The Tunnelers Campaign Session 8

Played Tuesday, September 2^nd, 2025

It is June 5^th, 2003, 5:30 PM.

Jel and Ash have finished confronting the goth teens, who gather their CDs and boombox and make a hasty retreat towards town. Ash and Jel weigh the options of waiting here until nightfall or going back to town themselves to rest and clean up. Jel wants to poke around The Rocks now that they are teen-free, and Ash is unwilling to leave her companion alone and in danger of being attacked by some sort of vampire.

I reveal to the party, now that they are able to get a sense of the place without distraction, that The Rocks are a place of power — any magic performed here will be more likely to succeed. The party does not yet know any rituals (as a reminder I am using the ritual magic of Barrow Keep as the basis of spellcasting in this campaign) but is glad to have the info for later use. They also observe the graffiti that litters the rocks: there are predictably some familiar staples of teen graffiti, names, swearwords, name-is-a-swearword, name+name enclosed in heart, etc., and a variety of generic goth go-tos of pentagrams and skulls, but more interesting and intricate are red-robed figures hidden under outcroppings. Many of them have names associated with them: Jel finds a trio labeled Karl, Jay, and Dennis and realizes that Karl was the name of the teen goth sorcerer she just had beef with. These are their vampire OCs. She also notices that Dennis’s name is fainter than the others, retouched less recently and with less enthusiasm.

During this time, Ash decides to taste the collection of gears that she pulled from the shrimp in the waterlogged dungeon. Ash can taste the makeup and value of stones and metals. The gears are gold and brass, and someone in town will pay $200 for them.

While pondering the vampire OC greaffiti, the duo finds a crevasse under some of the rocks, and can see something in there. Ash crawls in, handily succeeding at the caving roll. She finds a smallish chamber, just big enough to fit her head into and look around, and discovers it is the site of an art project. On the smooth stone roof, she sees a depiction of a veiny-cloaked man in a crown, on an intricate throne of skeletons, surrounded by stylized red skull-headed figures resembling the one that took Jerry earlier. Tinfoil is glued in strips to create dramatic shading on the figures, and the negative space is full of intricate crosshatching of the sort I recall drawing in all my middle and high school notebooks when bored. A violet mushroom grows in the corner.



Here is a helpful visual aid I produced.
This whole thing is meant to evoke the fact that the dungeon Halls of the Blood King, as deployed here, is an invention of the teens that they built in the place of power here. My choice of dungeon postdates the initial writing of the hex, so I had not specified the existence of the crevasse: I probably should edit it in.

Ash pokes the mushroom, patting it affectionately. It is one of the void fungi of Blood King. I make her save against disease. She succeeds and I tell her that she simply gets a sense that something is disappointed that it cant make her understand something.

Ash exits and helps Jel crawl in to get a look. Jel gets stuck for 3 full minutes. This gives her time to reflect on the place of power here: she wonders if it feels hostile. No, I tell her, in fact you feel comfortable in the tunnel. It is where a Tunneler should be, enclosed by the earth. This is a good place to be. She wonders if the place of power and the vampire imagery are intrinsically intertwined: if the former dictates the latter, or if it predates it and is just to the aesthetic tastes of the goths. Its the latter but I don’t tell her that.

When Jel emerges, it is 7:30. As her and Ash brush dust off themselves they realize that 12 coyotes are watching them, silently from the nearby grassland. A random encounter: wildlife, in this case acting as eyes and ears for an occultist. They are not hostile, just impassive. The girls consider them and talk about offering them food. After a few minutes, the coyotes shake their heads in unison as if disappointed and then trot away.