GM Primer • Pulgari Endgame
GM Primer • Pulgari Endgame
The ancient portal beneath Pulgari predates Bridden Pulgari. Bridden built his estate over the site and attempted to contact Mammon. His ritual ended catastrophically and left the portal open.
Ambithas, a gate archon, still guards that open portal.
The Golden Hand did not create or reopen it. Their plan is to weaken the protections around it until Ambithas can no longer contain it.
The unknown Kerse financier behind Reiver's Right is a senior member of the Golden Hand, a covert Mammonite society operating behind respectable commercial ventures.
Reiver's Right served as both a genuine logging operation and cover for roughly three years of prohibited excavation following its reopening in 4723 AR. Golden Hand engineers traced old subterranean works, ward-lines, buried roots, and planar scars connected to the Pulgari site.
At the same time, a secretive Prophet in their service hired druids to conjure the forest blight that devastated logging camps and attacked the Palakar fey.
This preserves the two causes established by the adventure:
- The blight was deliberately created.
- The excavation damaged Pulgari's ancient containment.
The Golden Hand then joined the two operations together.
The Golden Hand discovered that the conjured blight could be grafted onto damage created by their excavation.
At three major fractures they installed infernal ritual structures that force the blight into ancient roots, groundwater, and ward-lines. These sites are the blight source nodes.
The nodes do not create the ancient portal. They weaken the larger system that helps Ambithas contain it.
Earlier in the adventure, Macridi sent couriers to all three Palakar fey courts. One of those couriers eventually reached defenders associated with Pulgari.
The courier never returned personally, but the party recovers the courier's brass message tube during the later Palakar investigation. Inside is a badly damaged response written in Celestial and Sylvan.
Sorzmig Koob, a fey ally, or another qualified translator identifies its author as Caelivar, a celestial lieutenant serving Ambithas in the outer defenses below Pulgari.
The message identifies an old western maintenance descent and warns allies to find Caelivar before attempting to reach Ambithas.
Caelivar exists so the PCs have a celestial ally appropriate to their scale. Ambithas remains occupied with the ancient portal and should not become a normal quest-giver wandering through the dungeon.
Caelivar is wounded, exhausted, and unable to clear the underground complex alone. He knows the defensive network and can tell the PCs exactly where their actions will matter most.
Caelivar is a campaign-original celestial servant of Ambithas. He has spent decades carrying messages between the gate archon and the fey guardians of the Palakar and maintaining the outer portions of Pulgari's containment.
When the Golden Hand began its final assault, Caelivar led the defense of the subterranean approaches. Infernal forces eventually drove him back to an old ward chamber located between the estate's upper excavations and the deeper Pulgari ruins.
By the time the party reaches him, his task is no longer to defeat the invaders. It is simply to keep one route to Ambithas from collapsing.
"The blight above is no longer merely a creature of the forest. They have rooted it into the wounds they opened below. Three great infections remain. While they endure, every branch we sever grows again."
"Ambithas still holds the Gate. That is why you must not go to him yet. Each wound you close returns a portion of the burden to the old wards. Destroy all three, and I can reopen the path to the Keeper."
Each node contains two interconnected components:
- A living blight-heart grown into the Palakar's roots, water, or fungal systems.
- An infernal anchor installed by the Golden Hand to keep the corruption attached to the damaged ward-line.
Destroying only one component does not permanently kill the node.
If the blight-heart is destroyed while the infernal anchor remains, it begins regenerating. If the anchor is destroyed while the heart survives, the corruption attempts to root itself somewhere nearby.
The party must disable or destroy both components during the same encounter or scene.
Golden Hand excavators broke through an underground spring feeding a massive Palakar root system. The node has transformed the cisterns into a black-water marsh beneath the mansion.
The blight-heart is a swollen mass of roots growing beneath the waterline. The infernal anchor is a gold-and-black-iron spike driven into an ancient stone channel.
This node explains much of the contaminated groundwater encountered earlier in the adventure.
Encounter Style: Hazardous terrain, diseased plant creatures, submerged movement, and a lesser devil or Golden Hand ritualist protecting the anchor.
Effect of Destruction: Black contamination begins draining from the underground spring network. Characters who later return to Macridi may learn that the strange residue in the Sanctitude Saunas has begun disappearing.
