Disappearing dwarves


Advice


As part of my horror campaign I have a side quest in an abandoned mine/hall of a dwarven clan. I know that all the dwarves suddenly disappeared, but i haven't decide what caused this.
What do you think would be the scariest reason for 250 dwarves suddenly disappearing?


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They ran out of beer.


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It's Skyrim all over again!

Why! Why did they have to fill their fortress cities with useless pumps and stupid clockwork puzzles!


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Starfinder Charter Superscriber

Whatever you come up with, just don't tell that Tolkien dude. He'll swipe the idea right out from underneath you!

More seriously, a fungus who spores gradually infected the dwarves with cannibalistic hunger. It's pretty grisly, and the longer the PCs stay to investigate, the higher the chances they'll get infected too!

Scarab Sages

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A Balor living in the bottom level is the traditional answer.


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The mountain is a genius loci. After too long with humanoids inside of it, it developed an "immune system" and ate all the dwarves. The best time for the players to realize this is when they're deep inside, making a ruckus with something that was more natural than them and they wake the mountain.

Then they have to escape dealing with the mountain's "immune system" whatever that is. I'm thinking various elemental earth creatures.


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Borrow from a Drizzt novel.

In the novel, a contingent of Drow accessed an abandoned dwarven fore complex, awoken primordial, sentient magma from the planet core, and used it to infuse high level powers and magic into their crafting of weapons and armor.

You do not have to borrow word for word, maybe the dwarves awoken the primordial and were wiped out, or maybe the primordial infusion caused the dwarf weapon and armor to have more power - enough that the whole clan used them... But the primordial is jealous and likes not being used - there is a hidden sentience in each, and the dwarven armor and weapons shattered themselves during a raid, leaving the dwarves unarmored and unarmed against XXXX.


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They had been slowly replaced by dopplegangers over time. One day there were no dwarves left and the dopplegangers all left. The dwarves who weren't there at the time - traders, those who married out, exiles etc. - have fallen under deep suspicion by other dwarves.

Dark forces mutated them into terrible creatures, warped parodies of dwarvenkind... demons, undead, aberrations or even kender.

A terrible flood drowned them all, then a necromancer showed up and stole the bodies.


Some interesting ideas.
I don't think my pcs can handle a colony of doppelgangers and elementals don't really strike me as horrific. Balor may be too much of a cliché. I should have included that the mine/halls are without any sign of the dwarves.


Pathfinder Roleplaying Game Superscriber; Pathfinder Starfinder Roleplaying Game Subscriber

They were raided by drow. Now, all that remains are the hideously fleshwarped monstrosities who stalk their old homes for fresh victims.


Yeah, you have to do some work to make the elemental idea horrifying. I'm thinking the dwarves are gone because the elementals buried them alive and then the mountain animates and recycles them as some kind of terra-cotta style soldier. So when things get crazy, you have these smashable minion types that USED to be the dwarves with elemnentals trying to drag them into pits. And they all just keep coming while the players claw their way out.

Scarab Sages

Serious answer, a darklands zygomind came close to the compound and all the dwarves are now living the rest of their lives in its mindscape. It's up to you if anyone is still alive in there.


Disease. One that originally only affected Dwarves but has since mutated. Particularly scary feeds off magic. Cure Disease accelerates it's progression.


If you are thinking primordial magma as just "elemental" then yes, I can see where this would not be terrifying.

The ancient and primordial sentience of the magma in the book was terrifying because it was beyond gargantuan, could not be controlled, and was about to erupt and engulf an entire hundreds-of-leagues square area on the surface world due to its being, "awakened."

But don't focus on that if it does not fit what you want the PC's to fight NOW... it does not have to be the focus of what is there NOW, it could be a sidebar.


Well, if they're just 'gone' ... ie: no dead bodies or the like left over... that's a bit differnt.

Perhaps they were trying some grand magical experiment/ritual and ended up shifting the entire complex into another plane of existence? Perhaps with random ghostly echoes of the dwarves wherever they get sent to bleeding into the real world.

