An Adventure for Every Monster - Dinosaurs!

(with thanks to Arthur Conan Doyle)

The party is in a frontier town when they are approached by two rough, tough adventurers (at least a couple of levels higher than them) who explain that they are in the business of running hunting trips for bored nobles. Their previous security detail was seduced away by the lure of a large dungeon complex and they are in need of fresh volunteers to provide the weaponry and combat expertise for a new trip that the adventurers are planning.

Provided that the party is up for this, the two men arrange for them to meet up at the town gates in two days’ time, with their equipment, weapons, armour and supplies. The trip will probably take at least a month, the adventurers advise.

Two days later, the party is met at the town gates by their two new friends and a gaggle of rather uninspiring individuals, clearly wealthy and rather indolent, with their servants and retinues in tow. The nobles in question are diffident and will not speak to the party, seeing them as ruffians and too uncouth to bother with.

The voyage begins rather uneventfully; the town is in an area which, whilst technically wilderness, has been cleared out of any menacing monsters some years ago. However, once the party has covered the safe part of the journey, the terrain becomes rather more difficult; the hills become steeper and the going much tougher. Eventually, the two adventurers announce that they are nearing their destination. The next day should show where they are headed.

And indeed it does. Coming up over a rise in the trail, the party can see ahead a huge plateau rising above the wilderness. It looks big from where they are standing but it must be absolutely massive close up. The distance to the plateau takes at least two days to cross but when the party arrives, they will be scratching their heads about how to get to the top.

The two adventurers have the answer; they have been here before and know a way up the towering cliffs. They explain to the nobles that there will be no chance of carrying up all their equipment, so everything non-essential will be left at the bottom for their return. The nobles will balk at this but the two men know a cave in the cliff face that is easily concealable and suggest that all their equipment is placed in there.

With that out of the way, the ascent can begin. The path is steep and difficult but nothing that an experienced party can’t handle (rolling 1 on a DEX check is probably the only thing that can go wrong here). The climb will take the best part of the day – if the party has started any later than mid-morning, then the sun will set while they are still on the path. The DM can inflict penalties on the group but chances are the servants and retinue will pay the price, rather than the party.

And so the party will reach the top. The interior of the plateau is a tumbled mass of jungle, rocky outcrops, rivers and lakes, the sort of thing that it will be practically impossible to negotiate by horse. The two adventurers now explain that this is the hunting ground – the prey are dinosaurs, which seem to have survived here by some inexplicable chance. The nobles seem very excited by all this and start to unpack their weapons. The party may be quite eager to try their skills out against huge beasts from the dawn of time.

But all is not as it seems. The two adventurers have indeed been to this plateau before – as part of an adventuring party of their own. Whilst there, they stumbled across a temple complex inhabited by a native cult worshipping eldritch gods and were swiftly captured.  One by one, the captives were sacrificed in horrible ways and the experience drove the last two adventurers completely insane. They in fact became members of the cult and pledged their souls to the horrifying entities who were worshipped at the temple. To prove their worth, they suggested that they should return to the outside world and lure more victims to the plateau with the promise of hunting and wealth. This has worked twice already and now the third group of unsuspecting victims has arrived.

The two adventurers will contrive to lead the group closer to the temple but not so obviously that they raise suspicion. The natives will shadow the group to ensure that nobody escapes and then, when they ‘stumble across’ the temple, the trap will be thrown.

The natives will be skilled in bushcraft, armed with bows, arrows, spears, small knives and clubs. They will be wearing next to no armour. They will, in all likelihood have a shaman or priest (who will be the equivalent of an 8th level cleric) as well as tribal champions, probably 5th level fighters.  Their tactics will be to try and incapacitate rather than kill their enemies – this means they will reduce enemy parties to unconsciousness (minus hit points if you’re using that rule) and then bind them securely and use healing magic to bring them to perhaps 1 or 2HP.

The DM is encouraged to map and plot out the temple complex, although it will not be that large – perhaps a couple of levels. Being a lair of eldritch horror, it will have mysterious and eerie carvings all over the place and the holy of holies will cause detrimental effects to characters of strongly good alignments.  It may have guardians along the lines of Lovecraftian entities.

