Group 2 | Session 6:
Three strangers entered a buried library beneath the ruins of Ahknoor and found a place that remembered too much.
These are lightly polished recaps from an ongoing Beneath Ahknoor playtest campaign: emergent dungeon fantasy built collaboratively at the table through exploration, folklore, scavenging, grief, and bad decisions made underground.
The events below were not scripted in advance. My role as Keeper was to ask questions, follow consequences, and let the dungeon become what play demanded.
The recaps are generated by AI from my session notes and edited for accuracy and voice. The facts, factions, and consequences are mine; the prose is collaborative. See all the recaps here.
The Thursday group includes:
- Torrens as Eldric
- Michael as Thanatos
- Cameron as Gohma
The library is waiting.
Previously: The party stood at the threshold of the Reliquary with three conditions apiece and the knowledge that they had just fed a man named Davis to a pair of corpse ants. Eldric had not looked back. Behind them, two ants were still feeding. Somewhere ahead, in a room full of empty niches, the common dead of old Ahknoor were waiting for someone to notice what had been taken from them.
The Reliquary
The camera opens on three people standing in a doorway they have not yet stepped through.
The Reliquary is a large circular room with a domed ceiling. It was built for remembrance: framed niches and fallen plinths where the mementos of ordinary lives were once displayed, heavy benches where mourners could sit with their grief. The floor has been partially cut away, sections of tile mosaic pried up and carried off. The niches are empty. Whatever the common folk of old Ahknoor kept here to remember their dead by, someone got here first and decided it was worth taking.
Pat asks them what they feel the loss of, standing here among the empty niches.
Cameron, arriving late, says: the religious symbols have all been destroyed or removed. Deity has been stripped out of a place built for the dead. This room has become godless.
Mike says: the sacredness of the space has been diminished and forgotten, and not only through the absence of worship. Nobody here even knows what was here to worship. The iconography is marred or gone. The loss is deeper than looting. It is the loss of knowing.
Torrens says: there were people who cared for this room once. Who cleaned it, who tended it, who made sure the mementos were in order. Those people are gone too. The destruction is wanton. The absence is total.
They stand with that for a moment, and then Gohma begins to search.
He is methodical about it: pressure bricks, loose stones behind the niches, the places in a crypt where the things meant to be hidden are always hidden. The search turns up a loose brick behind one of the lesser deity niches. Behind it, not a small compartment but a false wall, and behind the false wall, a corpse. Posed with care, as though meant to be displayed. Bricked over, so it never was.
Across the room, in a completely different niche, Eldric notices something sealed with a pale, resinous substance. Something behind the seal is moving.
Torrens identifies it without hesitation: ant larvae. Fully grown.
The party looks at the sealed niche for a moment and then agrees, collectively and without discussion, to leave it sealed and move on.
The Chapel
Eldric reasons his way to the chapel: if the catacombs follow any logic of sacred space, the chapel should precede the reliquary. He is correct.
The chapel is a small rectangular room, bare where inlaid gems and precious metals once depicted the gods of Ahknoor, empty plinths where statuary stood, broken benches scattered and overturned. It has been looted as thoroughly as everything else. And yet, Pat says, even looted, the room seems to breathe tranquility into you. How are you both settled and unnerved in this place?
Eldric expected solemnity and found something else underneath it: an unholy quality, a wrongness pressed against the quiet.
Thanatos hears music. Faint, calming, sourceless. Somewhere in this room, something is singing.
Gohma looks up. The ceiling is high enough that the looters could not reach it, and the paintings of the gods of Ahknoor are still up there, old and faded and intact. In one corner, a section of ceiling has collapsed, and what the collapse reveals is not another painting of the gods. It is a figure in insect form: multifaceted eyes, inhuman angles, the image of something that was worshipped here alongside everything else.
The camera pans slowly down from the ceiling to the altar.
The body slumped over it is oversized, its proportions wrong in ways that take a moment to register. It is posed in an attitude of prayer. It has been there long enough for something to make a home of it: wasps, or something very like wasps, have built a colony inside the corpse, and the music Thanatos is hearing is not music. It is the sound of ten thousand wings.
As the party steps fully into the room, the body levers itself upright and turns to face them. Wasps fly in and out of it. It begins to move toward them.
