D20 SYSTEM✦ Normal

The Scalding Verdict of Hotspring Inn

# Wilderness# Intrigue# Beast# Investigation

The famed Hotspring Inn, a respite for weary travelers, has become a place of horror. Its therapeutic baths now overflow with searing, semi-sentient magma slimes, and the proprietor, Finnian Gorge, claims it's a natural eruption. Veteran investigators whisper of illegal boreholes tapped deep into the geothermal veins, a desperate bid for profit that has unleashed something ancient and hungry from the planet's mantle. The players are drawn into a web of ecological sabotage, corporate greed, and a terrifying truth: the slimes are not invaders, but antibodies, and the real infection is human.

Chronicle Prelude

The players arrive at the once-luxurious Hotspring Inn, now shrouded in steam and panic. The main bathhouse is cordoned off, its marble cracked and oozing with cooling magma. Guests are being evacuated, but the proprietor insists it's a minor geothermal incident. The air smells of sulfur and fear.

Environmental Traits

The regional crisis is twofold: the immediate, spreading threat of the magma slimes that are destabilizing the local geography, and the underlying corruption that caused it. The victory condition is to stop the slimes and decide the fate of the perpetrator and the resource, but the truth is far more complex than a simple monster hunt.

Legendary Archetypes

Rayan

HP:45

STR:16

WIS: 12

CHA:11

Key Factions & Autonomous Nodes (8)

Finnian Gorge
A middle-aged man with weathered skin, calloused hands, and the haunted, frantic eyes of someone watching their life's work crumble. He wears a stained innkeeper's apron over simple clothes.
Elder Pyra
An elderly woman with skin like dried lava and hair like white ash. Her eyes glow with a soft, internal heat. She wears robes of woven volcanic fiber and carries a staff of petrified wood tipped with obsidian.
Kaelen Stone
A scarred, pragmatic woman in boiled leather and chainmail, bearing the insignia of a hired sword. She carries a well-maintained halberd and has a no-nonsense demeanor.
Scavenger Jax
A wiry, nervous man covered in soot and grime, wearing a patchwork outfit of salvaged leather and cloth. His eyes dart constantly, and he clutches a bag of scrap metal and old tools.
Wounded Earth Elemental
A vaguely humanoid figure of cracked, glowing basalt and flowing magma, about seven feet tall. It moves with a painful, grinding slowness, and fissures across its body leak steam and light. It seems agitated and confused.
Roderick Chalmers
A impeccably dressed man in a dark, heat-resistant traveling cloak, his face smooth and his expression one of detached appraisal. He carries a leather-bound folio and a handkerchief to dab his brow.
Liora
A young woman in simple, heat-resistant robes, her face smudged with ash. She looks anxious and conflicted, constantly glancing over her shoulder as if expecting to be caught.
The Slime Matriarch
A colossal, ancient magma slime, easily fifteen feet in diameter, its gelatinous body a swirling vortex of deep reds, oranges, and cooling black crusts. Within its translucent mass, the shapes of old pipes and tools can be seen. It pulses with a slow, deliberate rhythm, and lesser slimes orbit it protectively.

Chronicle Prelude

Environmental Traits

Legendary Archetypes

✦ Related Cases ✦

The Medusa's Coiffure of Red Coral Bay and the Crated Bronze Mirrors of the Shipwreck

The Scorched Carapace