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I'm not running Blood Lords, but I am running another older 1e AP, Mummy's Mask, and one of my players has a connection to Kemnebi as a kind of mentor. I thought it would be neat to have Kemnebi distantly and tangentially involved in the overarching story to focus the player on events. My current idea is that Kemnebi, alerted to the existence of the Cult of the Forgotten Pharaoh, is interesting in supporting regime change in Osirion - an undead Mummy Lord Pharaoh might be more amenable to Geb as a nation, and a powerful ally in his later plots.

The thing is, without investing money in an adventure I have no short-term plans to run, I don't actually know what those plots are, which somewhat limits my ability to tie them into it. Is someone able to summarise Kemnebi's background and what exactly his plan in this adventure actually is, so I know how much to use in my game? Or point me to somewhere else I can find it?

This is mostly my internal headcanon as DM, culled from various sources including the 3.5 adventures The Veinstone Pyramid and Entombed With the Pharaohs, and the 2e playtest adventure Doomsday Dawn which is the culmination of the Countdown Clock metaplot. Much of this doesn't actually change the threat posed by Hakotep, but I'm hoping it will make the stakes feel greater on a larger scale.

By 4714, the influence of the Dominion of the Black on the reign of the Four Pharaohs of Ascension is legend, but a true one. Using their resources, the Numerian wizard Ramlock uses his connections to the Dark Tapestry to connect them to the Elder Gods while he works to find a way to reach the distant planet Aucturn so that he can solve what he calls the White Axiom, the last pieces of information to finish The Final Theorem, a dissertation on the Dominion of the Black. When Aucturn next returned, one of the Four Pharaohs was afflicted with an incurable wasting disease that, due to a magical pact meant to protect them all from backstabbing, afflicts all of them and eventually kills them. Ramlock, meanwhile, concluded that the White Axiom is a wild goose chase and instead believes that by travelling to Aucturn he can “ascend” to become more than human, and uses the alignment between Aucturn and the Sun with Golarion between to create a portal, disappearing. Without the Four Pharaohs or Ramlock, Aucturn’s direct influence on Golarion ends for a time until the drow ghost Maefra is contacted by Nyarlathotep, who recruits her to act his emissary on Golarion to affect the overthrow of the Pharaohs, the assassination of the Satrap, and the fall of the Sultana before the Forthbringer Dynasty’s restoration. Even she doesn’t know why, but Nyarlathotep has an interest in destabilising Osirion. But what Ramlock set in motion was a growing threat, building up like a capacitor until, in 4718, it will allow Aucturn to transpose onto Golarion, destroying the planet and freeing the Elder God gestating inside Aucturn. This is an ongoing story thread to be unravelled in other adventures - the Four Pharaohs in The Pactstone Pyramic and Entombed With the Pharaohs, and Ramlock in Doomsday Dawn.

What none know is that the Four Pharaohs were not the first attempt by the Dark Tapestry to gain a foothold on Golarion, and that their first prophet was not Ramlock but instead Neferuset, who was filled with the dark secrets of Nyarlathotep and gifted a copy of Secrets of the Dreaming Dark to work with. She seduced Prince Hakotep hoping to use her husband’s power to spread the influence of the Dark Tapestry, and is the one behind his reign’s dark perversions - undead, aberrations, and fiends of all kinds - that she promised would serve him against his enemies. But her real plan was to use the stolen Shory technology to create the first Doomsday Clocks, and if she had time to build a proper capacitor to create the portal herself. What Neferuset wasn’t told was that granting Hakotep the power of the Dark Tapestry also tied him to Aucturn’s influence, and when it appeared again his lifeforce began to drain, in the same way that the Four Pharaohs of Ascension later would, and he died. Genuinely in love with her husband, Neferuset took her life before she could even start on the plan, leaving only the first Doomsday Clock standing in the Slave Trenches of Hakotep waiting for Ramlock to pick up the slack, enigmatic to anyone who encountered it. Even Ramlock and the Four Pharaohs never suspected her role in events.

