The Frozen Laboratory

A 4-Hour One-Shot Adventure in Eiselcross

Opening Narration: The Promise of Aeor

Begin with a sweeping, epic tone, as if telling a legend:

In the world of Exandria, where gods once walked among mortals and magic flows like rivers through the land, there exists a place where ambition met annihilation. Far to the north, beyond the reach of civilization's warm embrace, lies Eiselcross - a continent of ice and shadow where the sun is a stranger and the aurora borealis dances above graves of the ancient world.

Here, buried beneath centuries of ice and shame, rest the bones of Aeor - the City of Innovation, the Flying Metropolis, the Crown of Mortal Achievement... and the Greatest Mistake. For Aeor was the city that dared too much, reached too high, and in its hubris, created weapons to kill gods themselves. The pantheon, in rare unity, struck down this floating affront to divine order, and Aeor fell screaming from the sky to shatter upon Eiselcross's unforgiving surface. But ruins, like secrets, rarely stay buried forever.

Shift tone, becoming more immediate:

In recent decades, as the Cerberus Assembly and the Dynasty of Xhorhas race to claim the weapons and knowledge entombed in ice, a gold rush of sorts has begun. Expeditions launch from every port that can muster the courage - glory seekers, knowledge hunters, those desperate enough to risk everything for the promise of Aeorian artifacts that could change the balance of power in Exandria forever.

You were part of this rush. Each of you answered the siren call of Aeor for your own reasons - glory, knowledge, redemption, survival. Each of you joined expeditions that promised safety in numbers, guides who swore they knew the secret paths, leaders who claimed divine favor or arcane protection against Eiselcross's murderous cold.

Let the tragedy sink in:

How naive you all were.

---

The Individual Journeys

Address each character directly, building their backstory:

For Aurene Mistborn:

Aurene, you came with the Moonlit Pilgrimage, a group of Selûnite faithful seeking to establish a shrine in the wastes, believing the Moon Maiden's light could pierce even Aeor's darkness. You remember the night the blizzard struck - unnatural, targeted, separating you from your sisters and brothers in faith. The screaming wind carried more than snow; it carried whispers in languages that predated Common, predated Elvish, predated thought itself. When the storm cleared, you were alone, following what you thought was Selûne's light... but moon's don't glow purple, do they?

For Kal Galad:

Kal, your story sang of heroism - the Aasimar paladin joining the Radiant Vanguard expedition, sworn to ensure no dark artifacts would fall into evil hands. Thirty strong you were, veterans all, blessed by priests and armed with holy steel. But the ice bridge that had held for a thousand years chose your crossing to collapse. As you fell into the crevasse, you reached for your brothers-in-arms, but hands of ice and shadow pulled you deeper, away from the light, away from everything. Your last memory of the surface is your commander's face, twisted in horror as something emerged from the ice behind him.

For Loogan Thunderfoot:

Loogan, the Tusked Brotherhood expedition promised kinship - fellow warriors who understood that civilization was just another word for cage. Your wild magic sang in harmony with Eiselcross's chaotic energies, or so you thought. But when the earth itself opened up beneath your camp, swallowing tents and warriors alike, your rage couldn't save them. The last thing you remember is charging toward what you thought was solid ground, only to find it was a mouth, ancient and hungry, lined with teeth of ice and stone.

For Morga:

Morga, you were part of the Undermountain Collective, duergar prospectors who claimed the surface's dangers meant nothing to those who lived in the earth's bones. Your divination magic had guided the group past a dozen dangers, reading the future in crystal formations and ice patterns. But futures can lie, can't they? The visions that led you deeper showed warmth, safety, shelter. Instead, they led to chambers where the walls themselves were predators, where your gift became a curse showing you exactly how each of your companions would die moments before it happened.

For Sattari:

Sattari, you traveled with the Serpent's Eye Trading Company, smugglers and merchants who saw Aeor as the ultimate score. Your hexblade whispered of power sleeping beneath the ice, and gold speaks all languages. But when your camp's guards started disappearing one by one, taken silently despite all precautions, paranoia destroyed your group from within. The final night, as accusations flew and blades were drawn, something laughed in the darkness beyond your fires. When the killing stopped, you stood among the corpses of those who had been allies moments before, and that's when the collectors came.

