📐 Infrastructure

The Drowned Chapel

Scene template · the chapel is a worked example, not a real location

Using this template

Duplicate this file, rename it, and replace everything. Set the marker to 🌊 Fluid. The Drowned Chapel and its choir are demo filler — they are not canon and not in the campaign. Do not carry them into a real page; template filler has escaped into live pages before.

At a Glance

Where: The tidal flats east of Ondu, past the wracked jetty
When: Reachable only at low tide; the sea returns in ~2 hours
Who: The scene's NPC (if pursued), one drowned choir
Stakes: A first clue — and a way to lose the party to the tide
Leads to: The next scene · the confrontation

Read aloud The jetty gives way to flats the colour of a bruise, and there — where no chart marks a building — a chapel stands to its shoulders in the mud, its bell-mouth open to the grey. The water has been here recently. The water intends to come back.

Arrival

The approach is the danger before anything inside is. The flats are walkable but sucking; a failed DC 12 Strength (Athletics) check by anyone in heavy armor costs them a turn of movement and a splash of noise. Anyone who studies the tideline (passive Perception 13) notices the wrack sits high on the chapel walls — this place floods completely.

What Happens

Three beats, in whatever order the party earns them:

The choir. Voices carry from inside — not quite singing, not quite drowning.
The ledger. A brass-clasped book on the altar, swollen with seawater but legible.
The clock. The tide. Track it visibly; let them feel it rise.

Clue — the ledger

Names, paired. Each pairing struck through but one. The surviving name is the scene's NPC. This is the first hard link between the disappearances and the House.

Behind the screen

The chapel is not consecrated to any Great Spirit the party knows — it predates the Pact. The choir are not ghosts; they are the terms of the bargain, given voice. If the party reads the ledger aloud, add one name to the choir: their own campaign is now on the list. Don't tell them. Let it pay off in Act III.

If they linger past the tide, this becomes a chase, not a fight — see below.

If It Comes to Blows

The choir will not attack unprovoked. If disturbed — or if the tide traps the party — run the drowned chorister as a swarm-adjacent threat that the rising water empowers.

Drowned Chorister

Medium undead, formerly bound

Armor Class13 Hit Points22 Speed20 ft, swim 40 ft CR1

Str10

Dex14

Con15

Int6

Wis12

Cha13

Rising Voice. While standing in water, the chorister has advantage on attacks and its lament forces a DC 12 Wisdom save or the target is frightened until the end of its next turn.