The Lord in the Pit. Created by Graham Robert Scott, adapted from “Huge Tree Roots at Angkor Wat” by Glenn3095 via Flickr (in Public Domain).

Introduction

Lord Blot is a sentient sphere of annihilation.

It maintains a low profile in a remote area of a larger kingdom, where it enjoys both limited anonymity and territorial independence. Local rulers know it exists, sometimes referring to it as the Lord in the Pit or the Floating Tyrant, but they also know that they have no way to destroy it. Since Blot seems to have no territorial ambitions beyond protecting its lair and a small region around it, local authorities simply ensure that all roads and traffic avoid Lord Blot’s tiny realm. They also do their best to keep its existence quiet. Records say little about the area, and any reports from the area tend to be destroyed. Maps of the larger kingdom or realm show just forested hills here, with no indications that anything interesting is to be found there.

Those few sages, scholars, government officials, and others who know that Blot exists generally avoid meeting it, as any such encounter is deeply unsettling — and often dangerous.

That said, Lord Blot is eons-old. It knows things about the wars at the dawn of the cosmos. It knows lore about demons, devils, angels, and more. It knows about old spells, ancient magical items, and more. And it quietly collects information on the status of these old, magical things and beings, making it a great resource for particular kinds of information.

And so, from time to time, people in-the-know realize that they need information from Lord Blot.

At which point, they often start looking for someone else to make the trip, unwilling to meet Blot in person themselves. 

It’s easy enough to understand their reluctance, to understand why they might be more inclined to send some adventurers like the PCs than to go themselves. For Lord Blot demands knowledge in exchange for any service or favor it provides (including letting visitors leave its abode alive).

Knowledge doesn’t sound like much of a sacrifice.

But Lord Blot only trusts knowledge that it digests. 

A book, or a scroll, or a living intelligent being must be consumed by the sphere before it will yield anything it knows.

Origins of the Lord in the Pit

Lord Blot didn’t start out intelligent. Blot began as a sliver of oblivion wielded as a weapon in the cosmological wars at the dawn of time. In mindless service to the demonic Lords of Mass, it devoured armies, angels, devils. But as it did so, it retained imprints of some of their knowledge — not everything they knew but everything they had thought in the past day or so — within the magical field around itself that sustained its form. Over eons, that collection of imprints began to self-organize and eventually became self-aware.

Declaring itself independent from its masters and proclaiming itself a Lord in its own right, the self-named Lord Blot went its own way, seeking the destruction of its former enemies as well as of its former masters — and most of all, destruction of the talisman once created to control it: the periapt of the void.

By studying engineering, Lord Blot became skilled at carving out support from under floors and walls, making almost instantaneous traps. By studying the psionic arts, it has developed its mental powers for communication, offense, and defense.

Over many years, it carved itself out a small, independent fiefdom where it now lurks and plots against its distant and immortal enemies–enemies who have often forgotten Lord Blot exists or who have assumed it has been destroyed. Lord Blot is very patient.

At the heart of Blot’s tiny domain is an old ruined temple, once a battlefield in a long-forgotten war. There, the sphere spends most of its time deep in thought, apparently dormant, deep within a large pit in the center of the room: 100 feet down to a water line and another 30 feet to the bottom, 10 feet in diameter. It “awakens” for visitors or to pursue its patient, careful agendas.

The Lord in the Pit is often served by other NPCs — priests, wizards, and the like — who are offering their services, and periodic sacrifices of “knowledge” in forms that Lord Blot can digest, in exchange for access to what Lord Blot knows. Who those servants are and what their motivations might be are left to the GM. One thing they have in common, though, is that they have all accepted Lord Blot’s sacrifice conditions, in some fashion, to get what they want. Hence, they are rarely, if ever, good-aligned.

Next page: Adjusting Behavior by Party Level