Candlemere Prison

[Justin Sluder]

I was reading through some of my old issues of Dungeon and came upon the "Spiral of Manzessine" in issue 94. It's a mind flayer prison. This also got me to thinking of Carrion Crown part 1.

These got me to thinking. What if Candlemere was an Azlanti prison. A remote location guarded by now barely functioning clockworks, with a demilich warden and a homunculus that used to be it's familiar. The homunculus would be the old reason any of the clockworks actually still function.

Perhaps it's another of the Star Towers?

The prisoners would be various "rebellious" figures. Some mythic, most not.

Thoughts?

[Justin Sluder]

*37 hour bump*

[Bofdm]

The mystery behind Candlemere seems to vary from campaign to campaign, and in a sandbox like Kingmaker it's easy to manipulate the reasons behind it to be more interesting for your group of players to investigate.

I'm not as familiar with the Golarion setting (or Carrion Crown) but I would question the danger of having a run down tower with a demi-lich and mythic figures about three hexes away from where most kingdoms have their Capital set.

However if the question is "Would it be cool to have an old run down clockwork tower still run by the homunculus of an ancient and powerful evil that also contains timeless powerful creatures within it?"

Then the answer to that is YES ABSOLUTELY.

Making it one of these "Star Towers" could make it seem more 'real' to your players if perhaps they are aware of what these are (either in character or out of character) in Golarion lore.

As-written the tower seems to lean more towards the Cthulhu Mythos as its origins. Is there a particular goal you're wanting to achieve by having Candlemere be a Star Tower as opposed to connected to ancient crazy elder gods?

[Orthos]

My one objection is that Candlemere getting mentioned in RRR makes it a lower-level challenge than it sounds like you're going for. If you can avoid the bait-and-switch of "hey check this out OOPS YOU'RE DEAD CAUSE YOU NEEDED TO BE HIGHER LEVEL" then I'm all for it. Bofdm brings up some good questions though.

[Justin Sluder]

I was originally going to go with a mythos focused Candlemere, until I came upon the Dungeon adventure, which sparked ideas.

It's not a clockwork tower, it's a Star Tower with a prison inside it which happens to have Azlanti built clockworks functioning as the guards. The demilich will most likely be at the bottom of the prison and inactive.

One of my players knows about Star Towers, because he's read Mythic Realms. My other three players, not so much.

The will-o'-wisps flock to the island because they feed of the latent fear wafting off the inmates, both those in stasis and those not.

Yes, it is designed to be an overwhelming challenge, at first. We're using a Horrifically Overpowered variant of the Gestalt variant, with Horrifically Overpowered feats. Plus, they tend to roll well. I don't use XP, so I generally ignore CR. When one of them one-shots a troll at 3rd-level, I know they can handle more than normal groups. ;)

I'm hoping for one of the three following outcomes with this:
1. They kill the demilich warden, and a PC becomes the new warden. Sadly, this means the player will need a new PC.
2. They kill the demilich warden, and an NPC becomes the new warden. I think Bokken would be the best fit for the insane job, because he's insane. :)
3. They manage to awaken the demilich and form a alliance with it.

I understand they'll probably end up doing option 4...
4. They kill the warden, leave, and the wards keeping the prisoners inside begin to break down, unleashing a great many and varied horrors upon their kingdom.

I'll be going with a panopticon design; open central shaft with different sized rings patrolled by 1d4+3 HD advanced clockwork soldiers. Creatures with Azlanti blood would be able to fly up and down the central shaft, while others would have to use the mostly maintained ladders, or some other means of moving between levels.

I want to give my players more than just another area to fight and kill everything in, there's enough of that in "standard" RPG gaming.

Anybody have interesting inmate ideas? ;)

[Bofdm]

What kind of prisoners do these Star Towers typically hold?

[Justin Sluder]

Well, Star Towers aren't normally prisons.

They're the "stitches" holding Golarion together after the gods imprisoned Rovagug inside the planet.

As far as I'm aware, the most information out there about them is in Mythic Realms, and excellent book with lots of story hooks within.

From what I can tell, they are randomly located around the globe, with three of them on the map as being in Avistan.

As for how many could one hold? I don't know, but when we're talking Azlant, I don't see the size of a prisoner being a problem for them.

[Bofdm]

Alright so I've done a little bit of investigation on Star Towers and Rovagug. They basically seem like defensive points built periodically at points where Rovagug's squirming might cause a horrible abomination to pop out into the material plane (such as the Tarrasque or any of his other brood, but also possibly natural disasters like Volcanos and Earthquakes).

So my recommendation would be, if you are set on a Demilich and Clockwork soldiers being the ruling force in this tower, then base some if not most of the 'prisoners' here on being things that would have an inherent weakness to Constructs and Undead.

Some basic ideas - Oozes/Gelatinous Cubes. I seem to recall some can't actually hurt objects, which could make construct guardians the best choice to keep them contained.

Creatures specializing in mind-affecting abilities such as Fear, Enchantment or Domination.

Horrible squigly monsters that are just spawns of Rovagug (I'm getting a distinct Lavos and Spawn of Lavos feel from this deity)

You'll also need to decide on whether the warden is still active (or even hostile - after all keeping Rovagug down even got Asmodeus on board with keeping the planet safe) and the reason why it was built. Perhaps there is some spawn of Rovagug that has to be kept dormant through a mixture of various kinds of creatures blood.

The possibilities are pretty varied in this case.