The Lost Gallery

A chamber embedded in solid rock hides treasure and petrified captives. After the Gate was sealed and as factions split and conflicts rose, the Stone-Herder responsible for the seventh level of the Tomb, who has no name, turned away from it all. It took the things from the level it found most interesting into one of the galleries, and sealed off that gallery, commanding the stone to carry it away.

Even through the stone separating the Lost Gallery from its master’s former charge, the anger, grief, and the tremors of fighting still reach the Herder responsible, and it cannot sleep easily. So, being unable to rest while the conflict continues nor able to end or alleviate it, the Stone-Herder occasionally find those looking for it (or not looking for it) while wandering the halls.

It has an appreciation for fine art, particularly metalwork. Unlike the others of its kind, its tail is long and sinuous, with a clublike bulge on the end which it can nonetheless flick around. It has the power to petrify and de-petrify the living, though it rarely uses it. It can collapse passages quickly (as a single combat action, it can startle the keystone of a typical dungeon archway so that the entire structure collapses), and un-collapse them, simply commanding the stone to meld back together into its proper place, with about ten minutes of effort for a small collapse. It is more likely to use this to put barriers between itself and people it no longer wishes to interact with at the moment than to use it to actively try to kill someone, but if an annoyance happens to be hurt by a collapse, that’s no problem for it.

It has a tendency, sometimes, to rearrange the dungeon map. Even though it does not care for its duties or maintaining the Tomb for purpose, it sometimes finds the act of rearrangement soothing, and perhaps a new arrangement will give it a while with less conflict. In general, it can move open spaces but it cannot create them, and the surface is too far away for it to bring open space from there down here. This movement is subtle enough that statues and the like on firm bases in the moved space can be moved with it without harm. Moving a 10′ cube of open space 10′ takes about ten minutes, but it rarely moves anything one cube at a time. Rotating a 40′ hallway 90 degrees, for instance, can be done in about eight moves, but rather than taking it apart and reassembling it more likely the entire hallway would simply rotate at a rate a little bit greater than 1 degree per minute. The stone under it would ooze in the proper direction, the stone in front of it would pull open and step aside, and the stone behind would assume its new position.

Neither the Cyclops nor the Arcanist are on favorable terms with the Herder. The Cyclops is a peer of the Herder, though they report to different gods, who is affronted that the Herder has abandoned its charges. The Herder assisted in the Arcanist’s capture, and the Arcanist holds some secret of the Herder’s which allow him to extort it for aid even as a statue. Dealing with the Herder is not a high priority for the Cyclops, nor even something the Cyclops is empowered to do, and the Herder cannot move directly against, nor directly ask agents to move against, the Arcanist.

The Herder’s treasure, should the Gallery be found (through magical divination and passage spells, for instance, or perhaps that it might bargain with) includes the metal diadems and symbols of office that several high nobles of past ages were buried with, as well as the spellbook which allowed the archmage Vanderakh to impersonate king Calben all those decades ago.