A razored isle chained above a sea of darkness in a great cavern. It was raised here as a retort and alembic for the forging of liquid life.
Pits of gleaming silver ichor flash between the isle's spires and dance up its chains like sunlight on a metal moon. At the isle's heart there is a gullet of boiling blood-metal.
The pits were living crucibles when the cavern's ocean was magma, imperial forge machine. Everyone on the isle died in a heartbeat when the magma leapt, a blinding bubble, and then fell away forever.
The magma sea has been replaced by an unending cloud of writhing charcoal motes.
The isle's goldbeaten spires were erected in times of better fire, magma lustering obelisks to eternal dusk. These warped in the final flare and drape in despairing tendrils towards the chamber's stony heavens.
The roof of the vault mirrors its pit, a fogbank of drifting motes in a constant floral boil, disgorging and dissipating into the chasm's lofty cracks.
The isle's vast metal chains are graven with spiral staircases winding helically around their exteriors, fanning and interlacing like gears where links fasten. The steps shift as the links wind and groan, rotating fuly as the workings of the isle tease through them.
The chains emerge from great silver fastenings in the walls of the chamber, as do you. These are wrought with flickering, gusty sigils indicating immovable force along the link-stairs. Symbols of submission to the gravity well, mocking highlight of the inexorable path.
The chains descend to the isle and disappear in canopies of black rugose moss fed by the airborne charcoal, which hangs from the chains like hag's hair, densest where the chains meet the isle. The moss shivers metallically when it stirs along the links and hangs quivering in the void.
Malefactors hide within the mossy beards, hidden in space, deposited on the link-stairs behind the party.
Humans have been tempted to this place so that its masters may employ their powers of perception, but they are not this place's beneficiaries, despite their firm belief.
They are paid with servants that live inside them, pools of smiling plutonic metal in their guts and livers, scrubbing and polishing, permeating and preparing.
The men possess an energy and radiance, urgency and confidence, artificial brilliance, and the loss of hair and teeth.
They have swords and single uses of ancient weapons. They deploy the latter only if certain they will die.
Beasts flitter in the upper void. Bone-wrought miracles, amber fossils engraved in their encasement and given animation. Their claws protrude, as do their wings, clad in black velveteen leather from the lissome air-eels flitting through thermal flues. Undead? The amber fossils have been abiogenetically imbued with fresh consciousness. Pseudoanimalia spellbound to inexpressable love and insatiable bloodlust.
There are silvery spires upon the isle, thinned and bent into swords, inlaid with heroes broken and warped into funerary shades, proud cities crushed to marred memories.
You pass earthfire crucibles once stirred by the mountain sea, fed by wisps from the excised dreams of metal spirits in their paradise of molten light.
The masters here are living metal. Quicksilver serpentmen masked with ice, steely slow-motion rainstorms traversing their environs in a perfect traffic, and colonial mists puppeting jointed harlequin statues of panoptic bladed kings and advisor spiders.
Only these beings survived the flash.
Their warped perceptions are unprepared for reality's truth. They will seize upon you but cannot fully appreciate you nor reliably perceive you at a distance. Hence their baited humans.
The liquid beasts will not approach white metal pits as they will be permanently psychologically altered to madness by their influence.
The humans are exiles or those hounded by visions. The freshest make reference to motile metal gifts, unbreakable weapons and deathless companions. Those who've borne the liquid metal in their guts describe themselves as ravishingly, deliciously superhuman, their bloodshot unblinking eyes pooling beneath hairless brows.
They can be knocked into the swordspires, pits, and charcoal sea.
There is a perfect treasure by the isle's heart. A lifelens for the reduction and animation of metal.
Affected forms are given motility and the potential for motion, animated by neotenous intelligences to utilize their shapes.
Swords are made familiars, scrap-dolls into haemonculi, statues agender instinctless sapients.
It is an arcane alchemy for shaping and commanding nascent intelligences. Is has become the raison d'être for the isle's liquid life.
New forms are engendered, enlivened, raised, and characterized via moments of spellfire. The products are assessed by porcelain serpent tutors or cast into arenas and labyrinths, and then dropped down pits of boiling metal or off of the edge of the isle.
The lens casts prismatic symbols across everything it sees. It is held at the tip of a motile spike of crystal glass that serves the isle's metal life as its bearer. The influence of this glassy spike is growing with its charge, and its silent uninterpretable dictates will more and more shape the policy of the liquid beasts.
