Carrefour Bunker (Dungeon for Aclas)

 

Carrefour Bunker is a military emplacement from the days of the Union, in the rocky moors northeast of the ruins of Amacos. Amacos went empty all at once, every soul, at the stroke of midnight, New Years 1800.  

Amacos is the “Ruin” referred to by the phrase “The War of the Ruins” (some complain “The War over the Ruins” might have been a better phrasing, but, hey, history is full of missed chances.) 

The Coalition (“Vestracoa”) army seized Carrefour late in the war, knowing nothing of why their Fedezy (Federation of Eastern Zymech) enemies had abandoned a strategically useful post. They picked it up quickly.

You are probably from one of the post-Union states which now tensely share the Amrun Valley - Sulas, the only remaining Surammar city-state of appreciable size and default capital of the Surammar League (“Suralega”), or the Strategic Federation, (“Stratfed”), the official successor of Fedezy.

You have been sent here to assess Carrefour Bunker for usability, danger, and the (incorrectly assumed) presence of an ochlocratic terrorist cell. In theory, this dungeon exists somewhere in an Amrun Valley hexcrawl.

The value of items is given in C, or Iskan Crowns, the most widely accepted currency on Aclas. 

ENCOUNTER LIST

It’s a list, not a table - when there is a loud noise, when the lights go out, or when someone is injured enough to bleed, work down the list: 

1. Willem Fols

2. Grue

3. The Millstone

4. Grue

5. Way Mold 

6. The Attention of the Seeker (see end for proper information)

7. The Displeasure of the Seeker

8. The Presence of the Seeker 

In short, things become worse the longer you spend here. If you leave, reset the List to 2 if you spend more than a day away from the Bunker (but don’t tell the players that!) 

WILLEM FOLS

A soldier from the Vadan March south of Adavor, the holy city. He’s still dressed in his ragged Vestracoa blues. Willem has no class levels, but has 2HD and +3 to hit with guns. He still maintains his medium army-issue Bela-Maximis rifle, carefully, carefully, and is well stocked with ammunition. He carries two fully charged vis-powered phoslamps everywhere, and is protective of them. 

Something is quite wrong with Willem. He’s aware of that, and he’s not pleased about it. He wants to go home, but a cold, persistent dread tells him he can’t. He can’t, everyone at home has been replaced. These aren’t his hands. This isn’t his body. That’s what he feels, and why he hides in Carrefour’s -1F Level eating tinned rations from the military store. 

Willem is friendly, offers his stock of stale cigarettes freely, and tries his best to laugh at jokes. He generally tries to encourage people to leave the bunker, but if they’re insistent on exploring it, he offers to be their guide. Willem genuinely has the visitors’ best interests in mind. 

Willem understands everything in Carrefour Bunker perfectly, especially the parts which are illogical, unexplainable, or just plain wrong. This is because he has made some inadvisable decisions. The Grues ignore him - they don’t detect him as alive. 

If Willem becomes distressed, things start happening around him - the written word melts, lights flicker, fires go out, and all material objects nearby become incredibly fragile. If he really freaks the fuck out, long white tendrils crawl out of his mouth and start trying to strangle anything nearby that makes noise. Dissecting Willem’s body would show no sign of these tendrils. 

In fact, if you cut Willem open he’s hollow like a glass jar. 

GRUES

Everyone on Aclas knows what a grue is. They come when blood is spilled in the dark, and they kill people by tearing them apart. They seem to hate everything living, and everything that the living make. 

They look like a gigantic, wet mouth floating through darkness. You can’t meaningfully harm them directly, but they avoid light, and die (or just vanish?) in sunlight. If a Grue bites you, you suffer 3d6 damage. They bend metal armour like paper and chew through spells. The best defense, second to sunlight, is to stay quiet, and hope they don’t notice you. 

WAY MOLD

This stuff occasionally manifests in particularly broken locations. It’s not fungus. 

It grows along vertexes, especially in corners, and slowly bubbles away in impossible colours. Sticking your hand into it, you’ll find it’s like cold porridge, and it gives way - you can reach into a patch of way mold forever, or climb into it, and vanish. Things can also climb out of it. Items dropped into way mold are irretrievable. 

