In my Age of Worms campaign the PCs have purchased and fixed up the abandoned mine office and are using it as their home. Finally, over the many weeks of adventuring through The Whispering Cairn and The Three Faces of Evil, the house is cleaned up, and mostly repaired. I made one important change to the cellar: the stairs that lead down to a collapsed area had been converted to a closet. The stairs were completed filled in, packed down, and resurfaced, so the area would look like a 5x20 storage area.
As the PCs were getting ready to meet with Alustan (with a job offer to lead into Encounter at Blackwall Keep), the PCs heard a scream from the basement, and they went to investigate. They found a young girl laying in the closet bleeding profusely from a large gash on her forearm. She appeared to have cut herself on a large ornamental door knocker that was hanging on the far end of the storage area.
The party druid used a heal check and bandaged the girl's arm, but the bleeding didn't slow. The druid did another heal check and determined that the wound wasn't responding to normal treatment and cast a cure light wounds, at which point the cut healed, and the bleeding stopped.
The PCs were alarmed at the strange wound, and did a thorough search of the area. They found two things: the door knocker radiated faint evocation and good magic, and they noticed that the girl's blood seeped into the cracks of the stones and created an arc of a larger circle.
The PCs pulled up one of the stones and determined (through an architecture and engineering knowledge check) that this closet had at one time been filled and resurfaced. They asked the general contractor to get to work on digging up the room to see is something was buried, and they headed off to meet with Alustan.
After their meeting, Alustan cast identify on the door knocker and said that it had a permanent consecrate spell cast on it. The PCs grew suspicious of the young girl, since she appeared to be severly injured by an item radiating good magic, but when they investigated her, she was actually good-aligned.
In the two days that followed, the PCs discovered that the storage area was actually a set of stairs, but were told by the workers that it would take about 10 days to dig up properly, less if they hurried, but that might cause some structural damage.
Since the PCs were on their way to Blackwall Keep anyways, they told them not to hurry the job, and they would see what was down there when they returned.
When the PCs return, they will discover that the blood of the *virgin* girl awoke an evil that haunts a sub-basement. I'm going to use the "Bad Place" template from "Not for the Living" (by James Jacobs, Dragon #336). The PCs will have to rescue the workers and find a way to stop the haunting.
Time-wise, this adventure will take place somewhere around Halloween, so it should be extra-spooky!
