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You descend from orbit, and the barriers of time, space, and genre fall away at last. Diegetic conventions shred and transform at the sight of a Terran atmospheric runabout hovering on a jet of blue-white fusion flame above the stillness of the Pendarren Forest, itself the echo of KidBits’ scrubby pines, now grown to enormous size and trackless extent. The Heroes file out onto the surface, inhaling the illusory digital scent of their long-ago franchise. See that it is Pren-Dahr who sinks to his knees; it is Loraq who curses aloud.

SOLAR EMPIRES EXPANDED

CAMPAIGN SETTING: ENDORIAN ANOMALY

Black Arts Studios brings you a gaming experience like no other!

An adventure for slightly-too-advanced characters, Endorian Anomaly pits the galaxy’s rulers against an ancient evil.

Note: Characters from a science-fiction milieu may find this context particularly unnerving, portraying as it does a preindustrial civilization with annoying mystical abilities. They may draw their own conclusions. For some, a sufficiently advanced form of magic will prove indistinguishable from technology. For others, it will stir strange sensations of other lives lived and emotions forgotten, or mayhap deliberately pushed aside, on the not unreasonable premise that magic is for the primitives, the losers, and the gaywads of the galactic backwater. It matters not; the Endorian Anomaly scenario contains all game items and all game rules.

Note:
Solar Empires
’ Embarkation mode allows you to leave your ship and play as an individual unit, so you can board an enemy ship or venture forth onto the surface of a planet. In fact, it’s an inheritance from the game engine’s original function as a dungeon adventure game, repurposed to add an exciting gameplay mode to your
Solar Empires
experience.

You consult the tracking device. There is a clear signal coming from far to the east. The group is silent as they fly over lands where they fought on horseback, moving a thousand times faster than the fastest horse ever could. Down below it is somehow still—still!—the fucking Third Age, its final end delayed for long, long eras as the Heroes busy themselves elsewhere. As you travel, the landscape below you changes from forestland to grassland to dark ocean. From high above you can see the shadow of a leviathan surging in the depths. At these speeds it is only an hour before you set down on the pebbled shore of an unknown continent. Outside, the day is warm and muggy, but you can smell the not unpleasant smells of grassland and forest and… adventure.

“Is this… what anybody was expecting?” Lisa asked.

“All that matters is we find it, right?” Don said. “And we can fix it?”

“Yes,” Lisa said. “It’s just weird.”

Darren shook his head and said, to no one in particular, “Simon, what did you do?”

Wise adventurers prepare for danger. The orbiter’s loadout includes a pair of blasters. Galactic empress Ley-R4 carries the ceremonial blade of her office even though she hasn’t drawn it in centuries. Loraq, of course, scorns all conventional weaponry. Pren-Dahr leads the party inland, flaunting his overland movement rate. It’s been so long since he’s had a ground movement rate, let alone an armor class! Brendan Blackstar lingers on the beach, trying to recall a half-remembered prophecy. A warning, wasn’t it? Well, it’s too late now.

It is not long before you encounter…

THE TOMB OF DESTINY

BY

SIMON BERTUCCI

What lies in the depths of Black Arts’ oldest and shittiest dungeon?

BACKGROUND

The Four Heroes reunite after many wanderings to discover at last the resting place of the legendary warrior-magus Adric and the accursed sword Mournblade. The Fortress of Adric lies in the far northern reaches of Endoria, amid the half-melted bones of the Great Ice Serpent, who lived far into the Third Age. The site has been abandoned for untold millennia, ever since the long-ago Correllean empire fell (see
Correllean Dreams,
various authors, Orbit, 1994).

Warning: This adventure is for high-level characters only. Naught but doom and defeat await you below! So you know.

KEY TO DUNGEON MAP

Starting Location

Aboveground, a mere two dozen slabs of stone in the mossy ground sketch the outline of what was once the mightiest fortress in the known
world. Alert players (INT check at −4) will observe a small crater a few hundred yards to the east containing a half-buried capsule bearing the markings
CCCP
and the decayed shreds of a parachute. The capsule is empty. Loraq lingers at the site a moment longer than the others.