Gohma does not hesitate. He pulls his miner's cap free and tosses it to the side: the light draws the wasps, the body stumbles to its knees without enough of the colony to hold it upright, and Gohma brings the pickaxe down through the skull. The whole structure disintegrates the way a wasp nest does when you hit it hard enough. The queen is in there, rat-sized and squirming, and she dies with the rest.
Cut to: Torrens noting, quietly, that Eldric once set a wasp nest on fire. Different dungeon level. Same instinct.
What the Chapel Holds
The room is still. The buzzing is gone. Three people stand in the ruin of something old and start looking for what it left behind.
Thanatos kneels at the altar and prays. He is not sure to what. He reaches, dramatically, for some kind of answer from whatever gods are left in this place, and the reaching turns up a clue: something is tucked behind the bricks near the demonic ceiling painting, in the section of ceiling the collapse revealed. He can see it. He cannot get to it.
Eldric searches with his charm symbol pressed against his palm, the metal warm, keeping the Second Guessing Yourself at bay long enough to look clearly. He finds a prayer book in a language none of them can read. Throughout the text, one name appears in a different ink from everything else: different color, different weight, the mark of someone who came back to this book after it was finished. Wherever that name appears, it has been scratched through. Multiple times. Thoroughly. Someone wanted the name gone.
The complication arrives at the same moment the clue does.
A voice begins to whisper to Eldric. Sibilant, close, in a language he does not recognize. Only he can hear it.
Close-up on Eldric's face: the cost of knowing is always there.
Eldric is already carrying three conditions. A fourth means retirement. Torrens does not wait to be asked: he marks a scar instead, and narrates it immediately.
He dove on a sunken ship once, with a companion he had found in a pub in Three Bridges. The shipwreck was not deep. They had a plan. Eldric went down, found the treasure chest, tied it off. When he came back up, there were sharks. He had a choice between the treasure and the companion.
He chose the treasure.
The companion's death funded everything that came after. Eldric has not decided yet what that makes him. He carries the scar of it now alongside the choice.
The Whispering Spirits dissolve before they land. The scar takes their place.
The Ceiling
Thanatos is not going to let a little thing like a Turned Ankle and a very high ceiling stop him from getting to that clue.
He pulls tar from his kit, applies it to the soles of his feet with the confidence of a man improvising something he hopes will work, and climbs. The pew makes a reasonable ladder when the others hold it steady. The tar holds. The ankle complains but cooperates.
Behind the bricks near the insect-devil painting, there is something folded and tucked away: a sheet of vellum, very old, covered in handwriting that none of them have seen before. It is a Saga. The kind of Saga built at a table when a campaign begins, the kind that tells you what this story is about and what it will cost.
The Saga is about one of them.
The adventure it describes has not happened yet.
Thanatos climbs back down with the vellum in his hands and does not say anything for a moment.
The Hallway, Again
The party has enough. They make for the surface.
Coming back through the hallway past where Davis fell, they find one of the corpse ants from the Ossuary: the abdomen ripped open, the body hollowed from the inside. Something else has been in this corridor since they passed through it. Something found the ant and used it for something, and then kept moving.
They catch up to it a little further along: a reddish-yellowish mass, thicker than honey, moving along the floor as though following a scent. It has bits of things in it that used to be people.
Gohma reaches for Davis's short sword at his hip, and the sword shifts in his hand before he draws it. He feels the presence of whoever carried this blade before Davis did. He makes the sacrifice: the blade enters the mass and rusts in the same instant it cuts, the rust spreading up to the hilt, the whole thing dissolving as the mass comes apart.
Inside the remains, in the particular way that dungeon logic works when you are willing to pay the price for it, there is a ring. Simple silver. Well-made. An inscription on the inner band that none of them can read yet, but that they are now carrying out of the dark toward whatever will allow them to understand it.
The camera holds on three figures emerging from the catacombs into the light of the above world. Behind them, in the dark they have come out of, a sealed niche waits with something moving inside it. A prayer book holds a name that someone tried to erase. A sheet of vellum carries a saga that describes an adventure that has not yet begun.
They carry eleven clues between them now. They are close enough to the truth of this level that the truth is beginning to press back.
Session 7 opens above ground: accounts to settle, conditions to reckon with, and a set of clues that are almost numerous enough to ask the question the catacombs have been waiting for.
