Group 1 | Session 2: "It Took Up Residency"
Three strangers entered a story before they entered a dungeon. They spoke the dead into history. They gave names to the grief that built these halls. They learned, in the manner of folklore, what happened here, which means they learned several things that contradict each other, and all of them are true.
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 Tuesday group includes:
- Chris as Gueller
- Danny as Caspian
- Matt as Swalthazar
- Torrens as Tengi
The catacombs are waiting.
Previously:Three strangers entered a story before they entered a dungeon. They spoke the dead into history. They gave names to the grief that built these halls. They learned, in the manner of folklore, what happened here, which means they learned several things that contradict each other, and all of them are true.
The procession was enormous. People came from everywhere, from cultures that had no other reason to stand in the same place, all drawn by a man whose influence reached further than anyone admitted while he was alive. There was an assassination attempt. One of the three mourners disappeared. Beornhelm was laid to rest behind magical wards in the plundered catacombs of Ahknoor, under heavy stone, watched over by his companions and by whoever had tried to kill someone in the middle of a funeral.
And then Malric Vane came down.
The apprentice believed the death was a murder dressed as something else. He believed an artifact was about to pass into the wrong hands. He had been inside the wards when they were made, so he knew their shape from the other side, and he walked through them.
He did not understand what he was walking into.
When Beornhelm's friends learned what had happened, two of them now, the third still missing, they went back in to find the one responsible and bring them to justice. Instead, they found that breaching the wards had let in something older and darker, something that had been waiting at the threshold and had simply walked through the opening Vane made.
It took up residency.
And Beornhelm himself rose, not into a body but into the walls around him. He became the dungeon. Enraged beyond reasoning, he began to curse everyone who followed Vane down: turning them into animated armor, animated objects, things that moved with fury and no face. The ones who crawled back out spoke of passages that changed, of the dungeon itself coming alive to attack them, of their companions turning and not stopping.
Those turned things are called the Children of Senkrit.
That is the story as it is told.
That is what waits at the bottom of the stairs.
The camera holds on the entrance. Two guardian statues flank the doors above. One has no eyes. The other has no hands.
Nobody has crossed yet.
Pull back to reveal three figures at the threshold. A cat, somewhere among them, has already made her assessment.
What Caspian Sees at the Entrance
The camera pulls in on Caspian's face.
He has a sensitivity that other people don't have, a way of reading what a place is trying to say before it says it. He uses it here.
Close on the two statues. The eyes were not broken out. Not chipped, not worn down by time. They were removed with purpose, the sockets cleaned and smooth, the damage careful in the way that only intentional damage is careful. The hands are the same: gone at the wrist, the break too clean for accident.
The camera holds on the sockets. On the place where the hands were.
Caspian knows what it means to walk into a place that has had something taken from it. He knows that kind of removal. He knows what it leaves behind.
He walks in.
What Tengi Notices in the Entry Hall
The camera cuts to the niches.
They line the passage, dozens of them, cut into the stone at regular intervals, sized for the statues that once stood in them. The statues depicted heroic things. Battles. Moments. The kind of images that say: this person mattered, and here is why. They were ornate. That is precisely why they were taken.
But not all of them were taken cleanly.
The camera pulls in tight on the remnants. Some of the statues were too deeply set, or the stone gave wrong when they tried to pull them free. So they broke them. The rubble is still here: fragments of carved faces, stone fingers, pieces of whatever heroic pose held until someone decided it was worth more as portable wealth than as memory.
Tengi slows down. The camera holds on his face as he moves along the niches.
There is something wrong with the fragments. Not wrong in a way he can point to. Wrong in the way that a place is wrong when something in it is paying attention. Around the rubble of the broken statues, the feeling is cold and specific and unhappy.
He keeps walking. He does not touch the rubble.
The Chapel
The camera follows the party along the right-hand wall.
The passage winds through the dark and the torchlight moves with it, and the sounds from deeper in stay at a distance that is not quite reassuring. They find the chapel.
The camera opens wide on the room: rectangular, low-ceilinged. It smells of old stone and the faint sweetness of decay. The benches are overturned, the wood splintered in ways that suggest violence rather than time. Where the altar wall should be inlaid with precious metals and gems depicting the gods of Ahknoor, there is bare stone: scraped clean, the shapes of what was there still visible as shadows in the rock.
The empty plinths stand where statuary once stood. All of them empty.
Almost all of them.
The camera finds the central alcove. A columnar plinth, not freestanding but carved from the wall itself. Above it: a statue. Still here. Still standing. The hands are broken off at the wrists. The eyes have been gouged out.
One socket is empty. The other is not.
The camera pulls in very close. A glass eye sits in the hollow where the stone eye used to be, placed there by someone, deliberately, after the original was removed. It is intact. It is catching the light. From across the room, it gives the impression that the statue is looking at something specific, and the camera slowly pulls back to reveal the angle of its gaze.
Hold.
What the Chapel Feels Like
The camera cuts between three faces.
Tengi: standing in the room as the feeling of it settles over him. There is reverence here, underneath everything else. The looting did not take it. The broken benches did not take it. The chapel still breathes tranquility, still holds the shape of what it was built to do. It is calming, in the way that holy places are calming, until you notice the statue. Until you notice that the statue is eyeless and handless and still seems to be looking at you, still seems to be reaching for you, still seems to want something it cannot take. He does not look away from the statue. The statue does not look away from him.
Caspian: feeling the weight of the watching. There is a benevolence to it, he thinks, or something that wears benevolence the way a magistrate wears authority, which is to say as a tool. The room is pleased, so far. The room is measuring. He has the distinct feeling that the moment someone steps out of line, the nature of the watching will change completely.
So far.
Swalthazar: who left the room briefly and came back to find his companions staring at the statue. He turns to show them something. He turns back to his companions. He opens his mouth. He turns to show them. The room is empty. The mannequins are gone.
Hold on the empty benches. Hold on the overturned wood. Hold on the place where they were.
What Comes Out of the Dark
The camera catches the movement in the hallway off the chapel.
The cat sees it first.
Close on Ink, who has been here the whole time, whose opinion about this room has been a matter of contained unease that a cat can project without much effort. The cat was uneasy. The cat is now frightened. The cat moves in one decisive motion to the space directly behind Caspian, putting him between itself and the doorway.
The doorway where the sound is coming from.
The camera turns.
There is a figure in the hallway. It approaches slowly, in the manner of something that does not need to hurry. The torchlight reaches it.
Close on what it was, once: a human corpse, more or less intact, more or less upright. Close on what it is now: the skin moves. Not with decay. With occupancy. There are holes, and through the holes the camera can see movement, and the movement resolves into wings, and the wings resolve into insects, dozens of them, flying in and out of the body like it is a structure they have built and not a thing that was once alive.
The buzzing becomes audible. It has been audible for a moment. Nobody noticed when it started.
The figure steps into the light.
The camera holds on the doorway. On the chapel. On the glass eye, catching the torchlight from its socket. On four people and something that is no longer concerned with the business of the living.
Cut to black.
Where Things Stand
One clue. One room. Four other locations nobody has seen: the reliquary, the vestiary, the processional hall, the ossuary of the lonely dead. All of them somewhere in the dark, past the thing standing in the doorway.
The Scar of Lost Grief waits if any of them need it. The catacombs were built for people who died without enough ceremony. The scar fits.
The Children of Senkrit are somewhere in the dark. Beornhelm is the walls. Malric Vane has not been accounted for. The glass eye is watching something specific, and no one has yet looked at what it is aimed at.
Ink has made her position on all of this very clear.
Next session picks up exactly here.
