Tomb Ship of the Lich King

So, I had wanted a place to plug in any particular dungeon or maze that I thought was cool and wanted to shove my players into, or maybe make some sort of great big mega-dungeon, but without having to fit it inconveniently into the world if it didn't exactly mesh. I saw this as a kind of living mega dungeon, full of surprises and treasure that was always inexplicably shifting, so that players could explore it, and it would be different next time.

The Pyramid

Some time in the great long winter that swallowed the planet in its journey to the Orrery, it was hit by a number of large impacts, many were the meteorites and other detritus that brought the Fey to the Orrery. The greatest of the impacts however, was a massive space-faring vessel. Miles long it was, of immense power and age. A craft in form and wonder to rival even the greatest science-magics of the long-vanished Naga Empire. An ancient thing, long traveled in the dark wastes of space and carrying within it an Ancient Evil. It was: The Tomb Ship of the Lich King.

A pretty accurate depiction of my blatant plagiarism

The impact with the planet was enough to sunder continents, to rearrange the world, and to scatter shards and fragments of the great vessel across the surface of the planet. It would have been enough to cause an extinction level event, had the extinction of the planet not already come and gone with its displacement within space.

The grandest piece however, was the central point. Although only a small fragment of the whole, the command centre jettisoned from the body of the ship, the pyramid still dwarfs all nearby structures both artificial and natural. A great pyramid, eight miles long each side, and plated in a deep obsidian black which seems to drink all light around it. 


The Lich King

Whatever it once was, by the time it journeyed onto the Ethereal Seas, it was a being of magic and horror. A desiccated corpse bound together with arcane forces, moved by a malevolent and inscrutable will. The Tomb Ship was its greatest achievement, wrought of forbidden and arcane geometry, fueled by black rituals and blood magic, formed in to a super-massive Pyramid fifteen miles a side.

The Lich King is known only as a shadowy figure. Many legends are told of his frightening presence. The Fey know of the Lich, and some say that it was once one of them. Although it is not certain whether the Lich has ever walked forth from the Tomb Ship, or if it only sends forth its malevolent influence in  the form of shadows and sorcery.

The Tomb Kings of the Great Valley, that mighty civilization that rose in the shadow of the black pyramid, erected mighty mountains of stone in imitation of the great structure which dominated their land and thoughts.

The Passengers

Aside from the Lich itself, there were also the servants, bred to do its bidding, to run the various systems of the monstrous machine as well as serve as the occasional experimental subject.

Bred and warped from what appears to be human stock, they were uniquely designed for spacefaring life. The servitors designed to maintain the mechanics and to mine for new resources were bred to be tough. Tough enough to be able to gather the precious resources needed from passing asteroids and comets, to withstand extremes of temperature and gravity. Those servitors that ran the many subsystems, running minor course corrections, overseeing slaved computer matricies and carrying out delicate wiring and circuitry maintenance were small and nimble, with a cunning able to dodge between mechanisms and keep them running. Their minds adapted to interface directly with the strange biomechanical computing that ran the ship. Their heads always abuzz with computations.

After the great impact, some of those aboard survived, wrapped in emergency impact couches. Preserved against the ravages of cold and time until the Earth settled in its Orrery and the dawn of life once more arose across its surface. Only then did they awake to stumble confused and groggy from the wreckage and into a new world. This is where the Dwarves and the Halflings first arose from; descendants of the servants of the dread Lich King.

The Maze Itself

The concept I had for this was the ability to both plonk down some random ancient science-fantasy bullshit wherever I felt like on my world (fragments of the Lich King's vessel) and to have a cool ever changing dungeon in the Black Pyramid itself. Perhaps one day I will have to actually build it, maybe start stapling random dungeons together and start playing with ever changing interiors and the like, but for now it is enough to know that such a place exists and it is a place that players can go if they wish to.

The End Boss

I haven't quite decided what to do with this, and in the off chance that any of my players read this I'm presenting a few different options (along the lines of the Wicked King).

1) The Lich: At the centre of the Tomb you find the powerful Lich King. Probs best to kill it before it kills you!

2) Terrible Darkness: The Lich has grown in power, it is now a terrible dark god and you have disturbed its amorphous slumber.

3) The anti-climax: Personally, my favourite. The Lich is dead at the centre of the great black pyramid. Pierced through with a spar of metal during the crash all those thousands of years ago. The Pyramid is still dangerous, but the terror of the Lich only still lives in stories, and the hearts and minds of all Halflings and Dwarves.