Publisher's blurb:
A vile green light flickers in the distance towards the end of the winding stone tunnel where a wall has collapsed. The main door has been barred by the fallen debris but the collapsed wall luckily gives access to a ledge and balcony above an eerie lake of pulsating goo.
After turning a corner you find yourself in a large room that has partially collapsed, the floor is lined by large metal grates and below them a stream of viscous green liquid flows out towards the lake. At the far end of the room there is a still intact crescent basin of sorts, also full of this strange green substance.
Adventure Seed
A recluse scholar has sent you to take a sample of a mysterious, green substance beneath the ruins of an ancient city. You must collect it from the original source—a crescent basin, to which he has given you the coordinates based off old blueprints he has.
According to the scholar, the substance will enable him to create wonderful devices that will grow and harvest food, saving hundreds of thousands of lives. When you go to take the sample however, tendrils of the goop reach out towards you, dripping into quivering blobs...
What’s happening? A vanished civilization once sentenced criminals to death by dissolving them into a magical substance that flowed through infrastructure beneath their city. It used the energy of their souls to power wondrous technologies, making their city a bountiful marvel of the ancient world.
However, as crime dropped due to the horrific consequences, the city's rules became stricter and stricter, twisting around its inhabitants like a serpent. Eventually people were sentenced for small things like forgetting to bow to officials, or missing religious ceremonies.
Sick of living in fear, a mage rose up against the city whose technologies—designed to make lives easier—had begun to cannibalize its people. She spoke out against what was happening, but for it, her and her followers were sentenced to death.
Despite the agony of her fate, in her last moments she managed to merge her consciousness with the slime—bringing it to life, and destroying the machinery it powered. She couldn’t hold onto herself for long, however, for the magic she had wrought had partially recovered the minds of others lost to the substance.
Thus, the mage’s consciousness faded, and the slime took on a horrible sentience of its own.