If the party are able to shatter this living spike and collect its lifelens, the objective of the human defenders will become to seize it for themselves and abscond with it, to wreak ruin upon the peoples who cast them out.
If they make it onto a chainbridge, one of them will madly dump a solvent on its anchor, causing the chain to come loose and fall against the chasm's wall. The great isle will snap free of its moorings and smash into the far base of the cavern like an asteroid filled with gleaming, boiling metal, crashing and spilling into the charcoal sea. The wiliest humans on the chain will ensconce themselves in the metalmoss nets and then begin their ascent of the chains' spiral staircases.
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Interface Serpents
Coils of cloud-white glittering like starlight in soft sand. Hissing of semi-solid metal kissing, voice jumping between different parts of its shifting body. A salt-pale mask peppered with charcoal motes in the shape of a rictus lynx or great complex key.
Armor Class 15
Hit Points 22 (5d8)
Speed 30 ft inertialess but must remain in contact with a surface.
STR 14 (+2)
DEX 15 (+2)
CON 11 (+0)
INT 12 (+1)
WIS 6 (-2)
CHA 16 (+3)
Immune to bludgeoning, piercing, and slashing damage
Condition Immunities Grappled, Prone, Restrained
Senses Darkvision 60 Ft., passive Perception 14 when speaking (wordprickle)
Languages Thhnahn, Stygioterminal, Helixthane
200 XP
Actions
Partial engulf. Melee Weapon Attack: +4 to hit, reach 5 ft., one creature. Hit: d4 + 4 crushing damage, d4 WIS damage
Levitating Beadstorms
Iridescent hydrofuel poison. A wasp-swarm of darts striking home in volcanic stone or tacking on softened steel.
AC 16
Hit Points 33
Speed 35 ft, must traverse objects at no more than a 120 degree angle from one another, though capable of self semi-directing trajectory
STR 12 (+1)
DEX 9 (-1)
CON 14 (+2)
INT 12 (+1)
WIS 8 (-1)
CHA 1 (-5)
Immune to bludgeoning, piercing, and slashing damage. Only susceptible to area-of-effect and magic attacks.
Large
Condition Immunities Charmed, Frightened, Grappled, Paralyzed, Petrified, Prone, Restrained, Stunned
Senses Blindsight 20 Ft., Darkvision 40 Ft., passive Perception 12 (mantic echo)
Languages Thhnahn (psychic or tapform)
400 XP
Swarm. The swarm can occupy another creature's space and vice versa, and the swarm can move through any opening large enough for a Tiny creature. The swarm can't regain hit points or gain temporary hit points.
Actions
Inundate. Melee Weapon Attack: +7 to hit, reach 0 ft. Hit: 4d4 piercing damage, d4 INT damage, d4 WIS damage
Statuemecha
Awful, self-destructive stone grinding. Mist of rancid furore; a twitching of the nose and lips before tears.
Armor Class 18
Hit Points 126 (11d12+55)
Speed 40 ft.
STR 23 (+6)
DEX 10 (+0)
CON 20 (+5)
INT 12 (+1) (piloting mist)
WIS 10 (+0) (piloting mist)
CHA 1 (-5) (piloting mist)
Saving Throws Dex +1, Con +8, Wis +1
Huge
Senses Darkvision 60 Ft., passive Perception 14 (polypermeation)
Languages Thhnahn (psychic)
2,500 XP
The statuemech is not immune to physical damage, but if its pilot-mist survives its destruction, it will quickly gust away to inhabit another statue.
Actions
Multiattack. It makes two attacks.
Strike. Melee Weapon Attack: +8 to hit, reach 15 ft., one target. Hit: (3d8 + 6) bludgeoning damage.
Mobile Spike of Crystal Glass
Silence; a cautious radiance. Smoothly traverses the rock like an ethereal paperweight.
Armor Class 10
Hit Points 21
Speed 20 ft.
STR 7 (-2)
DEX 1 (-5)
CON 12 (+1)
INT 16 (+3)
WIS 14 (+2)
CHA 16 (+3)
Senses Blindsight 60 Ft., passive Perception 14 (lens panopticality)
Languages Thhnahn (psychic, cannot interface with nonmetallic noncrystal beings)
10 XP
Human Guardians
Armor Class 12
Hit Points 11 (2d8+2)
Speed 30 ft.
