map would be perfect to depict a "race of men" who degenerated back to dwelling in the underground (thanks for that!). A degenerate Suloise tribe now serving...whatever built the ziggurat. Which would be something older than any of the human or demi-humans of the region and, at the same time, didn't or can't use the Theopart or the crystal? The Faranth idea is suitably alien, old and advanced during its time. Maybe a few alterations and it could work.

    I forgot to mention I have the Black Brotherhood involved too. The Black Brotherhood engineered a slave revolt and betrayed the Scarlet Brotherhood in the Hold of the Sea Princes. The turned the former slaves of the Sea Princes into a zealous force of sea reavers. They suffered two major defeats, against Keoland and the Principality of Ulek, and while they're still a menace on the high seas, they are using smaller groups with more discretion to drive towards the Suss and acquire their "holy artifacts."

    Edit Two: Cebrion, kinda freaking me out with your avatar and talking about Tharizdun. Shocked
    GreySage

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    Sun Aug 30, 2015 12:22 pm  

    I was going to suggest that the Cynidiceans could be degenerate Suel, though really they could just as easily be albino Flan or even members of an earlier race. But making them Suel would be in keeping with the idea that the Suel built a city on that spot.

    If you have a copy of Labyrinth of Madness, you could place that dungeon beneath the ziggurat and use the dyris people (who were originally human, grown albino from long subterranean living) from that module. The Theorpart/Crystal of Ebon Flame could be the source of the lifebane that corrupted them.

    Lately I've been associating the faranth with a variety of "mystery races" hinted at in various sources. The similarity is probably a result of a common inspiration (mostly Lovecraft's At the Mountains of Madness).

    First, the ancient worshipers of the Elder Elemental God described in Monster Mythology by Carl Sargent (page 60): "There are many tales of its being worshipped by elder races who may predate the coming of other gods and races to the Prime Material plane; these beings were shapechanging, polymorphous slime-beings of genius intelligence and uniformly evil nature. These ineffably vile spawns of evil were wiped out by the human and demihuman creator gods, save for a few places close to the core of a handful of worlds, where they are usually either in hibernation or gibbering insanely in the most desolate barrens." This description is probably meant to apply to something like Lovecraft's shoggoths, but fits decently with the description of the faranth and their nameless god.

    See also the tentacled creatures depicted in the Temple of the Eye in module G3.

    I'm also inclined to link the faranth to the Nerull's Bane culture of the ancient Fellreev mentioned in Iuz the Evil, which created a city where bodies grew mummy-like instead of decaying. This seems to fit with the faranths' desire to hibernate and wait out the aeons. "This once-proud city was the creation of a much older race than the Flannae, an unknown people who vanished long before the bronzed ancestors of the Rovers fearfully approached this place."

    Another possible connection is to the Doomgrinder, which was crafted by a conquest-obsessed warrior race according to the module of the same name, or merely ticks its way to a terrible cataclysm according to From the Ashes.

    Still another possible connection is to the lost inhabitants of the moon Celene mentioned in the Spelljammer supplement Greyspace. "At some point in the distant past, Kule [Celene] was home to a very sophisticated civilization... It seems unlikely they were human, however; according to magical assays, the ruins were deserted several million years before the first human walked the surface of Oerth." The far side of Celene was devastated by asteroid strikes at some point, which fits with the idea that the faranth civilization on Oerth was destroyed by an asteroid impact. Also, the description of the faranth seems to be based at least partly on the moon-beasts from Lovecraft's "Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath."

    But even the Forgotten Temple of Tharizdun, which I think a lot of us assumed was human in origin, wasn't necessarily originally built by humans (though I think human worshipers of Tharizdun must have discovered and temporarily inhabited it at some time). WG4 mentions at least two distinct periods of occupation; the first in a "previous age" before Tharizdun's imprisonment, and then, "after a time," servants of Tharizdun who returned again to attempt to awaken their slumbering lord.

    The Crystal of Ebon Flame might (or might not) be connected to the Cult of the Black Flame from Baltron's Beacon. I'm not sure if that could easily be tied with the Lost City of the Suel, but perhaps Ohjos or an earlier cultist at one point ventured into the ruins and became inspired by a glimpse of the relic.
    Apprentice Greytalker

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    Sun Aug 30, 2015 2:35 pm  

    Great information Rasgon and it's helping me synthesize the various elements into a cohesive whole. I do have Labyrinth of Madness (near mint in fact).

    The ziggurat was built by the Faranth in veneration of the Elder Elemental God.The Ziggurat contained the Theorpart used by the Faranth's sorcerer-priests for divination and communing until the time of the cataclysm that ended their civilization in the Flanaess.