---

The Taking

Bring them together in shared trauma:

Each of you fell into darkness. Each of you experienced that moment when struggle ceased, when the cold became absolute, when something spoke in your mind with words that tasted of copper and felt like violation: "Specimens acquired. Viable. Bring them to the deep places. The Master requires subjects."

Your captors were glimpses of nightmare - figures wrong in every proportion, movements that hurt to perceive, whispers that came from too many mouths. Through tunnels that defied geometry, past chambers where ice formed patterns that looked almost like screaming faces, down, always down, until the very concept of 'surface' became a fading dream.

And then... nothing. Sleep without dreams. Time without measure. Until you woke here, in cells that mock the word with their cruel efficiency, deep in the bowels of something that might once have been part of Aeor but has become something far worse.

Final transition to the present:

How long have you been here? Your beards have grown - those of you who can grow them. Your nails speak of weeks, maybe months. The cold has become your skin, hunger your constant companion. You've watched others come and go - or more accurately, come and never return. You've heard the screams that echo from deeper chambers, seen the things that shamble back wearing faces you recognize but souls you don't.

And through it all, there has been one constant - the Apprentice. The thing that feeds you, that selects the next victim, that mutters to itself in broken languages about pleasing the Master, about becoming worthy, about the transformations that await.

Which brings us to now. To this moment. To the sound of those shuffling footsteps approaching once again, and the knowledge that today, for the first time since your capture, one of you will discover what lies beyond these cells.

Today, the nightmare deepens.

Opening: The Cold Truth

Scene 1: The Taking

The cold here isn't like winter's bite or mountain's chill. It's something deeper, something that crawls into your marrow and makes a home there, whispering that you'll never be warm again. The walls of your cells - if these cages of rusted iron and frost-rimed stone can be called cells - weep constantly with condensation that freezes before it can pool, creating cascading curtains of ice that distort the world beyond into a nightmare of warped shadows and flickering lights. You've been counting time by the rhythms of suffering. The moans that echo through the corridors. The scrape of something heavy being dragged across stone. The wet, meaty sounds that you've learned not to think about too deeply. Days blur into weeks, weeks into... how long? Your fingernails have grown. Your hair hangs lank and frozen. The thin, tattered remnants of your cold weather gear mock you with their inadequacy. Then you hear it. That shuffling gait you've all come to dread. Not quite footsteps - something between a walk and a crawl, punctuated by the scritch-scratch of claws on stone and the wet slap of... something else. The thing that brings food. The thing that takes people. The thing that was once human.

Narration: The Apprentice enters the corridor.

It shambles into view, and even after all this time, your mind rebels at what it sees. The Apprentice - for that's what it calls itself in its lucid moments - is a patchwork of flesh and failure. Its torso, still recognizably human, sprouts a wolf's arm on the left side, gray fur matted with old blood and newer fluids. The right arm ends not in a hand but in chitinous claws that click nervously against each other. Scales, iridescent and sickly, patch across its neck and face like a disease. But it's the eyes that haunt you. One is crystalline blue, too bright, too aware, rolling independently of its companion - a jaundiced yellow orb that weeps constantly. When it speaks, its voice is a symphony of discord, human vocal cords trying to work around fangs and a jaw that shifts and reforms with each word.

Narration: Let players react as the Apprentice walks down the corridor, examining each cell.

Aurene's Selection

Narration: Turn to Aurene's player.

The creature stops at your cell, both eyes suddenly focusing on you with terrible synchronicity. Its malformed face attempts what might be a smile, revealing rows of teeth that belong to no single species.

The lock on your cell - a complex thing of gears and arcane symbols - clicks open at the creature's touch. The door swings inward with a shriek of protest.

Aurene's Options:

The Dragging

Narration: Describe based on Aurene's choice, but ultimately she is taken.

The Apprentice's strength belies its twisted form. It grasps Aurene with that chitinous claw, careful not to pierce too deeply.

