Location: The Shivering Obelisk

In the mountains north of Guran, there stands an obelisk of dark metal with a surface as iridescent as a beetle's shell. While difficult to reach, as no trails last for long in the region due to a combination of violent storms and the effects of the obelisk itself, it can easily be detected from nearly half a day's journey away, as the entire landscape gently trembles.

Up close, the structure visibly vibrates at a continual rate, the motion trembling through the rocky structure of the Black Riage like ripples on a still lake. Over time, these vibrations are wearing down the mountain range within 16 kilometers or so of the obelisk, causing carved paths to crumble and sending avalanches tumbling down the slopes.

Those who have braved the hazards of the region to study the structure claim that it is ever so slowly working itself downward into the mountains, at the ponderously slow speed of a millimeter or two a year. What the obelisk is digging toward, if indeed it digs toward anything at all, is a mystery. Some think that it serves to ward some other threat from the location, and would pay handsomely for any proof that the shivering obelisk is some manner of marker or defense for something the ancients buried beneath the Black Riage.

Seeds for the Shivering Obelisk:

The people of Guran are getting concerned at the increasing frequency of earthquakes affecting their settlement, and as such are offering a reward of a handful of oddities, cyphers, and even an artifact to anyone brave enough to seek out the cause of these events. Investigation leads adventurers to the Shiver Obelisk, whose descent into the earth has reached an previously unknown faultline that extends south to near the edge of Guran. It may be possible to shore up this fault, but the risk exists of releasing all the pressure along it at once, which would devastate the town and kill many innocent people.

Reports of strange lights in the vicinity draw the group to the Obelisk, where a strange religious group has gathered to pay homage to the structure, which they see as a manifestation of their deity, the Trembling One. They'd be harmless enough if it weren't for the fact that they feel that the Obelisk must be appeased with a living sacrifice, and none of them want to volunteer since the Trembling One's promised afterlife is less than pleasant.

Storms gather over the Shivering Obelisk more frequently than anywhere else in the Black Riage, unleashing torrential rains and heavy lightning; the former sweeps away any attempts to carve safe paths to the site, while the later seems to be drawn into the Obelisk itself. An enterprising scholar wants someone on site during a storm, based on a half-rotted report of a maddened explorer who claimed the structure opened like a flower during one storm, drinking in the lightning with delicate-seeming petals.

Artifact: Gate of Lost Dreams

Level: 1d6+4
Form: A hoop of thin metallic wire, easily twisted and curled into a small bundle that can be carried in a pocket; when active, the loop stiffens and becomes immobile, with a swirling prismatic mist filling it.
Effect: This numenera artifact gives access to a pocket universe built from the merged subconscious dream-state of everyone within a short range at the moment of activation. Passing through the portal provides physical access to this realm, where the rules of physics often take their leave completely, in ways that not even the strangest ruins of the past worlds permit.
The world has both risks and rewards - all the fear, worry, and hatred of a person who gave shape to the world is manifest here, in some form; fighting and defeating these things will cause a corresponding change in the mental state of that person for the next week; repeated destruction of these negative aspects can, over time, create a permanent change. Given their nature, however, none of them are easy to defeat - the level of the artifact determines the level of the creatures found in the pocket dimension.
Items found in this space can be taken back out through the portal, functioning as numenera devices in their own right; when used, they discorporate into thin slime, their essence returning to the awareness of the person from whom they were harvested.
One final risk/reward of this altered realm is the ability to relive memories and even transform them - a powerful tool for therapy, as events that cause grief can be mitigated in memory while positive memories can be reinforced. It serves as an equally powerful tool for those seeking hidden information, however, as the ability to step bodily into a memory and search it for secrets is not to be underestimated.
No one knows what happens if the Gate of Lost Dreams is deactivated while someone lingers in the dreamworld on the other side; none lost in such a way have ever been seen again.

Depletion: --

Artifact: Numbing Dispenser

This hand-sized tube can produce up to ten slightly sticky and extremely bitter-tasting translucent yellow lozenges each day, each of which dissolves into a useless gel after one hour. Taking this lozenge numbs the user's body, granting them 1 Armor for the next 4 hours as they become unable to feel pain with regular intensity.
    Each pill taken past the first on a given day requires an Intellect Defense action to avoid becoming addicted; addicts feel compelled to take pills regularly to avoid losing the now-pleasant-seeming numbness. Long-term detrimental effects include a growing inability to feel physical sensations at all, a slow transformation of the skin into a chitin-like material, and auditory hallucinations of alien voices speaking in unknown languages.
    Breaking the addiction requires a series of successful Medicine checks over the course of two weeks, during which the addicted individual cannot take any of the numbing pills and may become irrationally violent in pursuit of their next fix. If the artifact depletes, the victim will, eventually, be cured of addiction by lack of supply.
Depletion: 1 in 50

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Cypher: Nanoswarm Pill

This metallic-tasting green pill discorporates the imbiber after thirty seconds, turning them into a self-aware swarm of nanites for the next hour. In this form, the user gains 10 Armor against purely physical attacks but remains vulnerable to energy and mental attacks. They can also slip through incredibly small openings and gain an asset on stealth actions by being able to disperse and float in the air.
Cypher Level: 1D6+2

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Oddity: Shuffling Deck

This is a set of 64 thin but tough ceramic plates that continually shuffle themselves when left sitting alone. Each plate will self-repair if broken, and plates left apart from the set will flip and slide to return to the stack at an immediate pace. Each plate has been painted with colorful scenes and icons of human design, but underlying them are designs of an utterly alien origin.