Creepy plants are always good... The zygomind mentioned above might be a bit high up the food chain (unless the goal is to just deal with minions, not the boss). But perhaps a mindslaver mold... or a Myceloid.

The later could let you leave a few decaying bodies laying about that looks like they exploded from the inside.... and most of the dwarves could have been affected by the lesser geas effect of the disease, which would cause them to all want to travel to the nearest mycoloid colony, explaining why you see no dwarves at first.

Personally, I love how much I hate running into plants. Once spores and things start huffing around and I know I'm breathing them in, no matter how hard I try... god only knows what horrible things the GM can do from there.

There are lots of plants. Heck, since you're underground, perhaps the dwarves were doing something to bring them here, and you can tack a template of some sort on them, to make them creapier... maybe they all bled over from the shadow plane (shadow creature template?)... perhaps they came across a vein of some ore that was 'wrong' in some way, that infested the local fungus (lots of templates might work)... or if you want just plain creepy, the flesh plant template! Plants made of intestines and fleshy bits?! Hell ya.


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Pathfinder Roleplaying Game Superscriber; Pathfinder Starfinder Roleplaying Game Subscriber
EvilMinion wrote:

Well, if they're just 'gone' ... ie: no dead bodies or the like left over... that's a bit differnt.

Perhaps they were trying some grand magical experiment/ritual and ended up shifting the entire complex into another plane of existence? Perhaps with random ghostly echoes of the dwarves wherever they get sent to bleeding into the real world.

Yes! Make the entire place a "Silent Hill" styled dungeon. :D


Scariest thing for a dwarf is that the mine ran dry, so they all left.

Scariest thing for me would probably involve a lot of spiders and a re-enactment of the reactor scene from Aliens.


They kept mining, and found more and more gems ant metals. They kept going deeper. Then one day, the dwarf at the bottom asked, "Wait a minute, why is my pick feeling warm? And do I smell sulfur?"

And then the mountain erupted.


I had a similar "where did they go?" cavern complex.

My reason, was the introduction of Akata (Bestiary 2).

CR1 medium aberrations, that infect their prey with larval young.
Victims turn into void zombies, who have a tongue/tendril attack to feed the larvae inside them. Mature larvae become new Akata, and the cycle continues.
Unchecked, Akata can wipe out a community, no problem.

Plus, for your horror theme, you now have void zombies (fast, do strength damage) and you can add whatever young or adult Akata are still around.

Akata can hibernate, so even if the dwarves disappeared a long time ago, they could have gone inactive until new prey arrives.

Scale up/down to fit your party level.
My group was higher level, so the Akata were 'advanced' and the void zombies weren't limited to 1 strength drain attack. Now THAT was scary.

Hope you like the idea.


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Making the former dwarven stronghold a dragon's den is always solid. You could even try to use one of the other dragons who favor underground environment.

An Underworld Dragon who tunneled right into the dwarves' home and devastated them with the shock of the sudden attack perhaps, or maybe an Umbral Dragon with a contingent of undead dwarven servitors.


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Why not do a combo of Tolken's Path of the Dead (Dunharrow) and Pirates of the Caribian's Flying Dutchman. The dwarves were absorbed into the mine and became ghosts or haunts.


Since someone already did the Tolkien joke, I'll go with....

A Colour Out of Space.

Somehow, a Colour Out of Space ended up in the dwarf town and began to feed. The dwarves never found it and either turned into Colour Blighted monstrosities or crumbled to dust.

Scarab Sages

Pathfinder Rulebook Subscriber

Rust monsters.


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The mine went 'bad'.

People stuck in close proximity to one another for long periods of time tend to learn how to anticipate each other, wordlessly, instinctively. Normally this is fine, unless you're like the dwarves and spend a lot of time digging down into the deeps. You get naturally occurring deposits of magical materials down there as well as old spells or curses that were buried and forgotten.