Narration: ...and begins that horrible shuffling gait toward the corridor's end. The other prisoners watch through frost and bars as she's dragged past. Some press against their cages, others shrink back, and one - a human whose blue veins pulse visibly beneath translucent skin - simply whispers.

Narration: As they disappear around the corner.

The last thing you see is Aurene's face - fear, determination, and something else. The look of someone memorizing every detail, every turn, every sound. Then she's gone, and the prison corridor falls back into its terrible rhythm of dripping ice and muffled sobs.

Scene 2: The Waiting and the Return

Narration: Time passes. Let players discuss and plan. Then.

Time in this place moves like the ice that forms on your walls - slowly, inexorably, and with a weight that crushes hope. You've learned to measure it in small things. The rat that scurries past every few hours, stealing crumbs. The shift change you can hear echoing from somewhere above - muffled voices, never clear enough to understand. The spreading of frost across the ceiling, advancing like an infection. Then, breaking the monotony like a scream in a library, you hear it. The Apprentice returning. But something's different. Its gait is... prouder? And it's dragging something. No, two things. You hear Aurene's voice, weak but alive, and something else being pulled along the stone.

Narration: Aurene returns.

They come into view, and relief wars with horror. Aurene is alive, walking on her own power, though the Apprentice keeps one claw on her shoulder. But she's changed. Her eyes, when she looks up, flash with an inner light that wasn't there before - silver, like moonlight on water, but wrong somehow. Veins at her temples pulse with a faint luminescence. When she breathes, her breath fogs with more than just cold.

The Disposal

The Apprentice shoves Aurene roughly back into her cell.

Narration: ...then continues its grisly work. At the far end of your cell block, barely visible through layers of ice and shadow, is a grated shaft. You've heard it used before, but now you watch as the creature drags its failed experiment to the edge.

The frozen corpse disappears into the darkness below. The sound it makes falling - a series of wet impacts growing fainter - goes on for far longer than seems possible. Then, from far below, other sounds. Settling. Shifting. Things moving that shouldn't be moving. The Apprentice replaces the grate and turns back, both eyes scanning the cells.

After the Apprentice Leaves

Narration: Give players time to check on Aurene and plan.

Aurene's Condition:

What Players Can Observe:

Part 1: The Escape

Examining the Prison

Narration: As players investigate their cells more thoroughly.

Your cell, now that desperation sharpens your senses, reveals secrets hidden by routine misery. The walls aren't uniform - different stones from different eras fitted together like a patchwork of architectural history. Here, smooth Aeorian metal inscribed with geometric patterns. There, rough-hewn rock that might predate the city itself. And everywhere, the ice - but you notice now it follows patterns, channels, as if the cold itself is being directed.

Individual Cell Details:

The Escape Plan

Narration: When players coordinate.

The grate looms at the corridor's end like a mouth waiting to swallow. You've watched the Apprentice use it enough times to know the mechanism - simple lifting, heavy but manageable. The challenge isn't opening it - it's what comes after. The sounds from below speak of a charnel pit, a dumping ground for the Master's failures. But failure or not, those things were changed by powers that shouldn't exist.

Getting Out of Cells:

The Grate Challenge:

Aldric's Untimely Return

Narration: As the last player prepares to descend.

The sound freezes your blood - that shuffling, scraping gait returning far too soon. But something's different. The Apprentice is running, or trying to, its mismatched limbs creating a horrible galloping rhythm. It rounds the corner, and you see why. It carries another body, but this one thrashes weakly in its grip. A dwarf, beard matted with blood, skin already showing the telltale blue veins. But the most horrible thing? The dwarf's eyes are open, aware, watching his own transformation with mute horror.

Its form ripples and shifts, muscles bulging in ways that anatomy shouldn't allow. The wolf arm extends, claws scraping furrows in stone. The crystalline eye blazes with cold light while its companion weeps blood.

Aldric's Rage Actions:

Rage Mutations (roll d6):

Part 2: The Charnel Pit

Landing Among Nightmares

Narration: Read slowly, building the horror.

