Buriel's Bounty is an adventure for Dungeon World, and specifically for the Sundered World campaign setting produced by Awful Good Games.
Something I've always loved about A Sundered World is how gonzo its setting, the Remnants, is. All that remains of a sprawling cosmos are myriad islands floating in the Astral Sea, dumped there by the dissolution of the barriers between planes and the shattering of mortal worlds, godly dominions, and stranger realms into countless pieces. It's a churning soup of fragmentary landscapes both earthly and unearthly, the corpses and leavings of gods and primordials, and raw elemental power. Nevertheless, people still find a way to survive, plying the Astral Sea in ships great and small and dwelling on whatever islands can support life—whether that be a fragment of Arcadian paradise, a near-barren ball of ice, or a dead titan's severed head.
The ongoing revitalization of those relics of a bygone creation was something I wanted to emphasize in my adventure, which played a key part in its design.
The Corpse Kiln
In a way, new life emerging from the death and destruction of the old is what A Sundered World was already all about, and the Corpse Kiln that features prominently in Buriel's Bounty exemplifies that.
In English we use clay to mean flesh all the time, but the Corpse Kiln makes that literal. By the deific power of its creators, it fires the lifeless meat and bone of human corpses into a malleable and robust clay blessed by divine fertility. And as a forest grows strong on the fertile ashes left after a wildfire, so too do the fires of the Corpse Kiln create life, for the clay it produces can be shaped into mortal men and women of living terracotta.
Of course, in a ravaged world like the Remnants, nothing can be easy. Before the Sundering, the Corpse Kiln was the tool of a living god who cared for his creations. Now that god is dead and the Kiln is in the hands of his last surviving angel, driven mad by untold centuries of grief. Once more it fulfills its purpose of creating new life, but the clay creatures that emerge from it are not the progenitors of a new race beloved by their creator, but the first soldiers of an ever-expanding army bend on slaughter and domination.
In the wrong hands, this divine relic is a force of limitless destruction, but if it could be wrested away from the mad angel and his terracotta thralls, perhaps it could be turned towards the restoration of this Sundered World. Is such a thing possible? In the words of Dungeon World, play to find out.
The ongoing revitalization of those relics of a bygone creation was something I wanted to emphasize in my adventure, which played a key part in its design.
The Corpse Kiln
In a way, new life emerging from the death and destruction of the old is what A Sundered World was already all about, and the Corpse Kiln that features prominently in Buriel's Bounty exemplifies that.
In English we use clay to mean flesh all the time, but the Corpse Kiln makes that literal. By the deific power of its creators, it fires the lifeless meat and bone of human corpses into a malleable and robust clay blessed by divine fertility. And as a forest grows strong on the fertile ashes left after a wildfire, so too do the fires of the Corpse Kiln create life, for the clay it produces can be shaped into mortal men and women of living terracotta.
Of course, in a ravaged world like the Remnants, nothing can be easy. Before the Sundering, the Corpse Kiln was the tool of a living god who cared for his creations. Now that god is dead and the Kiln is in the hands of his last surviving angel, driven mad by untold centuries of grief. Once more it fulfills its purpose of creating new life, but the clay creatures that emerge from it are not the progenitors of a new race beloved by their creator, but the first soldiers of an ever-expanding army bend on slaughter and domination.
In the wrong hands, this divine relic is a force of limitless destruction, but if it could be wrested away from the mad angel and his terracotta thralls, perhaps it could be turned towards the restoration of this Sundered World. Is such a thing possible? In the words of Dungeon World, play to find out.
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