After a search, characters will notice a dozen stone steps leading down to a pair of doors built of the same stone as the rest of the fortress. A dwarf or experienced thief—although either would be an odd choice to go on vacation with—will observe that the gates have been opened and resealed several times.

Level 1: The Shallows

The stone complex is a simple maze built to no obvious purpose, terminating in a set of stone stairs leading downward. The air is dry and cold; the rooms are lit by gaps in the ceiling. Its ornamentation is sparse. There are crudely carved mossy granite and marble gargoyles and dry fountains in the larger rooms. The maze is empty and silent. Its floor plan resembles what you would draw in the last fifteen minutes of Western civ, which ought to at least have some cool castles in it, but what do you expect? Things never turn out the way you think.

Level 2: The Maze

Similar to the first level, but the walls and rooms form a more complex pattern, presumably a second layer of defense or the work of a more confident designer. You see the bodies of four or five ampers piled in one corner, mummified in the dry air. Once they were mysterious items of punctuation crawling through the dark; now, in color and three dimensions, they are, disappointingly, revealed to be thuggish bald men with tusks, wearing vaguely tribal leather gear. They were slain long generations ago, evidently by fire.

Level 3: Hall of Pillars

An airy hall of open construction punctuated by two rows of broad pillars that lead to a pair of white marble thrones on the far wall, the seat of absent monarchs. The air is growing warmer, with a hint of moisture. There are more dead ampers here, but these have rotted away to broken skeletons.

This may once have been an audience chamber, although not a very conveniently located one; maybe it’s there to congratulate people who can get through two pretty easy mazes. This marks the last point where anybody remembered constructing what was supposed to be a historical building rather than just going and drawing whatever they wanted.

Level 3: Inscription

You emerge into a set of corridors that form the puzzling words
Darren Rules
in cursive Roman characters (far away, its designer high-fived an associate producer). The hallways are mossy, and the air grows humid. Here and there a trickle of water flows down the walls and forms a running stream along the corridor.

Here you see what may be your first living ampers. It is unlikely they will stand up well to blaster fire. Ley-R4 draws her sword, which hums menacingly, a vibro-blade from the days when dueling was a deadly feature of life among the Martian aristocracy.

At the base of the second cursive
e
, adventurers will encounter a figure sitting upright against one wall. It is a corpse, long decayed, wearing a dark robe that survives, stiff with age. A staff surmounted by a broken animal skull lies a few feet from its outstretched hand. Players knowledgeable in the history of the
Realms
will recognize this as Dark Lorac, once the most feared wizard in this plane of reality. Characters of above-average intelligence may spot (20% chance) an additional set of small finger bones at rest nearby.

[I was startled by a cold pressure on my left hand. Lisa was handing me a Mountain Dew.]

Level 4: Pentagram

The passages form a five-pointed star surrounded by a circular corridor. This area of the complex has no obvious purpose other than to make it slightly more badass and reinforce the popular association between fantasy gaming and satanism. Observant adventurers will become aware that your grandmother is an insane bitch and even after a year your mother is not any closer to getting her head together, and
the later you can stay at Darren’s each night the better the chance they’ll all be asleep when you get home, or maybe they’ll be dead or they’ll forget you ever existed (does that happen?) and you can live at Darren’s forever or maybe get your own place.

Another skeletal body is here, lying facedown at an angle where a point joins the circle. The bones lie across a charred patch on the stone. Pren-Dahr kneels down and picks out a pair of modern spectacles and a short length of wire. There is no weapon. Deep in the angle of the jaw you see what is either a small round pebble or a cyanide capsule.

Level 5: The Guardian Figure

The shape of this level forms a crude representation of a human body (Adric?), similar to the Long Man of Wilmington or other hillside chalk figures. It is very evidently male. It makes you wish someone would stop fucking around; truly, this dungeon holds great evil.

Level 6: The Lady

This level has been built in the stylized image of a female face, architectural verisimilitude having been abandoned several levels ago.

