d20 Mongoose Publishing Infernum Volume III - Book of the Conqueror.pdf - Mongoose Publishing - R5700

Contents

Gareth Hanrahan

Credits

Contents

Editor

Richard Ford

The Conqueror

Introduction

Cover Art

Tony Parker

To Rule in Hell

Logo & Cover Design

Anne Stokes

Basic Structures

Interior Illustrations

Eric Bergeron, Chaminou, Ryan Horvath, Kythera,

Tony Parker, Chad Sergesketter, Christophe Swal

Fortresses

Dark Satanic Mills

Studio Manager

Ian Barstow

The Game of Lies

War in Hell

121

Production Director

Alexander Fennell

Conquests

146

Proofreading

Sarah Quinnell

Freedom in Chains

233

Playtesters

Tanya Bergen, Mark Billanie, Andre Chabot, Mark

Gedak, Robert Hall, Daniel Haslam, Mark Howe,

Ryan Kelln, Trevor Kerslake, Patrick Kossmann,

Kent Little, Alan Marson, Alan Moore, Murray

Perry, Mark Quennell, Daniel Scothorne, Mark

Sizer, Sam Vail, Michael J Young

Designer’s Notes

244

Log Sheets

246

Index

250

License

256

Open Game Content & Copyright Information

Game Content of this work by any means without the written permission of the publisher is expressly forbidden.

Infernum – Book of the Conqueror is presented under the Open Game Licence. See page 256 for the text of the

Open Game Licence. All text paragraphs and tables containing game mechanics and statistics derivative of Open

Game Content are considered to be Open Game Content. All other signiﬁ cant characters, names, places, items, art

The Conqueror

THE CONQUEROR

C ale had a voice in his head. The priest said that

Cale told the voice that it was just a fancy and that it

would go away. The voice whispered that he was the

descendant of a demon, that it was the echo of that

demon in his blood and that it was Cale who would

go away, not the voice.

everyone had a voice, that of their guardian

angel, and that it would tell them right from

wrong. Cale’s voice spoke of power, conquest and

enslaving others. Once he told the other children in

the village of his voice, and they had bullied him for

it.

Once the village children had gathered wood for the

ﬁ re and fed the animals and done all the other things

that there were to do in the village, they would ﬁ ght

with sticks and play at being knights. Cale had seen a

knight once, in the town at feast-day. He wore shining

armour and rode a great charger and seemed the

proudest and greatest hero in all the

world, like the saints in the stories

who crushed the devil-serpents

under their heel. Like all the other

boys in the village, he dreamed of

being a knight more than anything

else in the world.

The sorceress had eyes that were yellow and slitted

like a cat, but bore no other physical sign of her

taint. She threw herself against the bars of the

cage in fury once more and screamed at Theo. He

understood fragments of her speech, a bastard mix

of French and Arabic, but it was the nonsensical

rambling and invocation of a demon. The only thing

she invoked, however, were the other sorcerers in the

cages. Madmen, visionaries and diabolists gathered

from Constantinople to Jerusalem and Malta began

muttering and shouting. The din was a cacophony;

Theo steeled himself to listen and endure the noise,

for he knew he would soon face far worse.

The voice mocked these dreams,

saying that he was tainted by the

devil and that his soul was doomed.

When he confessed these dreams to

the priest, the old father laughed and

said that the voice was just a fancy

of the young.

One of them dared to actually begin a magical rite,

scraping symbols onto a wall with a scrap of bone

and muttering a formula. Theo reacted quickly, as he

had been trained, by smashing his mailed ﬁ st into the

sorcerer’s face. The old man collapsed to the ﬂ oor.

Far above him, the church bell sounded, marking the

end of his watch. The door opened as the bell struck

a ﬁ nal time and Brother Charles entered the dungeon.

The monk held a small monstrance in his hands,

containing a holy relic. Reverently, the monk held

the monstrance out and exposed its contents to

the air. For a moment, there was a smell like

jasmine, then the room ﬁ lled with an ungodly

stench that made the monk gag. Theo carefully

removed the monstrance from Charles’ hands and

closed it. The smell vanished instantly.

‘What does that prove, brother?’

‘The taint of these damned sorcerers is far more

intense when they are all gathered in one place.’

‘Is it enough to trick the Enemy?’

‘We shall see, but the reaction of the relic is a…

favourable omen. The maw of Hell will see only the

evil we have cloaked ourselves with, and not the

true steel concealed within.’

The Conqueror

The realised the sorcerers had stopped moaning and

shouting. They were listening and they were scared .

Brother Charles noticed it too. ‘They discern our true

purpose and fear the terrible wound we shall inﬂ ict

on Hell.’

It was the night before the departure. The monks had

learned much over the months since Tobias de Lyons

had conceived of the grand plan. The castle had been

fortiﬁ ed and stocked to withstand a hundred sieges.

Theo could only guess what they were thinking back

in Christendom with the strange requests for supplies

and tools. The order had kept their purpose a secret

from all but a few; the project involved consorting

with sorcerers and demons and others feared that such

a direct attack would bring about the Apocalypse.

That, thought Theo, or they’re just as scared of

damnation as we are.

Five years later, the priest led the village in trying to

stone Cale to death. That was after the signs of the

taint had become clearer, when his hands had become

claws and the ﬁ rst signs of the tail had begun to show.

He ﬂ ed into the mountains, running faster and for

longer than any true man could have. The deeper he

drew upon the taint in his blood, he realised, the more

the taint became part of him. The voice could speak

clearly to him now.