    The Suel folk who built the city (Cynidicea) around the Ziggurat originally settled the lands of Celene. They were driven from the lands of Celene by the Fey folk who could no longer tolerate their wickedness. Some of the leaders of the Suel were Doomdreamers and followed the portents to found their city around the ancient ziggurat. It's splendor became legendary as did its mysterious destruction (which I'm thinking was volcanic in nature).

    The survivors of the destruction fled into the ziggurat, further degenerating. The deeper the folk descended, the more warped by the malign force of the Theorpart until the ones in the darkest depths of the undercity are scarcely anything resembling human (not sure I'll use Yuan-Ti, something more like Kuo-Toa/Deep Ones or something more "tentacled").
    GreySage

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    Sun Aug 30, 2015 3:18 pm  

    I'll point out that the Suss Forest encounter charts include gibberlings. But there are a lot of degenerate human-descended races that could be used: grimlocks, meenlocks, foulspawn (from fourth edition). Gibbering mouthers? I guess you wouldn't have to change yuan-ti very much to make them masses of tentacles instead of snakes.
    GreySage

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    Sun Aug 30, 2015 7:07 pm  

    And, though I like most of your ideas, DeanP, I feel the need to point out that there isn't much support for the idea of volcanic activity in the Suss Forest. Despite the fact that Mount Suderham, south in the Drachensgrab Mountains, is volcanic, it is a lone volcano and there doesn't seem to be any such activity north in the Suss.

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    GreySage

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    Sun Aug 30, 2015 11:24 pm  

    Well, it's not as if anyone's done a comprehensive vulcanological survey of the Flanaess. Officially there's just Mount Suderham, the Hellfurnaces, and White Plume Mountain, but there's surely more than that, and I don't think absence of evidence is evidence of absence in a thinly described campaign setting. Plus there's artificial portals to the Paraelemental Plane of Magma or other hot planes.
    Apprentice Greytalker

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    Mon Aug 31, 2015 8:54 am  

    Sir Xaris,

    There is a Living Greyhawk "Lost City of the Suloise" article that makes mention of a Oerth Dragon priest who claims the Oerth Dragon claimed the city because of the theft of holy relics. While it may be a legend, there is a plausible basis, not to mention the possibility of now dormant activity. It could have just as easily been an earthquake related to volcanic activity of the Drachensgarb Mts.

    More importantly, it echoes several events in my campaign. Labyrinth of Madness and B4 Lost City also make use of volcanic setting elements. I'm thinking of changing the Green Dragon in the ruins to a black, tying it to the Black Dragons in Nol Daer and having pools of steaming acidic swamp water for added terrain difficulty. And it looks cool. :)

    As an afterthought, as Rasgon noted, we can't know for sure. It's possible Mt. Suderham and White Plume are part of a "chain of fire" and there are dormant volcanoes stretching north and south? We are dealing with the Elder Elemental God, maybe it was some disaster brought about by trafficking with one or more of the elemental princes of evil? I'm open to different possibilities.
    Grandmaster Greytalker

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    Mon Aug 31, 2015 9:28 pm  

    rasgon wrote:
    I'll point out that the Suss Forest encounter charts include gibberlings. But there are a lot of degenerate human-descended races that could be used: grimlocks, meenlocks, foulspawn (from fourth edition). Gibbering mouthers? I guess you wouldn't have to change yuan-ti very much to make them masses of tentacles instead of snakes.


    The Suss is also the only encounter chart with ettercaps (although you could probably end up with ettercaps in other places if the result was to roll on the standard encounter tables). This gave me the idea of an origin for ettercaps as the descendants of the cursed inhabitants of the Lost City, whatever the particular cause of the curse was.
    Black Hand of Oblivion

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    Tue Sep 01, 2015 1:46 am  

    rasgon wrote:
    Well, it's not as if anyone's done a comprehensive vulcanological survey of the Flanaess. Officially there's just Mount Suderham, the Hellfurnaces, and White Plume Mountain, but there's surely more than that, and I don't think absence of evidence is evidence of absence in a thinly described campaign setting. Plus there's artificial portals to the Paraelemental Plane of Magma or other hot planes.

