The Blood Keep
A Festering Warren Beneath the Earth
The Call of Crimson Dreams
In the deepest hours of night, when fever breaks across your brow and consciousness wavers between sleep and waking terror, you see it—a vision carved in rust and shadow. The Blood Keep calls to you through dreams thick as congealed blood, its corrupted stones whispering promises of secrets that mortal minds were never meant to grasp. You wake with the taste of copper in your mouth and the certainty that somewhere beneath the world's skin, something ancient waits for your arrival.
The Dwelling of Exiles
The Blood Keep still draws breath, though it rasps like a dying man's final words. Within its blood-slick corridors, displaced trolls have claimed squatter's rights, fleeing from some nameless darkness that even their stone-hard hearts cannot face. They've turned landlord out of necessity, collecting tribute from the quartet of horrors that skulk through the lower chambers—the Suture Stalker, the Giggling Defiler, the Ivory Craftsman, and the Broken Suppliant each pay their rent in fresh corpses and stolen dreams.
But the trolls' rule grows tenuous as reality itself begins to fray. Rifts crack open like festering wounds, bleeding the boiling unworld's chaos into the keep's already twisted reality. The air shimmers with otherworldly heat, and shadows move independently of their casters.
The Threshold of Damnation
Hidden within a secluded glade in the Sarkash wilderness, where twisted trees form a natural cathedral of thorns, stands a door that should not exist. Ancient runes crawl across its surface like living tattoos, their meaning shifting whenever observed directly. The very air around it tastes of iron and regret.
The door's guardian defies description—an inky formlessness that absorbs light and hope in equal measure. It neither speaks nor moves, yet its presence alone turns brave hearts to water. Those who would enter must face this living void, knowing that even victory may cost them pieces of their soul.
The Cacophony of Passage
Should you breach the threshold, prepare for the keep to announce your every movement. Each door within screams its protest when opened, their corrupted wood and rusted hinges creating a symphony of anguish that echoes through stone corridors. Stealth becomes impossible; the very architecture conspires to herald intruders to every inhabitant within these cursed walls.
Room 1: The Hall of Burning Vigil
The first chamber greets visitors with primitive warmth turned sinister. A massive bonfire crackles at the room's heart, fed by furniture torn from abandoned homes and the wooden bones of a dozen ruined strawmen that stand like silent witnesses around the flames. Their burlap faces, half-melted by heat, seem to track movement with hollow eye-sockets. The smoke carries whispers in languages that predate human speech, and shadows dance on the walls with too much purpose.
Room 2: The Spoiled Armory
Rows of sagging shelves display the remains of what might once have been provisions—now only putrid lumps of unidentifiable matter that pulse with their own internal decay. The destroyed armory tells a story of desperate last stands: shattered blades, split shields, and armor pierced by claws that could rend steel. Yet among this ruin, keen eyes might spot gleaming treasures that the trolls have overlooked—perhaps a blade that still holds its edge, or coins unstained by the keep's corruption.
Room 3: The Chamber of Severed Hope
Lengths of hempen rope dangle from the ceiling like hangman's nooses, their ends gnawed through by something with powerful jaws and little patience. Rotten planks scattered across the floor bristle with rusty nails that seem positioned with malicious intent, creating a treacherous maze for the unwary. The wood bears tooth marks too large for any natural creature, and dark stains suggest this room has witnessed struggles that ended poorly for the struggling.
Room 4: The Drowned Lock
Knee-deep water fills this chamber, its surface reflecting nothing but darkness despite the presence of any light source. The liquid carries an oily sheen and the sweet stench of things long dead. At the chamber's far end, a door awaits behind a lock that glints with false promise. The mechanism hides a glass vial filled with poison gas—a gift from the keep's paranoid architects. The water itself seems to resist movement, clinging to intruders like liquid despair.
Room 5: The Debris Tomb
Collapsed ceiling stones, rotted timbers, and the detritus of centuries create a labyrinth of hazardous terrain. Jutting from a partially blocked doorway, a goedendag—its spiked head still sharp despite years of abandonment—stands like a monument to violence cut short. Something important lies buried beneath the rubble, but extracting it will require disturbing a precarious balance that keeps tons of stone from completing their interrupted fall.
Room 6: The Fallen Crown
The remnants of what must have been a magnificent throne sit broken and defaced, its former grandeur now a mockery of mortal ambition. A single jewel remains embedded in the chair's headrest, gleaming with hypnotic beauty that seems to pulse with its own inner light. Yet this final treasure serves as the keystone in the room's structural integrity—removing it will bring the ceiling crashing down in a rain of stone and ruin that even the most nimble might not escape.
Room 7: The Suspended Sentinel
From the ceiling hangs an impossible statue carved from some dark stone that seems to absorb light. Its features shift when observed peripherally, and its eyes—if they are eyes—track movement with disturbing awareness. The chamber's entrance triggers a hidden mechanism, dropping a sticky net woven from silk that burns the skin and binds with supernatural strength. Worse still, the statue's disturbing presence alerts something deeper in the keep—something that begins moving the moment intruders become entangled.
