Broxon House (An Investigation for Sovereign Sea)

 

The dark waters of the Sovereign Sea reach right up to the cliffs under the black walls of Broxon House. Down there, at the foot of the cliffs, skerries and reefs under the surface rake their fingers over hard-earned treasures - shipwrecks of the olden days, splintered on the stones. 

The Broxons were an old family of the Greven gentry - among the wealthiest of them, in fact, involved in saltery, ironworks, ceramics, and even the first powdermill on the island. The family dwindled in the last century, however, first to a single branch of the once-expansive line, and then to a single man. How? By vanishings, fatal wasting illnesses and untimely deaths by horrid mischance. The last one of them, Edwin Prudence Broxon, was locked up in a sanatorium in Skelle five years ago, or so. 

Greven is a demonym - the island is Grief, the people, Greven. Grief is a constituent part of the Empire of Neverfar, which rules this part of the world. The Broxons weren’t originally Greven - or, well, they were - well, it all depends. They began on Hæl, an island to the west of Grief. Hæl sank into the Sea and vanished under black waves. But before that, the two islands were joined, though the land which joined them sank long ago too… 

It’s all academic. They floated here on boats stuffed with old possessions, or so they said, and damn the rumours of them surfacing well after their home sank down. Their “new” house was on the wild moorland of Westrey, where the sea-cliffs were highest from the splitting of the land. It didn’t have long enough to build up a village near to it, or a town around it, and they liked it so. 

It remains a greatly isolated place. The harsh white shine of aetheric lights has never touched it, or perhaps it never will, until you bring the portables here, on a rainy autumn outing to ruin on the cliffs…  

THE BIG HOUSE AND THE KIND SEA

If the ochre ghost of the sun is in the sky (1-in-6 chance each morning, lasts 1d6 days), the house is bathed in sepia light, furtively creeping through cracks, doorjambs and dull old window-panes. 

The panes are few, for like most from the eras before the aetheric light, the old Broxons were used most often to round the clock darkness, lit by nothing brighter than the Moon, or a wavering candle. 

If the day is, as it usually is, black and lightless - then the house’s interior is too dark to see your hand held up to your face. 

As a note, the system this would be run in would have a “stress” system - think like Darkest Dungeon’s one, basically. A parallel track to HP.  

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Broxon House is a large, dark, single-story structure, dotted with irregular windows of expensive glass, with a steeply peaked roof. It has a low, weatherbeaten profile and a generally muscular, prognathic architectural style. It’s a classic example of a manor house from the Late Royal Period. 

Encounters in the House

1. 3d6 Pale Crabs. Wide as two hands, red-eyed, a greeny-white colour. Eat corpses, move in a clacking swarm. Nasty pinches. Not aggressive unless you’re already wounded, upon which they attack as a 3HD swarm. 

2. 1d4 Seagulls. Loud, squawking, shitting, harmless. Eyes lumine yellow in the dark. 

3. Black Cat, carrying a similarly coloured, mewling little kitten in its mouth. On the way out of this place. Oddly friendly. Softest part of the belly is squamous, not furred. 

4. A huge mass of ship’s rats. Ravenous, filthy. Easily avoided with elevation or driven off with fire, but they’ll descend on the weak or dying like thousands of squeaking little vultures. If attacked by the rats, save or contract a randomly picked disease. 4HD (swarm).

5. 1d6 feral dogs. Hunt in a pack - if you roll Max HP, they’re one of Lord Broxon’s old hunting dogs, abandoned here, still in their spiked collars. Their malice is particular. Otherwise, just feral mutts with matted fur. 1HD each. 

6. Domnall Wicket, a Greven man. An outlaw thief, who took shelter in Broxon House a year ago, hiding from the weather. He encountered the thing in the basement, and now his desire to live has faded, and been replaced with a desire to kill and eat other human beings. Dishevelled, filthy, bugbitten, capable of appearing downtrodden and hangdog long enough to gut you. Smart, hungry, knows his way around the House. Otherwise, a 1HD human without shoes.  

Entryways

The House’s Main Door is the most obvious one, and it leads into the Vestibule. However, there are windows leading into the Boudoir, Ballroom, Servant’s Quarters and Library on the near, landward side of the House - though the Boudoir window has an iron grate over it. 

Trying to get to the windows on the far, seaward side of the house is a great way to fall to your death. 

THE HOUSE

1. Vestibule

Two long-burnt out whale-oil storm lanterns sit either side of the door in this small porch structure. There’s a tiled mosaic on the floor, depicting the old island of Loes, which Hæl, Grief and the neighbouring islets were all once part of. A historian could point out a number of inaccuracies. 

