Written by: James S.
A Rakshasa is a cunning and malevolent fiendish creature found in various tabletop role-playing games, including Dungeons & Dragons and Pathfinder. Prepare for a thrilling encounter with this sinister adversary using the "Necropolis Entrance - Neon Deity" Czepeku battlemap, and consider the following key elements:
- Once a century, a neon-lit gambling palace materialises in the desert.
- A makeshift city of travellers and merchants springs to life around it.
- The owner, a Rakshasa, claims and eats indebted souls.
- The palace appears nightly. In the sunlight, its dusty ruin glowers like a hangover.
- Naturally, games are rigged. People lose money, but the Rakshasa always lends more.
- A single genuine, priceless treasure entices people to gamble.
- After thirty days and thirty nights, the palace disappears again, along with its debtors.
Every hundred years, a golden city blossoms into existence around a ruined temple in the heart of the desert. Nindamarra, a city of pleasures and vices, where sweet honey pours from the mouths of gilded statues and wine bathes their feet, where fortunes are made, and secret dreams come true. When astronomers cry that the time is nigh, travellers and merchants camp around its ancient stones, waiting for the palace to appear.
As the stars align and the crescent moon sails into view, a colossus appears over the temple’s smashed stones—a hundred-limbed effigy with neon-bright skin of frosted glass—the symbol of Nindamarra, holding in its many hands all of the temptations that the palace offers. Its silken voice booms across the sands to announce its arrival. Its arms twist and wave hypnotically, beckoning people towards it. Beams from its eyes arc through dust plumes kicked up by the oncoming crowds.
Gleaming arcades and galleries flutter into view, coalescing from the air. Twisting stairs, towers, and balconies climb the sky. Shimmering quetzals sing from trees dripping with plump, glistening pears. An earthly paradise.
But it is all an illusion, intended to enrapture, to ensnare the senses. Only one thing is real—the creature who weaves the magic.
He has many names. To some, he is known as Anazaglu, the Golden King. To others, he is Lugankallugu, the Lord of Illusions. And to an unfortunate few, he is Lugalmazi, the Devourer (though simply being on first-name terms with a Rakshasa is unfortunate enough, so describing it thus is, at best, a little coy. I’m sure you understand).
He walks serenely through the palace, gliding amongst the crowds, draped in the most brightly-coloured and sumptuous silks, adorned with gold and jewels enough to purchase a small country. Cat-like, frog-like, his amber eyes glitter, and his throat balloons as he laughs his rasping, unctuous laugh. His serrated teeth clack together unnervingly as he talks.
This year, he announces, Nindamarra offers one person a prize beyond prizes: a diamond of such size and purity, such raw and delicious brilliance that its value cannot be estimated. He reveals an uncut, scintillating rock the size of a cow.
The game he proposes is as follows:
- All gambling in Nindamarra awards solid gold nuggets.
- Gamblers must win Anazaglu’s body weight in gold to claim the diamond.
- But they must win all the gold in a single night before the illusion is dispelled.
- The game lasts for thirty nights.
The palace is staffed by dozens of lithe, bronze-armoured security guards and sly croupiers who run the gambling. Games at Nindamarra include:
- Girzana- a betting game where two feather-adorned gladiators armed with razor-sharp blades perch atop a balancing bar. They must make a single move simultaneously in an attempt to deliver the killing blow while evading that of their opponent. Games are fast and bloody.
- Ushummara- a bid-and-burn game akin to poker in which players bid for coloured smoke tokens, which they then burn in an attempt to trump their opponents. They combine plumes of thick, coloured smoke in different ways to accrue points.
- Narashu- a snake race where venomous serpents slither up a golden pole towards an unsuspecting bird.
Nindamarra is his dominion; every aspect of the place bends to his whims. He is old enough to know that control breeds boredom, however, and genuine surprises delight him. Needless to say, this means the games are not particularly fair, and many careless gamblers fall into immense debt.
Until the end of the month, the Rakshasa will lend coin without limit to any who think they can win enough pure gold to claim the prize. His generosity is legendary. But so is his appetite. Anazaglu eats endlessly from an immense banquet table in the grand hall of the palace, sucking soft meat from lamb bones and mashing plums into a sweet, sticky mess. He grows larger every night until he becomes massive, corpulent, toadish.
Everything in this place is a powerful magical illusion: the money, the food, the bright lights, the people, even the building itself. And though it seems real to the touch, natural light pierces through it, so torches and lanterns are banned. All light in Nindamarra is magical.
The one thing it cannot ban, however, is the sun. When morning rays illuminate the palace's spires, they dissolve in the light; they fizzle into the air along with anything taken from the palace. Gold nuggets turn to dusty pebbles, luscious fruits to dry earthen clods. Hunger and regret wrack the desert-dwellers. But only until sunset, when Nindamarra appears anew, and the revelry resumes with riotous enthusiasm.
The Rakshasa’s plan is simple. He does not want to keep the diamond, so he will probably let someone win it towards the end, someone who has managed to impress, delight, or surprise him. What Lugalmazi, the Devourer, really wants is to claim the souls of all those indebted to him, and to eat them, which he will do at the end of the thirty nights with joyous abandon.
When the Rakshasa has fed, Nindamarra will fade once more, and for the next hundred years, stories will spread. Only those stories, the desert, and the ruined temple remain. The great effigy returns to its dormancy. Its body lies on the ground, its shattered face half-buried in the dry, cracked earth.
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