Inspiration for Lies at the Bell Tower

Napoli in Italy is a fantastic place. It is ripe with history, food, and culture. The 2'000 year old history is literally stacked onto itself.

During a work trip to the Observatory of Capodimonte, where I gave a presentation on the challenges of Dark Matter, I did some sightseeing of the city. I was recommended to go to the catacombs of San Gaudioso, the local saint of Naples, and so I did.

What is special about the catacombs of San Gaudioso is the bizzare burial rituals they performed there. To bury the dead, they put them into niches in a sitting position, then perforated the bodies, and drained them completely of their fluids, making mumies in the process.

If you were rich enough, the monks entombed your skeletons into the wall, with intricate paintings depicting what you did in your lifetime. Exploring this dungeon, feeling the dead watching you and seeing the draining niches, gave me a sense of dread and wonder I wanted to catch in an adventure. Especially a soldier with a sword took my interest. I imagined the skeleton walking out of the wall and attacking introducers.

I started drafting the adventure with this catacomb in mind, using the original layout I found on wikipedia, see the following image.

However, playtesting this map with my group revealed some issues, taking the map as is. For example, the small bent before room 1 was extremely difficult to describe and I could not bring the layout across without drawing it myself. Because the players were mapping the dungeon but did not get it right at all, it was a very frustrating situation and I decided to cut some corners (literally). From the original layout we simplified it to the following map.

The story arc with Sister Myrren was added on top of the catacomb. At the time I did not know where I had the idea for a silent town, but it struck me as an interesting theme, which changes the usual dynamics at a table. Only later, after playtesting it with my players, XXX called a "convergence of ideas".

A few years ago, XXX DMed an adventure we started but never finished. The hook of it was that we encountered a village of halflings, where only the kids still spoke, but the adults remained silent. We never came to the bottom of the mystery, but apparently this hook stuck with me unconciously.

The DM revealed to me after our playthrough of Lies at the Bell Tower that there was a voice eating demon causing the missing voices in that previous adventure, a demon we never encountered. Apparently, I thought up a demon who eats voices was a cool idea, and so did the writers of said adventure.

The adventure also needed a saint, because the catacombs in Napoli were dedicated to San Gaudioso. So came the Saint Gewnael into being. I find strong and heroic heroes boring, so I wanted him to be a simple blacksmith who got lucky, banished a demon into a church bell, and saved the day.

But then I needed something which threatened this peace, so came the idea of sister Myrren who was wrongly accused of consorting with the demon and burned for her crimes. She did not take kindly to that and cursed the liars which caused her death. To this day, her soul despises lies, which manifests in the rattling of the same bell the demon is bound to. This, eventually leads to a self-imposed absence of speech in this village.

Putting all things together, this is a stand-alone adventure with two adverseries and a twist in the way players interact with each other, if embraced, makes for a fun change of pace from the usual dungeon grinding. For me as a DM, it was fun to see the players looking through their inventory of how many sheets of paper they had (2 pages). So I brought out two sheets, which they used to communicate. One of the players wrote down elaborate texts in full formality, while another tried to save as much space as possible.

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