2. Cloakroom

Between the Vestibule and House-proper. Cracks in the ceiling drip with rainwater. Oilskin rainjackets and woolen greatcoats hang on pegs in the NORTH end of the room, and in the SOUTH, a rack hosting a variety of ratbitten boots. 

3. Grand Hall 

Faded opulence spoiled by mold, animal shit and falling plaster. A high ceiling is fashionably painted in deep black, cracks showing the white plaster underneath. Wood-panelled walls play host to paintings with running oil-paints dribbling out of the frames, distorting whatever was depicted upon them unrecognisably. The carpet is florally patterned, you think. Hard to tell through the layer of filth. The chandelier has snapped and fallen down, breaking the large central table into splinters.  

4. Library 

Dark floorboards, a thick rug, wooden shelving against all the walls. The thick door has kept this room semi-protected from the elements, as has the lack of window. There’s an appropriately aristocratic collection of books in here, wavering between various themes - naval architecture, Greven history, navigation principles, naval history, law, chemistry and dynamism (the study of the forces which animate the world). There are no books on “business”, because such a thing is hardly worth writing books on. One low-down shelf contains a few grudgingly permitted castaway novels and penny dreadfuls. 

But wait, doesn’t a window go into this part of the house on the outside? And didn’t I key in a window on the map above? Astutely observed, chum - there’s a secret room in the EASTERN section, behind the bookshelves. In here, a private reading room, with a plush armchair, thick red rug and a large supply of hefty candles. The window has thick sea-green curtains drawn closed over. 

The books contained in the secret snug are much less acceptable - books on the dangers and uses of sea-life, on rituals used by witches, forbidden compendia listing the names and forms of Petty Gods, and remnant holy texts of the same. Upon these shelves, there are even such things as the Lexikon des Unglücks, the reputed witch Mary Stahlen’s book of dark magic. That text nestles next to the Revealing of All Heresies Perpetrated Against the Holy Church of the Deep, famous for its rather unsubtle advocating position and for the grisly death of its author, the excommunicated priest Benred Felt. 

5. Inner Hall

Octagonal room, wood-panelled wall. Moldy rug, reeks badly. Plaster ceiling painted with an imagined image of the long-gone sunlit sky (inaccurate). 

As is standard for a house of this social class in this time, there is a large painting of the Empress on the SOUTH wall. The Empress is generally viewed as an immaculately-conceived Providence-given ruler in tune with the sacred deep, a prophet of state organisation, who has spent the last thirty years seeming to be thirty. Neverfar is a state moving from a messianic era, into one where they are beginning to realise their messiah’s not planning to go anywhere any time soon.

Unusually for any house of any social class, the portrait is clearly the focal point of a shrine. Dribbly candles burn down over a sea-chest used as an altar. Twixt the candles are a black-and-gold Neverish flag, gutting knives, rusty fish-hooks, a copy of the Lex Maiestas crusty with dried blood, a small Deepist anchor amulet (gold, worth £1), fish-heads with the eyes put out, and a decorated silver bowl worth £10.

Lying in the bowl, as an offering, is a fresh human ear, cut off with a knife. 

6. Trophy Room

A dark room with decayed red wallpaper. Pale sand-coloured carpet is laid down here. Pins and hooks are driven into the walls, and from them hang ragged ensigns from lands conquered by Neverfar: old Skelle, Callevar, Auger, Velta. Antique swords, a ships’ bell marked HMS Twenty Drunks, the taxidermied head of a bear, and twisty fish-bones, wrong-shaped and see-through. 

Three human skulls sit side by side in a glass-fronted cabinet, evidence of the killing blows from the headhunters still clear all these centuries later. Sharing the cabinet on a lower shelf is a thing shaped like a human skull but grotesquely elongated, with a huge protuberant maxilla and mandible, each filled with blocklike teeth, and a bulbous, distended parietal bone. 

There’s a humble iron bedframe round the corner, devoid of bedding. Someone once slept under these grisly victories. In such a fine house, this asceticism can only have been deliberate. A bedside table stands by, with a broken lantern next to a smashed bottle of Skellish whisky. Inside, a terse, unsigned journal relating journeys to Grief’s towns and neighbouring islets, with many pages torn out. The floor under the bed is stained dark red. 

7. Parlour 

Wood-panelled walls, ceiling painted with an inaccurate sky scene. The floorboards are clearly warped, and if you attempt to enter the Drawing Room incautiously, decay will catch up and they will collapse, hurling you down into the Undercroft (see below), just outside the door into the Cave Mouth. The fall will deal 2d6 damage from the impact and splintering wood. 

In the stable part of the room: two large couches, well-made, designed to sit four facing four across a wide, sturdy table. Every fitting in this room was once the picture of Greven aristocracy, a perfect room for entertaining guests. Here is the place where the hard work of keeping up appearances was set to, along with the tedious and easy work of business. A round, old-fashioned shield hanging on a wall bracket drips green and red paint. Possibly it once displayed the Broxon arms. 

Badly done life-size statues of old Hælish warrior-types with spathas and spangenhelms occupy the NORTHEAST and NORTHWEST corners. The workmanship is of a novitiate quality, and the sanding and varnishing is slightly patchy, but they are placed to proudly dominate the room. 

8. Small Room 

Wood-panelled walls, dark fitting, cramped due to the size of the furniture. Big bed shoulder to shoulder with sea-chests of crumpled shirts and expensive clothing gone to the moths

Thick rug on the floor, woodworking tools, sawdust in the corners mixing with the filth. A stash of wine bottles concealed under a thick woolen blanket under the bed. A broad, thick table, tool-bitten, is covered in small wooden carvings, mostly of sharks, occasionally of sharks biting badly-expressed people. They’re stacked up next to distorted ink-wash drawings of, probably, people, though the ink runs off the pages or pools in the middle, and nothing is left of the actual art. There’s an unloaded rifle mounted on the west wall, with IEVAN BROX. gouged into the stock with a heavy hand and a sharp chisel. 

9. Master Bedroom 

Wood-panelled walls, a ceiling painted with a scene of a coral reef in greys and blues. Dark carpet, threadbare here and there. A large wooden bedframe, devoid of bedding, somewhat inexpertly carved. Into its frame, scenes of sail and sea-life are impressed by an imprecise, amateurish, yet passionate hand. 

A bedside cabinet is found on each side of the bed. In the left side cabinet, four bottles of laudanum,, well-sealed, sit in the cabinet on the left side of the bed, along with a revolver, loaded and rolled up in a nightgown. In the right side cabinet, a pipe, some rolled tobacco and a snuff-tin, along with a wavy-bladed knife of unusual make and a large, uneven seashell. 

In the SOUTH of the room, a pair of fine old desks, well-carpented, with maker’s marks from the Orric Works, a Greven carpentry shop of significant renown and cost. Master Orric even supplied the bedframe used by the Empress in her palace, or so it’s said. 

The SOUTHWEST desk is covered in rolled up maps and charts. These depict Grief, the waters around it, and the other nearby islands. A depth-chart depicts the latitudes, longitudes, and depths in fathoms, of the remains of Hæl and Loes, eaten by the Sea. Along with this, there’s an inkwell, a ledger with a single entry on the front page recording the purchase of a full set of law books (The Commentaries of the Castigan Code, for delivery in early 1849). 

The SOUTHEAST desk is fastidiously neat, arranged in a fine station for the receiving and production of correspondence. Quires of paper, inkwells and ink bottles, a selection of pens, red wax sticks, and a set of seals. A large bundle of letters not responded to enquiring after the health of the Broxons (in specific, or in general) is stuffed into the docket in the desk marked IN. Most of these letters come from high society around Grief, but a few are tersely phrased and signed with odd, cryptic symbols in place of signatures. A small bell with a pearl handle (£4) sits where the sitter could reach it easily. 

10. Drawing Room 

Wood-panelled, ceiling painted with a scene of a shipwreck on Greven skerries. Ceiling mostly intact. Every fitting in here smells like someone smoked a lot of tobacco, every day, in this room for about two decades flat. This is because someone did. 

Two-seater couches form a guarding square around a low table with a tiled top, where up to eight people could sit and have drinks in a conspiring manner. Or perhaps a few could have drinks while the rest stood around the neighbouring billiards table under the light of the now-smashed oil-lantern hanging from the ceiling. The cues and balls are still here. You could still have a game. 

The rest of the expansive room features an especially large hearth, a cabinet full of liquor, paper and a tafl set, a corner desk, a compact harpsichord, and a clumsily executed wooden sculpture of a leaping dolphin sort of shoved into the NORTHEAST corner. 

11. East Bedroom

A large room, with whitewashed walls and a carpeted floor. Perhaps it served some other purpose before conversion into a bedroom, for it feels almost too large. The bed is sized for two, but has only one slightly bloodstained pillow. The footboard has been kicked off, leaving a raw, splintered edge. Did a giant sleep here? 

A large easel and a number of paints (pigments separating from the emulsions, colours spoiling, open pots dried out) sits in the NORTHEAST corner. Upon the easel is a confused, splodgy mass of blues, greys and blacks - the only part of the portrait not distorted into a chaotic sludge is a masterfully, carefully painted eye, peeking out from the middle as if behind a sheet of water. Sitting before the easel is an oversized, unstable, badly-made chair, initialed IB on the backboard. 

A simple desk, used only as a place to stack crumpled shirts and trousers fitted for a fat man of over six feet tall with huge shoulders. It smells of rot - a stash of fine cheeses has decayed terribly in the desk drawer. 

12. Boudoir 

Wood-panelled, cozy, plush, smells strongly of rosewater and rotting flesh. Desks and a chaise are covered in hundreds of tiny scrapes, and the curtains are torn as if repeatedly slashed with a knife. 

A cross-stitch sits partially abandoned, a creative endeavour depicting the Queen Mother in her convent, at prayer.  To the right hand side, the stitches seem to have come undone and somehow tangled together, bending the fabric and producing a complete distortion of the image. 

There’s a ragged, bloodstained hole in the floorboards in the NORTHWEST corner. The buzzing of flies is audible. A huge, dark-red stain trails across the carpet towards it from the middle of the room. If you draw close with a light, save or be pulled through by a pale tentacle, down into the Larder (see below). 

13. North Bedroom 

Wood-panelled, once plushly-appointed, quite decayed. The plaster from the ceiling has fallen in, and, in fact, a hole to the outside now exits to the sky right above the iron bedframe, which is splattered with white gullshit. 

In the SOUTHWEST corner, a large treadle-operated sewing machine, rusted to uselessness, sits by a table covered in scraps of fabric and pins. A pair of gilded scissors on the table are worth £2, for the gold, not the sentiment.

Half-constructed garments hang inside the armoire in the SOUTHEAST corner, some still held together with pins, all torn as if someone’s gone at them with a knife.  

14. Guest Room

Wood-panelled, outfitted well, but not expensively. Cracks in the ceiling admit ruining rainwater. Dogshit on the floors. An unremarkable chamber. 

Except for the large window of clear, expensive glass that looks west out to the sea. On a dark day, the thin white line of glimmering that delineates the black sea and black sky is all that can be seen. Why go to the expense of putting such a fine window in a guest room? Perhaps it had a second purpose. 

15. Map Room

Plaster has cracked away from the ceiling, revealing thick rafters. A twenty-year old map of the Empire of Neverfar (from 1835) is unrolled on the table, depicting all the islands we’ve reached in blood-red ink. The islands of the Celestine to the north, eternal enemy under the shroud of Mystery, are inked a cold shade of blue. Little wooden model ships, figures and barrels dot the map. Hefty ledgers of materials shipments, tonnage taxes and income-outgoing sit on a side table under a crack in the ceiling, bloating with water and bleeding their ink. 

16. Chapel

White walls, black tiled floors. Rows of dark wood pews. Pillars painted with bright reds and pinks. Either side of the altar in the SOUTH end of the room, tall sea-facing stained-glass windows. The left one is smashed, but the right remains, depicting a faceless figure in golds and whites descending into the black sea. This is Hiraeth, one of the saintly Obscura. 

Upon the altar is a ship’s anchor, hung above the hollow symbol of the dead sun. The symbol is gilded, worth £5. The altar has a dirty black cloth and a pair of melted tallow candles upon it, long extinguished. 

Along the west wall in alcoves are three traditionally faceless statues of saintly Obscura, who achieved communion. Depicted in smooth black marble are:

• The Duke, armoured, armed, tabarded, holding reins and spurs. A war-saint who is said to have been a premonition of the rulers of Neverfar. 

• The Queen Mother, robed and hooded, with a silver tiara worked into the stone (£10), carrying a removed wimple and a piece of ragged cloth (expertly sculpted). Immaculately conceived the Empress, created modern Neverfar. 

• Valsa, dressed to sail, arms flung wide, rope tied around the waist, and an anchor tied to that rope perched between her  boots. Descended below, returned above, protector of the drowned, sailors and the mad. 

17. Dark Room 

The thick wooden door to this room is locked. You’d have to bash it down. 

Small bedroom, black wallpaper, black carpet, black painted ceiling. Perhaps, once, a meditative space. Rooms like this aren’t uncommon in large houses. A family member aspiring (or expected) to become a member of the clergy might sleep in such a room, and work by the light of only a single small candle when necessary. This is thought to prepare some for the beginnings of the long spiritual journey to communion with the deep, and sacred Obscuration. 

