The Temple in the Valley of the Wombat People

The initial purpose of the Temple wasn't even a temple. At first, there was a demon that kidnapped babies, as demons are wont to do. This demon took over, corrupted, a wombat warren. At first, the idea was cramped spaces, having the PCs crawl through dark, narrow tunnels while continually being mocked by the demon. It was a journey through the underworld, from the normal to the supernatural.

The largest issue with the idea is this: I am writing this for a single mission, to be part of a collection of small hooks. It isn't designed or written in a way that furthers OSR play (exploration, faction play, etc).
Then, Grottröj, an OSR convention in Sweden, went digital because of COVID-19. I figured I'd run something and it seemed like a good choice. It was, after all, already written?

There's very little "adventuring" in Grottröj's play, focusing more on the Mythic Underworld and exploration. It didn't quite fit the bill.

I didn't want to give the warren up, though. When rewriting the dungeon, the warren connected to a buried temple. The demon took a less prominent space in it and the wombats themselves became more like Stone Age people. They now had tools and crude weapons.
It still didn't work, for me. The second iteration was a more pronounced Temple, with an incidental warren on the temple grounds. The story had already changed once and now did so again. The wombats used the temple grounds, surrounded by high walls, to farm the earth. That's not very dungeon-like, so the idea I had was that the wombats found the temple and took up religion based on the illustrations and paintings found inside the temple. The temple itself was a prison, think Magneto's prison in the X-Men movies and you're not far off, for the demon. The demon now had a way to influence the real world, through the wombat people. I'm introducing corruption, as both a moral and a visual, theme. Not only is the temple falling apart, but an innocent animal is corrupted (becoming more human-like, I wonder what that says about my view on humanity?). I had an idea of fragile stone floors and crumbling walls. With the demon being a less physical presence in the upper level, still mocking the players, but at times collapsing the floor under them and at other times caressing them, physically, softly.

The temple and its religion were too vague, and so I threw together a basic religion: the Sun erases sin, keeps shadow away, and keeps the forces of evil weak. The god imprisoned the demon in its temple, where the constant glow of the midday sun keeps it weak. But with time, gods disappear and their magic grows weak.
The third iteration had much clearer faction play. The wombats now use the temple and the underground halls for their own reasons. In the Sunrise Hall, beneath the temple building, they grow their crops in the soft glow of a magical sun. They stay away from the Midday Hall, where a harsh midday sun shines down on a golden cage, and they've not breached the doors to the Twilight Hall yet. (There is also a Midnight Hall, where the heretical texts and the tongues that spoke them are kept, but that is locked behind powerful magic and secret passages.) The demon is now its own faction, spreading Decay Spores that infect creatures (much like Ophiocordyceps unilateralis, the zombie-ant fungus) to do its bidding. Where do these creatures come from? That answer is still missing, at this stage. Another faction, the Ant People, have breached into the underground part of the temple too, and are exploring it as well.

I still kind of like this iteration; there is some promise here, but I need to rework it to a larger location. I'm still working on a very small scale; I want to make it explorable in a single session. I think that limit, self-imposed as it is, ruined my effort.
In the last iteration (fourth, if you're keeping track) I removed the demon (in hindsight a mistake) and made the Sun Religion take on a larger role. The underground farms are no more. Instead, there's a huge fruit tree in the Sunrise Hall, where the wombats perform weird rituals that fire in various ways. I remove the god, in its place is a Sun Construct, sitting on a throne where the prison once was; in its chest a miniature sun.
This is what I ran for a small group at Grottröj. The pitch, unfortunate as it is, was basically this: an anthropologist lived with the Wombat People for many years and has now returned to civilization. His essays and lectures are popular and everyone who's someone wants Wombat People things. The anthropologist himself wants the religious texts that he knows are in the temple (he was never allowed inside).
In the next post, I'll detail what the group did. I will also give you a rundown of what mistakes I made, and what issues there are with the fourth iteration.