When you encounter the Way Mold, it manifests in the room you’re currently in, and vomits out three 2HD ghouls in Vestracoa blues, whose eyes have been replaced by bubbling pits of Way Mold. They immediately act, moving to tear you apart and feed your body-parts to the Way Mold. They do this with their teeth, and the ragged bone claws extending from their fingertips. After they’re gone, encounters with the Way Mold become harmless, unless you do something stupid. 

THE MILLSTONE

It is a grinding feeling, a persistent sound, a tiny point of distorted space sliding over itself. It creeps around Carrefour Bunker, loud as a machine but nearly invisible and only the size of a penny. Anything that touches it is ground instantly into a fine powder - including flesh, of course. It’s constantly surrounded by a thin haze of powdered air.

The Millstone, despite being an anomaly of physics, is also a very skittish creature. It’s a bit like a small animal. It only trusts the dismembered, the damaged, the scarred or the chewed-up-by-life. It damages things which are symmetrical, cutesy, beautiful or unmarked, and once it does, it stops being aggressive - now it feels comfortable. Once it feels comfortable, it stops trying to fly through you, and if you want, you can powder things with it. 

The Millstone doesn’t really have stats. You can’t hurt it. Very loud noises startle it and drive it off, usually right through the nearest wall. Contact with it causes 1d6 damage per round and bores perfectly circular holes in your gear and body. 

0F (SURFACE CAMP AND BATTERY)

Ragged tarpaulins flap in the high winds. A chain-link fence topped with razor-wire surrounds the surface camp. 

1. Entryway

A gravel drive behind a collapsed chain-link gate. The watchtower looks down from a raised hillock nearby. The letters on the sign, which is meant to say “CARREFOUR BUNKER - TRESPASSERS WILL BE SHOT” have melted, and the paint has run down it and dripped onto the ground.  

2. Earthworks

Dotted with little emplacements facing the gate and the approaches to the base. The rusty hulks of a pair of howitzers decay in artillery pits. They’re Federation Workshop models, once top of the line. 

At the north end of the Earthworks, you’ll find a little hut containing a box - inside this box are 8 perfectly functional artillery shells full of Vis - a little rusty, but you could still fire ‘em. 

A defensive trench runs along the northwest corner of the camp, full of mud, rats, weeds and fallen razorwire, gone rusty. Behind a metal door barred from the other side, a concrete staircase descends to -2F, into the Checkpoint. 

3. Officers’ Residence

When not actively being fired at, the Captain and Sergeants in charge got the novel privilege of sleeping above-ground. This draughty prefabricated shack perches uneasily on a concrete plinth. Within, it is separated into three bedrooms and a small sitting room. 

Sitting Room

Armchair, couch, record-player (broken). Shellac record cylinders stand beside it in a little case. Your options are some middling Zymani waltzes, a solemn recording of the first book of the Ethos Catechism, one of Makerism’s holy books, or an honestly pretty lively rendition of a Surammar folk jig. 

Captain’s Bedroom

Under a sheet on the iron-framed bed is a headless skeleton in Fedezy khaki. It still has a loaded pistol covered in human rot tucked into its right high-boot, and tags identifying it as once belonging to Captain Akif Mirrado of the city of Nethelos. Because of the light of his soul, now gone from the world, the tags are still readable.

First Sergeant’s Bedroom

Unremarkable. No possessions remain. Graffiti scraped on the walls depicts crude images of what an average Zymani soldier would imagine an angel to look like. The words appended to the graffiti have turned into indistinct hatching on the walls. 

Second Sergeant’s Bedroom 

Bed heavily stained with blood. Walls scraped deeply with a knife. Hole in the wall about six feet wide, small craters in the concrete floor. Smell of ammonia. Standing in this room causes a low-level buzzing headache, a feeling of smallness, and a temporary deficiency in speech, slurring all words into a mumble for 1d6 minutes.  

4. Garages 

Ugly concrete blocks with rusted-up roller doors on the front, three in total. Painted on the sides, a large A, half of a B, and a melted smear where C was.