Things get mixed up and then the mine starts changing folk. Before you know it, nobody in the mine has spoken in weeks. Before you know it, nobody remembers how. All you want is to keep digging down, to sink lower into the old magic and dead histories.

A mine can go bad any number of ways. Like the time those paladins got worried and went to check on Tearhammer Crevasse. They say they found the upper residential levels abandoned, as though everyone just decided to get up and leave all at once in the middle of whatever they were doing. The paladins found them at the bottom of the lower shaft but by then they were barely recognizable as dwarves. Their flesh had begun to... run together, but still they dug.

Then there was the reports those halfling traders brought back from Findalstone. They say the gates were barred from the inside, and the mine seemed to have been collapsed after them, but there was something strange flapping from the flagpoles. It was as though the locals had simply stepped out of their skins and run them up the poles. They were perfect, intact, with no cutting or stretching marks to be seen anywhere. Not even a drop of blood.

Cragholm was not much better. Someone claiming to have escaped reported that the dwarves had shot him and a traveling companion with some kind of paralytic and dragged him into the mine. They did not stop until they got into the unworked passages. He said there was rotting meat scattered in chunks all over the mine floor. As he watched, helpless, they stripped the living meat from his friend's bones and discarded it. It was the bones they were after, stuffing their blood spattered prizes into mouths of rotating gem teeth before vomiting up a bone paste that they molded into a horrifying facsimile of a wasp nest.

Hundreds of ways but alike in two facets, they always dig deeper and the only thing to do is burn out the mine and seal it.


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Elephants, then mandrills, then demons, then everybody went crazy and killed each other in the middle of a giant fire.

Only the half-finished iguana statue outside the smoking ruin, and the mad dwarven child playing in the bone heap, remain of the proud dwarves that lived there.


What if they were attacked by Phase Spiders? Slowly they all got pulled to the ethereal plane. Even those that are still alive are trapped in a border world with only hazy glimpses of the material plane. Occasionally you can still hear their desperate screams, and the ectoplasmic scars of attempts to claw their way back to their reality.


Pathfinder Lost Omens, Rulebook Subscriber

A Colour Out of Space


Or for an idea that isn't a Dwarf Fortress reference, how about a deck of many things?

Visiting traveler pulls into town, sits down at the dwarven bar for an ale and a game of cards with the deck he found on the dead adventurer.

He deals the first card, and poof! A dread wraith appears and attacks him. The off-duty dwarven soldiers at the bar freak out and, not understanding the magic at work, attack the wraith. More wraiths appear for them and the battle spills out into the street.

Pretty soon the battle has claimed every able-bodied dwarf, with the non-combatants fleeing the carnage and dispersing, to be preyed upon by orcs and bandits.

(one of the cards in the DOMT summons a dread wraith to kill the drawer, with more appearing to attack any who attempt to help him. In a militarized settlement that didn't understand where all these wraiths were coming from, it could spread pretty quick)


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Zippomcfry wrote:

As part of my horror campaign I have a side quest in an abandoned mine/hall of a dwarven clan. I know that all the dwarves suddenly disappeared, but i haven't decide what caused this.

What do you think would be the scariest reason for 250 dwarves suddenly disappearing?

I always thought that Wendigo scenario in Rise of the Runelords had potential... might be something worth tapping into, and cannibalism is certainly horror-worthy.

Silver Crusade Contributor

Wiggz wrote:
Zippomcfry wrote:

As part of my horror campaign I have a side quest in an abandoned mine/hall of a dwarven clan. I know that all the dwarves suddenly disappeared, but i haven't decide what caused this.

What do you think would be the scariest reason for 250 dwarves suddenly disappearing?
I always thought that Wendigo scenario in Rise of the Runelords had potential... might be something worth tapping into, and cannibalism is certainly horror-worthy.

The bucca wendigo (scroll down) would be perfect for this scenario. ^_^


Due to a crash in the price of the material being mined, the Infernal Corporation that had contracted with them to operate the mine decided it wasn't getting enough return on its investment, so it invoked the Soul Consumption Clause between the lines in the fine print . . . .

