He kept the crypt beneath the cathedral for forty years, and rang the passing bell over every grave he filled. No one remembers when he stopped being seen at chapel, only that the bell in the crypt never stopped. In a fight he does what he always did — tolls it over the dying — except now every stroke calls one more set of bones up through the floor to answer him.
An audit of Cathedral Level 1's actual ambient encounter table found real content running
up to CR 17 (a jackal-headed guardian, anpu — checked directly: reasonable
hit dice, varied ability scores, nothing like the maxed-out stat-stick pattern that turned out
to be inflating several other areas' apparent ceilings). CR 7 was sitting well below that.
Cairnbell is bumped to Undead 8 / Cleric 11 (CR 19) to clear it with real room, keeping the
same 8:11 ratio between his two classes he already had at the smaller scale. Stat block and
prepared spells below reflect the revision.
Cleric 11 at Wisdom 23 — base slots plus bonus slots per level from Wisdom. Necromancy save DCs carry +2 from his two focus feats. The new 3rd–5th-level access is the direct product of the CR revision's extra cleric levels.
| Level | Prepared |
|---|---|
| 0 | Inflict Minor Wounds ×2, Resistance, Virtue, Light |
| 1 | Cause Fear (DC 18), Doom, Bane, Inflict Light Wounds ×2, Divine Favor |
| 2 | Death Knell (DC 19), Hold Person (DC 17), Silence, Desecrate, Inflict Moderate Wounds |
| 3 | Searing Light, Poison |
| 4 | Divine Power, Freedom of Movement |
| 5 | Slay Living, Symbol of Pain |
Layered on top of the module’s normal combat AI, which still picks his ordinary spells and targets. The fight moves through three phases as he loses hit points. Every toll prefers to raise whatever has just died nearby — a fallen henchman, a familiar, anything that isn’t a PC or already undead — before it settles for an empty patch of crypt floor. He will not raise more than eight skeletons in one fight.
The bell sounds every fourth round. Grave-cold rolls out from him in a ring, and one more skeleton claws up to stand at his side.
Hurt, he starts leaning on the bell rather than just ringing it. The toll comes faster now, hits harder, and the same cold that burns the living mends every skeleton standing near him — himself included.
“Every grave in this house is mine to open.” Every plot in the crypt opens at once, in a burst that reaches twice as far as an ordinary toll. Afterward the bell never really stops — it keeps tolling at Last Rites’ strength every second round for as long as he is still standing.
CR 19, revised upward from the module's own audit of Cathedral Level 1. Undead hit dice run large (d12) and eight of them plus eleven cleric levels land the total well past the crypt's real ceiling. The reinforcement loop and the toll's DCs are unchanged — they were never the weak point, his base stat block relative to the room was.
149 hit points is the module’s own average-hit-dice convention applied to a creature with a modest Constitution score now added on top, scaled up from his original no-Con-score build.
Save DCs follow the spell-like formula: 10 + effect level + Wis +6, plus +1 each from Spell Focus and Greater Spell Focus in Necromancy — the school every one of his toll effects belongs to.
Lawful Evil, not chaotic. He was a monastic officer in life and still keeps to a schedule in death — the toll lands on a fixed cadence, not a wild one. Turn Undead was deliberately left off his sheet: he is undead himself, so a rebuke effect would make more sense than a turn he cannot use, and the toll already does the job of calling his own kind to heel.
95 gates
only on the 12% roll — no day/night condition, since nothing in a crypt notices the
sun. Count is 1-2, so on rare rolls two Priors answer the bell together.cathedrallevel1.git → the
sparky_variables placeable → the first open slot, enc03 = 95,
alongside the level’s existing zombie/skeleton table in enc01.j_ai_onsp_leader first, the same boss shout every named boss in this module
uses, scaled to 1.15× with a permanent ghost-pulse glow marking him out at a glance.TYPE 26 (Boss Drop), BOSS 1 to
bypass the drop-rate roll, LOOPS 2 for two generation passes — the same
convention gc_wrecklight uses.audit.py bc_cairnbell reports OK — hp,
skill ranks, and resref length all inside expected bounds.boss_cr_rebalance_import.erf
carries the updated blueprint.The reinforcement loop deliberately never touches a dead player character — only henchmen, familiars, animal companions, and other dead monsters in reach are eligible to come back as a skeleton. A boss that raises the party’s own fallen ally is a strong beat; one that puts a downed player back on their feet as an enemy is just a bad night at the table, so that path was cut before it could be built.