I wrote previously about using puzzles and about playground rooms. This is another playground room for fantasy heroes to explore.

The Catacombs

While exploring some spooky catacombs, the heroes sometimes hear the beautiful voice of a young woman singing pieces of a sad folk song. The song echoes thru the corridors, impossible to pinpoint. Nearing the source makes it stop abruptly.

Eventually, the heroes find the voice comes from a fat, green caterpillar several inches long. The caterpillar speaks with a young woman’s voice and explains it is a corpse worm, which crawls into the ear of a cadaver and eats the brain. As a result, it gains the memories and voice of the last cadaver it dined on.

In this case, that is young Metira Borofolk, a girl who died of fever not long ago. It can tell the heroes about Metira’s life as a servant in a lord’s house and about her friends and family, who were very sad when she took ill. The corpse worm is not under the impression that it is Metira, however. But it shares Metira’s love of singing and may sing whenever it believes itself safe.

The worm is not harmful to living folk and could even be of use at a later time, if the heroes need to know something a corpse could tell them. If treated kindly and fed a brain, it will tell the heroes anything the deceased knew in that person’s voice. However, in a short time (before the end of the adventure or between adventures, depending on on whether you want the heroes to be able to use the corpse worm on the villain), the worm will spin a cocoon and turn into a huge (non-speaking) moth.

Variants

The corpse worm could, of course, have eaten any NPC’s brain. So it could already have the memories of some key NPC the heroes would like information from. Unlike the NPC, the corpse worm will have its own regard for the heroes depending on how they treat it, so a villainous NPC’s brain might result in the worm being perfectly friendly to the heroes and telling all about the deceased villain’s plans.