Garage A

An old Vestracoa troop carrier with armoured sides and a broken wheel crouches sullenly in the corner. With a new wheel, you could drive it out of here. In the back, a pair of dispatchers’ motorcycles, their vis-tanks rusted full of holes - scrap, in essence. In the saddlebag of one, there’s a telegram with all the letters melting into a smear in the middle of the page, except for the word STOP.

Garage B

Dominated by a large car-jack, three workbenches, and a pair of toolchests, both wheeled and extremely heavy. One contains screwdrivers, wrenches, hammers, and so forth. The other contains a number of clunky power-tools (impactor, drill, saw, &c) powered by small glass capsules of vis, 10 of which are stored in the reinforced top drawer of the toolchest. In the northeast corner, there’s a large refuelling valve, connecting to a pipe that runs along to the vis tank. 

Garage C

Requisitioned tractor from the farms down the road. Has a little Amacosi flag painted on the front. Someone’s scraped a knife through that. The glass cabin is shattered, but otherwise the tractor is mostly functional, if you can find some fuel. Inside the broken cabin, an empty handgun, a bloodstained seat, and a hip-flask full of herbal gin hanging by a strap from the top. 

The tractor has a functional pneumatic horn with a few loud-ass honks left in it. 

5. Empty Vis Tank

Once stored above ground for the safety of the soldiers - rusted all over, any engineer could point out the telltale signs of a decompression caused by decaying equipment. Useless for any conventional purpose. Next to it are the absolutely decayed remains of a water tank, water filter and raincatcher. 

Wet sounds occasionally emerge from the tank, echoing up the connecting pipes that once supplied vis to the lights and machinery of the bunker. 

6. Latrines 

Stinking concrete cube. The plumbing inside is mostly rust, the toilet-bowls are shattered and full of rat droppings and mold. Shattered mirrors line the wall opposite to the stalls, providing a fractured view of reality. The pipes drain into a buried septic tank forty metres east of the base. 

In the middle of the room, a spherical hole in reality, pitch black and letting off cold, hovers at about head height. Do not put anything you value into the hole. 

7. Bunker Entrance

Ajar double-doors made of metal go to a wide concrete staircase descending down to the Main Corridor of -1F. 

8. Watchtower 

A rusted iron frame supports a little roofed cabin with smashed windows and an external walkway. A shredded Vestracoa flag (blue and white wavy stripes, gold holy icon) hangs limply from the flagpole atop it. No matter how much wind is blowing, the flag does not move. Even if the mind pictures it moving, it does not move. 

Inside the watchtower cabin, there’s a seat, a paper book of local ordinance survey maps, a little portable gas stove for heating, and a table. On the table, there’s a heavy rifle with a x3 scope. The name “ISABELLA” is carved into the stock of the gun. Someone has taken the gas canister from the stove. 

-1F (UPPER BUNKER)

The walls down here are covered in thousands of small trypophobic holes arranged in clusters. The floor is covered in a layer of mud, grime and filth. 

1. Main Corridor

Filthy, empty, dark, smells of ammonia. The rusty doors of the Elevator are visible at the other end if it’s daytime outside, or if you have a light-source. This is the only underground room of the Bunker with any sunlight in it. 

2. Common Room 

Small, cramped, full of metal chairs, metal tables bolted to the walls, one threadbare couch with a few bullet-holes in it, and an icon of St. Zan, victor in war, on the far wall. He stands with his hammer and his solemn expression, gilded. His icon is worth 20C. 

A machine sits in the corner - at one point, this was a record-player sitting atop a calculating machine, but they’ve run into each other. There’s a gore of exposed phostube displays, sound pipes, input keys like a giant’s typewriter, and many little brass cylinders and gears. 

A little shellac record cylinder is set deep inside it. It plays a sad song in a folksy, rural dialect of Nevechi if you turn it on. If you turn it on, it keeps playing it. Only Willem can turn the thing off. 

Grues will be attracted to the sound of the little song - sounds like life to extinguish. 

