Spare Bits of the Sunset Palace of the Starry Sultan (d23 leftovers)

 So my Dungeon 23 project was predictably short lived. You can find my most recent post and links to all posts here. The basic idea is this: in the city of Itarra which is sort of like Babylon, Jerusalem, Istanbul, and Rome all rolled into one the central palace has been built over many many times throughout history. Each new ruling dynasty leaves its mark and builds its own layer of the Sunset Palace. 

Instead of trying to lay out each particular room of my d23 project which I have no time or patience for anymore, I wanted to just throw out some of the ideas that I had for floors, encounters, ect. Expect no stats.

The Wife Floor

Once upon a time, a sultan had a wife who could not bear him children, but he loved her very much. Rather than allow his dynasty to end or take another wife, he chose to call for healers across the world to come to enhance his own and his wife's fertility. This drew some mockery from the people, but he did not care. The healers, either out of fear or actual insight, declared that the problem was not with him but with his wife. They begged the sultan to simply have a child by a concubine or simply marry more wives, but he refused. Instead, he poured every gold piece he had into fertility treatments for his wife. History tells us nothing about the wife's opinion on these matters. These were sometimes painful and certainly ineffective, until a sorcerer from Abyssia came. He asked the sultan, "What do you wish? Do you wish your wife to be with child or do you wish her to be who she is?"

The sultan considered this. The question was strange, and yet he was desperate. He must have an heir, mustn't he? 

"Yes," he said, "I wish my wife to be with child not as she is!"

"Then you shall have your wish," declared the masked sorcerer. He fetched a fetish from a pouch, an idol of no god the sultan knew and certainly none that he worshiped. 

"Have her sleep in the bed with this, and she shall be with child and no longer be as she is," the strange fellow said. He requested a modest price and then vanished without a trace.

The sultan's wife, history does not tell us her name, slept with the idol in her bed and eventually began to show the signs of pregnancy. As her belly grew, so did her appetite. She ate increasingly large amounts of food, so much so that the sultan had to hire additional chefs to work in the palace. They worked from before dawn until dusk preparing increasingly strange foods for the sultan's wife. And as her appetite grew, she grew in anger and in strength. The sultan hired singers and musicians to try and soothe her temper, and though they might work for a time, they did not work forever and she began to throw them out of windows or break their necks with her hands.

Shen she ate one of them while others looked on in horror. She was no longer the sultan's wife. She was no longer even really human. Her belly grew and so did she, arms lengthening, claws extending, fangs growing, muscles engorging, skin paling. 

And yet even as the sultan saw her changing, he felt great love for her, or perhaps for the potential heir in her belly, and he refused to see her killed, if such a thing could even actually be accomplished. Instead, he had a whole floor of the Sunset Palace converted into a maze of comfort, a luxurious labyrinth of soothing sights and sounds, decor brought in from the far east known to bring about peace. Chefs and musicians were trapped on this floor with a large supply of preserved foods to last many years to soothe and feed the savage beast or be the food themselves. 

Adventurers who make it to this floor will find plenty of valuables in every room and hall. The passages are extremely hard to navigate and purposely so. The jewelry box of the sultan's wife is rumored to be down here somewhere and be one of the richest collections of jewels in the world. The descendants of the original trapped musicians and chefs have survived by becoming like ghosts. Their music can be heard from far off sometimes, and sometimes a cooked meal will be simply left in a particular spot as though appearing from nowhere, all to lure away the wife from the servants as they move. They have mostly given up hope of finding a way out. 

The wife herself is a terrible beast with incredible strength and speed. Facing her is almost certain death for most creatures, but even if you kill her, you unleash whatever has been growing in her womb for a hundred years, and perhaps that is much much worse. 

Gamaliel's Repose

In this post I discussed the entrance to Grand Student Gamaliel's Tomb. Gamaliel is one of the Student's of the Alchemist who is said to have achieved an ascendant existence with his perfection of the alchemical arts and handed these secrets down to his students. Gamaliel was convinced that the secret to immortality was the perfection of the body through the creation of artificial organs to replace those fallen versions we currently have. His tomb is not only a tomb but a workshop and full of his works, including the two guardians who are automatons entirely composed of the prosthetics that Gamaliel has crafted. They are male and female in appearance, meant to one day be joined together in a rebus, thus what one has the other lacks. Where one has a hand of wax emblazoned with a symbol of divine might, the other has a hand of glass with spidery delicate machinery so thin and intricate as to be mistaken for golden wires. This glass, however, is not fragile whatsoever, and it moves with fluidity like flesh. The guardians are, however, intelligent and creative beings. They will enjoy a stimulating conversation and might be convinced to leave their posts through rigorous logical argumentation.

As soon as the coast is clear, however, the disguised knowledge eater from the tomb's entrance will reveal itself and beeline for the Student's Notes which are priceless to fellow students of the Alchemist. If it cannot ascertain a clear opening, it will wait for the adventurers to return to take the notes from them and devour them. It is not interested in making copies. It wishes the knowledge destroyed forever. That is how it feeds. Other loot in this room is more of the alchemical organs and prosthetics that Gamaliel created which some adventurers might need or dare to make sure of in place of their present appendages for the powers contained therein. The notes are all but gibberish due to their incredibly complex formulae but a lifetime of study might reveal their secrets.

The Starry Sultan

In the first post I discussed Sultan Salamane II having returned from war changed, wearing a silver mask and a very very large turban. There's a Metroid under there, basically, an alien entity which is apart of a larger group of alien parasites who have attached themselves to leading members of the Cult of Star Seekers. They are the "gods from beyond" which people have been so fearful of. They are rebuilding their silver star chariot in the depths of the Sunset Palace. This level of the palace is patrolled by hulking white robed blank bodies, printed flesh from their alien technology, acting both as guards and as incubators for star creature larvae. The full grown individuals, when they are not attached to their human hosts, are contained in silver, spidery exoskeletons with incredibly thin needle arms that can crawl along the ceiling and use tools. They can cast spells that alter gravity and control minds.

If they complete their rocket, their launch will destroy the palace and Itarra.