This is the clearest evidence of the Big Dig: reinforced galleries, hoists, narrow rail carts, stacks of shoring timber, excavation tools, drainage channels, and concealed supply stores.
The Golden Hand cut directly through an ancient ward-line here.
The blight-heart has colonized the exposed roots and shoring timbers, turning wooden supports into a single diseased organism. The infernal anchor is incorporated into a massive hauling winch engraved with Mammonite contracts.
Encounter Style: Golden Hand soldiers, cult engineers, collapsing tunnels, moving machinery, and blighted wooden constructs.
Effect of Destruction: The unnatural corruption traveling through living timber begins to weaken. This directly connects to the evidence discovered at Best Fit Furnishings and Karland's Sawmill.
The Golden Hand did not build this level. The stonework predates Bridden Pulgari and belongs to the older history of the portal itself.
Here the blight has penetrated deepest into the old containment.
The blight-heart grows around a petrified root mass wrapped through ancient ward-stone. The infernal anchor is a ritual mechanism of gold chains, contract tablets, and hell-forged metal designed to pull the weakened barrier toward Mammon's influence.
Lesser devils have begun appearing here reliably enough that the Golden Hand now treats the chamber as an infernal staging ground.
Encounter Style: The hardest of the three node missions. Combine Golden Hand leadership, minor devils, unstable planar effects, and a dangerous environmental hazard.
Effect of Destruction: The secondary breaches around Pulgari collapse. The pressure against Ambithas drops dramatically, and Caelivar can finally reopen the route toward the ancient portal.
The three node missions should not feel like three identical dungeon rooms. Treat them as separate underground regions, each reflecting a different part of the larger investigation.
- Drowned Roots: water, wildlife, and environmental corruption.
- Gilded Galleries: the conspiracy, prohibited digging, and Golden Hand industry.
- Hollow Below: Hell, Mammon, and the ancient danger beneath Pulgari.
The order can be partly open. Caelivar provides all three locations and allows the party to choose which to attack first.
- Breach Pulgari Estate — Golden Hand occupation.
- Find the western descent — enter the Big Dig.
- Reach Caelivar — learn the real battlefield.
- Destroy Node I — environmental corruption weakens.
- Destroy Node II — Golden Hand excavation collapses.
- Destroy Node III — infernal secondary breaches close.
- Return to Caelivar — path to Ambithas opens.
- Final descent — confront the Golden Hand's remaining leadership near the ancient portal.
The effect should be immediate.
Roots that had turned black begin shedding dead tissue. Infernal heat vanishes from side passages. Gold-colored growths crack and crumble. Lesser planar breaches collapse. Fey defenders who had been forced away from Pulgari begin returning.
Most importantly, Ambithas no longer has to divide its strength among the spreading weaknesses.
Caelivar can finally open the sealed descent to the lowest level of the estate.
Since the camp reopened in 4723 AR, roughly three years ago, the Golden Hand used Reiver's Right as a respectable face for something forbidden. The timber operation paid for the excavation, justified the equipment, concealed the labor, and gave Mammon's servants access to the buried protections surrounding Pulgari.
Their secret Prophet then unleashed the forest blight against the very fey who had helped Ambithas guard the estate for generations. While the Palakar fought for survival above, Golden Hand excavators cut through the wards below.
They did not open the ancient portal.
Bridden Pulgari had already done that generations ago.
Their plan was more patient: weaken every defense around the gate until Ambithas could no longer hold it.
By the time the heroes descend beneath Pulgari, the gate archon is still at its post, still holding back Hell, but doing so while the containment around it fails piece by piece. The party's task is therefore not to replace Ambithas. It is to fight the war Ambithas cannot leave the portal to fight.
They must cross the occupied estate, reach Caelivar, destroy the three blight nodes spread through the underground complex, break the Golden Hand's machinery, and sever the network that is poisoning the Palakar and opening secondary wounds toward Hell.
With each node destroyed, the forest begins to recover and the burden on Ambithas lessens. When the last node falls, the party gains access to the oldest chambers beneath Pulgari, where Golden Hand leaders and Mammon's lesser servants make their final attempt to keep the ancient defenses from recovering.
If the heroes succeed, they do not close a portal that has defied generations of guardianship.
They restore the balance that allowed Ambithas to contain it.
And for the first time since the Big Dig began, the gate archon has only one gate to guard.