Scarab Sages

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Permanent Lycanthropy. They're still digging, but not in stone anymore.

The price of gems and metal tanked due to market saturation so they all killed themselves. Thus the players learn a valuable lesson in supply and demand.

A larger scale version of the "beautiful ones" rat experiment - Less sudden, but i think it's more horrifying because there are no monstrous/planar/magical/darklands interventions. Having created planar devices to provide infinite food and water the Dwarves fell into forge-peen measuring contests, smithing and smithing on more and more elaborate (but less functional) pieces that would make a History channel reality show jealous - until something broke. it'd been generations since something practical needed to be forged. after some trial and error it was repaired, as a Rube-Goldberg machine. generations of this lead to machines so complicated that users would die of thirst before being given a drink of ale, of starvation before some mushroom and leak bread could be delivered, and of shame and old age before the barber-bot could give them the most elaborate beard the world has ever seen. The worst part? Every Dwarf went along with it, they knew nothing else. they sat and waited, patiently, for everything to work as it always had. there's no violence, no struggle - just dessicated, fabulous, Dwarven remains and devices that are still running to complete their mechanisms triggered so long ago.


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This mine was the home to a great Dwarven alchemist who re-discovered the formula to make MIMICS.

At first it was just novelty cup-sized items that could walk and talk, but some less scrupulous dwarves got their hands on the formula and decided to use it to elevate their status in society. Now there's no telling how many mimics are hiding in these mines - or how big they got.

For extra fun, the mimics themselves got their hands on the formula and decided they havethe right to procreate themselves.

For extra EXTRA fun, the mimics aren't be evil/malevolent, they're the slave class who rose up and overthrew their oppressive masters. They simply hide until provoked by the PCs (although a PC actually touching a mimic might startle it into attacking).

Grand Lodge

Pathfinder Starfinder Roleplaying Game Subscriber

They created ever more intricate clockwork constructs with ever more powerful thinking engines to serve as their workforce in the mines. The greatest of these became self-aware and petitioned for freedom. When the Dwarves refused, their former slaves overwhelmed and slaughtered them.


The only clue is the untranslatable word CROATON carved on a stone column.

EDIT/. Yeah I know it should be a tree, but they ARE dwarves.


A lone kender was introduced into the clan...


Something lurking in the Shadow plane came for a visit.


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Paranoia+delusion murder-mist/plague.

