Something will go wrong with the large inn and tavern standing on Hodgeson Street (1).
Something is going wrong with the large inn and tavern standing on Hodgeson Street.
Something has always been wrong with the large inn and tavern standing on Hodgeson Street.
The Hodgeson Street Inn is owned and operated by Oroborus University, with David Hilbert serving as manager, and provides fair accommodations – the university uses the facility to teach people the trade of inn keeping. The tavern and dining hall provide decent food and a standard selection of drinks. Stables stand next door but are separate facility operated under different management.
Shaped like the letter “U” the exterior walls are smooth, wattle-daub and punctuated by few windows. Inside the “U” wide balconies provide access to the rooms and over-look a narrow, brick paved courtyard. Stairs are located in balcony, at the bottom of the “U.” A rarely opened two storey gate permit wagons into this courtyard and a smaller door, set into the gate, lets patrons in and out. During winter inn management hangs canvas over the balcony openings to keep out the worst of the frost and snow, while in summer people enjoy breeze on the balcony.
Occupying the ground floor are the common room, dining hall, kitchens, privies, storerooms and staff rooms. The best rooms are on the second floor, with actual beds, including several full suites. Standard rooms occupy the third floor, where low counters with cushions double as beds. Dorm style rooms, where people may sack out on the floor, occupy the fourth floor. Most rooms feature a small fireplace at one end of the other at least one window. There is no cellar or attic.
Sometimes something is always wrong with the northern end of the third and fourth floors and sometimes the second floor as well. Sometimes nothing has ever been wrong with these floors.
A GM should roll on the tables below for each character in the party for every six hours they stay in the inn. The appropriate table depends on the characters location. Ideally, the character should be alone when they encounter something odd the first time.
Roll a d20 – each floor has its own encounter table.
Second Floor Encounter Table (d20)
01 - 18 Nothing unusual happens.
19 Slugs – character encounters slugs where they do not expect to encounter them. This continues for 1d10 minutes.
20 Singing – characters encounter “regular” garden spiders that sing softly, rather like songbirds. This continues for 1d10 minutes.
Third Floor Encounter Table (d20)
01 - 16 Nothing unusual happens.
17 Not True – When the party members are not looking, walls, molding, doors and window frames, the distance of the ceiling’s distance from the floor all shift and twist by several inches. This continues for 3d10 minutes.
18 Old – One member of the party will begin seeing their surrounding as terribly aged and badly maintained. This continues for 1d6 minutes.
19 Slugs – character encounters slugs where they do not expect to encounter them.
20 Singing – characters encounter “regular” garden spiders that sing softly, rather like songbirds. This continues for 1d6 minutes.
Fourth Floor Encounter Table (d20)
01 - 12 Nothing unusual happens.
13 Maze – The layout of the inn, which should be a simple “U” arrangement of a balcony and rooms twists into an Escheresque maze. This continues for 4d20 minutes.
14 Distance – The distance across a room, or down the balcony/hallway, is only a few meters at most, but once a character has cross this distance they find it to be a kilometer back. This continues for 4d20 minutes.
15 Water Above – Off in some corner or at down a hall, dark water pools across the ceilings, in the way water usually does not, and judging by the ripples there is something on the other side of the surface of the water. This continues for 4d20 minutes.
16 Not True – When the party members are not looking, walls, molding, door and window frames, the distance of the ceiling’s distance from the floor all shift and twist by several centimeters. This continues for 4d20 minutes.
17 Old – One member of the party will begin seeing their surrounding as terribly aged and badly maintained. This continues for 1d10 minutes.
18 Slugs – Character encounters slugs where they do not expect to encounter them. This continues for 1d10 minutes.
19 Singing – Characters encounter “regular” garden spiders that sing softly, rather like songbirds. This continues for 1d10 minutes.
20 Roll Again – Roll on the Fourth Floor Special Encounter Table below.
Fourth Floor Special Encounter Table (d8)
1 - 2 Ring of Fire – while working their way back from a great and unexpected Distance (Result #14) if the character looks out a window, or looking out from the upper balcony, they perceive the world as a terrible, bleak and blasted landscape, the sky the color of a bruise and the sun a ring of blood colored fire.
3 - 4 Corpse – A character is navigating the Maze (Result #13) and while doing so encounters their own corpse in an advance state of decay. If they loot their own pockets, they may be surprised by what they find.
5 - 6 Mind Eaters – While they party encounters the singing spiders (Result #19) and slugs (18) they also encounter a number of mind flayers, navigating their way through the temporal fissure. Each is surprised to encounter the other. The ensuing battle should be appropriate for the level of the party members involved.
7 - 8 Alternate – While out getting a bucket of water or on a similar errand, a member of the party encounters an alternate version of themselves on a similar errand. Such as the human rogue in the party runs into an anthropomorphic fox version of themselves, from a world were such creatures are the norm.
The events listed on these tables are essentially plot seeds and situations designed to provoke a reaction and not full encounters in and of themselves.
Why is this happening?
At some point in the future, something from the darkness below fights a losing war against former slaves and those it attempted to enslave (2). As a mad gambit, these hungry and wicked forces struck a blow against space and time, damaging the fabric of reality. Cracks spread through creation like fissures through a pane of glass. Those terrible forces fled backwards through time and across worlds using these fissures.
One such fissure – invisible unless physically encountered – snakes through portions of the large inn and tavern on Hodgeson Street. As damage to the structure of space and time, it is at once; not yet appeared, always been present and is only just appearing. This is why no one has attempted to implemented solutions and why the inn was built at this location in the first place. Further, a crack in a glass ink jar will be stained as a portion of the ink spreads along the inside surface of the crack – likewise, the “reality” of the inn spreads along a portion of the space and time fissure running through and beyond the inn. This fissure connects the inn to other places and times, including a potentially endless assortment of other inns.
This is why easy to become hopelessly lost, discover one’s own corpse and be attacked by brain eating slugs in the short and brightly lit room of a respectable midtown inn.
The party – by dent of being player characters – will remember their experiences at the inn and tavern standing on Hodgeson Street, even as the memories of others are consistently inconsistent. There is also no permanent solution to the problem – it is just something to deal with and survive. However, a GM seeking a climactic battle may have the party discover they are the only thing that can prevent illithids from entering the party’s world. To do this the party will have to enter the surreal depth of a seemingly endless inn…
1. Some of the imagery here and mood come from “House on the Boarderlands” by William Hope Hodgeson.
2. This is a reference to Lords of Madness: the Book of Aberrations by Richard Baker, James Jacobs and Steve Winter, which described the illithids as having arrived in the past from the future. This is one of the best “monster” books produced by WotC during the run of 3.5
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