Jonrev at English Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 3.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0, via Wikimedia Commons

All right, first digital zine of the year. I decided to try something different: an honest-to-god dungeon crawl in the old-school style. It gives me a perfect excuse to add a new element to the lore, Wyrd incursions.

On Wyrd incursions

The prison in which Faolan resides is not perfect; the original creation left it riddled with hairline cracks and kinks in the cold iron shell and the miles of rock between him and the surface. It is through these kinks that Faolan’s power over change, contaminated with crazy, impractical, and frankly stupid ideas, slowly flows up to the surface. The flow is so slow that the power cogulates and turns into a liquid. Usually, it flows up to the surface and discharges, overwriting reality and dissipating back into raw Faerie magic.

Sometimes, however, the wyrd magic gets trapped in cave systems and ruins and starts to vaporize back into its original form without discharging. The bad ideas keep building slowly until a critical mass is reached, and space starts to warp to fit them better. The result is a wyrd incursion.

A wyrd incursion is a localized, enclosed distortion of reality in which the laws of the world have been rewritten to serve a small set of, usually terrible, organizing ideas. Inside the incursion, the world operates according to the logic of whatever idea or ideas created it, with general disregard for anything else. The laws of reality are bent well past their breaking points, gravity might pull towards multiple directions at once, time loops and stutters, and causality might become completely optional.

The beings that populate them are freakish creatures straight out of the sketchbook of an animator on a particularly bad acid trip, an amalgamation of person and objects that behave like an ill-conceived notion of a character with a thin layer of flesh on them and enough autonomy to be dangerous.

Wyrd incursions are dangerous by their very nature. Nothing inside them behaves in ways a sane person would predict, and prolonged exposure inevitably leads to transformation. Left alone, an incursion will slowly expand, rewriting more of the world to fit its governing idea and reshaping anyone unfortunate enough to remain within its influence.

And yet, adventurers still delve into them for what is changed by wyrd magic can never change back into what it was. Many wyrd incursions are filled with things worth stealing, provided the adventurers can get out without being transformed into a blob first.

Backstory

It is the worst-kept secret in Sliberberg that under the southern tip of Slibermond, deep below the intersection of Fireball road and Black Cat Alley, is a spring and reservoir of wyrd magic. The university and several of the alchemists in the neighborhood use it as a limitless supply of the stuff, using a network of cold-iron pipes and pumps in service tunnels under the streets, maintained by cold-iron constructs.

On the 21st of Yulemoon, the unthinkable happened: one of the pipes under the university cracked, sending a constant drip of wyrd magic into the tunnels beneath Fireball Road that turned into a trickle and eventually a flood. The school had closed for the Christmas/Yuletide recess, so nobody noticed that the pressure in the wyrd magic pipes had dropped to zero. By the time that maintenance construct number three, nicknamed Curly for some long-lost reason, had arrived to inspect the burst, the damage had been done, and Gremlins had already emerged from the pools of wyrd magic and ripped the construct to pieces. Shortly thereafter, the Wyrd Incursion formed beneath the streets. 

It is now the 28th of Yulemoon. The gremlins and other wyrd-created creatures have multiplied, and early this morning, they started to make forays onto the surface above to cause chaos. With the problem now plain for all to see, and the incursion beginning to expand into the shops along Fireball Road, a request for brave (and foolhardy) volunteers to descend into the wyrd beneath Fireball Road and deal with the incursion for a sum of 200 guildenmarks has been issued to the Iron Oak Inn Adventuring guild.

On Currency and Prices in New Mountainheart and the Feengrenze

The Feengrenze has no unified monetary system, which would imply a level of organization and unity far beyond what the farce allows. As such, a New Mountainheartian Mark is not equivalent to a Lyonesse Shilling or a Qualdirain Dinar, despite all being silver coins. To make matters even more confusing, every nation uses different denominations for how many copper coins equal a silver, and a few notable currencies are suffering from hyperinflation or rampant counterfeiting.

In this work, we will be using New Mountainheart’s native currency system. New Mountainheart, well ahead of everyone else in the world, uses a system of denominations that will be broadly familiar to most of my readers. 

• The copper coin known as Pfenning is worth roughly 1 cent American. 
• 100 Pfennig is equivalent to a Mark or 1 US dollar.
• A  Guildenmark is equivalent to 100 marks or 100 dollars American

Alongside this adventure, I will be publishing a price guide that adapts the goods and services list from the Player’s Handbook to this new pricing system.

Fireball road

Fireball Road is pretty typical of the sort of street you would find around Boston, Massachusetts, off of Harvard Square, Parker Street, and Mass Ave, a small collection of apartment buildings, “start-ups”, student housing, and small shops that cater to the occupants of the previous three types of residents. A street two blocks long that, aside from being the home of the wyrd well, is otherwise not particularly noteworthy. Below is a list of the residents and businesses on the street, as they would be in better circumstances