The fall seems endless, darkness swallowing you whole. Then impact - not onto stone, but onto something that yields with a wet crunch. The smell hits you before your eyes adjust - a concentrated miasma of decay, chemical preservation, and something else. Magic gone wrong. Flesh transformed past all recognition. Phosphorescent fungi cling to the walls, casting everything in a sickly blue-green glow that makes the scene worse, not better. You've landed in a pit of the Master's failures. Bodies - if they can still be called that - carpet the floor in various states of decomposition and transformation. Here, a torso that splits into tentacles instead of legs. There, a skull with too many eye sockets, each still holding a frozen, staring orb. But worst of all is the movement. Things that should be dead twitch and shudder. A hand, severed at the wrist, crawls across the corpse-pile like a flesh spider. Something that might have been human once breathes in wet, ragged gasps despite missing most of its chest. And from deeper in the pit, you hear sounds of larger things stirring, disturbed by your arrival.

Environmental Details:

Environmental Hazards:

Finding the Exit

Narration: After dealing with immediate threats.

The adrenaline of escape fades, replaced by the practical need to find a way out of this nightmare. Scanning the walls through the fungal glow, you spot it - a tunnel mouth, partially hidden behind a cascade of frozen viscera. But as you approach, the temperature changes dramatically. Heat washes over you, so intense after the supernatural cold that your skin feels like it's burning. Moving through the tunnel, the environment shifts jarringly. Worked stone replaces rough cave walls. The sound of flowing liquid grows louder - not water, but something thicker, more viscous. Then you emerge onto a sight that defies expectation: a bridge of ancient construction spanning a chasm filled with flowing lava.

The Bridge of Dichotomy

The bridge is a testament to Aeorian engineering - a single span of white stone that seems to glow with inner light, untouched by age or the heat that should have cracked it centuries ago. Fifty feet long, only five feet wide, with no railings. Below, channels carved into the chasm walls direct the lava flow in precise patterns. This isn't natural - it's a heating system on a massive scale. The heat hits you in waves, each pulse making the air shimmer like water. After so long in the cold, it's overwhelming. Sweat immediately beads on your skin, then evaporates. Your throat burns with each breath. But worse is the vertigo - the orange glow from below makes distance hard to judge, the bridge seeming to stretch and contract with each heat wave. Across the span, set into the far wall like a wound in reality, stands a door of black metal that seems to drink in light. Runes pulse around its frame in a rhythm disturbingly like a heartbeat. To its right, a sight that stops you cold despite the heat - a grotesque altar of sorts.

The Blood Price Revealed

Narration: As they approach the door.

The construction beside the door becomes clearer as you near, and clarity brings revulsion. A channel carved from stone, stained black with old blood, leads from a raised basin to the door itself. Above the basin, held in a framework of corroded metal, hangs a severed hand. It's mummified by the heat, skin drawn tight over bones, but somehow preserved. The fingers are positioned precisely, as if waiting to be placed palm-down in the basin below. But something else catches your eye. The basin isn't empty. Fresh blood, still glistening, pools in the stone. The metallic scent cuts through the sulfur of the lava. Someone used this mechanism recently - within hours. And looking closer at the door, you realize with a chill despite the heat: it's already unlocked. The blood price has been paid, but by whom?

Investigation Opportunities:

Part 3: The Four Runes Chamber

Entering the Geometric Impossibility

Narration: As they pass through the blood door.

The temperature drops so suddenly your sweat flash-freezes on your skin. You've entered a space that defies the crude architecture you've seen so far. This is pure Aeorian design - a trapezoid chamber that seems to exist partially outside normal space. The walls meet at angles that hurt to perceive directly, and the ceiling fades into darkness that swallows light rather than merely absence of it. The floor is a masterwork of engineering - metal grating that reveals channels below where lava flows in precise patterns, providing warmth without the overwhelming heat of the chasm. Four doors dominate the far wall, each marked with a rune that glows with inner light. Square. Circle. Star. Hourglass. The symbols seem simple until you look directly at them, then complexity unfolds like a flower of meaning that your mind can't quite grasp. But you're not alone. In a cage near the right wall - and how did you not see it immediately? - sits a figure that radiates patience like heat. A hobgoblin, scarred by countless battles, sits in perfect stillness. His eyes are closed, his breathing controlled, but you sense awareness. This isn't sleep - it's waiting.