When Aucturn appeared last in 4662, the influence of Nyarlathotep's will stirred the undead spirit of Hakotep. Unable to animate his corpse, it instead sent visions to the Tephan Neferekhu, a distant descendant of Neferuset whose ancestors have maintained an oracular gift since that dynasty even if they have forgotten their origins, who was sent visions of a flying pyramid, a golden mask, and a powerful Pharaoh. Unable to parse what the visions mean, or what to do about them, Neferekhu was left frustrated, made worse by the apparent failing of her family’s prophetic abilities when her son failed to manifest any, and then with the decadent hedonism of her grandson Nebta-Khufre, who founded a cult of charisma around himself by seducing other bored and disaffected Tephan noble children while promising “immortality” - actually embracing undeath. Eventually remembering his grandmother’s visions, he used their influence and wealth to study it, including research in the Great Library of Tephu and contacting the sceaduinar Sekuer, and when Neferekhu died he raised her as an unwilling undead slave to his will to find out more. Just as he found clues that suggested the mask lay in Wati, his cult was discovered and the Pharasmin Voices of the Spire were sent in to break up his necromantic cult, and while many of its members were able to hide behind their family’s power and status to claim domination, Nebta-Khufre and his hardliner followers were exiled to die in the desert. Instead, Nebta-Khufre led them to Wati where he and the survivors used the Lottery to slip in, looking for the mask until they found it. A few days later he unlocked its power, triggering the Ka Pulse but also shattering his soul, leaving him a slave to the mask’s will.

Meanwhile, the Ib was finally able to influence someone when the Nethysian cleric Serethet discovered it a few weeks before Nebta-Khufre’s exile, forced to devour it and becoming the Sky Pharaoh, possessed by his memories but without his full power. The Sky Pharaoh knows that she must find the Flying Pyramid of Hakotep so that she can restore the Ib to him, not knowing it would return to him anyway if she died, but cannot remember where it lies or how to bring it back because Hakotep died before they were set adrift, and didn’t live to see the completion of the Slave Trenches, and intends to interrogate its architect for answers. Even as Nebta-Khufre was recruiting in Tephu, she was recruiting in Sothis and led her followers south to lead an expedition into the desert to first find Chisisek’s tomb and then interrogate it in the Sightless Sphinx, one of the few remaining sites Hakotep knew that still exists. Unfortunately, the battle with the Maftet cultists of Areshkigal has distracted her while the adventurers catch up.

Hakotep awakens when his Ib is freed from Serethet’s dead body, but as an undead Mummy Lord unable to leave his pyramid. The nightmare scenario is him reclaiming his mask, because then he will truly resurrect as a living god-king with Mythic Power, able to finally leave his pyramid to rule Osirion. But Nyarlathotep’s true intent is the revival of Neferuset, his queen, to prepare the way for Aucturn’s arrival in 4718. Hakotep may live or die, but that is irrelevant. If he has Neferuset, then she can ensure that Ramlock's portal activates and Aucturn devours Golarion. At the very least it will feel the nascent Elder God, and at worst it will free the Rough Beast and kickstart the end of all things. He has been patient, but the moment is coming and it must be prepared for. With Neferuset in their way, the heroes destined in Doomsday Dawn to stop Ramlock would find their efforts blocked at every turn by a hostile Pharaoh with undead legions. In an ideal Mummy's Mask, where the heroes win, that terrible future is averted.

In the spirit of Paizo's recent announcement of Lost Omens: Highhelm, giving a dwarven cultural enclave its own treatment separate from the wider meta-region, and having seen some discussion of Golarion elves and the ways they can be/should be tinkered with to fit with 2e, I thought it would be interesting to see a separate threat just for Kyonin itself. I know very little about it, other than that it's the elf kingdom, insular, and that it patronised secret campaigns against the drow until recently.

Off the top of my head, I'd like to see:

* An expansion of the capital city, Iadara, and its connection via the Aiudara to Sovyrian - are they actually two different cities, or one city astride two worlds? How frequent is trade and travel between Golarion and Castrovel?

* Some expansion on High Elf culture, and the ways they engage and interact with other elves, like the Wild Elves and Drow. With the redemption of Nocticula, who many drow revered, has that changed Kyonin's relationship with the Darklands? Are there Drow enclaves of refugees who want to worship Nocticula in peace and find an unexpected, if reluctant, place in Kyonin? How different are the Lantern Bearers with those events? Do Wild Elves want anything to do with Kyonin, and vice versa?