1. University dormitory
   1. Heigh four stories
   2. The building is brick with a pair of floating annexes accessible via rope ladders.
   3. Books in this building tend to float towards the person most likely to read them.
   4. Off-campus housing for first-year students
2. Rose and the Holly
   1. Height 2 stories, the sister shares an apartment on he second floor
   2. The walls are in logic ivy that grows in geometric patterns and the  second floor has wandering rooms
   3. The Rose and the Holly is a small pub that serves as the the favorite haunt for most of the student body. 
   4. The pub is run by the pretty Sidhe sisters, Rose and Holly.
      1. Sidhe are rare enough in the Feengrenze, and seeing two of such obviously high breeding and refined manners serving as barmaids makes one wonder about their origin.
         1. However, they are notoriously tight-lipped about their origins, preferring their own company to that of the patrons.
3. Belcher’s Potions and Salves
   1. Large half-timbered wizard tower with unseen servants in the upper apartments
   2. Alchemist’s shop on the ground floor that sells common potions, non-magical salves, and curatives.
   3. The second floor is Mr Blecher’s workshop.
   4. The owner is Markus Blecher, a fat, greasy, unmarried human alchemist with a receding hairline, gas problems, and a personality more befitting of a pig than a human.
4. Yazius’ Reliable Unliving Laborers
   1. Wizard tower with a floating top story accessible by a spiraling metal staircase and anchored by multiple ropes
      1. Entering the shop requires the customer to part with a bit of blood.
   2. Yazius the Carver (real name Bob Mourner) is a thin, pale human man who is one of only a handful of sanctioned necromancers in the kingdom. He raises skeletal constructs made of beast bones (use skeleton stat block) and rents them for 10 marks a day.
      1. Also buys beast bones for 50c a basket.
      2. He leans into the dread necromancer persona, even though, without the black cloak and sinister airs, he is so utterly average in every possible way, including a completely forgettable personality.
5. Thaumaturgical pets and supplies
   1. Three-story tall townhouse, made of obsidian brick with color-changing lanterns.
      1. The building is a former atelier with residual scorch marks from the previous tenant.
   2. A store that sells supplies for the more exotic types of pets that wizards and witches tend to keep.
      1. Has only been open for a few months.
   3. Run by Julia Schauerte, a mouselike pooka with a mousy personality, nervous disposition, and chronic allergies to cats, cath sith, and mice
6. Newstand
   1. Run by a thin, shifty, human university dropout by the name of Joe Lieber (not his real name). Sells papers and magazines
      1. Joe is never seen without a cigarette in his mouth and speaks with a Brooklyn accent
   2. Currently has in stock the following
      1. The Sliberberg Sentinel
      2. Popular Sourcerry
      3. Modern Baroness
      4. Tournaments Illustrated
      5. Catholicism Today
      6. Merchants Insider
      7. Assorted small items sold by the average tobacconist
7. Beta Beta Phi Frat House
   1. 4-story tall dormitory built of anti-entropic obsidian brick
   2. Beta Beta Phi is a notorious frat house on campus, well known for its drunken parties, pranks, and frequent illegal street air polo games.
      1. The Frat is one more incident from being barred from the campus and the city.
      2. The brothers speak like well, college frat brothers
   3. The brothers might be persuaded to foray into the Wyrd Incursion if offered the chance for thrills and to get their hands on novel alcoholic beverages.
8. Asheworth Magical Supplies
   1. A three-story-tall building with large glass windows
   2. Ashworth Magical Supplies sells spell components, alchemy ingredients, and alchemy equipment.
      1. Nothing in their stock costs more than 20gm
      2. Mr Ashworth is a ferret pooka of completely average nature, who lives in the second-floor flat with his wife and children.
9. Erin’s Faerie Diner
   1. Three-story converted townhouse built of shifting wood with a constant layer of spell dust on the furniture despite Mr Erin’s best attempt to clean up
   2. Classic 24-hour diner that serves traditional fey comfort food, entirely vegan menu
      1. The forest gnome Erin works as the cook, while his wife, Patty, and their three daughters rotate helping in the kitchen and serving guests. 
      2. They live in the upper floors, along with a tenant in a room they rent out on the third floor.
10. Cleensmuneck’s Boot and Shoe repairs
    1. Cleensmuneck is a squat, redheaded gnome (lepercaun) shoemaker with a comically oversized mustache, specializing in boots with pointed toes.
       1. Cleensmuneck rarely, if ever, speaks to the point that most of his neighbors assume he is mute.
       2. The shoemaker lives in the second-floor apartment.
11. Tower condos
    1. Four-story-tall stone wizard tower
    2. The tower has four condos, one on each floor
       1. Current occupants:
          1. Empty
          2. Peadair MacEanain, gnome(lepercaun), professor.
          3. Patrick McDonald: Author of this blog and all-powerful worldbuilder
          4. Hykka Tresloggett: Hobgoblin and freelance wizard 
12. Miss Muffet’s Fine Fashion
    1. Two-story copper ribbed building with an acoustic leak
    2. A seamstress’s shop with presumptions of fashion that caters exclusively to young witches between the ages of 14 and 27 and sells what its proprietress calls dark witch chic, aka gothic lolita witch attire
       1. The proprietress is Miss Muffet, an awakened giant black widow spider with a bubbly personality and seeming obsession with anything involving silk and black lace.
          1. She rarely shows herself to customers, fearing that she might scare them off. Instead, she uses a marionette of her preferred self to interact with customers while dangling from the ceiling. She is good at manipulating the doll to the point where she can sew with it.
          2. She is saving up for a permanent shapechange spell that will turn her into a cute drider or other half-human, half-spider hybrid so she can wear her outfits.
          3. She communicates exclusively through gestures with her forelegs and written communication.
          4. She produces all the outfits she makes herself and uses her own silk to weave her own cloth.
          5. Currently single but eager to mingle
       2. Miss Muffet has two live-in apprentices who help her make her outfits
          1. Tamsin Penketh: Hobgoblin, 18, not really into Mis Muffet’s choice of fashion, too afraid to make her opinion known
          2. Fanny Landau: Otter Like pooka, 15, Miss Muffet’s favorite, deathly scared of spiders
       3. There might be some magical outfits among the clothing
13. Coláiste Draoidheil’s department of book restoration
    1.  Two-story traditional half-timber house
    2. The building is packed with workshops for repairing and transcribing books from the campus library.
       1. Rotating staff of bookbinders and preservationists 
14. Eroan Zinlynn Solvents and Glues
    1. Spire house of obsidian brick,
       1. Residence on the top floor, and a large alchemy lab on the first floor
    2. Eroan Zinlynn is an elderly, elvish alchemist who produces reagents and acid on an industrial scale. His hair is white, his skin dotted with chemical burns, and the centuries of breathing fumes have left him slightly dotty.
15. Magisterium Branch Office
    1. Half-timbered Wizard tower
       1.  Nasty arcane echoes inside the offices, which explains why nobody works here.
    2. Mostly nameless clerical staff, literally, 90% of the time, the location is staffed only by constructs.
16. Henderson Possibilium Ltd
    1. Wizard tower of obsidian brick that suffers random time dilations in various rooms
    2. Euan Henderson is a human man with raven hair and a gaunt face from staring at the crystals grow, drip by drip, for hours on end.
       1. He talks with long pauses as though waiting for a slow drip to land. 
       2. He is one of only three residents on the street with a license to handle wyrd magic and knows about the Wyrd Well and the pipes, but not the specifics of the latter
    3. Possibilium creation workshop on the first floor and in the basement.
17. Jordan Divination Mirror Servicing
    1. 4-story sentient stone dormitory with a lab space
    2. Jordan is an elven woman with black-stained fingers, black-stained blond hair, and seemingly black-stained silver eyes.
       1. She repairs divination mirrors and bowls in her shop on the first floor
    3. The rest of the building is rooms for rent
18. Pröll’s Convenience
    1. A three-story-tall copper ribbed townhouse.
    2. Ole Pröll is a badger pooka that runs a small convenience store.
       1. He is an aggressively overfriendly extrovert who tends to be nosy. 
       2. His shop is a mess of various dry and preserved groceries 
    3. Ole lives in the second-floor apartment and rents out the attic apartment for cheap.

At this time, the Wyrd Incursion is slowly encroaching upon these addresses. Currently, it is encroaching on 

• Erin’s Faerie Diner: The basement of the diner is gradually transforming into a storage area for the Mall’s Food Court.
• Cleensmuneck’s Boot and Shoe repairs: His basement storeroom now connects to the changing rooms of the Department store 
• Henderson Possibilium Ltd: A door leading to the maintenance corridors has appeared in the basement crystal growing room in the workshop.

Naturally, everybody who lives on the street is freaking out about the emergence of a wyrd incursion beneath their feet. When the player arrives on the scene, they find everyone on the street, panicking in ways entirely appropriate to their personalities.

The wyrd Well

The wyrd well stands in a small plaza where Fireball Road and Black Cat Alley meet. It is located in an unassuming stone building, unassuming except for the fact that it has no door and unfurils when you approach, for it is no building, it’s a Magisterium stone golem affectionately known by those who dwell in the neighborhood as Shack. Shack’s one job is to check for Magisterium Wyrd Magic licenses and proper wyrd magic containment vessels before people can access the pump. Other than that, it is an ordinary cold iron pump with a brass handle.

Setting the Scene

When the players first arrive at Fireball Road, read the following;

It is chaos out in the street. Dozens of people are milling about in the narrow snow-covered lane, talking to each other in panicked tones and looking worried. Below, you can feel something rumbling as it passes under you, shaking the buildings and sending sheets of snow tumbling downward from the roofs.

Describe some of the characters in the gazetteer to the players and let them choose who to talk to. Most of them know very little about what’s going on, save for that somewhere beneath the street, one of the wyrd pipes leaked, and a wyrd incursion has formed as a result. Only two people have anything helpful to add to the conversation.

• Euan Henderson knows about the pipes and the service constructs that maintain them. He has not noticed any change in the wyrd magic coming through the pipes to his workshop. He spends all day staring at vats of the stuff in his workshop, so he definitely knows this for a fact: the leak has to be south of the wyrd well, between the well and the university.
• Joe Lieber has been down in the wyrd incursion; he sleeps down in the maintenance tunnels due to a lack of a permanent living arrangement. He woke up this morning to find that, between him and his usual egress point, was a shopping mall. He did not stay long enough to explore the mall, being chased out by gremlins. He knows about the constructs, the standard layout of the tunnels, and can give a sketchy description of the layout of the wyrd incursion. 

Gremlin Rampage

After the players have had a chance to get their feet under them, there is an ominous scratching sound coming from a nearby manhole. Read the following

The manhole flips over, and dozens of small puke-green and nauseous-purple, goblin-like things pop out. They rush in all directions towards the horrified onlookers, towards the shops, towards the side streets.

• The twelve gremlins make a beeline for whatever form of mischief catches their eye in the players’ vicinity. They rush towards the shops to smash windows and merchandise, towards the onlookers to scratch and pull hair, and towards the side streets and rooflines to find more victims. They move like demented, evil chimpanzees on all fours.
  • They linger in the lane for three rounds before they troop off to find more fun to be had and victims to terrorize.
• Of the people in the crowd, 1d12 can put up a reasonable defense in the immediate vicinity of the players; they use the commoner stat block.

The Transit Mall

When the wyrd incursion formed beneath Fireball Road, it unleashed a mass of several ideas to improve the efficiency of retail complexes… by using high-speed mass transit. The result is a shopping mall with not one but three subway systems, one that (supposedly) connects to a regular subway and two narrow-gauge systems that connect the various stores in the mall. The Transit Mall is a fever dream of design: high-speed trains share space with shoppers and merchandise, and an eclectic selection of stores from around the world, populated by caricatures of people and, of course, gremlins.

Factions

Like any good mall at Christmastime, the place is packed with people.

• The shoppers: Wyrd made mannequin-like caricatures of humans with the intelligence of a zebra. Incapable of speech but can understand it enough to obey simple orders and understand announcements on the PA. They are herd creatures that graze in the mall’s shops. Harmless unless they stampede
• Security: Ogre-like men made of wyrd, meat, and exercise equipment with uniforms and oversized metal knifesticks (use ogre stat block). Dumb Bullies that speak like Grimlock from the Transformers, who like to throw their weight around and are easily angered and will beat those who anger them to a pulp. 
• The employees: Mutant half-flesh, half-retail-equipment caricatures of humans who work in the shops. Noncombatants who will call security if threatened. Understands New Mountainheartian but speaks gibberish made up of a dozen different languages, will be increasingly replaced by New Mountainheartian as the Incursion state progresses.
• Janitors: Beings made of mops, brooms, and other janitorial equipment that work to maintain the mall; mostly nonverbal but understand New Mountainheartain. Will not cause trouble, but can fight.
• Gremlins: Nasty little globs of wyrd in the form of goblins the size of a poodle with razor-sharp claws and a wicked streak a mile wide. Live to cause trouble and will frame it on the players.

The dungeon hazard die.

This uses the dungeon-hazard die system, as popularized by Necropraxis and Knave’s second edition, to keep track of time, determine encounter spawns, and monitor resource depletion. While in the mall, roll a d6 every ten minutes in world (hence referred to as a dungeon turn in this document) and consult the chart to decide what happens

d6
1	Roll for an encounter
2	Consume rations or take 1d4 damage
3	Light sources are expended, and spells that have timers go out
4	Roll once on the mall shift table
5	Players find a clue of some form, maybe advertisements or normal people to talk to
6	Free roll: Nothing happens

Encounters

Until incursion level 2, all encounters are rolled with a d10.

d12	encounter
1	2 security guards accost the party, looking for a fight
2	A pushy salesman employee stops the party and tries to force them to buy… something
3	1d12 gremlins climb out of the ventwork to cause trouble, and will try to pin it on the players
4	A security guard chasing 1d6 gremlins. If the players stop the gremlins, the guard might be appreciative, maybe?
5	A dense knot of shoppers blocks the players’ path to their destination, and they are refusing to budge. The players will have to disperse the crowd or find a way around
6	A group of janitors enters and begins mopping the floors. The players need to make a Dex check DC 12) to move without slipping.
7	Trains incoming! If the players are standing on or within 5 feet of tracks, they need to make a DC 10 Dex check or receive 1d4 damage as they run down
8	A train arrives at the station, and they will wait 1d4 minutes before departing
9	Announcement over the PA. If the incursion level is less than 3, it is complete and utter gibberish; else, it is the sort of boring announcement that typifies a mall.
10	Roll twice, and combine the results
11	The players encounter a group of 1d12 commoners curious about the store.
12	The players encounter another group of adventurers, a gang consisting of a scout, an acolyte, a tough, and a bandit captain from the surface, who is robbing one of the nearby stores.

.

Mall shifts

d10	Mall Shift
1	A sale is announced in one of the stores. If the players are in the store, then they must make a Dex check, DC 10, or receive 1d6 bludgeoning damage from the stampeding crowd
2	It’s closing time, shoppers and staff leave, more alarms and security devices are activated, and all random encounters become guard encounters or janitor encounters. If the mall is closed, this becomes the mall opens.
3	Shift change, the mall rapidly empties and refills via the platform in the central concourse.
4	Two trains packed with shoppers arrive on the central concourse, and the stores will be packed for the next 1d6 turns
5	Power failure, the lights and everything electronic go out in the mall until either the players fix the lights or 1d12 turns elapse
6	A full-scale war breaks out between the gremlins and security. For 1d12 turns in every location, there are gremlins fighting security
7	The music coming over the speakers turns discordant; it’s harmless, but it really grates on the nerves
8	The Incursion expands. Advance the wyrd incursion state
9	Maintenance time: All the trains stop where they are while the janitors work on the tracks. The doors on the trains lock until maintenance is done in 1d6 turns
10	Store closing. The PA announces that, for some improbable reason, one of the stores will be closed until further notice. All security devices are active in the store

wyrd incursion level

step	level
1	The incursion expands northward, and two new shops open up
2	Actual mall entrances appear on the surface of the neighboring Charm Way and Black Cat Alley. Curious bystanders enter to investigate the new buildings. All encounters from this point on are rolled with a d12
3	The incursion breaks through to Miss Muffet’s cellar, creating a new entrance to the dungeon accessible via the maintenance tunnels
4	The incursion completely consumes Erin’s Faerie Diner, making it part of the food court. The entrance to the mall via Erin’s Faerie Diner is blocked permanently
5	Cleensmuneck’s Boot and Shoe repairs is entirely consumed by the incursion, turning into a storeroom in the department store. The entrance to the mall via Cleensmuneck’s Boot and Shoe repairs is blocked off.
6	The incursion starts to press into the remaining shops on Fireball Road
7	Miss Muffet’s is consumed entirely, and it becomes a new boutique in the mall
8	Fireball Road is entirely consumed, and the mall, a one-story brutalist building, emerges where the street once was.

The Trains

There are tracks everywhere in the mall. A standard-gauge subway line cuts through the central concourse, complete with platforms where six-car subway trains—painted red and grey and bearing a T-in-a-circle logo—regularly stop. Alongside this, 2-foot-9-inch narrow-gauge tracks snake through stores, concourses, hallways, and walkways, violating space and time as single-car trams shoot in and out of tunnels that connect stores like wormholes.

• If the players try to ride the large subway trains, they always end up back at the Transit Mall. They exit through one tunnel aperture and arrive instantaneously at the other.
  
• The single-car high-speed tram lines are free for players to use, though checkout counters are generally located around the stops inside stores.
  

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Tracks

Whenever the players cross or linger near a set of tracks, roll a d8 (use a d10 in especially busy or confined areas). As a result of 1–2, a train comes thundering down the line toward them.

• Affected players must make a DC 10 Dexterity check or take 1d4 damage as the train clips or slams into them.
  

(If you want this to be nastier at higher incursion levels, this is a great place to scale damage or frequency.)

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“Crime”

Despite the stores’ unusual nature and the mall’s general character, this is still a functioning shopping mall. If employees witness players stealing, fighting, or damaging merchandise, they respond as real-world retail workers would—by immediately attempting to summon security.

Hidden throughout the mall are discreet security-call buttons. Employees who witness a crime will make a beeline for the nearest one and activate it, starting a d4 countdown.

• When the timer reaches zero, 1d3 mall security guards arrive.
  
• The guards focus on subduing offenders as quickly and efficiently as possible, beating them until they are prone and unresponsive.

Dungeon Key:

First floor Concourse

The room is long, brightly lit, and filled with knots of people around kiosks or moving between stores. A pair of tracks runs down the center of the hall, and more tracks criss-cross the hall. You spy a set of stairs leading upward to another concourse on the ceiling. Halfway up the hall is a pair of platforms with stairs leading up to them.  

Knots of people: There are 1d12 groups of 1d20 shoppers “grazing” at the kiosks or moving between stores; unless a fight breaks out, they do not pay the players any attention whatsoever  

Kiosks: There are six kiosks along the length of the concourse. They are in order from north to south.

• Info booth. An unmanned booth with a store directory.
  • If the incursion is less than 4, the directory is gibberish; otherwise, it provides an accurate description of all the stores’ public areas. 
• Watch seller: An employee selling low-quality watches that do not work. 
• Stuffed “Animal” Seller: An employee selling stuffed toys of things that could generously be called animals. 10 marks each.
• Gatchapon machines: For the low price of a mark, you get a plastic capsule containing something indescribable, made of plastic. 
• Coffee stand: An employee selling water that is brown and smells like coffee and coffee drinks. Tasteless and does not have caffeine. They also sell a collection of cardboard pastries. 
• Newstand. A newsstand selling various real-world periodicals from every non-German-speaking country on earth (New Mountainheartian is a form of German). 16 marks each.

Stairways: The stairways lead to the second-floor concourse.  

Stores: The following locations are accessible from the first-floor concourse. Each one has a sign bearing the store’s name.

• A gold sign in Times lettering reading “Thrifany’s” above the door of the Jewelry Store
  Thin black lettering spelling “Tracy’s” above the wide entrance to the Department Store (First Floor)
• A sign depicting a burger and a soda cup above the entrance to the Food Court
• An orange-and-white sign above the Hardware Store, proclaiming it “Residential Station” in Swiss German
• Red block lettering reading “The Second Amendment”  in englishabove the entrance to the Gun Store

platforms with stairs: Lead to the Subway Station

Subway Station

Two long concrete platforms sit on either side of the tracks, accessible by stairs and enclosed by a low metal wall. The platform is crowded with people. Advertisements line the fence. There is a large signboard with the words Fireball Rd/Coláiste Draoidheil in white lettering upon a red field with the logo of a T in a circle flanking it. Below is a Diagram of various colored lines.

People: There are 1d20 shoppers on each platform, waiting silently. They will board the next train.  

Advertisements: The ads are all gibberish and clearly parodies of real-life brands.  

Diagram: The diagram looks like a map with various colored lines in red, green, blue, and orange, with white dots with names in english beside them. Fireball Rd/Coláiste Draoidheil is the southernmost dot on the red line, just south of Quinsy Adams and Quinsy Center. Other circles have names like South Station, Government Center, and Harvard Square

• If the players watch the diagram, they notice that the existing lines and names fade away, leaving only Fireball Rd/Coláiste Draoidheil.

Stairs: The short flight of stairs leads to the first-floor Concourse

Jewelry store

You enter a softly lit room with a soft, unpatterned carpet, wood-paneled walls, and glass displays filled with twinkling accessories. There is a display with a few rings mounted on a twitching iron hand.  There are a few employees behind the displays and a door behind them.  

Glass displays: The displays are filled with jewelry that looks impractical or painful to wear.

• Most of the stuff in the displays is worthless, pieces of glass, iron plated in precious metals, and paste. However, there are about 100 guildmarks of authentic jewelry among the worthless pieces. 
• The cases are rigged with alarms that trigger if anyone attempts to open them without using the keys the employees have. When triggered, start a d4 timer ticking down each round. When the timer expires, the alarms will summon 1d4 security guards who will immediately attack the players.

Iron Hand: The Iron Hand is the left forearm of Curly, the maintenance construct, and it twitches aimlessly, trying to free itself.

• There is a ring on each of the fingers of the hand, all fake 
• The hand is located in the same sort of case as mentioned in the Glass displays

Employees: Two employees are manning the counters, dressed in eye-wateringly loud outfits.

• The employees have keys on retractable key rings to open the displays 
• The salespersons are incredibly pushy; they try to force a sale at any cost.

Door: If the players investigate the door before opening it, they hear nothing behind it and smell a foot odor.

• The door is unlocked
• The door leads to the service tunnels

Gun Store

You enter a small store with strange-looking things mounted on the wall. A half mechanical bear wearing a brimmed hat and dark sunglasses sits behind a cash register, sitting on a glass display filled with more strange things. Strange posters line the wall, and a door with a frosted window leads to another room where there’s lots of yelling and loud noises.

Strange-looking things: The things on the wall are Faolan’s bad interpretation of firearms, all of which are so bad that most don’t even look like guns; all look either painful to hold, awkward to use, or a combination of both.

• All the guns on the rack are non-functional and made of solid metal and plastic.

Half mechanical bear: The shop’s proprietor is an animatronic that looks like it was made from parts of an actual bear, including the meat, dressed in a vaguely cowboyish outfit, and bolted to the floor

• The bear speaks and understands only American English. The players can make an Intelligence check, DC 14, to recognize that the bear’s language is similar to Lyonesse and can use that to speak with the bear.
• The animatronic has a few dozen canned phrases in American English that it uses to converse with the players. Most of the phrases are gun lobby talking points, conspiracy theories about root vegetables, and comments about shooting shoplifters with his machine gun. There are plenty of phrases that appear to contain curse words, but they are bleeped out.
• If the players try to steal anything or make it clear by any means that they are not American citizens, the bear lets out a string of bleeped-out expletives about thieving carrots and orders them to get the bleep out of his store.
  • If they remain after his warning or try to get back into the store, the bear chest splits open and starts spraying the environment with a submachine gun and a lot of bleeped-out comments about root vegetables.
    • Every round on initiative 20, every medium creature in a 15-foot cone directly in front of the bear must make a Dex check, DC 1,5, or receive 2d6 damage. The bear continues firing until destroyed or until no creatures remain in its cone.
    • Any prone creature does not need to make a check.
    • The mechanical bear turret has an AC of 10, 8 hit points, and resistances to poison and psychic damage.

Display Case: The case is filled with handguns that are really just lumps of metal and wood, painful to even look at.

• Only one item in the case, the “handgun,” is remotely functional.
  • Hand Gun: magic item, rare. (pistol) The device is the sort of oversized pistol one might expect to see in Warner Bros. Cartoons, with a gloved hand at the end of the barrel. As an action, a player can make a ranged attack roll to shoot the hand and a thin black cable connected to it at an object or creature up to 120 feet away. On a hit, the hand will grab whatever it was shot at and rapidly drag it back to the player before releasing it. If the object or creature is larger than the player, they will have to make a strength check or be dragged towards the object or creature.

Cash Register: The register has 500 marks in various coins

Posters: The posters are a mix of doomsday prepper, pro-military, and conspiracy theory drivel about carrots presented as patriotic slogans, the sort of stuff you would expect to find in a militia hangout.

• All are in American English and riddled with typos and spelling errors. See reference to the bear above.

Door: The players smell the scent of used gunpowder and hear three male voices quipping among themselves. Through the glass, they can see three man-shaped figures in front of a window.

• The door is unlocked.
• The door leads to the shooting range.

Shooting range

The room is a long chamber with a low wall with windows splitting it into two. There is a rack containing a few strange-looking guns and small boxes, and three men are shooting guns into the larger of the two rooms. One has a black leather coat, jeans, and a flat haircut; one has a green tank top and a red bandana around wild brown hair; and one has a denim jacket and a blond mullet. There is a sign above them in what appears to be Lyonesse. Out in the big room are various targets, as a platform and a pair of tunnels with tracks leading into them.

Sign: “Gun Training with special guest stars” in an eye-watering script.

Rack: The rack contains two semi-automatic pistols and a revolver. The boxes contain ammo for the guns. There are 20 rounds for the semi-auto pistols and 24 for the revolver.

• If the players leave and come back, the rack will have restocked itself.

Men: The men shooting at targets at the shooting range are caricatures of three well-known 80s action movie stars in their most famous roles: the relentless android assassin, the haunted rogue soldier, and the disgraced commando.

• They speak exclusively in a limited set of cheesy action movie one-liners ( though not necessarily ones from their own movies)
• Any character who succeeds on a DC 10 Insight check notices that the men look less like real people and more like three-dimensional paper cutouts, as if torn from movie posters.
• Only the one in the Leather jacket understands New Mountainheartian and speaks with a strange, mechanical, flat, slightly menacing, Austrian accent.
  • When they notice the player, he asks if they are here for firearms training.
• Firearms Training: The training takes three dungeon turns. At the end of the 3rd turn, any character that participates in the training becomes proficient in the use of all handguns, including modern weaponry and feengrenze produced matchlocks.
• When an action star is not interacting with the player, he resumes shooting targets and ignores the players.
• If asked, they will stop shooting long enough for the players to board the next train to stop at the platform.
• If attacked, they simply ignore the players and keep shooting at the targets on the range. They cannot be damaged, restrained, or meaningfully interacted with beyond conversation and training.

Targets: The targets at the shooting range are soda cans on small stands. They respawn infinitely

Tunnels: the tunnels lead to

• Tunnel A3: Tunnel A3 in The Sporting goods store
• Tunnel A2: Tunnel A1 in The Food Court

The Department Store: Tracy’s

Ground Floor: Women’s wear, perfume, and cash registers

As you enter the store, you find yourself confronted by a bank of cashiers and a maze of low glass counters manned by women armed with pump spray bottles. Beyond the labyrinth are rows of clothing racks and shelves topped by dummies wearing outrageous dresses cut through by tracks that lead out of the store from a tunnel in the back wall. You can hear a mechanical voice reporting its status from a display of hats. A set of stairs leads upward.

Cashiers: There are six cashier stations, each operated by an employee

• Each cashier station has 300 marks in coins and greenback bills

glass counters: There are 1d12 employees stationed around the perfume counters, which are explicitly arranged to be maze-like

• It takes a dungeon turn to navigate through the maze
• The employees swarm the players immediately, begging them to buy something and trying their best to make them stay. Engaging with them adds another turn to the time it takes to get through the maze.
• The perfume on offer costs 1 to 40 guildenmarks, and most of the scents sound utterly unappealing

clothing racks and shelves: The shelves are packed with what can only be described as high fashion because they are utterly impractical for day-to-day use.

• Each outfit costs roughly 90 marks.
• There are 1d12 employees scattered through the racks

Voice: The voice belongs to Curly. He is shouting various status errors and requests for assistance at the top of his nonexistent lungs.

• Tracking the voice leads to the women’s hat section of the floor, where Curly’s head is serving as a bust for an extravagant pink Sunday bonnet.
• Curly speaks like a robot, mainly focusing on his status and functionality, and instructs the players to reattach the rest of his body.
• Removing the head from the display will be considered stealing and result in the appropriate response.

Stairs: the stairs lead up to the Men’s Wear department

Tunnel: The tunnel leads to:

• Tunnel B2 leads to Tunnel B1 in the Food Court
• Tunnel B3 leads to tunnel B5 in Housewares

Food court

The concourse opens up into a vast hall filled with tables, one of which is noisily hopping up and down in one corner. Knots of shoppers sit at the table or wait in lines at several stalls on one wall. At the far end of the hall is a platform sandwiched between the entrance to two sets of tunnels. Beyond it, you can see a door.

Hopping table: The table in question is hopping on one corner despite being heavily laden with disgusting tubs and trays of food. There is a heavyset shopper messily stuffing his face with his feast, seemingly mindless of the hopping.

• If the players investigate the hopping corner, they find an iron construct leg is being used to prop up that corner of the table.
  • The leg is curly’s right leg.
  • Removing the leg without replacing it with a suitable alternative will cause the food to spill onto the floor, angering the shopper. He will raise such a huge fuss that security will arrive in 2 rounds and immediately attack the players.

Stalls: parodies of real-world fast-food joints that frequently appear in food courts, and all the food costs about five marks each. Standouts include

• Jalopeno’s: Food openly rotting beneath the counter. Eating it causes 1d4 poison damage.
• Jack Torpedo’s: Very sorry-looking burger, fries, and shakes. Almost edible.
• Mrs Tansy: Cookie shop with no line, food here is actually edible and tastes like the real thing.
  • Wyrd magic knows better than to mess with Tansy
• Sataros: Serves up slices of cardboard pizza

Tunnels: The food court serves as the interchange point between lines A and B. The destinations of the tunnel are

• Line A
  • Tunnel A1  leads to Tunnel A2 in The Shooting Range
  • Tunnel A6 leads to Tunnel A5 in The Bookstore
• Line B
  • Tunnel B2 leads to tunnel B2 on the first floor of the department store.
  • Tunnel B8 leads to Tunnel B7 in the Arcade.

Door: If the players investigate the door before opening it, they hear nothing behind it and smell a foot odor mixed with ozone and fryer grease.

• The door is unlocked.
• The door leads to the service tunnels

Hardware store

The store is lit with harsh lighting from fixtures high above you. Rows of tall orange shelving stretch out as far as the eye can see, and large signs with block lettering are plastered everywhere. A quintet of identical looping employees stands erect at five identical checkout counters just in front of the entrance.

Shelves: The shelves rise 15 feet high and are loaded with standard DIY tools and supplies

• The players can find every tool from the Player’s Handbook here, including variants “improved” by Faolan, as well as improved versions of power tools that do not actually work or are not remotely ergonomic.
• The players can also find the following if they spend two dungeon turns searching the store.
  • Dimensional timber in various sizes
  • Plywood sheets
  • Ropes in various lengths
  • Hoses of all descriptions
  • Every kind of screw, nut, nail, and bolt imaginable
  • Pipes in every diameter from half an inch to 4 inches, made of every conceivable metal, including cold iron
  • Tiles
  • Sheets of various metals

Signage: the signage is all in a form of German close enough to New Mountainheartain for the players to read

• The signage lists what is in each aisle, as well as various nonsensical sales

Employees: Five men/cash register algmations in identical flannel shirts, orange vests, trucker caps, mustaches, and brown hair stand patiently at the checkout counters for customers to check out.

The maintenance room

The room is dark, smelly, a little damp and small, claustrophobic even. There are shelves filled with bottles and jars, a workbench with a metal torso sitting upon it, a large metal cabinet mounted on the wall, and a large metal closet.

Janitors: There is a 1 in 6 chance that there will be 1d4 janitors in the maintenance room when the players enter
Shelves: The shelves are filled with chemicals.

• There is every cleaning chemical under the sun here, and many that one would not expect to find in a broom closet.
• If the players’ characters have found the Le livre de cuisine des anarchistes in the bookstore, they can use the chemicals here to manufacture up to 6 sticks of dynamite.

Workbench: A simple workbench with a lot of little drawers and a metal torso sitting on it
There is a complete set of tinker and smith’s tools located around the torso.

• Drawers: the drawers are filled with assorted misshapen bits of metal that might be screws, bolts, and other common components, as imagined by Falaon
• Torso: The torso is made of black iron and has a number 3 painted on it. A small brass plate has the name “Curly” stamped on it.
  • The torso is Curly’s torso.
  • If the players can repair Curly, he will immediately make his way to the breach in the Gremlin spawning pit. Assuming the players can provide him with a cold iron pipe, he will repair the breach.

Closet: The closet contains brooms, mops, buckets, and other assorted cleaning supplies
Cabinet: The cabinet is actually the main electrical box and contains dozens of breakers, all of which are labeled in a version of German Close enough to New Mountainheartain for the players to read without checks.

• There are breakers for every location in the mall and the tram lines, flipping one immediately cuts power to that part of the store.
• Shutting off the power to any part of the mall will prompt a janitor to arrive 1d4 dungeon turns later to restore power to that part of the mall.

Gremlin Spawning Pit

Harsh industrial bulbs brightly light the plain, grey-walled room you entered. The room is dominated by a large, shimmering pool of liquid in the middle that resembles Technicolor mercury. A small but constant stream of more liquid dribbles into the pool from a gaping hole in a large iron pipe, a little over head height. There is a valve in the pipe just above the center of the pool.

Shimmering liquid: The pool of shimmering liquid is wyrd magic in its liquid form; any creature that succeeds on a DC 8 Intelligence check can identify it as such.

• The pool, despite how it looks from the hallway, is actually 10 inches deep.
• If anything or any creature that is not made of cold iron touches the pool, it causes a wyrd magic discharge. Any creature within 30 feet of the pool must make a DC 15 Wisdom save or be forced to roll on the wyrd magic discharge table. After a discharge, there is half as much wyrd magic in the pool.
• The pool is spawning gremlins once every two dungeon turns. Roll a d6; on a result of two or less, a group of 1d6 gremlins crawls out of the pool and immediately disperses to find mischief.

Burst pipe: The pipe is large, roughly 4 inches in diameter, and made of black iron

• The pipe is made of cold iron
• The section with the breech is roughly 4 feet long
• There is a small but constant stream of wyrd magic flowing from the breach in the pipe. After discharging, the stream takes 1d6 turns to fill the pool to full again

Valve: The ordinary valve on the pipe is the shutoff valve. If switched to the off position, it will stop the flow through the pipe.

Erin’s Faerie Diner Basement

The room is large and filled with shelves filled with various foodstuffs. Light comes from a single glowing bulb. There is a door in one wall and a flight of stairs up.

Foodstuff: depending on the incursion level, the type of food on the shelves will change

• If it is less than 2, the wooden shelves are packed with dry goods, fresh fruit, vegetables, and jars of preserved fruits and vegetables.
• If it’s three or higher, the steel shelves are filled with boxes and cans of ingredients that sound less than appealing.

Door: If the players investigate the door before opening it, they hear nothing behind it and smell a foot odor.

• The door is unlocked
• The door leads to the service tunnels

Stairs: The stairs lead out of the dungeon into the kitchen of the diner

Second-floor concourse

The room is long, brightly lit, and filled with knots of people around kiosks or moving between stores. Tracks criss-cross the hall. You spy a set of stairs leading upward to another concourse on the ceiling.

Knots of people: There are 1d12 groups of 1d20 shoppers “grazing” at the kiosks or moving between stores; unless a fight breaks out, they do not pay the players any attention whatsoever

Kiosks: There are four kiosks along the length of the concourse. They are in order from north to south.

• Flower seller: Sells arrangements of strange-looking flowers for 20 marks a pop.
• Bank of Crane machines: 1 mark a pop to try your hand at getting a stuffed mutant thing. Machines are rigged never to let you get a prize
• Ice Cream vendor: 2 marks a bowl, a wide selection of the most unappetizing flavors imaginable
• Board game and puzzle seller. 15 marks each. The games are impossible to play with confusing rules and missing pieces. The puzzles are missing a random selection of pieces.

Shops: Like the first floor, each of the shops has a sign for the business in the native tongue of the store’s origin. The players can see the following location.

• The Arcade has a large sign with the Kanji for Mr Roboto’s Arcade in red on a white board above its single door entrance. There are strange beeping sounds coming from this store.
• The Sporting Goods store has a large sign that reads “Tom’s Sporting Goods” in white on a green background. There is a indescribable racket coming from this store.
• The bookstore’s sign is block lettering that spells out “Shed’s & Duke’s” in French.
• The Pet store has a sign shaped like a dragon that looks more like a dachshund, with Dragons and Friends written in white lettering along its side.
•  Miss Muffet’s Boutique has a sign that looks like a spiderweb with the name spelled out in cursive.
• The entrance to the Department Store’s Men’s section has the same sign as the first floor.

