Since time immemorial, you and your people have toiled in the shadow of the cyclopean ruins. Of mysterious origins and the source of many a superstition, they have always been considered a secret best left unknown by the folk of your hamlet. But now something stirs beneath the crumbling blocks. Beastmen howl in the night and your fellow villagers are snatched from their beds.
The time for retribution has come! With no militia to provide protection, you have rallied a dozen or so of your fellow commoners—simple tradesmen, craftsmen, and farmers who are brave to take a stand against the evil assailing your village. All of you are unskilled but there is safety and power in numbers, and hopefully, this party can help one another survive.
You and your companions stand before the ruined keep, your meager weapons at the ready. The ruins squat atop a low, craggy hill, its walls of toppled stone and massive granite blocks hinting at forgotten battles and the clash of mighty armies. Now the ruins seem host only to creeping vines and the foul miasma that drifts down from the keep.
The air is overrun with pestilence. Fat flies bite at you incessantly, and clouds of small black insects choke your every breath. The long-abandoned land is choked with thorny vines that drape the sickly trees and hang from the ruined walls. There is an odor of rot and decay as if the hill itself were decomposing from within.
The keep’s massive wall has collapsed here in the northeast part of the wall, spilling cyclopean stone blocks down the rocky slope. The blocks are precariously balanced atop one another, like a titan’s game of dice. Upon searching the rubble you discover a narrow, rocky shaft descending down before opening into a small chamber.
Your party squeezes down through the narrow opening, going single file, dropping into the chamber below. The air is choked with chalky dust and the pervasive smell of rot. A single shaft of light cuts through the swirling dust to illuminate an enormous stone door set in the wall.
The door is circumscribed in runes. At the center of the door is a large pentagram inscribed within a circle. Both the runes and the pentagram are set with silver and seem to glimmer faintly in the dim light.