The Things Below

Primordial entities of darkness, chaos, and corruption, older than the world and trapped inside it.

When light first filled the void, They Who Dwelt In Darkness were already huddled in the shadows. They whispered lies to the First Creators and urged them to ruin. The Creators saw the lies for what they were — and laid a trap. They forged the world itself, then folded it around the Things That Knew Only Hate and sealed them in rock and stone. The world became both tether and prison. They are not one god or one faction in the mortal sense but a legion of sealed powers, emanations, hungers, voices, marks, and bargains.

No prison is perfect. The Stone Lords found the cracks first and laid great seals upon them, quieting the whispers for a time. Then The Green Lords called the Things Below up in panic against the Fae and weakened the bindings; the whispers became a song; the Stone Lords' own sorcerers heard it, broke the seals, and ushered in the Cataclysm that toppled the Makers' age. The Barrow Builders rose in the aftermath; The Fomoraij still carry that corruption forward.

For centuries the Things Below have lain mostly quiet. Some say the gods intervened, some that mortal heroes worked a great binding, some that the world began to heal itself — your table decides. The retreat was incomplete. Touched places remain, stained creatures still walk, and objects of power linger and corrupt the unwitting. Within the last generation, tremors have run through different quarters of the World's End. Something below is straining at its shackles again.

• Corrupted sites — shunned places, hungry places, poisonous places, spawning places, and (rarest) wounds in the world, each darker than the last
• Emanations — physical horrors that congeal out of corruption, neither beast nor spirit
• Thralls — people, beasts, or spirits twisted to a Thing's purpose, sometimes willing, sometimes not
• Marks — taint that rides a person or object across a lifetime, drawing more corruption to it
• Bargains — power, knowledge, vengeance, immortality, offered at exactly the price that will ruin the asker
• Motifs — red crystal (cruelty solidified, warm and thirsty), black iron (cold light that leaches color), and dreams that whisper the same answer night after night

Six exemplars the source names; whether any walk in your world is your call.

• Daagon, Who Waits in Deep Waters — gluttony and roiling flesh; sends squirming servants to take from the surface. See The Ring of Daagon and Blackwater Lake.
• El'rash-Orra, Lord of Orbs, the Many-Eyes — denial and delirium; reveals every shame and secret. See The Staff of the Lidless Orb.
• Hec’tumel, Pale Serpent, Death Is Its Eyes — despair and undeath; raised the first sorcerers. See Hec’tumel Codex.
• Hlad, the Devourer, the Eternal Maw — hunger and ruin; a howling vortex that wants to consume reality. See The Hungering Maw of Hlad.
• L'bin'bozia, Flesh-Candle, the Wax Skull — mutation and confinement; finds dreamers and turns their flesh against them.
• Y'aaw'kara, the Howling Wind, the Flayer of Flesh — hunger and cruelty; the angry word on the winter wind. The Howling Curse is his work.

• Bendis root, burned, drives off lesser corruption; Marshedge keeps it burning constantly. The fiercer Things shrug it off.
• Bronze is bane; Object of Orichalcum is sharper still.
• An elder tree, a deeply etched ring of runes, a sealed barrow, a perpetual holy flame, or the bones of a pure soul properly carved — any of these can hold corruption back. None hold it forever.

• A local unwittingly offers sacrifice to a corrupted spirit and gains power; the spirit asks for more
• A vexed PC consults a Black Menhir in the Great Wood and pays for the vision
• Crinwin have begun worshipping at a corrupted site and are turning in turn
• An antiquarian is secretly a thrall and seeks to unleash a more powerful servant
• A spot in the fields around Stonetop festers like an infected boil — a discarded artifact, left to rot in the soil