 Arcade

You enter a large, long, noisy, dimly lit room filled with weird machines covered with strange symbols that make strange beeping sounds and emit lights, all but one, which is just an iron hand affixed to a box. There is an employee in a black-and-white striped outfit, looking bored, and leaning on a glass counter. At the back of the chamber is a platform and a pair of tunnels

Machines: There are two dozenish arcade machines from the 80s and 90s lining the walls covered in strange writing.

• Strange Writing: If the players ask to try identifying the characters, have them make an Intelligence check with a DC of 20. On success, they recognize the characters as a variant of Yamatiness (in truth, it is modern Japanese).
• The games are playable for 50P. The players can try to play the games, but they are horribly buggy and constantly glitch out.
  • At the end of play, roughly half the machines spit out 1d20 paper tickets.
• Each machine has roughly 1d20 marks worth of copper coins inside
• The machines are likely worth well over 100 guildenmarks to an artificer, but each machine weighs up to 140lbs.
  • However, any attempt to carry out the machines will be considered theft by the Employee manning the counter.

Strength Tester: The Strength tester machine consists of a small box with a dial with various labels(in Japanese) and a thrashing iron arm

• The arm is actually Curly, the maintenance construct’s right arm. Any character proficient with tinker tools can remove the arm from the machine. But this will be considered a crime by the Employee.

Glass counter: The glass counter contains prizes that can be exchanged for tickets.

• The ticket prices are, of course, in Japanese.
• The prizes are indescribable lumps of plastic, and that might have been Faloan’s idea of what cheap Japanese toys look like

Employee: The employee is seemingly intent on ignoring the players at all costs. He sits at the counter, cheek in palm, staring blankly at the wall.

• He only reacts to two stimuli.
  • The players redeeming tickets for prizes
  • The players are physically messing with the machines. If the players mess with the machines, he will call for security.

Tunnels: There are two tunnels at the back of the store for the trains.

• Tunnel B6 leads to Tunnel B5 in The Shoe Department
• Tunnel B7 leads to Tunnel B8 in the Food Court

The Sporting Goods Store

It is mayhem inside this store. Balls are flying everywhere as gremlins in red and blue jerseys with mallets, rackets, and bats smack balls into each other using their implements while giggling like maniacs. The store employees are cowering behind their counters as balls ricochet off the cash register. At the back of the store is a door in the back wall and a tunnel.

Ironically, this is the most normal of all the stores. The goods sold here are standard sports equipment available at any UK sporting goods store.

Gremlins: There are 12 gremlins, two teams of 6, engrossed in a sport of their own invention.

• The sport appears to be a mashup of  cricket and field hockey, played with an unlimited number of balls, whatever implements they can use to hit them, and no rules beyond causing mayhem, hitting balls into various nets around the store, and hitting shoppers and staff.

Balls

• When the players enter the store and for every round they remain in the store, they will have to make a Dex save, DC 12, to avoid being hit by stray balls. Failure results in them taking one hp of damage.
• Likewise, the gremlins must make a Dex save, DC 12, to deflect incoming balls away from them using their implement.
  • Gremlins can only deflect balls with an implement and auto-fail the save if they do not have one.
• The balls can be stopped by using the various soccer goals around the store. A character hiding behind soccer goals automatically succeeds on their Dex save.

Staff: The staff are utterly powerless to stop the gremlins and are cowering behind their checkout counters

• If the players drive off the gremlins, the gremlins reward them with 4 100-mark bills. These bills are legal tender only within the mall and can be used to purchase items at any store.

Door: If the players investigate the door before opening it, they hear nothing behind it and smell a locker-room-like odor.

• The door is unlocked.
• The door leads to the service tunnels

Tunnel: The tunnel A4 leads to tunnel A3 in the Shooting range

The bookstore

The store stinks of tobacco smoke and brie. There are lines of bookshelves stretching back to the train platform and the tunnel exit. An employee in a beret is smoking a cigarette behind his cash register.

Bookshelves: The shelves are packed with books on a wide range of topics, including cooking, winemaking, philosophy, politics, existential misery, obscure art movements, and several subjects that seem chosen solely because an average American would assume the French care deeply about them.

• The books are all written in French. A player who knows Slanacian (a version of French that serves as the official language of the Royaume des Rêves) or can succeed on a DC 15 intelligence check can read the books.
  • However, the books are written in what is effectively gibberish; the covers are legible, but the contents are not.
  • One book is very real: a French printing of the anarchist cookbook.
    • Le livre de cuisine des anarchistes: Wonderous item Rare: A character who can read Slanacian may spend a long rest reading the book. After finishing the book, the player gains proficiency with thieves’ tools and alchemists tools. Furthermore, they can make a DC 15 intelligence check once per long rest to craft 1d4 sticks of dynamite, assuming they have access to the right chemicals and alchemists tools.

Employee: The single employee in the store is a bad attempt to make a better Frenchman, leaning on the stereotypes Americans have of French people.

• Roleplay the employee as the most obnoxious Frenchman you can imagine.
• The Employee here is the only one who fights back against the players. If the players attack him or try to rob the store, he starts hurling insults and screaming for security before drawing a sword and pistol and chasing after them like a madman. Use the bandit captain stat block

Tunnel: Tunnel A5 leads to Tunnel A6 in the Food Court

The Pet Store

The room is dark with low lighting and filled with a cacophony of noise and smells. The room is filled with cages and tanks with scaly things, and dragonish decor. A single employee with dreadlocks and a colorful cap is leaning bored behind the counter, and there is a small room out back with a glass wall where someone is shouting to let him out.

Cages and tanks: The shop’s theme is dragons, so all the creatures are dragon-themed among the cages one can find:

• Sea dragons
• Draco Lizards
• Frog Dragons
• Blue Dragon Sea Slug
• Pink Dragon Millipede
• Baby Komodo Dragon
• Frilled Dragon
• Dragon Flies
• Bearded Dragon
• Sailfin Dragon

All of which look a good deal more dragonish than their real-world counterparts

The price for any of the creatures is 60 marks

Employee: The employee is a bad imitation of the reggae stoner archetype

• He speaks English with a Jamaican accent so thick that it is difficult to understand, even if a player speaks Lyonsese, and is laden with misapplied slang terms
• Will insist on handling the animals before any transaction is made
• Acts like he is high, but he is as sober as they come, and will automatically notice if somebody tries to steal product from the store or tries to open the enclosure room

Enclosure Room: The room contains a baby dragon who is visibly frightened and desperately pawing at the glass, begging to be let out and for his mama.

• A sign on the glass says that the price for the dragon is 40gp
• The wyrmling is about the size of a fully grown corgi. Use copper dragon wyrmling stats for the dragon
  • He does not know where he is or how he got there. If pressed, he admits he does not remember his own name, where he is from, or what his mama looks like, which distresses him even more
    • The truth is, the wyrd magic leak led him to complete Faolan’s mad idea for a pet store.
  • If the players rescue him from the shop, he immediately latches on to them and follows them. He acts like an eager 3-year-old who wants to help Mama/Dada any way he can
• The enclosure is large, and one wall is made of indestructible glass.
• There is a single door leading into the room, locked and requiring a DC 20 Dex check to open.

The Closed Store/Muffet’s Boutique

This location only appears when the incursion level is greater than 1

If the Incursion level is less than 7, the store is closed, with “coming soon” signs plastered over the shutters.

If the incursion is equal to 7 or greater, read the following.

The store is dark inside with sporadic spot lighting illuminating the spooky decorations, many mannequins, and the black and purple dresses loaded with lace, frills, and eerie decorations. At the counter, a familiar-seeming and cute girl with pale skin, red eyes, raven hair in ringlets, six arms, and wearing a similar outfit to the mannequins, but with a spider theme, gives you a sweet smile that reveals one fang.

Dresses: Make it clear when players ask for more info on the dresses that they are Miss Muffet’s designs; they should not need to make a skill check.

Girl: The girl is Miss Muffet, transformed when her store was assimilated into the mall

• If the players had spoken to her previously, she will not wait for them to initiate the conversation; she is overjoyed that her wish has finally been granted. It’s not quite what she had in mind, but now she can wear her outfits.
  • However, there should be an undertone of uncanniness to her behaviour.
    • Her personality has subtly shifted into an over-the-top anime goth girl, as imagined by a male shut-in who has never met a real-life goth girl.
    • She inadvertently inserts phrases about sales and dress choices; this becomes more pronounced as the players interact with her, as if canned stock phrases are replacing her speech. These tics become more frequent and more jarring the longer the players interact with her.
    • Four turns after the store appears, Miss Muffet is fully assimilated and acts like any of the other employees.
    • If the players remove her from the mall before the four turns are up, the assimilation is stopped, and she slowly returns to being just a spider/girl hybrid.
      • Having one (and only one) player take her out for drinks is a particularly effective way to convince her to leave the mall.