STR 12 (+1)
DEX 12 (+1)
CON 9 (-1)
INT 8 (-1)
WIS 8 (-1)
CHA 12 (+1)
Senses passive Perception 14 (metallically heightened)
Languages (one of) Stygioterminal, Helixthane, Mercurial Cant, Usjanik, Dracosump, Earthrip, Ethero, Olustuyikugkab, Smokeflesh, Fulvigath, Camathau, Lichbreath
25 XP
Actions
Scimitar. Melee Weapon Attack: +3 to hit, reach 5 ft., one target. Hit: (1d6 + 1) slashing damage.
Light Crossbow. Ranged Weapon Attack: +3 to hit, reach 80/320 ft., one target. Hit: (1d8 + 1) piercing damage.
Ancient Weapon (one use): d4 sample effects;
1. Enforced Divination. Save WIS DC15 or have your mind plunged into an ancient epoch of unspeakable cruelty for d4 Rounds. You are Stunned until you return, Exhausted 2 for one hour from psychological trauma, and Exhausted 1 thereafter until long rest.
2. Tectonic Destabilizer: The warrior doesn't know what this does; it will affect the wall of the chasm and cause shifting in the earth, making the chains violently twist. Next turn, DC checks from the chains shifting are 3 DC higher (see next section).
3. Superheat Local Metal: The local chain link becomes superhot. Those remaining on it at the start of their next turn take 3d6 damage. Those still holding metal take d4 damage and must drop it.
4. Microorganize: Latent plagues and diseases in the target spring back with a vengeance; any disease the PC has ever suffered (except for any that are explicitly purely magical simulacra of disease) erupts and affects the PC until the end of combat. If they have never suffered a specific disease in-game, mighty influenza has its day and the PC suffers Exhaustion 3.
The humans here have a chance of spilling plutonic liquid metal when they are killed by slashing damage. Attacker must check DEX vs d20 if adjacent. On failure, suffer d4 INT damage and d4 WIS damage. Gain d4 temporary CHA.
Traversing the Links
Every round of combat, or whenever the GM calls for it, everyone traversing the links must make a DC 12 DEX test. Failure indicates a fall, which requires a DC 15 DEX test to arrest, in which case the subject falls prone, hugging the link. Those who pass their traversal test may make an additional test to arrest the fall of anyone adjacent to them (one per open hand) who's failed their traversal test. Those standing still may remain in roughly the same position without a test.
The GM should draw the chain battleground twice on a grid, the links being in alternating flat and vertical dispositions. The maps should be mirrored. When the traversal check is made, move all tokens from one map to the other. Decide whether the chain has rotated clockwise or counterclockwise to determine where anyone who's fallen might be hanging.
Withered Spires
4d6 slashing damage to anyone who makes an uncontrolled entry into a square containing a withered spire's edge.
White Metal Catalyst
Per round of immersion: 8d6 radiant damage, 2d4 INT damage, 2d4 WIS damage
Blood Metal Catalyst
Per round of immersion: d4 necrotic damage, imbued with a soul. It will take 2d4 days to learn your language and will be able to speak with you psionically.
Ascertain its personal arc of development using this generator.
At first it will only be able to silently communicate with you. Then, each month, it will gain 1 level in Wizard and will be able to cast d4 new spells, solely of its own volition, selected by the GM based on its personality. After 6 months it will be able to communicate with others psionically without your knowledge.
A soul imbued in this manner can be removed by Dispel Evil and Good. It is obliterated.
Lifelens
The Lifelens can cause Ensoul Metal on contiguous metal objects up to small size once per day.
For each additional day the lifelens lays fallow, it can Ensoul an object one size larger than the previous day.
Objects lose all hardness and cannot be damaged by bludgeoning, piercing, or slashing. For the purposes of leverage, they have double their original capacity.
Objects become motile enough for self-directed perambulation or lateral undulation.
If an object is only loosely connected together, it will shake off weakly-connected pieces as soon as it is Ensouled. These objects do not express these characteristics.
Created objects have d4 INT and d4 WIS. 4s explode, max 18.
Ensouled metal will be under the creator's indirect psychic control for 21 days, becoming free thereafter, but the liquid beasts have not yet allowed any object to live long enough to learn this.
Ensouled metal of gargantuan size immediately breaks free of control.
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