Whether through invitation, trickery, kidnap, or the manipulation of dreams, the party find themselves entering a beautiful gingerbread house. Boiled sweet windows, gum drop door-handle, icing icicles hanging from the eaves... but sized for humans. Full size gingerbread people busy themselves in the house, smiling faces showing their enjoyment of their seemingly imaginary work.
If players engage with the gingerbread folk, touch anything, try to leave, attempt to detect magic - or at any other trigger the GM deems appropriate - they are transformed by a Curse of Gingerflesh Reversal:All PCs become gingerbread versions of themselves; clothing and armour is rendered in icing and weapons become candy and toys.
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| Image (cc) RollieFingaz |
Meat Golems: slow, stupid, resilient.
They have a taste for gingerbread and will use spade-like hands to shovel it into wide smiling mouths...
The House, being extraplanar, has no strong or consistent layout and is not bound by geometry. There is no reason it can't be bigger inside than outside, and the orifices that were once external doors and windows lead back in rather than out.
Perhaps the only way out is to break the Curse. What lies down these pulsating intestinal corridors?
The Bakery - here fresh Meat Golems are stamped from large blocks of living meat. A foot-thick slab sits here for processing, moaning quietly in a dozen voices. Mis-shapes await re-rolling and an enormous oven burns brightly in one sweating meat-wall.
Mis-Shapes: malformed, pitiful, desperate
Unable to bite but clamouring to lick at sweet icing for sustenance. PCs who have their icing licked off are left naked and unarmoured.
The Cellars - the walls are rock here, and vast rivers of warm milk flow through this maze of underground caves. The milk is harmless (nutritious even) to meat-based creatures but will dissolve gingerflesh in under a minute.
It will probably need to be crossed somehow.
The Elf Halls - these vast underground halls echo with the incessant talking of hundreds of Elves.
The Elves: tiny, cunning, incoherent
While individually weak, their numbers are enough to overwhelm any troublemakers.
They claim the Master holds them here against their will, working them endlessly until they can buy their way off The List. Generations have died trying to buy their freedom. Only when the Master is dead, or they are otherwise free from oppression, will the curse be lifted.
The Workshop - here the Elf machines churn away, their great waterwheels turned by torrents of milk, cunningly adapted to some other purpose than the manufacturing they were designed for. Discarded toys litter the area like ... discarded toys.
Perhaps the toys can be repaired or repurposed, or perhaps the Elves would rather they weren't.
The Slay Room - far from the Elf halls, this huge meaten hangar is dominated by a crimson chariot that resembles an enormous bathtub. Meat Golems gorge themselves on the chocolate deer carcasses harnessed to the chariot.
The Master's Grotto - barricaded in this meat-walled suite of rooms is a huge, red-iced gingerbread man with a great beard of white buttercream.
The Master: ancient, jolly, controlling
Old as the telling of stories, the Master can be in many places at once - or does he move at impossible speed? - and has the power to condemn his enemies to The List.
He claims the wicked Elves have put this gingerbread curse on him - and the PCs, only the Elves seem immune - to take the realm for themselves, and it will only stop when their infernal machinery stops running. The Elves' trap, meant for him, was sprung early by the party's arrival.
The Master's Library - there is but one book in the Library; the Book of The List. Anyone whose name is on the List will never again receive or achieve anything good, and the Master can put anyone on the List who displeases him.
Perhaps the List can be destroyed, or perhaps entries can be erased or forged?
Encounters:
Roll d6 when entering a new area, when something needs to happen, or whenever seems appropriate.
- A dead Elf. Hard to tell of it has been trampled to death, mauled by a Golem, or died of fright.
- Meat Golems! Enough to cause problems, but not too many.
- A panicked chocolate reindeer, running, unstoppable. Golden bell around its neck jingling. May or may not have a red nose.
- The House shifts. Players may feel a lurch as the rooms relocate, or not notice until they head back the way they came and it goes somewhere else.
- An Elf patrol, trying not to be seen. Possibly trying to herd the Golems somewhere, possibly trying to evade them.
- A deep booming voice echoes through the House. Any Elves cease their chatter and look terrified. Ho, Ho, Ho.
