The Temple is set beneath the town of Darceath Moor, to the North of the Olde Stone Church and Loesmouth .

Name: The Temple of Dagon

Mancles story relationship:  Plot area near the end.  Clues from the Olde Stone Church lead to Darceath Moor and the Temple hidden underneath.  At the end, the party will have found clues to send them searching the Manacles reef for the source of all of this nastiness.

Setting: Underground temple that riddles the hillside beneath Darceath Moor and has an exit on the cliffs by the ocean... Carvings near an inaccessible section of the beach are the entrance to the underground Temple of Dagon. The main entrance would be via the sewers under Loesmouth, a deslate and shunned village to the North of Darceath Moor. These sewers are rumored throughout the region to have been built upon the ruins of an old heathen(?) temple.  Those brave enough to have entered there tell of giant rats and the usual foulness you'd expect in sewers, but nothing out of the ordinary. 

• Level 1 would be a random set of  sewer pasageways.  Giant rats-uncommon, skeletons-rare.  One exit down to a lower level.

• Level 2 is an "abandoned" temple area.  Giant rates-common, skeletons-uncommon, Ghouls-rare.  Some other minor nasties. The Ghouls should have some sort of encounter based on the party's experiences, or lack thereof, in the Old Stone Church.

• Level 3 is the first proper level of the Temple of Dagon.  Storage rooms, an altar, living quarters for  guards, acolytes and priests, and a small library of occult books.

• Level 4 is the deepest level of the "human" portion on the Temple.  It provides private areas for the High Priest and a chamber for access to the lower levels owned by the deep ones themselves.

• Level 5 is a temple complex maintained by the Deep Ones priests. See the notes on a separate page.

• Level 6 is a set of caverns that open to the sea - the "strange sea-side carvings".  Also, there is a dark underground pool used as a breeding/training ground for shogoths.  Much dark and scary stuff.

Interaction with PCs (puzzles, NPCs, etc.):  

• Old Man Silas and his brother, Enoch 

• Ka'nach'Tur

Goal of area:  The goal here is to present the party with the target of their search for the source of the evil activities on the rise in the area.  Also, as they delve deeper into the Temple complex and discover the connections with the Deep Ones they are drawn into a deeper evil whose plot lines point to the next "area" - the Manacles themselves.

• Who are these cultists behind the murders and kidnappings? Originally, the Temple was dug out and cleaned up by a handful of occultists investigating the rumors of an abandoned area below the town's sewers.  They find libraries and old altars that inspire them to investigate further.  Then, as they begin to experiment with the knowledge they've found, they attract the attention of the Deep Ones.
       This all turns out to be a trap for the cult set up by the Deep Ones in order to lure someone into freeing the Spawn of Cthulhu trapped within the Manacles.  The human cultists think they're gaining power in order to take possession on the area and the Deep Ones are using them to find a method to free the Spawn

• Why are they now active in the area?

• What do they want?  The cultists are A) looking for information on the Manacles and what they contain.  B) They need sacrifices for their newly-found Sacrifice Biding magic and the required offerings for their Deep Ones masters.

• Where is obivous - the party has just discovered the Temple - but is this the only such temple and are the Deep Ones found at the bottom of it found only in this area?  Also, access to the different areas of the Temple could be restricted by a "logical" maze (see that sub-section in the onlne book The secret art of Adventure Computer Adventures) .  It might even be logical from the cultists point of view, as it would keep the initiates away from the true source of the cults power.  This would also add to the Lovecraftian aura of "wierd angles" and "cyclopean" contstruction.   There's a lot of potential here!

• When?  Not as obvious as the above.  Having a script of events that happen independantly of the PCs would be a matter of having a set of pre-encounter triggers that check the game's current date variables and place/delete/modify the encounter as appropriate.  Hmm....