The first body you find here lies on its side, with a long dagger resting between its third and fourth ribs; it displays tallness and slightly elongated fingers, toes, and cranium. Fifteen feet farther down the corridor, a skeletal hand still holds the hilt of a long black sword, the NightShard (artifact longsword; +5 to hit and damage; 4% chance of Soul Drain; wielder’s Altruism, Loyalty, and Mercy scores immediately fall to zero). The hand evidently once belonged to the human female whose skeletal remains lie on the very top step of the stairway down to the next, penultimate stage.

Ley-R4 may pick up the NightShard if it is found. She now has the option of remaining in Endoria, walking away from her job as empress of the galaxy, and returning to terrorizing the unjust from horseback. If she does, she will relinquish her ceremonial blade and the title to Brendan Blackstar, the true king of Endoria.

Level 7: A Giant Penis

Here, the walls form what we just might as well say is an image of an erect phallus. The three disconnected rooms to the west of the main complex were originally thought to be sealed burial halls. It is time for archaeological scholars to admit they represent airborne ejaculate.

“Oh, Jesus,” said Lisa. “Really?”

“What, you never saw that?” said Darren.

“Yes, but I deleted it.”

“I wondered if that was you. Yeah, I put it back.”

“Did you ever think that maybe that was why we got a B plus? Which is why I wasn’t class valedictorian?”

“Did you ever think of getting over it?”

There is one body, that of a large human male dressed in scraps of denim and a canary-yellow shirt emblazoned with the words
SOUL ASYLUM
. Nearby you find the remains of a fiberglass skateboard, its rear wheels sheared off. Brendan lingers, baffled at his doppelgänger’s choice of weapon.

Level 8: The Antechamber

From the base of the stairway a single corridor zigs and zags, then terminates in a large room, one hundred feet square, empty except for a low square altar built of stone. The only other item in the room is a skeleton wearing the gray cotton fatigues of a senior intelligence officer of the Soviet Union. It rests, propped against one wall, in a sitting position, hand extended toward the altar.

You always thought this was the bottom level, but the altar has been pushed to one side to reveal a set of stairs leading down. You check the tracking device: Mournblade is exactly five meters below you.

Level 9: Adric’s Tomb

The final level is a network of natural stone caves plainly much older than the rest of the complex. You see here the skeleton of an enormous beast, half hound and half dragon, a long row of vertebrae encircling the room.

At the rear of the room is an archway built of porphyry, which any competent mage or an associate producer who could stand to broaden his horizons a little will recollect is the primary component of any portal spell. It is sad that they know this, but they are correct—any player present will see through it to another place entirely, a random location in space and time.

Here you see Adric himself, seated on a black throne and dressed in shreds of chain mail. His skin is pearl white and his mouth sneers, even in his sleep. He is slender and beautiful and tragic, just as he is on his book covers. He is, without any doubt, what Simon looks like in his deepest, most private fantasies. At the sound of a living being on his threshold, he begins to awaken. His eyes, when opened, are green and soulful. The Artifact-class greatsword Mournblade is visible on his person.

This is the end of the Endorian Anomaly module. Any further material included is of abstract interest only. It is here that the players will die, regardless of whether they rule the galaxy and can’t believe they are being knocked off by a pissant artifact on a backwater planet in an unfashionable genre.

“So is this it?” I asked.

“Okay, okay, I get it,” Lisa said. “Simon said he’d put it in a place no one would ever find, but I didn’t understand the scheme exactly. The room runs simulated all the time, and sometimes Adric gets activated and wanders out into the world. Or an amper picks it up, maybe. So the sword is out there, and then very occasionally the wielder runs into somebody and kills them. Or the wielder dies and another creature picks it up and the rampage starts.”

“Why’s it happening more often, though?” I said.

“Simon wanted it to, I guess. He had some theory about the year 2000, how there should be some big computer failure. Probably it just checks the system clock, spawns wandering ampers more often.”

There was a scuffling sound in the corridor outside Adric’s chamber. I whipped the camera around to see what could only be a Dreadwarg, the terror of the First Age. A Dreadwarg looked like a standard wolf, but, like that of Mournblade, its palette was wiped to black.