Oaxaptupa

[DM Leverage]

Oaxaptupa, World Beneath the World (Upper Old Shanatar)
- Forgotten Realms : Underdark -

A great colony of stingers (or tlincallis, as they name themselves) has claimed the ruins of the dwarven kingdom of Xothaerin, and its threat grows stronger every day. The stingers have rebuilt the realm in their own hideous image, but one city is not enough. The stingers are now using this place as a staging ground for aggressive expeditions that venture into the neighboring portions of Old Shanatar, in search of easy prey and sites for new stinger colonies.

[DM Leverage]

Oaxaptupa (large town)
- Forgotten Realms : Underdark -

Magical; AL NE; 3,000 gp limit;
Assets: 703,500 gp;
Population: 1,690; Isolated (stinger 94%, salamander 3%, azer 2%, duergar 1%).

Authority Figures: Tluipacal, Lord Diviner of the Nest.

Important Characters: Huitzolputl, War Chief of Oaxaptupa; Poaxala, leader of the Black Pearl raiding party; Ahxalli, Nest Keeper. Tlincalli Diviners. All stinger spellcasters, arcane or divine, are referred to as diviners. These creatures serve as the leaders of a stinger colony.

A little less than 3 miles beneath the Small Teeth in Amn, the hive-city of Oaxaptupa buzzes with activity. When they took over abandoned Xothaerin, the tlincallis discovered that the dwarven structures were too small for their needs and full of unnecessary fripperies such as stairs, so they immediately began to rebuild the structures.

Ease of use is only a secondary consideration in stinger planning. Of primary importance is that the buildings within a community exist in proper relation to one another. Stingers need perfect architectural geometry for their mystical grid systems to maximize divinatory magic. Therefore, entire blocks of buildings were torn down and either moved or reused as building material in other projects.

To accommodate their height in multistory buildings, the stingers simply removed every other floor. In single-story structures, they raised (or sometimes simply removed) the roof. Other necessary modifications included widening doors, turning large, public-use buildings into private dwellings, and converting private dwellings into storage.

The result is a crude shanty-town filled with piles of rubble that were formerly dwarven homes and workshops. Though architecturally insensitive, the stingers easily divined which structures were load-bearing, so despite its ugly appearance, the hive-city is mostly stable. Stingers routinely examine their work with additional divinations to warn them if a building is about to fall.

The tlincallis are a fatalistic folk who place great importance on omens and portents. Because they believe that the hour of their death is preordained, they fight with savagery rarely seen even in the Underdark. Stingers feel that they need only fulfill each day’s destiny, one day at a time. As a result, the city’s leaders spend a great deal of time in divination.

The stingers do not maintain much in the way of a formal defense. The colony is organized into thirty or so discrete “clans,” which outsiders might refer to as gangs or war parties. About half of these clans are raiders and scouts who spend their time scouring the nearby Underdark for foes and prey. The rest are engaged in the ongoing construction of the stinger city, herding and gathering, supervision of prisoners, or support of the city’s Diviner caste. Stingers have little interest in capturing slaves, since they consider teaching and motivating others to do their bidding to be a bothersome step. However, the Diviners make good use of prisoners by sacrificing them on a regular basis.


Brief History

When Amn opened trade with Maztica, the country’s mercenaries and merchants brought back many wonders from the new continent, but they also left a bit of themselves behind. A hivecity of stingers saw the strange visitors from this faraway land, and their leaders, reading the appearance of the Faerûnians as a divinatory sign, began a three-year mass ritual to follow the newcomers back and conquer their lands. The Diviners completed their ritual in 1365 DR and successfully gated more than a thousand stingers into the caves and tunnels beneath Amn. This expeditionary force quickly descended deeper into the Underdark and infested the abandoned dwarf kingdom of Xothaerin, where they established Oaxapupta.

The tlincallis discovered a number of fire elementals and outsiders in the vicinity of Xothaerin and immediately launched a furious assault on the azers, efreeti, and salamanders who lived nearby. The stingers’ blithely murderous fighting tactics soon overwhelmed the other denizens of ruined Xothaerin and drove them away from the old dwarven city. Celebrating their victory with hundreds of sacrifices and great divinations, the stingers began chiseling away at the remnants of the dwarven city, remaking it in their own image.


Important Sites

Oaxaptupa is a dangerous place to visit. Outlanders must survive the scrutiny of Tluipacal’s clerical divinations, and if the Lord Diviner detects the intent to spy on the tlincallis or report their presence to the wrong ears, the visitors are promptly thrown into the pens for future sacrifice. Tluipacal knows that his people cannot make enemies of everyone in Faerûn, but any visitors must justify why they are more valuable to the tlincallis alive than dead.

Plaza of Visions
In the center of this immense stone plaza is a wondrous fountain. This hot spring once powered water wheels that drove machinery all over the city, but the stingers have gutted this wonder of ancient dwarven engineering. Now a brilliant tile mosaic radiates 100 feet in every direction from the hot spring’s spout.

The circle is divided into eleven sections, corresponding to the eleven limbs of a scorpion (two pincers, eight legs, one stinger), the eleven signs of the tlincalli zodiac, the nine major tlincalli gods and two minor ones, each of the gods’ avatar animals, and the six virtues and five vices of tlincalli legend. Each representation interacts with the others in increasingly complex patterns, with successive symbols not merely adding to the overall meaning, but changing all previous meanings. When the spring water bubbles up, the droplets land on different sections of the mosaic. Watching where and when they land is the most public form of divination in the city. Individual stingers spend days staring at the fall of water on the mosaic, drinking only the sulfuric water from the fountain itself and waiting for the interplay of symbols and meanings to surface and tell them their destinies.

Corantllil Workshop
In the former coliseum of Xothaerin, the tlincallis have set up a massive workshop of clerics who make healing potions nearly every day. Corantllil is the stinger deity of unceasing activity. These potions are dispensed to tlincallis for a nominal offering, but noncitizens must pay normal prices for them.

Temple of Huoxopica
Almost one in every five stingers is a cleric, or belongs to clans that support the cleric caste. Stingers require great amounts of healing, divination, and plenty of consecrated priests to carry out the multiple daily sacrifices at the Temple of Huoxopica. Huoxopica and his wife Ixtilli, the two main stinger gods, require constant blood and activity to be sated and entertained.

While any productive stinger activity appeases the gods, only blood spilled at the temple goes straight to their throats. Thus, a steady supply of sacrifices is kept in a nearby pen. Visitors who can adequately defend themselves and do not pose a threat to Oaxaptupta are seldom taken as sacrifices, simply because attacking them outside the temple is a waste of blood. If the sacrifice pool is low, however, visitors would be well advised to leave
Oaxaptupa quickly.