Room 8: The Gallery of Agonies
The Blood Keep's torture chamber stands as a testament to the refined cruelty of its former masters. Instruments of pain line the walls in careful arrangement, their metal surfaces polished by years of use and darkened by substances best left unidentified. More rotten planks carpeted with rusty nails create a floor designed to wound with every step, while chains dangle from pulleys that still turn with oiled precision. Here, the quartet's Broken Suppliant sometimes comes to remember what it flees from, and visitors might encounter it cowering among implements that tell stories written in screams.
The Blood Keep waits, patient as stone and hungry as the grave. Will you pay its price in blood and sanity, or will you add your bones to the foundation of its endless appetite?
The Exiles of the Keep
The Suture Stalker
This wretched thing bears the unmistakable marks of crude surgery—black stitches crisscross its pallid flesh like a grotesque map of suffering. Fresh wounds weep amber sap that hardens into brittle scabs before cracking away, leaving a trail of autumn's decay in its wake. Its movements are unnaturally silent, joints articulating with the practiced stealth of something that has learned survival through observation. The creature clutches a makeshift spear, its grip betraying an almost parental protectiveness over the reed bundle it carries—within which something small shifts and mewls with the voice of dying seasons.
The Giggling Defiler
Age has not been kind to this acid-slick horror. Its flesh bubbles and hisses where moisture touches it, sending wisps of acrid steam into the stagnant air. Despite its decrepit state, it moves with the giddy enthusiasm of a child at play, tiptoeing through puddles of its own corrosive secretions while releasing wet, tittering laughs that echo off stone walls. Its eyes burn with zealous purpose as it contemplates the sacred work of adorning the Father Tree with fresh offerings. The creature's acid-eaten features make its expressions difficult to read, but its intent is unmistakably malevolent.
The Ivory Craftsman
Albino perfection married to reptilian coldness, this being's snow-white scales catch and reflect light with prismatic intensity that can blind the unwary. Its elongated skull houses calculating eyes that appraise every person encountered, mentally cataloging the texture and length of their hair. Those follicularly blessed earn its covetous attention, while the bald receive only contempt—they are worthless materials, unfit for its grotesque artistry. The massive two-handed sword it wields seems almost ceremonial, its blade etched with patterns that mirror the stitching on its prized dolls. Each swing is measured and precise, treating combat as merely another form of craftsmanship.
The Broken Suppliant
This pitiful creature embodies existential dread made manifest. Its teeth chatter in an endless rhythm of terror, creating a percussion of despair that underscores its plaintive whimpers and half-formed pleas for mercy or release. Whatever horrors it has witnessed—or fled from—have left it in a state of perpetual anguish, yet still it clings to existence with desperate tenacity. Its thick, scarred hide speaks of countless attempts to end its suffering through violence, all unsuccessful. The jar of spiders it carries seems less like a weapon and more like a final failsafe—a last resort for when whatever it's running from finally catches up.
The Interlopers
Hurp, the Pale One
At the group's edge stands a figure that seems perpetually out of phase with reality itself. Hurp's skin bears the pallor of something dredged from ocean depths, unmarked by sun or warmth. Their fingernails hang like black petals ready to fall, and the constant wet rhythm of coughing, spitting, and swallowing provides a grotesque soundtrack to their movements. Ancient words in dead tongues occasionally slip from their lips—fragments of cosmic truth that make listeners' minds itch. The wooden crucifix clutched in their grip seems less like faith and more like a desperate anchor to mortality. There's a weight to their presence, as if they carry the crushing loneliness of deep waters and distant stars.
Grendl, the Sacrilegious Songbird
Where eyebrows once framed their face, only smooth, fire-scarred skin remains—a testament to bargains made in desperation. Grendl moves with the defensive posture of someone always expecting the next blow, yet when they speak, their voice carries an unnatural sweetness that makes hardened hearts flutter and cruel minds pause. The bone mouth harp at their belt gleams with polished ivory, its hollow chambers promising both healing and horror. They unconsciously mirror the mannerisms of whoever they're speaking to, a chameleon quality that unsettles more than it charms. Sleep finds them restless, their feet carrying them to places better left unvisited while their soul screams soundlessly within.
Dekram, the Gutterborn Scum
A mountain of unwashed flesh and ravenous appetite, Dekram embodies survival through sheer unpleasantness. Spittle perpetually gathers at the corners of their mouth as they argue with the world itself, finding fault in everything from the weather to the way others breathe. Their corpulent form moves with surprising grace when motivated by greed or self-preservation. The three monkeys that follow them represent a bizarre contradiction—creatures that show pure love to someone fundamentally unlovable. They cluster around Dekram's shoulders and pockets, chattering and grooming, oblivious to their master's protests. Death itself seems to find this walking disaster too distasteful to claim properly.
