The Vampire's Factory

Steampunk Industrialism

The great city of Sholn is filled with stone towers as tall as mountains, connected by a vast network of bridges. Airships dot the skies, ranging from transport ships the size of galleons to personal cruisers little larger than gondolas. Most of the inhabitants rarely ever set foot on the ground, where the air is thick with smog from the city’s countless industrial chimneys, and the pickpockets are never far away.

But our band of brave heroes recently made a visit to the ground. In fact, they’d ventured far beneath it in their quest to find an ancient, alien airship known as a spelljammer. On the way down, they passed through an abandoned prison, a mine, a duergar fortress, an ancient elven city, an ancient dwarven city, and a mind flayer colony.

Those places all have their own stories, but the one that matters here is the prison. Because when the prison closed down some twenty years before the events of the game, the worst criminals were left behind in their cells to starve. When the party came to the lowest level of the dungeon, they heard a knocking coming from inside one of those cells.

One of the prisoners was still alive.

The group simply let him out and asked why he wasn’t dead. The man said he was undead. He thanked them, said he owed them one, and went on his way as a free man, having definitely served his sentence by now.

They met him again soon after returning to the bridge-streets above ground. He bailed them out of trouble during a high-rise standoff with the inventor of the machine gun. Out of curiosity, they tailed his airship to a factory, located halfway up some thousand-foot tower. They waited a bit, taking care against his seeing them, and followed him inside, entering from one of the bridge-streets.

The Factory

There were no windows nor any lights inside the factory. The room smelled of metal and oil. As their eyes adjusted to the darkness, the party heard the sounds of whirring machines and conveyor belts. A woman appeared before them, asking about their intrusion. After the party’s paladin demanded to know what their deal was, he learned that all the factory workers were vampires—a fact he did not take kindly to. One fight later, and the vampire turned into a fine mist that drifted away into the ventilation system.

But the paladin never got to face the consequences of his impulsive actions, because his player wasn’t there the next session. Instead, this story focuses on Traz, the dark elf cleric with terrible luck; Titus, the human wizard who used to have two personalities until one of them died; and Rurik¹, then nondescript dwarf barbarian.

With the vampire seemingly vanquished, the group—minus the absent paladin—was free to explore the factory. The first thing they did was turn on the lights. Fluorescent lamps began to buzz, stinging their eyes. Once their eyes had adjusted, they saw conveyor belts moving springs, bearings, sprockets, and all manner of parts between large, boxy machines. One particular conveyor belt dropped the parts into a box at the far end of the room.

Investigating a part of the wall that was covered in oily smears, the party found a secret door hiding a spiral staircase to the floor below. Seen from outside the towering industrial building, the factory wasn’t in any way connected to the business on the floor below. It was a place called Lucilla’s Meat Factory, which seemingly dealt with processing meat. But the hidden stairway connected the two businesses, and the party decided to find out why. They followed the stairs down, opened the door at the bottom, and emerged onto an industrial catwalk.

Vampiric Efficiency

They were surrounded on all sides by a jungle of slithering pipes—bronze, silver, and copper in color. Some cold and some radiating heat. Thick and thin, hissing and humming, turning and bending in all directions. The pipework was so dense that they couldn’t see far through it. It stretched far above and beneath them, and looking down, they could see some sort of creature climbing the pipes below. From the faint glimpses they caught of it, the creature seemed humanoid. A moment later, it was gone. They pressed on.

The pipework avoided the space above the catwalk, creating a corridor through the tubes. There were several paths branching off ahead of them, and they turned left toward a gray metal door. As they approached, hot steam erupted from a pipe coupling at just the right time to scald them all. They hurried through and shoved the door open. They found the timing suspicious, almost as if the pipes themselves had been trying to hurt them. Little did they know it was about to get worse.

A large room with a thirty-foot-high ceiling awaited them on the other side of the door. It was some kind of loading bay with an airship loading door at the far side and a narrow corridor to the right. The rest of the room was filled with iron cages. The party was horrified to find that the cages were packed with people. Adults and children alike; humans, elves, dwarves, and many others; all wearing ragged clothing and covered in soot. The city’s poorest people, the kind who dwell all the way down on the smog-covered ground.

The group didn’t have time to free them as suddenly, three sets of manacles attached to long chains swung toward the party. The chains moved along a rail in the ceiling, almost as if someone was pulling them. The group jumped out of the way, but Rurik the dwarf was too slow. The manacles latched on to one of his arms and began dragging him across the floor along the rail, toward a narrow hallway where the floor dropped, leaving Rurik hanging in the air. The others lost sight of him as the chains rounded a corner in the hallway.

The Drain Room

Traz and Titus got back on their feet and rushed to follow Rurik down the hallway. As they turned the corner, they saw Rurik hanging in the middle of a square room with a blood-stained floor of steel, sloping down toward the center of the room like the inside of an inverted pyramid. At the bottom was a hole leading down into darkness. Rurik was trying to free himself from the manacles with raw strength when suddenly a long, thin blade unfolded from one of the walls and slashed at his throat. He threw his legs and body back, swinging just in time to avoid it. He had managed to free himself of the manacles and was now holding onto the chains as he swung back forward, jumped, and landed on the inclined floor just short of the corridor where the others were standing. Titus grabbed his arm and pulled him up as Traz held up his shield, deflecting the blows from the chains that were still trying to grab them, and swung his sword at them to little effect.

