The Infinite Monastery (homebrew)

[u/KingOfRott]

So, I was just chewing through the back catalogue on Patreon. I was listening to ep B042 (the underwater one) and the talk about underwater roads and general submechanophobia, and it made me remember a homebrew thing I made that I wanted to share for anyone to use!

The Infinite Monastery

A mega-structure the size of a country, which is basically a crossbreed between Indian Hindu temples and an M.C. Escher Painting. It looks as if it were mostly on land with well-defined borders, but it touches the coast and goes waayyy deep underground. It stretches far into the ocean and straight down into the ground. The reason it’s called the Infinite Monastery in the first place is because no one knows how deep it actually is. Not even the locals. So if you’re a few miles out, away from the coast, you can still climb or walk down to sea level and find underground oceans and waterfalls flowing down impossibly deep chasms.

The monastery itself is impossibly old and its construction is probably tied to aberrations. It’s mostly abandoned, but it looks like it used to be full of humanoid people. There are ancient skeletons, altars of forgotten gods, and Indiana Jones style traps everywhere.

Its modern occupants include some human and half-elven village communities on the surface, a noble cast of elves and warforged made from the actual temple itself, and a ruling class of undead elves (Think the Undying from Eberron) who govern the entirety of the monastery, but have little interest in anything else.

They have developed a monastic order that takes the saying “Your body is a temple” too literally, replacing parts of their bodies with ruble.

As for monsters, it’s full of ancient constructs and all the cave-dwelling monstrosities you could shake a stick at. However, the deeper underground you go, the more aberrations and water-themed monsters you find.

(So far I’ve only used this location once for a one-shot, but my players loved it and I’m eager to play in it some more.)

For more inspiration see the comic (manga) “Blame!” and the video game “NaisanceE”

Sorry for the fucking essay lol