The Titanic Cromungi

Beyond Countless Doorways Sneak Peek

An excerpt from "Palpatur" by Ray Vallese

Sorrow's Heart is a typical cromungus, home to a tribe of Palpatur's tieflings. Map by Ed Bourelle.

The most prominent natural features of Palpatur are the enormous humanoid faces that burst forth from the ground during the demon-devil war. The tieflings call these faces titanic cromungi. One can find them all over the plane, at a distance of 30 to 50 miles from one another.

Now hardened nearly to the density of rock, they seem like nothing more than irregularly shaped mountains when viewed from ground level. The faces of sorrow and fury are plain when viewed from the sky. Otherwise, climbing a cromungus and mapping its topography is the only way to realize that the giant outcropping that looks a bit like a nose is—well, a nose. And the immense chasm over there? A tremendous maw frozen in a scream of fear or howl of rage. While the sizes and details of the features vary, each rocky face has two empty eye sockets, a nose with nostrils, and a mouth at least partially open. No two outcroppings are identical, so the protruding visages can serve the PCs as landmarks by which to chart their way across the bleak landscape.

The cromungi serve another role, as well—they provide shelter for tiefling tribes that now live within the hollow “skulls.” On most faces, the eye sockets, nostrils, and mouth give way to steep (sometimes, sheer) passages descending into the cavernous centers of the rock formations. The tieflings usually post guards at these entry points or fill them with rubble. Some openings are home to clusters of grey oozes and ochre jellies, which the tieflings block from seeping farther down the tunnels with densely packed walls of stone-filled groundflesh.

Some cromungi remain empty, but each inhabited cavern hosts a tribe of 500 to 1,000 tieflings, expert climbers and rugged survivalists all. The settlements usually form around shared specifics of faith. The tieflings consider cromungi to be holy sites, grown by Palpatur as safe gathering places for its adopted children.

Tieflings
The tieflings of Palpatur use the planetouched (tiefling) statistics in the MM except as noted in this section.

Religion
Reduced to a primitive state, the tieflings settle in the titanic cromungi, separated into tribes according to differences in the practice of their faith. Most tieflings believe in the inevitability of the Waking, but each group believes that it knows best how to achieve the Waking. For some, this means lots of prayer. For others, it means lots of planar maintenance: trimming away the groundflesh eruptions and so forth. Although the various tribes all have more or less the same goal, they seek to achieve it in very different ways—and are fiercely defensive about their particular methods.

As mentioned above, many tieflings devote their lives to the care of their comatose plane, and the work easily fills their days. Most of the time, they scour the ruined landscape to keep Palpatur looking neat. Primarily, this involves trimming the unsightly growths of groundflesh tentacles and plugging the bloodswill geysers. The work is hard and tedious, and occasionally they lose comrades to massive sinkholes that open and close again in the space of a few seconds. But they serve eagerly, viewing the eruptions as signs of their plane’s continued life and strength. Also, they keep the severed groundflesh for food, and they maintain regulated geysers near each cromungus as sources of drink.

The tieflings also spend long hours praying to Palpatur. They offer animal sacrifices to calm the turbulent weather, light, and gravity—they read the changing conditions as signs in a bizarre system of interpretation that makes perfect sense to them. They collect and dispose of dangerous remnants left over from the unholy war. They track and kill fiends that manage to pull themselves free of the imprisoning groundflesh. Once in a while, arguments over specific tenets of faith or practice boil over, and two cromungus tribes go to war with each other.

Other than cleaning up the surface, the tieflings seek to restore balance to their plane’s essence. They must counter the blight caused by the absorbed demons and devils by giving Palpatur fresh sources of life from which to draw strength. To do this, an especially charismatic or sneaky tiefling journeys to another plane, where he convinces, coerces, or tricks the unwary into a one-way trip through the nearest doorway back to Palpatur. The alignment of the victim doesn’t matter, and pretty much anything with a pulse is fair game. Because intelligent beings resent being hijacked, the tieflings usually try to bring animals and monsters instead of people. But few would pass up the opportunity to lure a hearty band of adventurers with much life force to offer. The displaced beings don’t suffer any harm from being on Palpatur, but the tieflings believe their plane draws sustenance from its inhabitants, so they refuse to let anyone leave without a compelling reason. Indeed, most cromungus tribes try to convert intelligent newcomers to their cause.

Physical Characteristics
Because all tieflings have a fiendish ancestor somewhere in their lineage, they exhibit physical traits that suggest their demonic or devilish heritage. Determine traits for an individual by rolling 1d4 times on the Tiefling Physical Traits table below. (Tieflings in the greater multiverse exhibit a much wider variety of traits than do the isolated, interbred specimens of Palpatur.)
A tiefling’s ancestry also confers innate spell-like powers or special abilities. Determine these for an individual by rolling 1d4 times on the Tiefling Abilities table on the next page. Powers and qualities assigned by this method replace the darkvision and resistances described in the MM.

See Beyond Countless Doorways for more on this plane, including the fiendish war that sent Palpatur into its coma, details on strange bioleche items, groundflesh and bloodswill, other inhabitants of the plane, new characters, and adventure hooks to use in the plane.

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