Titus looked into the room. The hallway with the rail continued on the other side. To the right was a small platform with a door. An idea formed in his head. A reckless one. He pushed past the others and jumped, reaching for the attacking chains to swing to the other side. They pulled away just as his fingertips grazed one of them, and he fell, sliding down the floor into the hole at the bottom.

He splashed into a thick liquid as the stench of iron overpowered his nostrils. His lungs were flooded and he couldn’t see. He flailed in panic, instinctively reaching for his spellbook. By some miracle, he got his head above the surface. He coughed. He was in an enormous glass vat of blood. The room was filled with them. He flipped open his blood-soaked spellbook and spoke the words, spitting out blood all the while. Then he turned into a giant owl.

It’s not easy to fly when your wings are soaked in blood, but somehow, Titus did it. He flapped his way back up through the hole and carried the other two across to the far side corridor as they fended off the chains. The corridor led to a large, open room, another jungle of pipes where the floor should be, and a conveyor belt leading from the corridor opening into a series of machines full of sharp implements. Titus still being an owl, ignored it all and flew to one of the walls that had another small platform leading to a door.

A Machine for Pigs

Just before reaching the platform, Titus once again spotted a creature of some kind moving around in the pipework below. It was closer this time. He set the others down on some room-temperature pipes next to the conveyor belt and turned back into his human form. Then the creature came at them. It was quick, moving between the pipes like a running animal, and was upon them before they could react. The creature grabbed Traz by the throat and beat his head against the pipes. It was a man, more muscular than even Rurik, and it had the head of a pig. It made a terrifying squeal as it jumped for Rurik, like that of a pig getting slaughtered alive combined with a human’s screech of pure rage.

Rurik swung his axe at the creature’s head. It connected with that familiar and awful sound of metal crushing bone. The creature went limp. It slipped between the pipes, bouncing against them as it dropped into the depths of the pipework, dead. Traz was alive, but had acquired a rather spectacular headache. Ignoring the conveyor belt and the hair-raising machines it led to, they climbed some pipes to the platform. The door led to another catwalk through yet more impenetrable pipework.

Hearing the wheezing grunts of more pig-men in the distance, they kept their heads low and snuck to a door ahead of them. It led to a small office, lavishly decorated. There was a tapestry depicting a pale, dark-haired man sitting on a golden armchair upholstered in red, holding a wine glass and a tarot card². Inspecting some books on the bookshelf, they found one³ that opened a secret hatch in the floor when moved.

They Missed All the Vampires

Climbing through the hatch, they finally got away from all the pipes and machinery, arriving instead in a network of stone corridors. The group made their way into some kind of research room. It was full of spell components and notes about creating man/pig hybrids. There was also a scroll with a spell for combining heads and bodies into new creatures, but the party didn’t find it. They headed straight for the next room, being greeted by the smell of decay upon opening the door. They found huge vats of green liquid with pigs floating in them, and piles of decomposing human body parts. Titus and Traz were both capable of necromancy, so they used the body parts to create a small army of zombies.

Heading on, they unwittingly walked right past the room full of vampire coffins and headed straight for the personal room of the factory’s owner, Lucilla the vampire. There was a coffin, a desk, a bookshelf, and a chest inside. They found another book attached to a hidden lever⁴, but all it did was make a clicking sound. The room contained a combination of all the puzzles they could find in other parts of the facility. Other than the book, they had to move a paperweight, and pull a lever underneath the false bottom of the chest. After figuring this out, they could hear the sound of a wall sliding away, but they saw no such thing. Turns out the wall was hidden by another, illusory wall. With that figured out, they stepped through and entered the heart room—a small chamber with nothing but a pedestal in the middle. On the pedestal was a glass dome covering a beating heart.

To make a long story short, the party had, through clues scattered throughout the factory that I couldn’t bother mentioning, learned of a vampire who was attacked by an adventurer long ago. The adventurer had stabbed him with an enchanted dagger that prevented him from healing the damage. Then, the adventurer had cut out the vampire’s still-beating heart, kept it as a souvenir, and burnt the rest of the body. This had greatly angered the vampire’s wife Lucilla, who was also a vampire. She tracked down and killed the adventurer, reclaiming her lover’s heart. Unable to break the spell that prevented her husband from regenerating, she had instead managed to integrate it into her meat-packing facility, giving the heart magical control of the factory. Of course, the slaughterhouse was actually meant for draining the blood of homeless people for the vampires to drink, and selling the leftover meat was just a nice way to cover the costs. Lucilla had eventually bought the space above the facility to make more machine parts to keep expanding her husband-machine.

Anyway, the party destroyed the heart, which caused the whole building to start rumbling like an earthquake. They made the wise decision to skedaddle. Traz’s leg got trapped under some falling debris. They freed him with the aid of their newly acquired zombie army and bolted out of there. Titus transformed into a giant owl once more, and flew ahead of the others. He went back the way they came, out the front door to one of the bridges that connected the city’s many skyscrapers. Due to some poor rolls, Rurik, Traz, and the zombies didn’t get out in time. The whole building came down with a deafening crash, spreading a massive cloud of dust through the city. Once it had settled, it turned out that just about everyone inside, including the caged homeless people and everyone on every other floor of the frighteningly tall building, had died. Rurik, the barbarian with a massive health pool, actually survived the 20d10 bludgeoning damage of being hit in the head with a high-rise. Traz was eventually dug out and resurrected at a nearby shrine.