Hi everyone, and welcome back to the Finder’s Archives.
In this column, we take some of the lands from Magic: The Gathering and turn them into something you can use for your fantasy games.
The stats given in each entry assumes that you’re using Pathfinder for your games, but they can easily be converted over into any fantasy system. This week we turn our attention to the Ancient Ziggurat.
Ancient Ziggurat
The ancient ziggurat is a place of power, since time immemorial, a place where mortals commune with the divine. It is also a place of sacrifice, of blood, fear, and the communion with dreadful powers, far beyond mortal ken.
Lay of the Land
The ziggurat is a large building, standing 175 by 175 feet at its base, and soaring to 100 feet in height, with steps leading from the base to the top (where it’s some 50 by 50 feet wide). The top and sides are stained with old dried up blood, with the top becoming especially slippery when it rains. Engraved at the very top is a circle of runes with a raised dais in the middle, that has grooves and canals for leading the blood down the ziggurat. When enough creatures are sacrificed and their blood spilled, the entire ziggurat starts vibrating and humming almost as if it comes alive.
Surrounding the ziggurat are ancient forests, deep tropical ones, where tribes have spent centuries sacrificing creatures upon the ziggurat and using it to summon creatures from the beyond to fight their wars. The tribe that’s currently in control of the ziggurat are a small tribe (some 300 members) of cannibal humans (use the stats for Ghouls, except they’re not undead. Succumbing to their version of Ghoul Fever causes the victim to succumb to feverish (and permanent) delusions that lead them to become a member of the tribe).
Dangers
The entire ziggurat is a gigantic mechanism for communicating with the Old Ones, creatures like Cthulhu, Shub-Niggurath, Azathoth, and their ilk. When an intelligent (at least Int 4) creature is sacrificed, the ziggurat absorbs a number of points equal to the Hit Dice of the sacrificed creature. A spellcaster can then channel the power within, by spending a full minute invoking one of the Old Ones (this requires a Linguistics check with a DC of 20 + the spell level – as well as the ability to speak Aklo). If the check is successful, you cast summon monster with a level equal to the total amount of points absorbed divided by 10 (i.e. if 20 points are spent, you cast summon monster II) – it automatically summons an aberration within the boundaries of that spell (as determined by the GM).
If it ever reached 1,000 points absorbed, it instead summons a Star-spawn of Cthulhu (CR 20) the next time that it is used, but which is NOT under the control of the caster. There is no way for a caster to determine how many points are currently stored, though they can control how many are spent each time (unless it reaches 1,000).
It currently has 782 points stored.
Kim Frandsen
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