    Those are almost the exact words and phrases of the Conjure Maldin spell, but I don't know if it will work. He was last seen playing with the Codex of Infinite Planes, again, and hasn't been seen since. Laughing
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    Journeyman Greytalker

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    Tue Sep 01, 2015 4:48 am  

    Ettercaps are mentioned living in the Fellreev Forest in Iuz the Evil, iirc.
    Apprentice Greytalker

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    Tue Sep 01, 2015 5:21 pm  

    An Ettercap curse. I'm going to use that, not here, though. I'm making the degenerate Cynidiceans cannibalistic. A couple of inspirations come to mind. HG Wells' The Time Machine, that horror flick with spelunkers, I think it was called "The Cave." Deeper in the Ziggurat there might be actual undead, not to mention many of things previously mentioned by everybody. The idea though, of degenerate, once human beings trying to eat people alive is even more grotesque than the undead. There's a scene crying out for a NPC "guide", hireling or whatever who gets cornered and rapidly torn apart and devoured. Flicker light sources playing over the scene, the smacking, wet sounds, the shrill scream followed by gurgling and finished in silence. It should help set the tone as they descend into the Ziggurat, then the labyrinth and bear witness to the ruin of body and mind that that relic of the Elder Elemental God makes upon men.
    Grandmaster Greytalker

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    Tue Sep 01, 2015 6:17 pm  

    DeanP wrote:
    An Ettercap curse. I'm going to use that, not here, though. I'm making the degenerate Cynidiceans cannibalistic. A couple of inspirations come to mind. HG Wells' The Time Machine, that horror flick with spelunkers, I think it was called "The Cave." Deeper in the Ziggurat there might be actual undead, not to mention many of things previously mentioned by everybody. The idea though, of degenerate, once human beings trying to eat people alive is even more grotesque than the undead. There's a scene crying out for a NPC "guide", hireling or whatever who gets cornered and rapidly torn apart and devoured. Flicker light sources playing over the scene, the smacking, wet sounds, the shrill scream followed by gurgling and finished in silence. It should help set the tone as they descend into the Ziggurat, then the labyrinth and bear witness to the ruin of body and mind that that relic of the Elder Elemental God makes upon men.


    This sounds great! I've never heard of anyone using the degenerate cannibals horror movie theme in a game before. Hope it goes well. Smile
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    Tue Sep 01, 2015 6:22 pm  

    I forgot to mention, if somebody were to use 5e and wanted to keep "Zargon" intact in the Lost City., Fifth Edition Foes from Frog God Games has a "Tentacled Horror." Tentacles, single eye, horn, a tendency to claim divinity, etc. It's all there.
    Black Hand of Oblivion

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    Tue Sep 01, 2015 11:12 pm  

    Sometimes things just sort of write themselves, don't they. Happy
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    Journeyman Greytalker

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    Wed Sep 02, 2015 1:09 pm  

    I'd love to hear how this campaign develops and plays out Dean. Keep us posted.
    GreySage

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    Wed Sep 02, 2015 1:33 pm  

    I thought the ettercaps were a way to make the Suss more like Tolkien's Mirkwood, whuch would make the lost city Dol Guldur.
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    Wed Sep 02, 2015 5:05 pm  

    I'm happy to share, but beware, I'm a notorious heretic. No cow is too sacred to turn into a nice steak.

    Rasgon, Mirkwood. Hmmm...I need a druid covered in bird poo and I'm all set. Smile

    I think I prefer a more savage feel with a touch of dark fey for the Suss.
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    Sun Dec 27, 2015 4:22 pm  

    I finished the storyline, one begun close to 11 years ago in real time involving multiple player characters. It ended with one of the characters acquiring the Theorpart. He promptly used one of his three wishes to transport the Theorpart and himself to Cania and the court of Mephistopheles, where he promptly turned the artifact over to the archdevil. In doing so, Mephistopheles kept his side of the agreement and ended their pact, freeing the Tiefling's soul.

    Mephistopheles intended to use the Theorpart to counter the power of Asmodeus and his rod, re-igniting a war with Asmodeus for control of the hells.

    Now, one Theorpart is with Alathea, former priestess of Iuz, one is with Eclavadra of Lolth and the last part with Mephistopheles. In my chronicle, each part takes the shape desired by its wielder: a Ring for Alathea, an amulet for Eclavdra and a rod for Mephistopheles. It is unlikely that the Black Brotherhood will achieve its aim of unchaining Tharizdun. The corrupting nature of the artifacts are such that no agent of good or any good realm could guard the artifact(s) without eventually suffering its corrupting effects (like the Suss suffered). This solution seemed the most viable to keep it from the Black Brotherhood and stem the Theorpart's influence upon the Oerth.
    GreySage

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    Mon Dec 28, 2015 4:20 pm  

    Interesting! Sounds like fun.
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