Bigtun, the Wretched Royalty
Fallen nobility clings to this figure like expensive perfume gone sour. Every gesture carries the ghost of courtly grace, every word drips with the authority of bloodlines now meaningless. Their chapped lips constantly move, cataloguing the failures and inadequacies of everyone around them with the precision of a royal accountant. The sapphire family jewel they carry catches light like trapped tears, beautiful enough to make thieves forget caution. Yet for all their condescension and bitter correction of others' mistakes, there's something genuinely tragic about Bigtun—a person who had everything and watched it all crumble, left only with empty titles and burning pride.
Scruffy, the Suffering Companion
Though absent from their portrait (having darted away the moment anyone produced sketching materials), Scruffy haunts the group's periphery like a living wound. This matted nightmare of fur and exposed sinew leaves a trail of blood droplets wherever it goes, each step a small agony made manifest. Its acid blood means even offering comfort risks injury, creating a creature desperate for touch yet deadly to embrace. The single grimy copper coin it carries seems almost mockingly insufficient compensation for eternal torment. When it does appear, usually slinking from shadows or crawling from beneath debris, its eyes hold a plea that transcends species—the universal desire for an end to suffering that never comes.
Together, they form a procession of the damned approaching The Blood Keep—each carrying their own burden of loss, corruption, or cosmic horror. They are united not by friendship but by the peculiar gravity that draws broken things together, seeking answers or absolution in places where only more questions and damnation wait.
Afterword: From Statistics to Stories
This zine emerged from a counterintuitive creative process. Rather than beginning with setting and atmosphere, it started with mechanical stat blocks—raw numbers describing hit points, armor classes, and special abilities for a quartet of dungeon inhabitants and a band of damaged adventurers. Through iterative collaboration with an AI assistant, these clinical statistics underwent a transformation into atmospheric descriptions, room details, and narrative hooks.
The generative process revealed both the possibilities and limitations of algorithmic translation in tabletop design. When tasked with expanding terse mechanical descriptions into evocative prose, the AI demonstrated remarkable capacity for atmospheric extrapolation. "Carved up, fresh from the operating table. It's leaving a trail of dead leaves" became the Suture Stalker's detailed description of surgical scars and amber sap. Statistical relationships between characters—the quartet paying "rent" to displaced trolls—evolved into complex social dynamics within a community of exiles.
However, the algorithmic approach also introduced systematic biases. The AI consistently favored certain narrative patterns: gothic horror aesthetics, existential dread metaphors, and melancholic characterization. While these choices created tonal coherence, they also narrowed the interpretive possibilities that more diverse human perspectives might have explored. The original stat blocks could have supported comedic interpretations, body horror themes, or political allegories, but the generative process channeled them toward a specific atmospheric register.
The reverse translation—converting the atmospheric material back into OSR statistics—demonstrated another limitation. The resulting stat blocks captured mechanical functions but flattened the interpretive richness. The Broken Suppliant's "existential dread made manifest" reduced to simple morale penalties, losing the deeper roleplay implications that phrase suggests. Numbers provide clarity and playability, but they cannot encode the ambiguous spaces where human creativity thrives.
Most significantly, the algorithmic process struggled with the material's most radical possibility: the suggestion that players might portray the dungeon's inhabitants rather than traditional adventuring parties. This conceptual inversion requires human insight to recognize and develop. AI excels at pattern recognition and stylistic consistency, but it cannot easily identify opportunities to subvert fundamental genre assumptions.
The system-agnostic approach emerged naturally from this tension between mechanical specificity and narrative openness. By removing statistical frameworks entirely, the material invites game masters and players to negotiate their own interpretations. However, this accessibility comes at a cost—the zine demands more creative labor from users who might prefer ready-made mechanical solutions.
The generative process suggests that AI-assisted design works best when human creativity provides conceptual direction while algorithmic assistance handles elaboration and consistency checking. The AI proved adept at maintaining atmospheric coherence across multiple rooms and character descriptions, but it required human intervention to recognize when mechanical assumptions limited creative possibilities.
Perhaps most importantly, this experiment demonstrates that tabletop gaming materials exist on a spectrum between pure mechanics and pure narrative. Different groups need different points on that spectrum, and AI tools can help translate materials across those positions. The heavy lifting of conversion—mechanical to atmospheric, atmospheric back to mechanical—becomes trivial with algorithmic assistance, potentially allowing designers to create multiple versions of the same core material for different play styles.
The Blood Keep stands as both setting and methodology—a demonstration that creative constraints, whether statistical or atmospheric, can generate unexpected possibilities when filtered through collaborative human-AI design processes. Whether those possibilities enhance or diminish the medium remains for individual tables to decide.
Images generated by Thomas L. Harfst Jr. and shared on the Dungeons & AI Facebook group.