Exploring Snowy Mountain Ruins

What risks and rewards might a group of explorers discover within a ruined monastery city lost for centuries in the snowy mountains?

Rewards: Ancient monk treasures and magic scrolls with dank lore and kung-fu magic.

Risks: Yeti AIDS.

The monks never really died, they just reached a level of zen that lies beyond death.

The altitude and cold are as deadly to the party as anything else. If they don't come prepared to combat altitude sickness and arctic weather conditions, they die.

A massive People's Army has bunkered down in one of the temple complexes and need removal to continue your journey. Watch out for mortars, as they've got the whole mountainside you can approach from zeroed.

>Remains of a old Chinese military instillation lay scattered around the ruins of the monastery city, abandoned it seems since the 1970s or so.

>Did they succumb to the same icy winds and thin air that have been giving your exploratory team so much trouble on your long trek upwards?

>Or, perhaps their disappearance has more to do with sounds of murmured chanting and distant bells coming from the great, sealed temple...

how cold are we talking? year round sub zero temperatures preserves damn near everything. what WOULDN'T they find. there might still be food in the fucking pantry. a body mummified via ice hundreds (thousands?) of years ago. fragile frozen parchments that, if carefully thawed and opened, might unearth lost spells or secrets.

pic related: a cabin in antartica built in 1912.

Rewards: Groundbreaking archaeological and geological data.
Risks: Shoggoths.

I am now imagining these ruins to be haunted by undead, ice-mummy Monks who have learned the secrets of life beyond death and are NOT happy about what they discovered.

Mellified men

Don't forget everyone's favorite natural pit trap. Snow filled crevasses. They've got falls. They've got suffocation, and they're really fucking hard to get out of because you're probably wedged in there.

I had to look this up, and am suitably interested and horrified. I'm not sure what to make of this:

>Mellified men are amongst the more unnerving and unsettling rewards found in the monastery's vault of strange and esoteric treasures.

>A council of conscious, mellified monks wielding terrible magics are the final enemies to be fought inside the temple's innermost sanctum.

>Bits and pieces of mollified men are scattered in reliquaries throughout the city ruins, and may be used as grotesque healing items.

>In the dim blue light of the crevasse the fallen explorer can see more ruins, buried centuries ago when the mountain fell in upon the city.

>As his vision further adjusts to the dark, he thinks he can see vague, shadowed shapes passing through the iced-over arcades below.

>They stop, seeming to stare at him as he hangs there, and he suddenly feels colder and more afraid than he was when he'd first fallen.

...

"You open the door and the sickly sweet scent of honey and stale air surrounds you. Do you proceed?"

That would make for a pretty great way to trigger fear in the players. Every time something terrible and supernatural occurred, they'd catch the sickly sweet scent of honey on the frigid air.

>Rewards: Groundbreaking archaeological and geological data, the Wave Beam.
>Risks: Sheegoths.

...

Thanks Cap

Frostbite

>Throughout the ruins of the monastery city, the explorers discover the frozen remains of older expeditions that came I search of the monks' secrets, only to perish in the icy cold of the mountains. However, these corpsicles don't seem to stay put, and may in fact serve the monks.

The frozen corpses have an unnerving, golden light in their eyes, an ooze of glowing mellific honey falling from their mouths and a symbol drawn in the same glowing, golden honey on their foreheads.

...

...

...

...

...

bump

Don't forget avalanches!

>They leave smeared foot and handprints in the glowing mellific honey wherever they go, animated by its healing magic but not truly living.

>They are what remains of the Chinese army soldiers who had come to investigate the ruins of the monastery city in the 1970s and vanished.

>One by one they began hearing the sound of chanting and bells deep within the sealed temple, and one by one they deserted their posts.

> They are saved from a death trap by an old rough man in a tired mended Chinese uniform.

Yes, exactly!

>The man is the last remaining soldier from the People's Army and has managed to resist the Monks' call through sheer stubbornness.

>He was the one who'd barred the gates, blockaded the streets and took pot-shots at the party to try and scare them off the mountain.

>Now that they've come this far, it's clear that he can't keep them from killing themselves but does offer advice and words of dire warning.

>His commanders in the People's Army had thought, once, that they were prepared for anything they might find in the monastery city.

>They came with their trucks and their tanks up the mountain, ready and willing to plunder any treasures and secrets the monks had hoarded.

>Like the party, they considered themselves enlightened men of a modern age who held no stock in the occult nonsense of their ancestors.

>What they found there in that ruined city proved them terribly, terribly wrong.

>the monks at this temple long ago ascended to a level of enlightenment that put them beyond physical discomfort and even death
>the temple fires haven't been lit in centuries, and gradually the temple was frozen and buried beneath snow and ice
>even inside it's cold enough to kill within hours unless precautions are taken
>the monks, however, wander still in simple robes, delving ever deeper into strange magics

This guy

A lot of angry zombie elephants that formerly belonged to Hannibal