Gotoh's Introduction

Narration: When the party approaches or speaks.

One eye opens - just one - and regards you with an intelligence that seems at odds with the brutish stereotype of his kind. When he speaks, his voice carries the gravitas of command, despite his imprisonment.

Gotoh's Bargaining:

Gotoh the Strategic Mind

The Foundation Chamber (Square Rune)

Narration: When approached correctly.

The square rune flares with brilliant white light, and the door doesn't open - it simply ceases to be, revealing a circular chamber beyond. The room is small, intimate, with walls that curve up into a domed ceiling covered in mathematical equations that seem to move when you're not looking directly at them. In the center, on a pedestal that grows from the floor like a geometric tree, sits a device that defies easy description. Crystal and metal interweave in patterns that suggest both machine and organism. It hums with potential energy, occasionally releasing pulses of light that trace the equations on the ceiling.

The Device Speaks

Narration: When touched, it activates with a voice like grinding crystal.

Solving Foundation:

Narration: On success.

The device's hum rises to a crescendo, then releases a beam of pure energy that passes through the wall toward the Circle door. The equations on the ceiling rearrange themselves, now showing the beginning of some vast formula.

The Transformation Chamber (Circle Rune)

The second door.

This space is larger, more complex. An alchemical laboratory frozen in time, with apparatus of crystal and metal that still bubbles with reactions begun centuries ago. The walls are covered in transformation circles - not just drawn, but carved deep into the stone and filled with metal that changes color as you watch. Copper to silver to gold to something that has no name. Workbenches overflow with components both mundane and impossible. Here, a flower that blooms and withers in an endless cycle. There, a cube of metal that's simultaneously solid and liquid. And everywhere, notes in a dozen languages describing experiments that push the boundaries of natural law.

The Transformation Puzzle

A voice echoes from the central crucible.

Finding Components (Investigation DC 12 each):

Narration: When combined correctly.

The crucible accepts your offering, and transformation begins. The essences merge, separate, merge again in a dance that speeds up until they become a single point of impossible light. That light explodes outward, creating two effects: the Star door's rune ignites, and a bridge of crystallized energy extends to the central platform you glimpsed earlier.

The Preservation Chamber (Star Rune)

The third chamber opens.

If the previous rooms were workshops, this is a vault. Shelves stretch from floor to ceiling, filled with specimens preserved in crystal, floating in luminous liquids, or frozen in fields of visible time. A thousand experiments catalogued and stored. Some beautiful - flowers that never bloomed caught at the moment of opening. Others hideous - tumorous growths that pulse with malign life despite their preservation. But it's the notes that draw your attention. Not scattered like before, but organized, collated. Someone's life work preserved as carefully as the specimens. The name "Ferol Sal" appears again and again, documenting a descent from ambitious researcher to something far worse.

Ferol Sal's Journal Excerpts:

The Culmination Chamber (Hourglass Rune)

The final door.

The smallest chamber, barely fifteen feet across. Every surface is covered in clockwork that has long since stopped, frozen gears and springs creating a mechanical mandala. In the center, incongruous in its simplicity, sits a single chest of dark wood bound in silver. Above it, carved in the ceiling in letters that glow with soft light: "At the culmination, all transformations end. Choose wisely what you preserve."

The Chest's Test

Narration: Opening it triggers a whispered question.

Acceptable Answers:

Chest Contents:

The Mimic's Deception

Narration: Using the key on the central platform.

The grated window slides away with a grinding protest, revealing a chamber that gleams with promise. Gold coins carpet the floor. Jeweled goblets overflow with gems. Weapons of obvious magical nature hang on display. It's a dragon's hoard without the dragon - or so it seems. At the far end, mounted like a hunting trophy, the head of a brass dragon stares with closed eyes. Too perfect. Too still. The preservation too complete for something truly dead. And in the corner, one chest sits apart from the treasures, its wood dark with age, its silver bindings tarnished but intact.