3. West Bunk-Room

Ten bunks. Filthy, ragged, torn up. A little hand-mirror with a handle that folds into a stand is set up on an iron cabinet with ten small labelled lockers. The writing on the labels is now illegible. 

A headless skeleton in Fedezy khakis lies under a spherical hole in reality in front of the mirror. 

Searching the lockers yields three venerable Fedezy army uniforms in khaki, 23C in notes and coins, a gold ring worth 20C, and the remains of a novel with all the words smeared and scrambled across the pages.   

4. East Bunk-Room 

Ten more bunks sans bedding, and another set of lockers with illegible paper labels. Deep irregular gouges are taken out of the walls and most of the bunks, and some of the metal frames are crushed and warped, like some huge mouth bit and chewed them (obviously, Grues). 

Searching these lockers turns up 11C in coins, two more ruined books with the brightly printed covers smeared into nothing, a hand-grenade (functional) wrapped in an oily rag, a tin of hair cream, a small bottle of Toran akvavit, and 

At the back of the last locker there’s a small, round hole that drops into a smooth, angled tunnel of metal that runs off into darkness without a visible end. It’s about wide enough to reach into. 

5. Mess Hall

Long wood-topped tables attached to the walls with metal brackets, and long benches. The tables are covered in hundreds of stochastically-patterned holes bored through the wood. Half of a skeletonised arm lies on the floor, sheared off neatly in the middle of the ulna - anyone would recognise the sign of a Grue’s predations. 

6. Kitchens 

Metal stoves powered by gas canisters occupy the northern corner. The floors are bare and filthy concrete. The taps in the basins used to connect to the water tank upstairs. There’s a red stain all over the wooden worktops, and deep gouges as if from knives. Staying too long in this room causes a slow, creeping feeling of paranoia and dread - Willem sprints through it. 

7. Food Store

The tinned rations are still good. Most of them can be eaten cold - Willem does, since the gas for the stoves ran out a while ago. If you haven’t encountered him yet, he’s sitting in this dingy room on a crate, spooning cold tinned vegetables into his mouth.

This room consists basically of a deep and narrow concrete chamber lined with shelving on all sides, covered in lots and lots of various tins, all tinned back in Kelos before the war. Under one of the shelves, Willem has created a little nest of bedding, within which are two fully-charged backup phoslamps, in case his breaks, along with ten or twelve packs of judiciously used stale cigarettes and a spare lighter. He is correct in assessing this the safest place in the bunker. 

8. Engine Room 

Pipes connect to the Vis Tank up above. This machine ran the generators and powered the interior phoslighting of the base. The phoslighting is broken, but there’s enough cyan-glowing vis left in the rusty engine’s tanks to activate the elevator for a total of 1 hour. The engine is loud. 

9. Elevator 

Rusty carriage with sliding doors, and buttons for -1F, -2F, 3F and then a fourth button with a greasy, discoloured smear around it that distorts the brass plaque the buttons are set into. The labelled buttons take you to the respective floors, the unlabelled one drops you through the bottom of the bunker to hang suspended by the cable over darkness forever stretching in all directions, like a diver in a shark cage. Going below the Bunker immediately attracts the Attention and Displeasure of the Seeker to everyone in the carriage. 

The elevator moves up and down with rusty shrieking and an unpleasant set of noises, but it won’t drop you unless you panic and start flailing around. The Elevator is loud and a Grue attack while you are in the carriage is highly likely to either be fatal, or to send you screaming to -3F. The hole to the darkness below doesn’t exist unless you push the button that takes you there.  

-2F (LOWER BUNKER)

Subtly rainbow-toned way mold grows in most of the corners. Watch your step. 

1. Elevator

Exiting the elevator leads immediately into a cramped concrete chamber with a grue-bitten storage rack on the EAST wall. The floor is gouged out too - the bottom half of a boot, with a skeletonised foot inside, lies in one of the craters in the floor. Bitten mid-run. 

2. Map Room

Broken phoslight hangs from the ceiling above a table. Wooden cabinets hug the surrounding walls. Inside them, a bottle of cheap Iskan gin, reams of paper covered in smeared writing, a cigar-case sans cigars, a sewing kit, a bottle of painkillers, and 20 bandages. 