Picture this: Your players walk into the mine. One of them picks up a journal describing a daily maintenance log for a few weeks, then a somewhat humdrum description of the the last few days. Towards the end, the writing begins to describe disturbances in the lower tunnels - sounds, noises. Various specific valuables gone missing - chunks of onyx, diamonds, silver dust, grandmother's pentagram necklace, etc. A few miners presumed lost. Then it mentions somewhere truly strange and indicative of a specific menace deeper in the tunnels, but it is cut off and perhaps blood-stained, with a third chunk of the book torn out. The clues seem to hint towards a Balor inhabiting one of the lower reaches. No dwarf in sight, however. Other journals/mine logs describe similarly strange happenings that are indicative of different threats. One tunnel/work gang might have put up mirrors and garlic, and had the strange noises/disappearances/happenings appear to cede. Another might have had everyone light scented candles. There might be a maintenance request to remove a layer of sea-scented slime mixed with bird bones in a lower tunnel. One or two might note that their vision seems clouded, or perhaps there's some smoke drifting into the tunnel. Many of them describe other dwarves as acting suspiciously, hiding secrets, or being overeager to escape company and delve deeper into the mine. As the players venture deeper, have a few of them make secret Will saves or something. Ask for their mind-affecting save modifiers, then roll the saves for them behind your GM screen. Those who succeed start to notice a sort of thin, wispy fog once they get deeper. Those who do not start to see the signs of a certain powerful threat down one of the shafts (like the Dwarves did) or hear some of the noises described. Both groups should see an increasing number of bloodstains and/or marks of more recent activity. As they progress, you should prompt a few more saves as such, probably at intersections, journal discoveries, or landmarks. Each success, the visible fog grows deeper, although it is not enough to seriously disrupt vision. Each failure, and more signs and noises are apparent. Once someone has failed (secretly, of course) a decent number (probably 3-4), you should pull them aside, and tell them an absolute lie about what is down one of the tunnels. Perhaps say that there's treasure down one of the tunnels, definitely out of sight to those who are seeing the fog. The next person who fails enough should be told that the first person was deceived by a much more powerful (demon, devil, ghost, shadow - whatever fits best), and they are being lead to its nest/home/man-cave. However, they should also be told that they cannot leave or tip off the demon/devil/ghost-thing that they know, since it is lurking higher up in the tunnel, towards the entrance. Given the journal reports, there might be a way to defeat it using materials left in the lower tunnels. The next player to fail gets told that the mist (which only the people who mostly saved should be seeing) is actually an illusion created by a murderous (cave-shaped mimic/necromancer/Dwarven cannibal cult/whatever works), and that the party needs to get out immediately or be eaten. Repeat secret, plausible, conflicting information/instructions until at least half the party is misinformed and disagrees on what to do. Remember that 3 people (in a 6 or 7-man party) 2 people (in a 4 or 5-man party) or 1 person (in a 2 or 3-man party) may not have failed most of their saves, and will see the mist clearly. This is alright, so long as everyone has doubts and secrets.

Once you have set up appropriate confusion among the party, and have gotten them deep enough into the mines, pop a reveal on them. Once you get deep enough, you should find the Dwarves, or their remains. What condition they are in exactly may differ depending on how you want the story to go. I'd say the most likely thing is that they all slaughtered each other, and it ends there. But you could use this as a setup for a more powerful enemy, such as a Zygomind (haha, good luck). Or as a stepping-point to dive into unknown territory - perhaps all the Dwarves' side-tunnels led to a single, strangely gourdlike lumpy-round cavern with a broken circular seal/table covering a deep, greenish watery pit. Then you flood the room. Or instead of that, the fog seems to curdle around a brass oil lamp left at the bottom of the tunnel. And the first player to pick it up...

Well, you get the idea.


I skipped reading some ideas, I'm afraid, so I don't know if these appeared or not...

This idea is stolen right out of the Dragon Age vault: Does there have to be NO sign of the dwarves? Why not dwarven ghosts, talking about some approaching menace that would (and did) wipe them out? Some ghosts say they want to flee, of course, and others are exhorting their comrades to fight as a rear guard to give those that do flee a chance. The menace might still inhabit their halls, or might have died or moved on. {To clarify: the ghosts are mere images that cannot be interacted with.}

For a different approach, it could have been a disease that eliminated procreation. Perhaps, the last few dwarves left in search of a cure. But do remember, there should be a burial ground or catacomb or something. In which case, the dates given would give clues as to what happened. And there might be a journal in the clinic.


A wandering medusa with a ring of invisibility moved in. She waits for a dwarf to be alone then attacks with her gaze. She then casts Shrink Item and picks up the tiny statue and goes invisible. Result: one less dwarf, and one more statue to be found in the rubble pile no one has looked at in ages.

/cevah


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Daw may have intended his as a joke, but that might just be the way to go: The dwarves are simply not there, there is no apparent reason for them to be gone and they only left a handful of cryptic clues that are impossible to decipher.

When even appealing to otherworldly or divine information sources simply results in more unintelligible 'clues', your players will scare themselves trying to figure it out.


They were about to be attacked by a powerful enemy. Rather than betray the secret they were guarding, they sealed the complex away and committed suicide. One room contains all their corpses.


Air. I had a hostile Earth 'demon' close off all the ventilation shafts. The lack of options forced the Dwarves out. The demon left, but the dwarves left for good.

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