Good Guy Cthulhu 3

An Adventure for Every Monster - Devil, Erinyes

Although I'm a big fan of Tramp, I'm not that keen on his illustration of the Erinyes in the Monster Manual so here are some other interpretations which I found whilst out on the net.

Righty-ho, let's get on with the adventure.


Erinyes

Frequency   Uncommon
No. appearing  1-3 or 4-16
Armour class  2
Move    6”/21”
Hit Dice  6+6
Percentage in lair 20%    
Treasure type R
No. of attacks 1
Damage per attack 2-8     
Special attack  See below
Special defences  See below
Magic Resistance 30%
Intelligence Average
Alignment  Lawful Evil
Size   M (6’ tall)
THAC0  13
XP value 875 + 8/hp

Magical dagger, when struck, save v poison or faint for 1-6 rounds
Rope of Entanglement
Cause Fear in all who look at them
Once per turn or melee round
Detect invisible
Locate Object
Invisibility
Polymorph self
Produce Flame
Summon another Erinyes (25% chance of success)

Other powers:

• Charm person
• Suggestion
• Illusion
• Teleportation
• Know alignment
• Cause fear
• Animate dead

The Adventure itself

The party is given the job of hunting down and bringing back alive a fugitive from justice. The precise details can vary depending on either DM choice or a die roll.

Five options; 

1. The fugitive has killed his father in a vicious argument that got out of hand (well, that’s his story). In fact, his father found him forging documents to get his hands on the inheritance and a fight broke out which was rather one-sided as the father was elderly and infirm. However, his siblings will be rather cross about the whole thing since the authorities have refused to permit their father’s will to be read until the killer is brought to justice. Therefore, the siblings have hired their own gang of bounty hunters to bring him back alive and this is where the party comes in.

2. The fugitive is being pursued because of his evil murder of his step-children, who were standing in the way of him inheriting his wife’s fortune. His wife is being slowly poisoned by the fugitive but his choice of method for the infanticide raised suspicions amongst the city watch and he realised that it was time for him to leave town. The city watch’s jurisdiction extended only so far from the walls and so a posse was formed to hunt him down and bring him back for trial.  The party has been hired by relatives of the fugitive’s wife to hunt him down and bring him in.

3. The fugitive had been involved in atrocities committed during a war about five years ago and had been rewarded by his master, a duke who has now been deposed by a palace coup. Keen to start with a clean deck, the new regime has turned on the favourites of the old duke and that includes the fugitive who has now skipped town. As well as the party hunting him down, there are also the relatives of the victims who want the fugitive’s head.

4. The fugitive is a professional con-man, swindler and fraudster whose latest scam has deprived a charitable foundation of its main source of income, led to soup kitchens and shelters being closed down and the suicide of one of the trustees of the foundation. The party will have been hired by an irate member of the foundation who wants to keep the revenge mission quiet as the foundation itself is run by a religious body who, much against their better judgement have forgiven the fugitive (as their doctrine demands)

5. The fugitive is a former member of the Order of Dispater who has angered his master by transgressing the precepts of the order (possibly for personal gain) and is now a marked man. The party will be hired by a member of the Order, but he will keep his identity secret and just use the cover story that he has been cheated of a large amount of money/his brother has been murdered by the fugitive. He wants the head back in one piece if possible and will offer a bonus if that can be done.

The personal stats and capabilities of the fugitive are up to the DM to decide; he can be a match for the party or an easy capture but needs to be played convincingly and with conviction.

It won’t be long before the party realises that they are not the only ones on the fugitive’s trail. The Erinyes will make their presence known through subtle manifestations of their power, since they want to make their victim sweat before bringing him in. Thus, the party will know that the fugitive is being chased but not by whom. 

When the party catches up with him (and in all likelihood they will) then he will throw himself on their mercy and explain (assuming that the presence of the Erinyes is known) that he has somehow angered the infernal powers – all the time portraying himself as an innocent man – then explain that he needs to get to the abandoned temple to find the item that will enable him to escape his doom. 

The fugitive has worked out that if he can present the infernal lord with sufficient souls, he can escape the justice of the Erinyes. However, he has to get the party to the long-abandoned temple of Dispater so that when he sacrifices them, their souls will go straight to the second plane of Hell.  He promises the party full access to the treasure which is there as long as he can have that one magic item. Of course, the temple of Dispater is a full dungeon in itself, complete with lethal traps, crumbling architecture and unknown denizens, any one of which can cause real problems for the party.

Meanwhile, there is another individual on the case – Father Sholta, a cleric whose church is keen to have the Order of Dispater destroyed. He will be pursuing the fugitive himself but believes that the fugitive can lead him to the temple, so will not attack immediately, even if he has the fugitive and the party at him mercy.

However, there are three options for Father Sholta

• He is a low-level cleric who has adopted his quest to prove his worth to his church hierarchy. Competent for his level, he is zealous, intelligent and determined – just not strong enough to take on a flock of Erinyes or the fugitive and his party in combat. He knows this and will use subtlety and cunning rather than outright confrontation. He realises that the party may in all likelihood have been tricked or deceived into helping the fugitive and may use indirect approaches to pull them back from their Faustian deal.
• He is a mid-level cleric, who has a selection of powers and weapons at his disposal but operates alone, due to the distaste evidenced by his church for his methods (he’s a bit of a loose cannon when it comes to combating evil, but the church is happy to accept the results, just not the means). Collateral casualties are all in a day’s work for Father Sholta, who has seen those he befriended and cared about killed by evil cultists in the past. If the party have thrown in their lot with a disciple of Dispater, they deserve all that’s coming to them.
•  He is a high-level cleric, with an arsenal of spiritual and magical weapons at his disposal as well as a collection of acolytes who follow him to learn his methods and gain spiritual credit in the eyes of the church. He has not got where he is today without learning a few tricks but has also acquired a degree of pragmatism, so may be more inclined to cut the party a deal if they realise that they have been stitched up by the fugitive.