 

There is an excellent map of the Amrun Valley unrolled on the table, with all the labels smeared off. 

3. Armoury 

In this room, eight Ooze Shells stored on a rack on the north wall have rusted and burst open, covering the floor with flesh-eating green ooze which rapidly attacks and digests any organic material, including the leather of your boots. It’s shiny and visibly slimy, so fairly easy to see if you’ve got a light. 

Also in this room:

• Four medium rifles.

• 500 rounds of medium ammunition.

• Two heavy rifles.

• 200 rounds of heavy ammunition.

• Two 2x scopes.

• A 3x scope. 

• Four medium sabres. 

• Four heavy silver bullets (for spirits, of course, they sting ‘em fierce)

• Four heavy wolfram bullets (for wizards, of course, they fly right through wards) 

4. Magazine

Heavy double-door is rusted shut. Can be opened with a decent kick or a power tool. Sign on the door has smeared letters and warnings. 

A skeleton in heavily bloodstained Fedezy khakis is curled under a rack in the corner. The tags identify him as Sgt. Marcus Pilar. There’s a Distinguished Service Medal (10C, life’s achievement) pinned to the front. 

Also in this room:

• Six gas shells.

• Eight incendiary shells.

• Two H.E. shells.

• An anti-construct rifle and 10 ammunition for it. 

• Four chemical (non-vis) blasting caps. 

5. Equipment Store 

Way mold is especially thick here, crawling up the sides of the shelves - knock one roughly and they might all topple like a house of cards - anyone among the shelving racks when this happens must save or be pinned under the weight of something toppling on them. This also makes a loud noise. 

Also in this room:

• 10 Spools of rusty razorwire. 

• 20 entrenching tools.

• 100’ of metal cable.

• 300’ of hemp rope.

• 4 steel hooks.

• Two sets of steel plated armour.

• Eight chainmail splatter masks. 

• Ten rubber gas masks.

• Folding stepladders. 

The rest is unsalvageably rusty or was eaten by the way mold. 

6. Checkpoint

A locked door and iron bars control ingress from the Earthworks stairway. Two discarded light pistols of Federation Workshop make lie on the floor on the near side of the bars. The door through the bars is held shut with a padlock and a chain. Getting into here allows you to ascend the stairway to the door from the Checkpoint, opening a sort of “one way shortcut” out of the Bunker. 

-3F (MOUTH WITH NO TONGUE) 

1. Elevator 

The elevator shaft corkscrews on the way down, but this doesn’t prevent the elevator from arriving in the tilted bottom of the shaft. In the chamber on the way out, three empty Fedezy khaki uniforms hang suspended in the air, as if upon invisible bodies. 

At this point, Willem insists you should leave. He won’t make you, but he starts getting a bit jittery. 

  

2. Thoroughfare

Directions in this room are uncertain. Walking slowly is fine, but running requires a save or you may end up going completely the wrong way. Willem is familiar, and will tell you as much. 

3. home

Door leads into your childhood bedroom, or, no, a bedroom (maybe?) with manacles on the wall that was at one point a prison cell but is now also your childhood bedroom. The stains on the wall are shaped exactly like the silhouettes of the people you remember. 

This room does something to your ability to discern memory and present stimuli. Spend more than a minute in here and save vs. delusion, entering into a fugue of jumbled fake memories for 1d10 days. 

Willem can make the room show you what you want it to show you, even things you don’t remember, things from other times and places. This is useful, but the images are never perfect. 

4. Standing Space

Satisfying to stand in. Feels safe. Empty, gouged by grues. Way mold drips from the ceiling. Holes in the wall offer an illusory glimpse of daylight. 

5. The Endless Hallway

Runs off SOUTH forever. 

About 2 miles into it, the perfectly preserved corpse of a woman in Vestracoa blues, her tags identifying her as Sergeant Irina Nikao. She looks emaciated. Tracks in the dust lead back eighteen miles in fits and starts to a broken-down Vis-powered motorbike, containing a logbook detailing a forty-mile trip down the Endless Hallway, attempting to establish its true length. 

6. Intercessor

A dead body in Vestracoa blues with no boots, perfectly preserved, is propped up in a metal chair under a bowed ceiling. The body is held to the chair with tightly tied razorwire. His tags identify him as Private Richard Fols. 

A horizontal gouge divides the face, with pins carefully stabbed in along the top and bottom halves of the cut, sort of like eyelashes. This dismembered corpse functions perfectly well as an idol to the Intercessor, who is the only one who can save you, and can hear your prayers. If you pray and make offerings, sometimes the bleeding “eye” gouged into the corpse’s face blinks. 

7. Darkness

The bottom of the bunker opens out into a cold, light-eating darkness. If you look through here, immediately increment the Encounter List. 

This underpins everything, it’s the punchline. You are a trick of the light. From here, you can begin to make inadvisable decisions, just like Willem. Go down here, you’ll never come back up.  

THE SEEKER

This thing is massive. It swims in the darkness under Carrefour, peeking up through the hole into the world like a giant under the floorboards.

The Attention, the Displeasure and the Presence of the Seeker are all phenomena caused by it, but are distinct beings of unreality. They arrive in sequence.

THE ATTENTION 

It selects the explorer with the lowest POW / XHA score, as they have the least natural defences. In the first stage, one of their eyes begins to ache, with a feeling of internal pressure, like a thumb pushing from inside of their head. The group of phenomena called the Seeker can now see through this eye, and use information from it. If the explorer ever makes eye-contact with this eye (such as in a mirror), they must save. Succeed, and you’re fine, until you next make eye-contact with the eye. The duration of this effect is permanent, and death doesn’t end it.

Failure causes the black dot of their pupil to expand and fill their eye. 1d6*10 minutes later, they must save vs. death as it expands to envelop their head. Failure leaves behind a permanent spherical hole in reality and, for particularly unfortunate victims, consumes the soul. Success returns you to the first stage. 

THE DISPLEASURE

It selects the explorer with the lowest HP, often the smallest. It starts as an itching feeling, usually on the inside of the arms and legs and in the small of the back. After 1d6*10 minutes, it advances to a generalised ache of the affected skin. This may pass after about a decade without further exposure.  

If the affected person is ever alone in the dark, they must save. If they fail, the affected skin curls off their body all at once, peeling up from instantly-appearing fissures like it’s got air underneath. This usually causes a very quick death from exsanguination. 

If you look at yourself in a mirror, you can see a huge white tendril trailing off the back of your neck or from out of your armpit, going up and then out through the doorway of whatever room you’re in. 

THE PRESENCE

A pair of huge, flat, white ciliated tendrils, each about 6 feet across. Their ciliated sides touch and intermingle, locking them together. Concealed within them is a third tendril - it’s soft, pink, wet and reeks of ammonia. It looks quite like a tongue between a pair of snow-white, hair-covered lips. It reaches in from the darkness, seemingly infinite in length, holding itself up off the floor.

When it is in the room, language fails. Words melt off of things, the voices of your friends become meaningless garbled noise, you forget your own name, and you forget the name of the place you are in. If you get away from it, these things return over the course of 1d6 days. 

It speaks, repeating babbled snatches of sentences in Zymani, Nevechi or Surammar. What it says are garbled sections of soldiers’ chatter, or the panicked orders and reports of those same soldiers fighting for their lives. 

If it touches you, save or lose the ability to utilise language. Every month afterwards, save vs. mutation. All mutations are internal. They do not breach the skin. Three or four months of failed saves will kill you, as your organs will no longer be the right shape to perpetuate life. Three successes clears the condition.

This might not be worth worrying about, however, because if you get grabbed, it will crush you for 4d6 damage like squishing a grape against the roof of your mouth with your tongue. 

Like a Grue, sunlight burns it and drives it back, but you cannot meaningfully harm it. 

If Willem sees the Presence of the Seeker again (for he saw it once before) he will shoot himself in a calm and businesslike manner, saying “Adieu.” He will then find out all of his “delusions” are true, when the bullet does nothing. 

Willem's soul is in a safe place, being looked after by a friend. His friend, not yours.