Rain pattered down in sheets over the scorched skeleton of a once majestic building. Walls of thick, blackened masonry stand tall and abandoned, with gaping wounds revealing where stained glass windows once caught the morning sun. The roof has collapsed and most of its remnants are long gone. Only large, immovable remnants of the crumbling masonry remain in the rubble piles scattered throughout the ruin.
All that remains inside this ruin are rocks and chunks of wood either too worn out and ruined to be of use or too heavy to carry away. There are signs that this place has been used in the past for shelter, but it has since completely collapsed, and most of the residents of the vagabond camp seemed to give it wide berth. Two sets of ruined stairs in the temple's south wall lead to a once proud pulpit. At the back of the pulpit, an enormous stone lid, several hundred pounds in weight, has been pulled off a set of stairs leading down into darkness.
The former consul of Oppara, Magistros Sebastus Hustavan, was here, currently being menaced by a pack of wild dogs. Hustavan is well over 6 feet tall, shockingly thin, and quite old. His head is balding and fringed by frizzled gray hair. His chin and cheeks are covered in several weeks' worth of beard growth, the gray hairs standing out against his pale, leathery skin. He wears long white robes, muddy, torn, and ragged, and wears what looks to be a blue sash tied around his waist as a belt. The dogs were mangy, dirty things. When the heroes arrived, Hustavan stood on the pulpit. He was wielding a long piece of wet, rotting wood and was just barely keeping the dogs at bay. Once Aranthor entered the temple ruins, the dogs abandoned Hustavan to his perch and attacked. Sullen and depressed, Hustavan moped and complained a great deal. He fleed for safety, crying for the heroes to help him.
Once the heroes killed the dogs, Hustavan dropped to his knees and began sobbing. Hustavan is a broken shell of his once proud, arrogant self. He told the heroes that Fel Bustrani's Zyphus-blessed plan to uncover the ancient Zyphus Stone and turn all of Oppara's citizens into slobbering, horrid zombies failed. In a twist of irony, Hrol, Mrunk, Seoni and Wrack struck down Bustrani not long after he betrayed and murdered the Pathfinder who helped him in the acquisition of the Zyphus Stone in the first place. All of this came to pass inside the House of the Immortal Son, Oppara's most famous opera house and a frequent gathering spot of Oppara's wealthiest citizens. Pathfinders in Oppara are now held in even higher regard than before - especially by the upper class citizens - as many of them either had relatives that survived the incident at the House of the Immortal Son or actually survived it themselves.
Bustrani's ragtag band of cultists did not fare so well. Most of them were either killed when Hrol, Mrunk, Seoni and Wrack foiled their plans or were captured and quickly put to death by the Opparan constabulary. A few dozen managed to escape, however, and skulked back to their hideout beneath a burned-out church of Sarenrae in the rotting, tumbledown camp on the south bank of the Mighty Porthmos River known as the Grandbridge Vagabond Camp. There Bustrani's lot fumed and argued about how they might seek revenge on the meddlesome Pathfinders, or how they might steal the Zyphus Stone back from the Lodge and use it to finally fulfill the will of their deity of accidents, graveyards, and tragedy.
Unfortunately for the cultists, Zyphus sent one of his servants, a ragged dead thing with skin like blood and eyes like fire called Baillaset, to deal with the cult. Baillaset appeared in the Zyphus hideout in a nimbus of blood-red smoke and declared the cultists damned for all time if they didn't fulfill one final order: to choke the hideout with dozens of traps to capture and kill all but one cultist. The final cultist would replace Fel Bustrani, rebuild the Opparan cult, and again attempt the downfall of the city by Zyphus' will. The cultists didn't wait to ask questions - they began to build.
The newest addition to the ranks of the Zyphus cultists was a fallen consul of the empire named Magistros Sevastus Hustavan. Hustavan fell so far out of favor of the empire in the aftermath of the cult's assault on the Immortal Son (and his rescue by Hrol, Mrunk, Seoni and Wrack), that he eventually enlisted in the remnants of the Zyphus cult's faithful just to survive. When Baillaset arrived and set the cultists loose on one another, Hustavan turned to the Pathfinders for help. Because Hustavan hasn't entered the hideout for a week, he doesn't know the current state of affairs. He knows only that the cultists were building traps and killing one another when he fled, and that no one has come to the surface since. The fallen consul wants to accompany the heroes down into the hideout as a guide and refused to take no for an answer. Hustavan only knows the layout of the hideout - he doesn't know anything about the traps or current whereabouts of the denizens below.
The hideout was built beneath a burnt ruin of a temple of Sarenrae. The cult expanded the catacombs beneath the temple into a home and training ground for the faithful. The first level below ground is nothing more than an abandoned catacomb. A secret door there leads down to the testing areas and living quarters on the second level, while tunnels in the second level lead further down to the worship areas on the third level.
The catacombs and living areas are cold and damp, and the walls, floors, and ceilings are all carved from the bedrock, though the living areas have doors, chipped plaster and masonry for walls, and torch sconces at regular intervals. The ceilings are 10 feet high throughout the complex.
Hustavan is meek, broken, and depressed, and he latches on Aranthor, promising great riches for him should he survive his journey through the hideout. During combat, Hustavan moves to somewhere safe and periodically calls out things like "A well-timed blow, m'lord! Not as well timed as my downfall, but good enough!" or "Ooh, sorry about that trap there! I should've known that Croaker would build something like that! Sorry m'lord!" or "Please don't let these hellspawn kill me! I was important once! I was somebody! HELP!"
The heroes had interest in Hustavan. Mrunk, Seoni and Wrack convinced him that his years of service to Taldor served only evil purposes. Hustavan was initially indifferent to the idea that he did evil for Taldor and needed convincing before he accepted the idea.
At the bottom of the stairs that lead down from the surface is a small room. Two female statues stand in the middle of the room; their arms were broken off and are missing, and their facial features were long ago scraped away.
A small amount of light reaches this place from above, casting the entire room in shadowy illumination. Three tunnels lead away from here - a wide tunnel to the north and two smaller passages to the west and east. The tunnels are pitch black.
An arrow trap was set in front of the statues. Aranthor triggered the trap.
The crypts are all relatively intact. Dozens and dozens of delicately wrapped skeletons are stacked in the alcoves throughout. The crypts are devoid of any life.
The cultists left behind a surprise - a zombie who was once the guardian of the cult's baptismal font. The zombie stood in the northeast hallway of the crypt. Once it heard the heroes, it moved down the 10-foot hallway toward the entryway, but stopped at a pit. The heroes spotted the zombie, and it wandered north and came at the heroes from another angle. It attacked Aranthor and Mrunk and mindlessly tried to bite them. It fought until destroyed.
There was also a tripped swinging axe trap in the crypts. The corpse of a human male dressed in rags hangs from an enormous axe attached to a mechanism in the ceiling. Wrack revealed that he's been dead for at least a week. At his feet lies a bloody club. There was additionally a tripped rock fall trap. A small pile of rocky rubble lay here, all of which collapsed from the ceiling above. Two sets of pale, cold feet stuck out from the debris, and a coagulated rivulet of blood oozes forth from beneath it. When the heroes dug the bodies out, it took several minutes to move the debris enough to uncover the corpses. Seoni and Wrack found a scroll of lesser restoration and a ring of climbing on one of the bodies buried under the rock fall. The pit was a tripped spiked pit trap. The pit is 10 feet deep and lined with etched and crumbling metal spikes. A single body lays at the bottom, melted into an unrecognizable mess.
A secret door was located in the south wall near the stairs that lead back up to the surface. This door is a moving stone wall. The secret door leads to a stairwell.
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