Tick pits and parasitic keys

A look inside my latest project and some creepy doors for your next adventure.

This month, I’m making an adventure set in Kal-Arath by Castle Grief. There’s lots of Conan-ey goodness there, but the thing that drove me to bend the pen was the Great Khan’s thousand-room temple. And it’s home to a blood god and his blood-drunk cult…chef’s kiss.

This adventure is already the most doom metal thing I’ve ever made. The setting itself is bloody, brutal, and bizarre, and I’m stretching some creative muscles to meet the tone. It’s not a far walk from dendritic witches, but it’s itching a part of my brain I didn’t know was there.

The part that wonders: “what if the temple is a living thing.”

I spiraled from there.

—“What if there’s a pit full of ticks — no, waist-deep.”

—“What if you open doors by murdering them?”

—“What if the keys are alive…and parasitic” — spoiler…they are.

In this adventure, players roll dice to generate new rooms. Feeding the tick helps them pick a room that has higher… survivability

Creative muscles, like I said. And it’s in color — not something I do often.

Continuing in this spirit, I wrote up some horrible locked doors suitable for a living temple to a blood god.

Locked doors and their horrific keys

1. Dozens of skulls with one fixed at eye-height, wreathed in finger bones like sunrays. It’s toothless — the others are not. Fitting a tooth inside the jaw will open the door. Any tooth will do.

2. A brute block of rust with a toothed-blade socket where the handle should be. Placing your hand inside activates the blades, deals 1d3 damage, and opens the door.

3. A half-dead man is shackled tightly against the door by the neck and wrists. There’s a tattoo on his stomach that reads: “Open when he confesses.” The key is in his belly.

4. A slimed slab of reinforced metal covered in leeches. Some slither out of the keyhole and slop to the ground. You feed the leeches. The leeches feed the door, and the door opens.

5. A long, arched corridor terminates at a steel door with a padlock. Thousands of barbed fishhooks dangle from ceiling to floor like roots. One of them has a key.

6. An engorged tick feeds on a rat nearby. It draws closer to the locked door, and it opens for the rat. The corpse the rat crawled from is covered in the bloated things.

That’s it for this week. Blood for the blood god, folks.

—Odinson.