Narration: The moment anyone enters.

All the gold melts instantly, revealing the trap.

The treasure was an illusion, a projection. As it fades, the true nature of the room is revealed - a killing floor, stained with the remains of previous victims. And that chest in the corner? It shifts slightly, a predatory adjustment. Not a chest at all.

The Transformed Mimic

This isn't a natural mimic - it's been experimented on. The creature that unfolds from its chest shape is wrong even by mimic standards. Its flesh is translucent in places, showing the organs beneath. Extra mouths open along its form, each speaking in a different voice - all previous victims.

Environmental Hazards:

Narration: After defeating the mimic.

The dragon head's eyes dim, and when it speaks again, the madness is gone, replaced by immense weariness.

Part 4: The Genesis Ward

Descent into Aeor's Heart

Narration: The broken elevator shaft.

Behind the dragon head, a passage opens into a vertical shaft. Once, this was an elevator - you can see the grooves worn into the walls by centuries of use, the corroded remains of guide rails. But the car itself lies far below, a crumpled mass of metal visible in the phosphorescent glow that seems endemic to this place. Climbing down, the nature of your surroundings changes dramatically. The rough stone gives way to seamless metal inscribed with geometric patterns that seem to shift and reconfigure when you're not looking directly at them. This is true Aeorian construction - the city of mages that dared challenge the gods themselves. The air grows colder, but it's a different cold than above. This is the chill of preserved time, of moments frozen at the instant of catastrophe.

The Guardian's Vigil

Narration: At the bottom of the shaft.

You emerge into a circular chamber where multiple corridors converge like spokes on a wheel. Emergency lighting flickers to life at your presence - strips of luminous crystal that cast everything in hard-edged blue shadows. The room is pristine, untouched by age, as if time itself has been held at bay. Standing in the exact center of the chamber is a figure that makes your blood run cold. Seven feet tall, composed of the same blue-gray metal as the walls but with crystalline components visible through gaps in its frame. Its face is a smooth, featureless mask save for a single lens where eyes should be. It stands perfectly still, has stood perfectly still for over a thousand years.

Then the lens flares to life, bathing you in analytical light. When it speaks, the voice comes not from any mouth but from the walls themselves, a harmony of tones that might once have been soothing but now carries the weight of eons.

Narration: Battle with the Eternal Guardian.

The guardian moves with impossible grace for something so large. Its joints rotate in ways that anatomy shouldn't allow, and when it raises its arm, energy coalesces into a lance of pure force. But it's the way it moves that's most unsettling - not like a construct following programming, but like a soldier remembering its training across centuries of solitude.

Environmental Elements

The room itself becomes part of the battle. Panels in the walls iris open, revealing defensive systems that still function after all this time. A turret extends from the ceiling, a red targeting laser painting geometric patterns across the floor - beautiful and deadly in equal measure.

The Drill Chamber

Narration: After defeating the guardian.

Beyond the guardian's post, the corridor curves and narrows. Massive pipes run along the ceiling here, glowing dull red with inner heat. Condensation forms and immediately freezes, creating a constant rain of ice crystals that chime against your armor. The air smells of metal and ozone and something else - the sharp scent of active magic. The passage ends in a partial collapse. Tons of rubble block the way forward, but against the left wall stands a machine that makes your brain hurt to perceive. It's clearly a drill, but one designed by minds that thought in too many dimensions. The drill head is crystalline, faceted like a gem, and even dormant it seems to twist space around itself. Along the walls, cells with rusted bars contain the detritus of ancient horror. Most hold only bones, but in one, a figure stands frozen solid. The ice is so clear you can see every detail - a human woman, face twisted in a final scream, blue veins creating a delicate tracery beneath skin turned translucent. She's been dead for years, but the preservation is so perfect she might have died moments ago.

Narration: If they investigate the cells more closely.

Each cell tells a story in scattered objects. Here, scratches on the wall counting days that eventually just... stop. There, a child's toy, inexplicable and heartbreaking. And in the corner of one cell, written in what might be blood: "He makes us watch the others change."