A bed with black bedding, a dark wood desk painted black, no windows or lanterns of any sort. The door, locked by the last occupant when he left six years ago, has protected the room’s contents well. A small cupboard contains a few sets of finely made black clothing which you could sell for £9. Upon the desk, inkwells and a single candle (unlit, for Edwin found he had no need of it). These sit by the books he didn’t bring with him: History of Loes, A Fine Hystory of the Battle of Rant, Lamia: A Romance, and the first two books of the (banned) Valleigo Quadrilogy by Clement Canne, titled Adventure in Valleigo and Sin in Valleigo. 

18. Dining Hall

Panelled walls, bare floorboards, white plaster ceiling riven with cracks. The room smells of whale-oil, rotten food, and vomit. 

Bloodstained table gouged with deep marks. Seats and places are meticulously laid out for seven, two at the table’s head, three on one side and two on the other. If you were entering from the north, all those seated could turn to look at you together. Some of the plates are still in place, but cracked sharply. The wood of the table is filmy, like something thick is soaked into it.  

Distorted, molten paintings adorn the walls, whatever they depicted running together and dripping down the walls. A tapestry depicting some kind of scene involving leaping deer and imagined sunlight frays apart - inexplicable, wandering lines of split threads spiral and crisscross, ruining the scene. 

19. Servant’s Quarters

This is a set of rooms of similar construction, divided by wooden screens and thick curtains. Whitewashed walls, bare wooden floors, plain ceilings. There is one window, situated near the front of the room, to allow the staff to anticipate days with sunrises and adjust the curtains to the satisfaction of each Broxon. 

Humble beds with storage trunks at the end, ten in all, occupy the cramped conditions, which now smell of animal shit and rotten wood. Water runs down the walls in rivulets from cracks in the ceiling. Searching the trunks reveals a total of £12 pounds of abandoned keepsakes, valuables, knicknacks and momentos - a gold locket with a microportait of a sad-eyed man inside, a tin ring with a little emerald in it, a pair of silver earrings, a horn-handled hunting knife with a silver pommel-cap, and others alike. 

20. Ballroom

Empty, dark, the wide dancefloor visibly warped - at the SOUTH end, tall, widely spaced windows sit smashed. Reeks of gullshit, blood, ethanol. There’s a large, smashed hole in the floor in the NORTHWEST corner, with ragged edges. It descends to the Earth Cellar (see below). Seagulls cry outside the windows. 

There’s a dead body in the NORTHEAST corner, a figure in a nondescript suit, that looks like it was hit by something massive and heavy, but nevertheless soft - bruised purple, bones broken, but not a cut on him. Searching his coat will turn up a discreet medallion, indicating he belongs to the Intelligencers in service to the Empress. 

Stepping out onto the ballroom floor and dancing, or playing music, will draw up Captain Thomas Broxon (see below), from the hole in the NORTHWEST. While there is dancing or music, it is not aggressive. It can even save to attempt to speak. 

21. Kitchens 

Flagstone floor, bare brick walls. Lit stove makes the room warm and humid. Smell of cooking meat and rotting fish. 

Among the old countertops, a raggedy camp is set up, with a filthy pile of pilfered bedding, and a stack of dirty dishes and cutlery, glued to each other with dried, congealed blood. Mr. Wicket sleeps here, and if you arrive between the hours of MIDNIGHT and 6AM he is in his fitful, nightmare-filled sleep.

Searching the whole kitchen turns up £40 of good glass and silverware, but you’d need a carriage to get it all out of here. 

22. Storeroom 

Large, stone-walled room. Bare floorboards. Shelves stand against the walls. On the shelves:

• Bottles of milk and pats of butter so decayed they now possess individual ecosystems. 

• Bags of salt, a bag of flour, a bag of brown sugar.

• 40 tallow candles stacked together. Smell a bit. 

• Small, sealed, still-decent containers of spices from foreign isles, worth £8 all together. 

• Rope, nails, oil (whale, 4L), oil (canola, 6L).

• A pair of dusty oilskin rainjackets full of spiderwebs. One has a naval medal for valour jauntily pinned to the collar (the medal is worth £15). 

• Huge rusty metal can of rat-poison in pellet form. Dissolves in water to produce a neurotoxic compound.  

• 16 bottles of Herriman’s Wondrous Decoction, a snake oil from the capital, popular in the last few decades. Herriman was insistent in his claim that it makes sealife safely edible. 

Between the shelves, under an open hatch, a staircase crusted with a layer of salt goes down into the cellars under the house. 

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Encounters UNDER the House

1. Octopus, land-crawling, slate grey, man-sized. 4HD, can change the colour of its skin and the shape of its body to hide in plain sight. Strangles with multiple suckered arms at once, attempts to drag away singular prey. Slower than a human, it relies on ambush. 

2. 1d6 Man-Mussels. From the stomach down, a clumsy, naked, wind-bitten human fundament with attendant legs, knock-kneed and livid around the feet. From the stomach up, a gigantic glossy black mussel, chokingly briny, snapping like a demon’s castanet. The muscle which opens and closes the shell looks like a smeared human head. Move with a clumsy run, attempt to ram, batter, slam and crush with their oversized shell-heads. 2HD each, armour as plate. 

3. Ieuan Broxon. Twisted human body with livid skin, forced into an all-fours position, head replaced with a shark’s tail. A dead-eyed shark’s head grows out of its lower back. Marches around arse-first, bites whoever it can. If bitten, take 1d6 stress as you suffer visions of shark attacks and black, doll-like eyes. 3HD, moves in a quick hobble, unagile but persistent. Will stop anything to lap up spilled alcohol. 

4. Mercy Broxon. Branching nexus of squidlike tentacles, white as porcelain and cold as ice. Just tentacles, only tentacles, just the branching mass, terminate together in a fist-sized lump. Strangles, climbs, slithers, hangs off ceiling. 4HD, rubbery consistency gives it slashing resistance and bludgeoning immunity. Hates lights - will react with fear for a time, then attack the carrier of a light after about ten minutes, seeking to extinguish it. 

5. Lewis Broxon. Slithering thing like a beluga body, size of a horse, white and blubbery. Muscles and bones push against the skin as it struggles along. Looks a bit like a tall, fat man trapped in a sack made of hide and filled with tallow. Has a mouth on the underside, with a bright red tongue covered in dirt and yellowy peg teeth with sharp tips. Very hungry. 5HD, immune to light weaponry, moves in a slow crawl. 

6. Captain Thomas Broxon. Cyclopean giant, swollen with blood, with bulging blubbery arms and huge heavy hands, in mittens of flesh like a whale’s fins. Fills rooms. Smells of ethanol, legless - each leg trails off into a slithering trail of stinging jellyfish tendrils, see-through and soaking-wet. The thing’s head has a singular huge fish eye straining its socket, pushing every other feature to the edge of the head. Moves with a pulsating peristalsis, can drag itself vertical with parallel walls to press against. 7HD, immune to light weaponry, stinging tendrils inflict a save vs. shock on contact if stumbled into. 

THE CELLARS

1. Under the Pantry

Creaking wooden staircase comes down to a small room with a single square window overlooking the sea. Whitewashed walls, bare stone floor. Cold, dark, but fairly dry. 

2. Wine Cellar

Bare stone walls, arched ceilings, flagstones. Cold enough to show your breath, as is the rest of the are under the House. Eight rows of parallel wooden racks, stacked with bottles, most of them smashed and empty, with only £5 worth of a fairly extensive collection remaining. The floor is sticky with spilled and dried wine. 

Ieuan Broxon will pace the narrow, parallel corridors, if not yet encountered, and it will wait around a corner to leap out at anyone passing through. 

The door through to the Earth Cellar is stuck with rust, and will require a great shove to get open. 

3. Earth Cellar

Dark walls, bare stone, flagstone floor. Smells of brine, glue and rot. 

Smashed barrels, and deep stalls for storing barrels, butts of water and rum, and root vegetables (the SOUTHEAST corner is home to a pile of rotting potatoes). A hole in the roof ascends up to the Ballroom above, admitting light if there’s any up there. Just inside the door are a few open pots of adhesive paste and a dropped brush glued to the floor. The remaining glue inside the pots has dried to a tacky solidity. 

In one of the wide stalls, a mass of smashed barrels, tarpaulin, is piled and glued into a roughly spheroid pile with a hollow in the centre. If not yet encountered, Captain Thomas Broxon is squeezed into this “nest”, and will begin to crawl out when anyone enters, cyclopean eye glinting even in the dark.  

Stuffed in the briny muck at the back of the “nest” is a leather bag containing a navy revolver with a single bullet in it, £50 in promissory notes, and two unsent letters. The first is to the Attorney General of Grief asking for assistance with complex divorce proceedings in the civic courts of the island of Skelle. The second is to an “Effie Smith”, beginning with a greeting and rapidly devolving into confused demands for forgiveness, before the increasingly jagged writing trails off into illegible zigzags. 

4. Undercroft

Underpins most of the house. Dark, bare stone, cold, damp. A huge, open space, punctuated by ranks and files of octagonal pillars, occasionally marred by bulletholes. Used for storage of large barrels, collapsed furniture under sheets. 