* How fares the elves' eternal war with Treerazor? Has the closing of the Worldwound freed up a bunch of outsiders with demon fighting experience, and are the elves willing to admit they could use the help? Most of the Mendevian Crusaders seem to have switched their focus to the rising threat of Tar-Baphon, but just how many sellswords and veteran Champions are willing to keep the fight against chaos going, and how happy are the elves about outside help?

* Are there other elven enclaves across Golarion with embassies, maybe even connected via Aiudara gate, in Iadara? We know that Jinin exists in Tian Xia, but are there elven nations in Casmaron or Arcadia who are interested in reconnecting with the ancestral homelands they once held before Earthfall? We know that there are other gates in the world that can transport people - Voradni Voon used one to march his army from Iblydos to Absalom. Are those also Aiudare, left behind when the elves abandoned the world, or are they developed in parallel by someone else, or even predating the Aiudara and served as a model the elves innovated on?

* We know bits and pieces of some very interesting culture - the Vourinoi's fluid approach to gender, and belief in the Brightness. How common are these among other elves? Is this unique to the Vourinoi, to Wild Elves, or do elves as a whole have similar or different beliefs?

I did a bit of a deep dive into Ancient Egypt for my Mummy's Mask game, and while I think the Old Gods provided by Empty Graves are a decent and versatile sampling, it doesn't really represent just how fricking many gods the Egyptians worshipped - even for the ancient world, it was a dizzying number and the Egyptians had no problem with different regions having their own theologies and embracing contradiction. There was really no ONE Egyptian religion, but rather hundreds of loosely affiliated beliefs that shared similar themes but could be very different. Osirion is also missing some of the Hellenistic influence that popular culture associates with Egypt - the Ptolemaic Kingdom left a last impression, and it is through Greek and Roman authors that we know so much.

So as a pet project, I went through as many gods as I could and statted them out as a supplement to Empty Graves. There's a bit of redundancy here - Amun, Atum and Aten were often syncretised with Ra, there are various lioness or cow goddesses that fill similar niches to Sekhmet or Hathor, and so on. But I thought it would be nice for those who want a few more authentic options, or slight twists on something more familiar. Sokar is not the same as Osiris, though the two were often syncretised, nor were Khnum and Ra, or Hathor and Mut. I've also included a few of the Hellenistic syncretic gods that emerged with the Greek colonisation and Roman conquest, with the excuse of trading links with distant Iblydos. Hopefully there's something for everyone in here. The justification (supported by wording in Empty Graves) is that the ones provided are the ones that still have prominent cults, while these are either extinct or almost extinct, but have just enough of a presence that with a suitable dedicated follower to rebuild the faith they could make a comeback.

As a sample of what can be found here:

* Amun, the Hidden One, whose breath rolls back in mercy and is patron of the traveller in darkness
* Hermes Trismegistus, the Thrice Great, alternate aspect of Thoth and god of hidden knowledge and alchemists
* Isfet, Falsehood, the antithesis of Ma'at who embodies chaos and lies
* Khonsu, the Pathfinder, god of the waxing and waning moon who dismembers gods to nourish the glorious dead
* Mafdet, Slayer of Serpents, progenitor and patron of the Maftets of the desert
* Seshat, Mistress of the House of Books, daughter of Thoth and patron of libraries and scholars
* Taweret, She of the Pure Water, the hippo-headed protector of the household and women
* The Aten, the Sole God, heretical precursor to the Monad
* The Ogdoad, the eight gods of Hermopolis who presented a possibly older, rival cosmogony to the more familiar version of the Ennead

I've done a lot of research, and I've tried to be as respectful of the original gods and belief systems, avoiding some of the orientalist and exoticist tropes that TTRPGs tend to indulge in with ancient cultures. I've also credited sources of text quotes and artists as best I can, and included a selection of my own reading list. But I hope people like it!

Given what's involved, the Canny Jackal auction seems perfect for a Social Encounter. I've played a couple in other games so I know they can be fun, but every time I go to look at the Ultimate Intrigue rules my eyes go cross-eyed. Does anyone else have experience running it with those rules, and if so am I able to see what you used for it, or did you just run it as freeform roleplay?