Second Floor: Men’s wear and Cashiers

The room is brightly lit with rows and rows of racks and shelves of clothes. Dummies are everywhere in the section, each holding a heavy metal briefcase or a golf club and wearing ridiculous suits. There is a staircase leading down. Tracks cut through the space, and a bank of cashiers occupies the east wall.

Racks and shelves of clothes: The suits on the racks are utterly impractical; they are lurid and look like the sort of costumes that ’80s pop and rock stars would wear.

• They are also expensive, each one costs 180 marks 
• The clothes are mostly unmagical, but there is one item among the 
• The Stardust Jacket: rare Magic item (only usable by a bard). A green-and-orange striped jacket with exaggerated shoulder pads, glittering seams, and a faint scent of ozone and sweat. It once belonged to a famous bard, Ziggy.
  • While wearing it, you have an advantage on performance checks. 
  • Once per long rest, you may use an action to make a mesmerizing performance. Choose a number of NPCs who can see and hear you equal to twice your proficiency bonus.
    • The targets must succeed on a Wisdom saving throw (DC = 8 + your proficiency bonus + your Charisma modifier) or become charmed by you for 1 minute.  
    • Charmed NPCs will regard you as a beloved, inspirational figure and will listen eagerly to what you say, perform favors for you within reason, defend you, or follow you short distances. 
    • They will not endanger themselves or violate deeply held beleifs. 
  • Wearing the jacket will cause your hair to turn orange and you to develop a messiah complex. The GM is encouraged to introduce intrusive thoughts, overconfidence, or compulsions to perform for an audience at dramatically inconvenient moments.

Mannequins: There are eight dummies spread throughout the menswear section.

• If the players insult the dummies’ outfits, the dummies come to life and attack the players, treated as animated armor.

Tracks: The tracks cut through the menswear section on their way to housewares and shoes

Cashiers: There are six cashier stations, each operated by an employee

• Each cashier station has 300 marks in coins and greenback bills

Second Floor: Housewares

The room is dominated by strange amalgamations of wood, metal, and plastic sitting on shelves or displays with dummies. The tracks snake through the shelves before disappearing into a tunnel.

Strange amalgamations of wood, metal, and plastic: The implements lining the shelves are appliances of the future as imagined by Faolan the mad. All are so stylized as to be rendered useless.

Tunnel: Tunnel B4 leads to Tunnel B3 in Women’s Wear.

Second Floor: Shoes and changing rooms

The sign above the entrance says ‘shoes,’ but the items on the shelves can only be described as shoes by a very loose definition of the word. There is a tunnel in the wall and a hallway off to one side.

Shoes: The shoes on display are hideous, like the work of someone on a bad trip.

• They are also painful to wear. Trying to walk in any of the shoes causes 1 point of damage per round.

Tunnel: Tunnel B5 leads to Tunnel B6 in the Arcade

Hallway: The hallway leads to a set of changing rooms.

• There are small booths with public restroom-style doors
• At the end of the hallway is the door to Henderson Possibilium Ltd’s basement.
  

Staff Room

The door was clearly labeled ‘Staff Room,’ but when you opened it, wooden poles 4-6 feet long started tumbling out. There are hundreds of them in every imaginable type of wood.

Faolan’s sense of humor abandoned him when he lost his marbles, and as such, he considers bad puns like this to be the height of comedy.

Staves: There are exactly 1000 quarterstaffs in this small closet. Most of them are ordinary Jo and Bo staff that could be bought from a martial arts supply store.

• There is, however, one +2 Bo staff with golden tips hidden among the sticks. If the players take a dungeon turn to check every staff, they will find the +2 quarterstaff.

Security room

One wall of this room is covered with many glowing boxes, each showing a grainy black-and-white scene. A large, ugly lug of a man made of rotting flesh and dumbbells is sitting in a swivel chair staring at the boxes in front of some form of control panel. A big red buttonis mounted on the wall beside the door,and a metal cabinetis nearby.

Glowing boxes: The boxes are labeled 1-6 and appear to be security monitors, each showing a different part of the mall, but in reality, they are just static scenes that do not move. A player who makes a DC 12 Wisdom check notices that nothing in the scenes displayed is moving.

• If the players try to dismantle any of the screens, they quickly discover that they are merely empty metal boxes with a sheet of glass for a screen

control panel. The control panel controls which scene the screens show. The panel is divided into six sections, each with a button for the mall stores, the employee-only section, and the concourses.

• There are no text labels for the buttons, just little symbols for each location.

Man: The man is a security guard tasked with watching the “camera” feeds. He immediately attacks any civilians who make their way into the security room.

Button: The button is the mall panic button. Pressing the button will trigger a loud alarm and flashing red lights. 1d12 security guards will sweep the mall, hitting everything that moves, including shoppers, employees, and other security guards, until it stops moving for three dungeon turns before disappearing.

• The mall repopulates after 1d6 dungeon turns; until then, the mall is almost empty
• Ironically, the one place the guards do not check is the security room

Cabinet: the cabinet is made of cold iron, and it is filled with nasty-looking clubs

Door: The door is made of a single piece of thick steel and has a nearly indestructible lock that only works from the inside

Break Room

The room is small with bare, colorless concrete walls and a few sparse pieces of furniture under a single light tube. There is a table where three men in coveralls are reading magazines, four chairs at the table, a small counter with a sink, and a large white box.

Table: An ordinary table as one would find in any breakroom; several magazines are scattered across it.

Men: there are three janitors in the room, sitting at the table, nose deep in magazines, conversing in a limited vocabulary that seems to consist of a few dozen single-syllable words.

• The magazines they are reading are
  • PlayBunny: A gentlebuck’s magazine filled with pictures of stunningly gorgeous rabbits
  • Popular Quantum Mechanics: A magazine for DIY theoretical physics
  • Space: A current cosmological events magazine
• The janitors will ignore the players unless they sit down at the table with a magazine, any magazine at all, at which point the “language” of the janitors becomes understandable, and the players can converse with them.
  • The janitors will happily answer any questions the players have about the mall, providing complete and truthful answers.
  • To any characters not sitting at the table, any conversations between a sitting player and the janitors sound like a string of disjointed single-syllable words.

Sink: The sink is filled with disgusting green slime. Any creature that touches the slime is dealt 1d4 acid damage

• Turning the tap to sink produces more green slime

large white box: the white box is actually a refrigerator

• It is currently half filled with plastic tubs filled with disgusting-looking goop with solid bits.
  • If the players try to eat any of it, have them make a Con save DC 14. If they fail, they are poisoned for 1 hour and seriously need to use the bathroom.

Conclusion

The players fix the Leak before the incursion reaches level 8.

The Wyrd Magic index in the mall falls back down to normal background levels for Sliberberg over the course of a few hours. Gremlins and mall creatures stop spawning, and the shoppers, security guards, and employees gradually disappear as the wyrd magic that sustained them fails. The players are rewarded 20 guildenmarks for solving the issue quickly.

If the players fail to fix the leak before the incursion reaches level 8

Fireball Road is consumed, and in its place is a two-story-tall brutalist building; the mall consumes all the residents and becomes employees until the wyrd leak is plugged, at which time they slowly return to normal, though with a lingering sense of vertigo. With their homes replaced by a big, ugly mall and most of their possessions destroyed, the player receives no reward for stopping the leak, and the people of Fireball Road are forced to disperse across the neighborhood.

If the players do not do anything or fail

The mall continues to grow unabated; once it emerges on the surface, it begins expanding its central transit line outward. New stations and new smaller malls appear at Queen’s Heart Station, Market Grove Bazaar, and Hengegate, and eventually new lines appear and expand out of the city to its suburbs. Meanwhile, Fireball Mall continues to grow, consuming many of the surrounding streets. The citizens of Slibermond initially find the new transit system and mall appealing and convenient. Still, those who use the trains or the mall slowly lose themselves, becoming faceless mannequins, creatures who live only to shop.

The Transit Mall consumes Miss Muffet’s shop.

Miss Muffet’s transformation is permanent. But she does not mind. She wanted to be something like a drider, but being a girl with six arms and a bit of a spider’s abdomen sticking out her behind suits her fine, and now she can wear her own creations, just like she always dreamed. Plus, she still has her infinite supply of spider silk to use in her creations. She also adores her new shop in the Mall. She will be the shopping arcade’s first tenant once it reopens after its retrofit.

If the players asked her out for drinks

Miss Muffet has never been asked out before, and she really wants to continue the relationship with the player who asked her out. She will frequently call on them, seeking companionship and more dates.