The Laboratory Beyond

Narration: When they power the drill.

The machine roars to life with a sound like reality tearing. The crystalline drill head doesn't spin - it phases, existing in multiple states simultaneously until the stone ahead simply ceases to be. In thirty seconds, it carves a passage through what should have taken days, and beyond... A vast laboratory space opens before you. Four connected chambers without doors, each flowing into the next like thoughts in a vast mind. The preservation here is perfect - experiments still bubble in their containers, lights still glow on control panels, and in the air hangs the sharp scent of active alchemy.

Ferol Sal's Manifestation

Narration: As they enter the lab.

The temperature drops twenty degrees in an instant. Shadows gather in defiance of the omnipresent lighting, coalescing into a form that makes your primitive brain scream warnings. Tall, gaunt, draped in robes that seem to exist partially in some other space. The face that regards you is translucent pale, veins visible beneath skin like parchment. But it's the eyes that hold you - violet lights that burn with an intelligence both vast and utterly indifferent to your existence.

When he speaks, the voice carries the weight of centuries, each word precisely chosen and delivered with the dispassion of someone discussing insects.

He glides - doesn't walk, glides - to one of the active experiments.

Narration: If anyone attacks or threatens.

He doesn't dodge. The attack simply... doesn't reach him. Space between you and him stretches like taffy, your weapon or spell traveling forever without arriving.

Narration: His parting words.

The Laboratory's Secrets

Narration: After Ferol Sal departs.

The laboratory stands open to your investigation. Each room tells part of a horrific story:

The Library:

The Active Laboratory:

The Storage Chamber:

The Personal Study:

The Golden Hope

Narration: Among the horrors, salvation.

On a separate table, quarantined from the other experiments, sits a rack of vials filled with golden liquid. These are labeled differently, almost reluctantly: "Antidote - Batch 7 - Stable." Notes beside them, in handwriting that shows frustration: "The cure remains irritatingly simple. Subjects must be treated before full crystallization. Consciousness returns with treatment. Side effects include nightmares, cold sensitivity, and unfortunate tendency to remember the experience. Note: Perhaps memory erasure should be incorporated?"

Final Discoveries:

Gotoh's Wisdom

Narration: If Gotoh survived, he speaks quietly.

Conclusion: The Weight of Knowledge

The Escape Choice

Narration: Three options present themselves.

If They Confront Aldric

Narration: Returning through the complex.

You find him in the prison corridor, standing among the opened cells. He's changed - worse than before. His master's dismissal has broken something fundamental. The wolf arm has spread, fur covering half his torso. The crystalline eye weeps constant tears that freeze before they can fall.

This fight is desperate, savage. Aldric has nothing left to lose.

The Surface

Narration: However they escape.

Eiselcross greets you with wind that cuts like knives and cold that makes the prison seem warm by comparison. But it's clean cold, natural cold, not the supernatural chill of preserved death. The aurora dances overhead in sheets of green and gold, and for a moment, the beauty of it makes you forget the horrors below. But you can't forget. Not really. In your packs, the golden vials clink softly - hope in liquid form. In your minds, knowledge that sits like lead - somewhere out there, an ancient lich continues his work, and the frigid woe was just the beginning.

Final image

Behind you, the entrance seals itself with grinding finality. But you know that's an illusion. Evil like this doesn't stay buried. It waits. It plans. And somewhere in the ruins of humanity's greatest folly, Ferol Sal continues his symphony of endings. But for now, you have antidotes. You have proof. You have each other. And sometimes, that has to be enough.

Epilogue Moments

Narration: Give each player a moment to describe their character's reaction.

Gotoh's Parting

The Final Question

Narration: As you make your way across the frozen wasteland toward civilization, one question haunts you more than any other. Ferol Sal spoke of dozens of facilities, of a greater plan. The frigid woe was called a test run. A test run for what?

DM's Extended Notes

Pacing Guidelines:

Voice Acting Notes:

Horror Elements to Emphasize:

Hope Elements to Balance: