LogFAQs > #897172266

Prologue

The legends have it that a black stone shrouded in flames descended from the sky and created the Pit of Periphetes thousands of years before the birth of the first human, shaking the earth and casting enough dust into the air to turn the sky black and block the light of the Sun for three days. Fragments recovered from the chronicles of the Elves speak of walls of fire scouring the land down to its bones, followed by a cold so deep that nothing could live in the regions around the Pit for years, perhaps decades. The land there became a land of death, marked off by a circle of the blackest ash.

The Elves had enough sense to avoid the Pit, but they decided to keep their suspicions to themselves, and, as the millennia passed and new civilizations appeared to replace the Elves that had gone before them, other races discovered it, attracted by the black magic of the object that had first created it. No one can say how many of them it consumed, how many clans and tribes sacrificed themselves to it, but they all built on top of it, making it the focus of their shrines, their temples, their cities, never bothering to clear the ruins of their predecessors, only building on top of them, stacking them up until they filled the original crater, living only long enough to complete their works.

Prehistory became history, and the remnants of the Elves, upon returning from a long exile, followed stories of the Pit back to their source, discovering that the circle of ash had become a labyrinth of ruins upon ruins, filled to the top by the black magic of the object ... and the Undead that it had made of its worshipers over the ages. The Elves lacked the numbers to defeat them all, but they retained their magic from the days before their exile, and they used it to bury the entire crater under a mountain of earth, hoping that it might pass from memory and attract no more victims to its site.

Another millennium passed before a band of human settlers arrived and built the village of Vikenti, unaware of the horrors that lay underneath their feet. For the first year, all seemed normal ... until one of the settlers discovered, in trying to dig a new well, the entrance to a tunnel. He thought it might be the remains of a mine, perhaps the former property of Dwarves, and he gathered several of his fellows to search it for riches.

The expedition did not return, and, by the next morning, the village of Vikenti had been emptied of all life. The Pit of Periphetes had been rediscovered, as had its curse.

Afterwards, adventurers came to the ruins of Vikenti to investigate the rumors started by that initial wave of disappearances, and they, too, vanished into the Pit. Soon, the place developed a reputation as one of the greatest unconquered dungeons in not only the realm, but the world, and the adventurers continued to come in the hopes of being the ones to discover its secrets. Not a single one of them returned from its depths.

The Pit became a business for Rostik, the village closest to the land of death, the last stop for adventurers on their way to the dungeon. At first, Rostik acted as a mere outpost, but, as the years passed, its officials decided to make a major event of the Pit, sponsoring a contest of adventurers and offering a prize to anyone who emerged from the darkness. No one did, but the incentive encouraged the business, and, every year, a new batch of adventurers arrived to test their luck against the Pit and its denizens.

One year has passed. The Contest of Rostik begins again. A new group of adventurers arrives to go into the Pit of Periphetes, unaware of the madness that lurks in the darkness below, but one of them, perhaps, might learn of the secret in its depths.

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-- I Abibde / Samuraiter
Laughing at Game FAQs since 2002.