Location Seed: Kingkiller Cave.

Kingkiller Cave – Google Docs

Kingkiller Cave

The lack of an apostrophe and ‘s’ there is rather important, in fact.  The ‘official’ name of the place is Judges Cave; it’s a place in Connecticut that once sheltered a couple of judges who had been part of the group that sentenced Charles I of England to death.  As one might imagine, post-Restoration England was far too hot for them, and even the colonies weren’t exactly safe. But they eventually got away, died in exile, and never were hanged, drawn, and quartered.  So, merely a mildly interesting local legend, right?

Wrong. Kingkiller Cave is called that by those in the know for a fairly simple reason: as near as anybody can tell, any crowned monarch who ever enters the cave will die instantly.  No excuses, no defenses, no saving throw; this is the magic bullet’s magic bullet — if you are a legitimately crowned monarch who formally rules over a parcel of territory.  Researchers think that the effect will still work if the monarch’s title is disputed; but simply proclaiming somebody “the King of Rhode Island” or whatever won’t work.  It’s an open question if somebody who was, say, the current king of a kingdom of the Society for Creative Anachronism would be affected: nobody’s checked because the Illuminati don’t perform ritual human sacrifices, for the same reason why they don’t gargle with mercury.

Kingkiller Cave is thus a very interesting place — and one that is mostly useless, unless you absolutely need to have a crowned monarch killed.  Thanks to the Weirder World being the way it is, that scenario is not entirely zero-probability, but the right circumstances have yet to come up.  The Illuminati still keep the site prepped, just in case they need to lure an Undead lich-queen or something there on short notice, and they do have Kingkiller Cave wired with various supernatural-based sensors.  Which is why the team is going in. A recent storm blew out some fuses, and the repair team that went to replace them just missed its first check-in. The Illuminati always sends in a strike team right away, when that happens; statistically, it pays off in the long run.

Still, probably nothing.  Have fun! Connecticut has some decent beaches.