In the SOUTHWEST, cold water pools. Pale crabs crawl around a rotten human hand, gnawed by them and by the rats. Bone is visible. 

In the SOUTHEAST, feral dogs occupy a makeshift kennel between a pair of old chests of drawers, under a white sheet. Blind, black-eyed pups yelp for their mothers. The dogs will go for the throat of anyone that draws near, but will flee and abandon even the pups if one of the house’s monstrous inhabitants draws near.  

At the EAST edge of the room, the bones of three horses are suspended in a hanging leather bag. 

In the NORTHEAST corner of the room, a pile of rusted, empty canisters marked “Phlogiston”, once full of flammable gas. 

5. Larder 

Sixteen dead people are piled in this bloodstained room, which smells overpoweringly of decay, blood and shit. Flies buzz with a thickness that blinds. If you haven’t yet encountered Mercy Broxon, it's here, lying in wait in the rafters to drop on the unwary. There’s a cracked, ragged hole in the roof that goes to the Boudoir above. If you sort through the corpses, you’ll discern they consist of: 3 Navy sailors, 8 Greven farmers, 3 Greven fishers and 2 people in nondescript garb who carry the secret medallions of the Empress’ Intelligencers. They have £30 of valuables and promissory notes between them, entirely untouched. One of the Intelligencers carries a smashed oil lantern.    

6. Office

Iron door, open. Whitewashed stone walls, gas heater (broken), wooden desk, multiple inexpertly carpenter chairs, and a wall-mounted cabinet by a wall-mounted wooden board. There’s a map of Grief with multiple sites marked with cryptic symbols on the desk, but more than half of it is obscured by a massive, rounded bloodstain, like a steady stream of blood poured out slowly onto the top of the desk. 

A keyring hangs just inside, neatly replaced by a hand that left smeared, bloody fingerprints on the wooden board. Any extant door in the house can be locked or unlocked with this keyring. 

7. Workshop

Bare stone walls, flagstone floors. Smells of sawdust, gas and woodrot. An open flame in here will cause a short, loud burst of flames. 

Iron table in the SOUTHEAST corner, covered in a stack of rusty tools (a save vs. tetanus for the incautious), a few lanterns, and a sawtooth winch, seemingly mid-repair. A gas burner, rusted to hell, sits under the table, linked to a canister with a loose valve. 

 Large hunks of old-growth wood are crammed in the WEST, huge chunks of ancient trees from Callevar, are stacked up here, rotten and riddled with woodworm. Some are idly carved at - half-formed figures never quite freed from the wood. One has a heavy lumber axe embedded in it. 

8. Cave Mouth

A natural cave-mouth. Yawns open below. Translucent stalactites shimmer sea-green under lights. A narrow carven stone staircase allows further descent. To any geologist, it’s clear the house was built over this cave-mouth deliberately, for it is centuries, or millenia, older. 

THE CAVES

1. Lagering Caves

Mash tuns, a patinated brewing kettle, casks. A small-scale operation. The freezing cold cave smells of fermentation and strong lager. The floor is uneven. At the back, a steel door, locked with the key in the Office. 

The beer in the casks is full of black particulate that smells of wrack, and is exceedingly foamy.  

2. Armoury

At the back of the lagering caves, connected by a steel door set into the stone itself. Racks of mass-produced swords, harpoons, rifles and boxes of rusted bullets. You could arm twenty people with a sword, harpoon and rifle each, or I suppose sixty with only one of those each. 

Among it, a bomb-lancer sits down here, the crate opened but the weapon never removed. This is modern whaling gear. There’s a crumpled manifest inside the packing hay indicating it was delivered in 1848. Edwin lacked the bravery to even pick it up, but for you, five explosive lances are ready to fire - and mostly intact, only detonating in the lancer on a fumble. 

3. Lord Montague Broxon 

This room is partially flooded with water at all times. The water is dark, salty, and exceedingly clear. A small pontoon bridge crosses the underground pool. Just under the water, a huge sessile mass of blood-coloured coral bubbles away, jagged spires and forests of spikes forming an abstract mass.

Touching the coral causes instantaneous visions of solar death, inflicting 3d6 stress. If one of the monsters in the house touches it, their skin splits as if under a blade, and they suffer 1d6 rounds of agony. 

4. Ritual Chamber

Sailcloth painted black hangs down diaphanously from the rock and is spread across the floor, giving this freezing cave the vague feeling of being inside a huge tent. Cords hang from the ceiling, ending in fishhooks which seem to sway in an invisible breeze. There’s a circular groove carved into a central spot not covered by sailcloth. From that spot in the dead middle of the room, an otherworldly cold emanates. Stepping inside covers the entrant with a pervasive stillness and cold (if pious Deepist, clear 2d6 stress. Otherwise, gain 2d6). 