As can be seen, this is a very adaptable adventure, which has a variety of possible outcomes. It might almost grow into a mini-campaign as there are off-shoots and side-quests suggested by the characters and situations.

It be September 19th...

...and we all knows what that means, m'hearties. Yes, splice the mainbrace, swash your buckles (or the other way round) and hoist the Jolly Roger. Last one to Port Royal buys the grog!

Good Guy Cthulhu 2

An Adventure for Every Monster - Devil, Bone

Bone Devil

Frequency   Uncommon
No. appearing  1-2 or 2-8
Armour class  -1
Move  15” 
Hit Dice   9
Percentage in lair  55%   
Treasure type Nil
No. of attacks 1
Damage per attack  3-12   
Special attack  See below  
Special defences  See below
Magic Resistance 40%
Intelligence Very
Alignment Lawful Evil
Size  L (9’ tall)
THAC0  12
XP value 2800 + 12/hp

This adventure begins in what appears to be a perfectly unremarkable section of dungeon passageway. However, there is a nasty surprise waiting for the party; a pit trap of sufficient size that most, if not all of the characters are going to be caught in it.

They will be plunged down a shaft sufficiently steep that climbing back up would be difficult but not so deep that they would be incapacitated by the drop. At the bottom, they will find themselves in pitch blackness, not because the door to the pit trap has closed again (it has) but because the pit into which they have been dropped is under the influence of a Continual Darkness spell that has been made permanent.

The pit is merely one section of the Black Maze, a labyrinth of twisting, turning and sometimes dead-end passages, with a number of nasty features like doorways that open onto very deep shafts. Somewhere in the Black Maze there is the switch which will deactivate the Continual Darkness; all the party has to do is find either it or the exit (there is one) by fumbling along in the darkness, going by touch alone. Infravision or ultravision will work in the darkness, which is just as well because in the Black Maze are two Bone Devils, whose job it is to hunt down and despatch anyone who enters. They have infravision, ultravision, and they can also detect invisible.

They also have the powers of
Charm person
Suggestion
Illusion
Teleportation
Know alignment
Cause fear
Animate dead
Fly
Become invisible
Summon another bone devil (40%) – the DM could conceivably use this ability to restock the devils if the party gets lucky against one too quickly – not that a good DM would do such a dishonest thing!

Once a day, each devil can create a wall of ice, so they may well use that to block off sections of the maze to channel the party into a killing zone.

The DM can have a lot of fun with this one; remember that the remains of previous parties who didn’t find the exit in time will litter the labyrinth (which the DM can make as large as they wish). There are lots of opportunities for trips, bumps and nasty accidents – plenty of saves v DEX to be made here.  A good trick which the devils might try is to suspend the skeletons of their victims by wires from the ceiling of the maze so that the rattle of their bones might make the party think that a devil is in the area. Another nasty trick might be a patch of fungus or slime which is harmless in itself but marks the party member who blunders into it with a stain that is visible on the ultraviolet spectrum, meaning they’re even more visible to the Bone Devils.

It should also be remembered that infravision in particular may work well to see sources of heat but it’s much harder to spot things which are the same temperature as their surroundings. Like uneven slabs of stone on the dungeon floor.

Malice by John Gwynne

Another week, another big book (628 pages). Unlike Hawk Quest, this one takes a while to get going and I suppose that there are  readers who would have given up by the time the slow-burning plot really fires up. It’d be their loss because once it does get underway, the iron shackles of the quality writing grip and won’t let go. In tone, it’s similar to both Paul Kearney and Brian Ruckley; it’s also been compared favourably to David Gemmell but (and I know this is going to come as a shock) I’ve never read any Gemmell, so I can’t comment.

Gwynne has taken what appears to be the Dark Ages (always a plus in my book) and set his story there. The map seems to be based, in the North at least, on Europe – with the British Isles expanded slightly and attached to the mainland, similar to the way things were before the end of the last Ice Age. I’ve done something similar when designing a campaign map many moon ago, so I recognised it pretty quickly.

Into this familiar arena are pitched the protagonists; chief amongst these are Corban, a blacksmith’s son and Nathair, a prince with big ideas. Starting at almost opposite ends of the continent, they’re clearly on a collision course as kings, warriors and mysterious wise men are swept up in a frenzy of expectation at the imminent rising of champions of good and evil known as the Bright Star and Black Sun respectively. Add to that tribes of giants who haunt the huge forest at the heart of the continent and we’re set for hundreds of pages of good old-fashioned action – and there’s plenty of it to go round. One of Gwynne’s publicity shots has him sitting with two huge dogs (both of whom appear in the book) and a massive axe, so he clearly knows his stuff when describing the combat scenes. There’s blood in bucketloads and when he says, on the cover of the book ‘even the brave will fall’ he means it. There is, however – as far I could see – no foul language in the book so in this respect, it differs from other ‘gritty’ fantasy novels out there.

The book uses a single point of view per chapter, each headed with that character’s name. There are actually six individual point of view characters and that, to me at least, was perhaps too many. Gwynne could have pruned it down by two without losing any of the story’s strengths and a good case could be made for further pruning. Still, spending time with the characters means that what happens to them during the book does affect the reader more than if they had merely been referred to in the narrative of another. The structure does mean that on occasion, the reader has to wait a considerable number of pages before finding out what happened to a particular character, left dangling on a cliff-hanger.

If you’re prepared to put the effort in, Malice is a good read; I found myself making time to read on once the pace picked up and having been drawn in by Gwynne, I’m looking forward to the second book, Valour, due out in the UK early 2014. 

Good guy Cthulhu