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Creature: Cave Lily

Cave Lily

Level: 5 (15)

    A cave lily is a predatory lifeform that dwells in the living cave systems of the Ninth World, hanging by a combination of powerful rootlike tendrils and sticky suction pads from the roof as it dangles long, feathery tendrils toward the floor below. Anything that disturbs the fronds is subject to attack as the cave lily attempts to snare it with a sticky mucus and draw it in to be shoved into the creature's maw.
    Most cave lilies appear mop-like, with a long and spiny stalk hanging down from where they cling to the roof to where the feathery tendrils droop to near the floor. They could easily be mistaken for a more harmless form of life if seen from a distance, as the cave lilies only attack things that move close enough for the disturbance to be felt by the tendrils.
    A cave lily that is getting less food than it needs will migrate to a new location - at first by shifting along the roof slowly, but if need be the creature's feeding tendrils can be used as legs to let it walk across open spaces. they try to avoid leaving the cave systems of the Ninth World, although the sensory methods they use to determine their location are uncertain.
    One unpleasant detail of the creatures is the simplistic form of their digestive tract - essentially an intestine that travels the length of the body and back, with the excretment being eject in close proximity to the mouth, forming a putrid mound directly underneath it that may serve to attract prey.

Motive: Hunger.

Environment: Cave systems throughout the Ninth World act as home to these creatures, although there are rarely more than half a dozen in any given location.

Health: 25

Damage Inflicted: 5, plus sticky mucus

Armor: 1

Movement: Immediate

Modifications:All Intellect-based tasks at level 1; cannot be affected by visual abilities or cyphers.

Combat: A fight with a cave lily almost always begins when an unsuspecting victim attempts to pass through or brush by the feathered tendrils of the creature, which responds by attempting to grab the victim, stabbing them with the dozens of small spikes hidden on the underside of each tendril and smearing a thick, sticky mucus across them.
    Victims of an attack must make a Might Defense check or have all their physical actions modified by one step to their detriment as the mucus glues their limbs to their sides and makes movement difficult at best. Victims who suffer three successful attacks by a cave lily are drawn to the creature's maw, where it stuffs them into the foul-smelling length of its intestinal tract, dealing an automatic 3 damage per round until either freed or dead. Victims can use any light weapons to attack the cave lily from the inside, where it has no Armor.

Interaction: Cave lilies are functionally mindless, existing only to eat and reproduce. Interactions with them are limited to luring other creatures into their reach to be attacked or fighting the cave lily itself.

Use: A known explorer has gone missing while spelunking, taking a valuable artifact with him; those going looking for him find a cavern with half a dozen cave lilies, each one with the stinking ooze of a recently digested meal beneath it. To retrieve the artifact, PCs will have to pacify or slay the cave lilies and search the muck beneath them.
    A very confused cave lily has emerged from a breach in the cave network beneath a town, and now the creature is wandering the streets, making meals of anyone unlucky enough to be in the way of it as it searches for a way back into the caves. PCs must either kill it or lure it back to a tunnel entrance to be rid of it.
    Someone with an active dislike of intruders has carefully cultivated a perimeter of cave lilies around their subterranean abode; the PCs need to get to the person for some reason, requiring them to either kill the creatures - to the ire of the person they're going to see - or to 'gild the lily' by making a treacherous passage along the only known route into the safe inner area.

Loot: A cave lily will have 1d6 indigestible cyphers in the muck pile beneath it.

GM Intrusions: A PC's foot slips in a spill of cave lily excrement, falling prone unless they make a Speed Defense check.
    A cave lily nearby convulses, perhaps attempting to digest something still struggling, and hurls globs of mucus at the party; if they fail a Speed Defense check, they're snared as per the mucus description in the combat section.
    A cave lily that was invisible in the darkness is alerted by the vibrations in the ground and starts reaching out with dangerous tendrils, joining an ongoing battle.

Inspired by the lifeforms known as crinoids.

Artifact: Lovers' Rings

The rings in this set are all linked together by quantum entanglement, permitting those who wear them to always know the mental state of the wearer at any given time. Additionally, at the rink of depleting the rings of power, any wearer may instantly teleport to the side of any other wearer, even if the distance is across parsecs of distance. Differences in time or dimension prevent this teleport function from working, however.
Depletion: 1 in 10, whenever teleport is used.

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