At any rate

Even with the source of wyrd magic dealt with, the mall and much of its contents remain; what has been transformed by wyrd magic stays transformed. There is some debate about what to do about the mall and its train system. Eventually, a consortium is formed to lease out the space to potential merchants. It takes 4 months to retrofit the space into a usable space. Still, by the time it’s done, Fireball Road Shopping Arcade opens to much fanfare and instant success despite some lingering weirdness, like the fact that the second floor is on the ceiling.

The trains also pique the interest of those with an engineering and magical bent. Without the wyrd magic providing electricity out of nowhere, the trains do not run, and with the wyrd magic gone, the tunnels lead nowhere. There is some interest in expanding the subway line and getting the train operating, but these ultimately go nowhere, as the disruption would be too significant for the meager gains.

Appendix A Wyrd Magic Discharge Table

If the players get caught in a wyrd magic discharge and fail their con saves, roll on this table to determine what happens to them.

2d20

Effect

2	Total Species Rewrite – Your body melts and reforms into an entirely different sentient species from anywhere in the multiverse. Class, gear, and memories remain. Personality is 50% the same, 50% new instincts.

3	Animal Form (Permanent) – You become a normal-sized mundane animal (GM’s choice or roll 1d6: 1-cat, 2-dog, 3-bird, 4-fish, 5-horse, 6-goat). Intelligence score remains, but speech is lost unless you already knew a magical way to communicate.

4	Body-Swapped – Swap bodies with a random ally or enemy within 60 feet. Hit points and conditions stay with the body, but mental stats and class features remain with the mind. Lasts 1d6 days.

5	The Wrong Shadow – Your shadow now belongs to someone (or something) else. It moves independently, whispers to you in dreams, and may occasionally act out in the physical world.

6	Head Detachment – Your head harmlessly detaches from your body and floats nearby. Body still works normally but must be carried if separated by more than 30 ft. Lasts 1d4 days.

7	Partial Polymorph – 1d4 random body parts transform into those of a completely different creature (elephant trunk, crab claw, moth wings, etc.). The effect is permanent unless dispelled by a wish.

8	Chromatic Blood – Your blood changes to a vivid, unnatural color and glows faintly. Once per day, you may spray it as a 15-ft cone dealing 1d6 damage per depth to one damage type matching the color (GM’s choice).

9	Reversed Gravity Field – A 30-ft radius around you experiences reversed gravity for 1 minute. Everything falls upward until it hits a ceiling or vanishes into the sky.

10	Memory Replacement – 1d4 of your memories are replaced with those of a stranger who lived centuries ago. The memories may contain useful secrets — or dangerous compulsions.

11	Floral Bloom – Flowers sprout all over your body. They heal you for 1d8 HP per depth, but after blooming, your scent attracts nearby predators for 24 hours.

12	Time Loop – The next 10 minutes repeat endlessly until you perform an action you would usually never take. Everyone remembers the loop, but not the source of the discharge.

13	Voice of the Elements – You can speak to wind, water, and fire for 1d6 days. They have strong opinions and petty grudges.

14	Living Tattoo – A tattoo appears somewhere on your body. It can detach as a Tiny creature to scout for you, but it has a mischievous personality.

15	Transparent Flesh – You become see-through except for bones, organs, and magical gear. Stealth checks gain advantage, but Charisma checks with non-adventurers suffer disadvantage. Lasts 1d4 weeks.

16	Rain of You – For 1d4 minutes, it rains perfect miniature copies of you from the sky. They vanish on death or after 1 hour. They act independently.

17	Species Blend – Merge with the nearest non-hostile animal. Roll 1d4 for the blend: 1 = body, 2 = limbs, 3 = head, 4 = random patches. Lasts 1d8 days.

18	Voice Theft – Your voice moves to another creature within 100 feet for 1d4 days. You can still speak, but the sound comes from them.

19	Reflected Self – Your reflection is now a hostile alternate version of you. It can emerge from mirrors or reflective water under a full moon.

20	Beneficent Surge – All HP restored, conditions removed, gain +2 to all ability scores for 1d4 hours—afterward, the exhaustion level increases by 2.

21	Gravity Pulse – Everyone within 60 ft must succeed on a Strength save or be crushed prone for 1d4 rounds.

22	The Eyes Have It – Your eyes detach and float nearby, granting 360° vision. They can be stolen.

23	Language Flood – Instantly know every language for 1d6 days, but must speak all of them at once.

24	Phantom Limbs – Gain 1d4 extra spectral limbs for 24 hours. They can wield weapons or tools but deal force damage on contact.

25	Season Swap – The next 1-mile radius changes to a random season (roll 1d4) for 1d12 hours. Weather adjusts accordingly.

26	Insanity Bloom – Make a Wisdom save or gain a short-term madness. On a fail by 5+, gain long-term madness instead.

27	Metallic Skin – Skin turns to living metal, AC +2, speed halved, disadvantage on Stealth. Lasts 1d6 days.

28	Beast Voice – You can only speak in roars, howls, and hisses for 1d4 days. Animals treat you as kin.

29	Pocket Dimension Collapse – Everything you’re carrying vanishes into a personal demi-plane for 1d6 days.

30	Perfect Beauty / Monstrous Form – Roll 1d2: (1) become impossibly beautiful (advantage on social rolls, creatures are obsessed with you), (2) become hideous (disadvantage, but fear aura vs. hostile creatures). Lasts 1 week.

31	Random Spell Eruption – Cast a random spell of the highest level you can cast without using a slot. If you can’t cast, the GM chooses a wild magical effect.

32	Animal Form (Temporary) – Transform into a random beast of CR ≤ your level for 1d8 hours.

33	Reverse Aging – Roll 1d4: (1) child, (2) teenager, (3) prime adult, (4) elderly. Adjust physical stats appropriately.

34	The Sky Opens – A huge eye peers through a rift above you, observing for 1 minute, then blinks away.

35	Musical Aura – You are followed by a dramatic soundtrack audible to everyone for 1d4 days. You can’t control the genre.

36	Splitting Self – You split into two copies: one good, one evil. Each has half your HP.

37	Ghost Step – You become incorporeal for 1d4 minutes, falling through floors if unsupported.

38	Bone Growth – Your bones grow outside your skin in decorative ridges and armor plates. Permanent unless removed magically.

39	Unstable Magic Field – All magic in 30 ft becomes unpredictable for 1d6 rounds; roll on the wild magic table for every spell cast.

40	Ascension or Annihilation – 50% chance you gain godlike radiance for 1d4 minutes (fly, immune to damage, inspire awe), 50% chance you explode into glittering motes and reform 1d4 hours later at a random known location.

Appendix B New Monster

Gremlin

Tiny fey, chaotic evil

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• Armor Class 12
• Hit Points 7 (3d4 + 0)
• Speed 30 ft.

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STR	DEX	CON	INT	WIS	CHA
8 (–1)	15 (+2)	10 (+0)	10 (+0)	8 (–1)	8 (–1)

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• Senses darkvision 60ft, passive Perception 9
• Languages —
• Challenge 1/8 (25 XP)

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Nimble Escape. the gremlin can take the Disengage or Hide action as a bonus action on each of its turns.

Clambering Menace. When the gremlin moves at least 10 feet straight toward a creature, it can move into the creature’s space. While in the same space, the gremlin has half cover, and the creature has disadvantage on opportunity attacks against the gremlin.

Actions

Claws. Melee Weapon Attack: +2 to hit, reach 5 ft., one target. Hit: 4 (1d4 + 2) piercing damage.

Bonus Actions

Hair-Puller. Bonus Action. One creature sharing the gremlin’s space must succeed on a DC 10 Strength (Athletics) or Dexterity (Acrobatics) check or be distracted until the start of its next turn. While distracted, the creature has disadvantage on its next attack roll or ability check.

Janitor

Medium humanoid, unaligned

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• Armor Class 10 (12)
• Hit Points 32 (5d8 + 10)
• Speed 30 ft.

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STR	DEX	CON	INT	WIS	CHA
15 (+2)	12 (+1)	14 (+2)	10 (+0)	10 (+0)	11 (+0)

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• Senses passive Perception 10
• Languages Understands Common but does not speak it
• Challenge 1/2 (100 XP)

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Actions

Mop. Melee Weapon Attack: +2 to hit, reach 5 ft., one target. Hit: 5 (1d6 + 2) bludgeoning damage.

Mop the Floor. janitor cleans a 10-foot square of floor it can reach. Until the end of the janitor’s next turn, that area becomes slick. A creature that enters the slick area for the first time on a turn or starts its turn there must succeed on a DC 11 Dexterity saving throw or fall prone.