D20 SYSTEM✦ Normal

The Rusting Bloodpits of Auranthis

# Construct# Combat# Dungeon# Intrigue

The subterranean gladiatorial complex of Auranthis is a monument to brutal ingenuity and failing artifice. Its legendary weapon racks are spring-loaded traps, its gates are powered by fatigued mechanical tensioners, and its glory is a faded memory. You are not here by choice; you are a conscript, a debtor, or a prisoner. Your only path to freedom is through the pits, but the true war is fought between the masters who control the machines and the broken souls who must fight within them. Every victory is a negotiation with fate, every alliance a potential betrayal, and the final gate opens only for those willing to decide the fate of the complex itself.

Chronicle Prelude

The Contenders' Galleries: A grim, rust-stained barracks carved into living rock, lit by flickering chemical lanterns. Rows of weapon racks line the walls, each one a potential deathtrap of spring-ejecting blades. The air is thick with the smell of old blood, ozone, and despair. This is your starting safe zone, a temporary reprieve between the screams from the pits below.

Environmental Traits

The entire subterranean complex is failing. The master artificers, the Gearwrights, are running out of the alchemical reagents that power the tensioners and weapon mechanisms. Without a fresh supply from the surface, the pits will collapse into permanent darkness and chaos. The rival faction, the Rusted Champions, sees this collapse as their only chance for true freedom. You are the swing vote in this conflict, and your journey through the mechanical labyrinth will force you to choose which future the Bloodpits will have.

Legendary Archetypes

Rayan

HP:45

STR:16

WIS: 12

CHA:11

Key Factions & Autonomous Nodes (7)

Gearwright Master Volen
A lean, middle-aged human with oil-stained robes and calloused hands. His eyes are bleary from lack of sleep, and his face is a mask of weary calculation. He wears the heavy cog medallion of a Consortium master. He moves with a tense efficiency, perpetually listening to the groans of the machinery around him.
Rusted Champion Kael
A tall, powerfully built human with ritual scars mapping old victories and defeats across his arms and torso. He wears patched leather armor adorned with broken chain links. His gaze is intense and philosophical, fixed on some middle distance where he sees a future in flames.
Overseer Trask
A bitter, hunched man in a stained Consortium foreman's coat. His left hand is a crude mechanical prosthetic that whirs and clicks. He smells of machine oil and resentment. He clutches a small, tarnished locket to his chest.
Scout Maya
A young woman propped against a wall of bones in the Ossuary, her leg crudely splinted. She wears the scavenged leather armor of the Rusted Champions. Her face is pale with pain, and she watches the shadows with a scout's alertness.
Ancient Golem Ordinator
A towering statue of fused bone and bronze, standing motionless in the center of the Sanctum. Its joints are immense, interlocking gears, and its chest is a hollow cavity filled with a slowly spinning, luminous gyroscope. It speaks in a resonant, harmonic voice.
Sentinel Construct
A multi-armed, humanoid automaton of riveted steel plates. One arm ends in a spinning saw, another in a pneumatic piston-hammer. Its single, cracked lens-eye glows a baleful red as it jerks and twitches in a patrol pattern, its joints screeching. It attacks anything that moves.
Deserter Finn
A gaunt man wrapped in a tattered blanket, hiding behind a stack of rusted pipes. His eyes are wide and haunted. He wears the faded insignia of a contender from a previous generation.

Chronicle Prelude

Environmental Traits

Legendary Archetypes

✦ Related Cases ✦

The Lost Workshop: Heart of a Raging Core

The Reckoning of the Blood-Soaked Bracers