With a thought, the one inside the circle can choose to disappear and never return. Obliviate rituals can be done here, if a player knows how, or wants to try and bullshit their way through one. 

In the SOUTHEAST corner, behind the hanging sailcloth, is a huge pile of smooth shells, fishbones, dolphin bones, shark-jaws and crustacean husks, devoid of meat and chewed with human teeth. 

5. Trying Pot

Attached to the ritual chamber by a natural cave aperture. Dominated by a gigantic cast-iron cauldron pot, suspended above a huge, rusted gas burner. Rubberised hoses connect the burner to rusty canisters sitting askew, on trolleys with their wheels seized up. The pot’s sides are decorated with images of sharks eating people, cryptic geometric symbols, dead-suns and anchors. A wooden lid sits over the pot. 

Metal pipes serving as crude ventilation drip rainwater and sludge into the room. The lower sections of the floor have an inch of cold, standing saltwater. 

Within the pot, as if sleeping there, is Lady Constance Broxon, coiled up. Mass of asymmetrical crablike limbs connected a pallid mass of flesh, emerging from a huge lobster-tail covered in wicked spines. Red crab’s eyes stand on stalks covered in smooth human skin. Moves in an irregular stumble with significant momentum, but cannot corner well. Tail is a strong, deadly bludgeon, and spikes can be flung like arrows. 3HD, armour as chain. 

It will crawl out and attack anyone who starts to use the Ritual Chamber. Otherwise, it will lie in wait to ambush anyone coming up the ladder. It will also spring out, pissed off and surprised, if someone turns on the burner. 

6. Ladder

A small door opens into a narrow shaft behind the Trying Pot room. Metal brackets are driven into the wall, creating a ladder down a 100ft descent. For 15ft in the middle of the ladder, there are no rungs, as if they’ve been pulled out of the walls. 

7. Sea Caves

At HIGH TIDE, these caves are 90% underwater, with only small air pockets. At LOW TIDE, they’re only ankle deep, full of stranded fish and blasphemous-looking crustacea. Barnacles, clams, and rock-pool sessiles dot the walls. The space is prehistoric. If you’ve gotten here without encountering Captain Thomas Broxon, it’s either lurking in the water or hauling itself up the tunnel. 

At the far end - an old, worn stone staircase ascends into a stinking square doorway forty feet square, dug through into a neighbouring cave of great size. 

8. The Whale

This chamber is the aforementioned cave of great size. An unsteady, water-damaged wooden platform stands under the occupant, metal gantries loom above, rusted but sturdy. Chains, winches and lanterns (long-burnt out) are attached to the gantries, which are accessed by rusty ladders. 

An atrous Whale hangs suspended on chains in the middle of the chamber, glossy black - it seems featureless at a glance, but you can find the eyes, lightless black on black, by the thick dribbling stream of lachrymal oils running down to drip off the whale’s ship-hull belly. Fins hang limply, chewed by rats. Sections of its hide show red, the skin and blubber sliced and peeled away. The thing’s hide is crawled by fist-sized sea-lice seizing the chance to taste the nectar of whaleflesh. Its flukes hang only a foot off the floor, still able, despite it all, to lash out and break the spine of the incautious. 

So says the Fisher’s Apocrypha: the biggest fish is the Devil, who we call Leviathan, and in the dark days after the Sun died and the Sea ate the mountains, all the whales of the Sea squirmed free from his churning loins - they are now chosen by Providence to rule Creation in our place. 

The thing is swollen in the middle, skin taut on the hooks keeping it up, agonised and dying, but certainly not dead. The intelligence it possesses is far superior to a human’s. The Broxons caught it alive and strung it up here to have it explain the world to them. 

It put the truth in their mind like woodworms in antique furniture. It will do the same to you if you refuse to pull the hooks. The hooks are crusted with blood and pus, stuck in taut pinches of blubber formed geometric from the tension on its flesh. Mr. Wicket refused to pull the hooks. A Whale is a very powerful friend, if you let it back into the Sea when the water is high. It can shatter ships, teach you the dark arts and lead you through the Sovereign Sea even without a compass.

The first thing it will do if you free it is swim north. Then, it will crawl a mile inland on the island of Skelle, squeeze its briny black bulk through narrow, clean hallways lit white by aetherics, and hammer the screaming Edwin Broxon into an undifferentiated pulp against the wall of his sanatorium cell.