Theo sat on a hillside and watched the sun go down.

As it slipped below the horizon, he fancied that it

glittered off the sea. Somewhere in the west, there

was the Mediterranean, where the ships could carry

him home. ‘Oh Lord,’ he muttered, ‘let this cup pass

from my lips’, but there was little apprehension in his

soul. A terrible sense of purpose ﬁ lled him.

The hellgout will begin soon. You’re too close to the

demonic to stay in the mortal realm.

A hot, sulphurous wind blew into his face. It was

starting.

‘Who are you?’ asked Cale.

I told you. I’m the demon in you. Your ancestor was a

demoness, a succubus. The demon blood runs strong

within you, strong enough to manifest. You’re going

to Hell, Cale, and I’m your only chance of survival.

‘ Skeee , a twisting,’ gibbered Yrich. The stalker’s

mouth was a cone of cockroaches that whispered in

unison. It pointed with its lesser left arm towards the

storm on the horizon. It was the ﬁ ve hundred and

twelfth year of the Infernum and the Houses were

once again at war. Yrich and its broodmates were

former soldiers of House Zethu, who had ﬂ ed the

army of the Unveilers as it crumbled before the might

of the Sturrach onslaught.

‘You are trying to frighten me and to tempt me,’ he

replied, momentarily remembering his dreams of

being a knight in shining armour.

I do not need to tempt you – you were lost from the

moment you were born. As for frightening you, child,

I have no need to do that. There are things far worse

than me, waiting for you.

‘Sweetmeats,’ rumbled a hulk. Wires and cables hung

from its misshapen body, the legacy of failed Zethu

attempts to augment its already prodigious strength.

A wide grin spread across its massive jaw, then

vanished abruptly. ‘Unless it’s a demonjack. Cursed

demonjacks. No more cages.’

There were shouts from lower down the mountain

slopes. He saw the bobbing lights of torches down

in the valley below. One of the village trackers found

his trail. Something inside his mind – or his blood

– twitched and he suddenly wanted to tear them apart.

He could see them in the dark now, as clear as if it

was noon.

The other dozen demons grunted and roared in

agreement. The war had driven the ﬁ nal wedge

between House Zethu and their erstwhile faustian

allies in House Malthus and now they all bore a

burning hatred for the arrogant mortal sorcerers.

Many of them remembered bindings and warding

circles. Yrich leapt into the air to attract the attention

of its companions.

He still had enough self-control left to turn away and

start scrambling up the slope.

The hellgout claimed him that night. Hell rose up and

swallowed half the mountainside, a devil’s bite that

would be remembered in local legend for centuries.

‘A hunt, a hunt. If ‘tis a demonjack, then we swarm

him and peel him and show him his true place here. If

‘tis a sweetmeat, then we feast and then squeeze and

The Conqueror

then feast some more. Are you covenanted to this, my

broodmates?’

desire to survive rose up in him, overcoming all

thoughts of despair or suicide or throwing himself at

the mercy of the cosmos.

The demons loped off across the dusty plains of the

First Circle towards the opening hellgout.

Good. Now move, you sluggard.

The chase was on. Cale ﬂ ed down the weirdly-angled

collapsing mountain and ran. The demons chased him

across the desert, their untiring limbs remorselessly

pursuing their quarry. Stalkers sniffed the air as they

ran, tasting the queer mix of mortal and demon in

Cale’s sweat.

‘Close the whoreson window!’ Tendrils of blazing red

energy clawed their way in through an arrow-slit in

the south wall of Outremer. Theo forced the wooden

cover back into place over the slit; the tendrils left a

rash like nettle stings on his bare arm.

‘Where am I running to?’ he asked himself and the

voice answered somewhere where you can take them

on one at a time. A shadow passed over him and

the voice cursed and said damnation, too slow. Not

again .

The whole castle groaned again like an animal in

pain. Dust fell from the ceiling and Theo felt the

whole mountain shake and revolve once more. A

chorus of damned voices echoed through the halls.

It was like being aboard a sinking ship, only the ship

was a mountain of stone. Time had lost all meaning;

there had never been anything but the constant threat

of ﬂ ooding from outside the keep, from whatever

halfway realm they had ended up in.

Two winged demons hovered above him with a net

held between them. They looked like birds, insects,

bats and partially decomposed corpses. Fiends said

the voice, but Cale was already dodging the falling

net. His tail lashed out and batted the leading edge

of the net away, then he leapt up and caught onto

He had been ready for Hell. That Limbo might

consume them all ﬁ rst had not crossed his mind.

The window cover exploded into burning fragments

that fell with incredible slowness. The alien energies

surged in again.

Outremer would continue to fall through the space

between worlds until manifesting on the Fifth Circle

in the year 668 of the Infernum.

Wake up, you fool .

Cale opened his eyes. Above him was a swirl of

purple clouds. Panic seized him as he found he could

recall almost nothing of who he was; a few tattered

memories of names and faces, but no true sense of

self apart from the image of a knight, proud and true.

They can sense hellgouts. Every new arrival in Hell

gets its welcoming committee.

He pulled himself upright and glanced around. The

mountain he lay on was already beginning to subside

into the surrounding dust. There, in the distance, he

could see a dust cloud rising as something moved

swiftly across the plain.

He was in Hell, he was becoming a demon, a monster,

but he pushed all that to the back of his mind. The

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