If the party is captured en masse, it may seem as though there is little that can be done to save them. However, it is possible that one of the nobles or one of their servants has managed to escape and could try to free one or more of the party. It is unlikely that they will be able to recover their armour and weapons unless they want to provoke a battle with the entire tribe. A tactical retreat into the jungle and some canny tricks and traps a la McGyver may be the best tactic.

There is of course treasure in the temple, but it will mostly be in the form of gold idols and artefacts which have been fashioned in the image of the eldritch nasties, so making them unsellable to any but the most dedicated scholars and collectors. They can be melted down for bullion value, of course. The property and belongings of previous duped parties were stored in the cave at the foot of the cliffs and later sold for profit by the two adventurer cultists.

If the party ends up due to be sacrificed, the ceremony should tax the sanity of all those present; those who do go insane may well end up as demented servants of the eldritch entities themselves and may join the two adventurer cultists on their next trip back to civilisation in search of more victims.

The City by Stella Gemmell

Yes, Gemmell as in David’s wife. She worked with him on some of his books and completed his Fall of Troy series after his death. This is her first solo novel and by heck, it’s a cracker. This is, for me, the equivalent for fantasy of what Hawk Quest was for historical fiction. I don’t think she put a foot wrong in this one – it’s so well written, inventive and plotted that it was a joy to read.

What’s it about?  Well, it describes the efforts of a motley assortment of characters to bring down an apparently immortal and thoroughly decadent emperor who rules over the eponymous City. Some of them are fighting in an incredibly long war between the City and its enemies, others are inhabitants of the gloriously intricate under-City which is like some kind of mega-dungeon, slowly flooding and causing the city above it to sink. They are tied together by some truly brilliant plotting that is immensely satisfying when you finally realise how it all falls together.

The prose is realistic, particularly the combat scenes, gritty without being nihilistic or bleak in any way, with characters that you really come to like and want to see succeed. One of the main characters, in my mind at least is the City itself. There’s no map but by the end of the book you feel you could probably draw one. It’s a huge, sprawling place, amazingly real, and – as I mentioned before – built on so many levels, it’s a bit like Gormenghast. The world-building is sans pareil, and could give many DMs a lesson in how to make something at the same time familiar and yet strikingly new in its exoticism.

It’s 560 pages long, so as fantasy epics go, it’s rather mid-length. I could have done with more pages, to be honest as at no point did I feel that the pace was flagging. I’d recommend it if you like David Gemmell’s work but I think Stella should be read on her own merits – of which, if this is anything to go by, she has plenty.

An Adventure for Every Monster - Devil, Pit Fiend

Frequency   Rare
No. appearing 1 or 1-3
Armour class  -3
Move  6”/15” 
Hit Dice  13
Percentage in lair 65%     
Treasure type J, R
No. of attacks 2
Damage per attack  5-8/7-12    
Special attack  See below
Special defences  +2 or better weapon to hit
Magic Resistance 65%
Intelligence Exceptional
Alignment Lawful Evil
Size   L (12‘ tall)
THAC0  9
XP value 7900 + 18/hp

The devil’s abilities include:

Pyrotechnics
Produce Flame
Wall of Fire
Detect Magic
Detect Invisible
Polymorph Self
Hold Person
Gate in 1-3 barbed devils (60%) or another pit fiend (40%) (70% chance of success)
Once per day, the pit fiend can deploy a Symbol of Pain.
Shed Fear in a 20’ radius.
Charm Person
Suggestion
Illusion
Infravision
Teleportation (no error)
Know Alignment
Cause Fear
Animate Dead


Many years ago, a high-level party was adventuring when they came up against a particularly tough opponent. The magic user, high in intelligence but not quite as well-endowed in the Wisdom department, used a Polymorph Other on his trusted henchman to turn him into a Pit Fiend. The plan worked but the magic user got separated from his polymorphed henchman and was then killed elsewhere by another opponent.

Left on his own, the henchman struggled to come to terms with what had happened to him and what his fate would now be. He was horrified, particularly as he was a nice chap to begin with, but slowly his predicament and his isolation began to eat away at his sanity and he started to believe that he really was a Pit Fiend and that his human memories were just delusions.

Succumbing to his diabolical urges, he began to go on rampages, slaughtering parties of adventurers sent to finish him off. After each combat, he would remember his former self when looking at the bodies of adventurers and this drove him even more insane. His rampages grew worse, including atrocities more in line with demons than devils.

In time, this came to the attention of Asmodeus himself and he despatched a real Pit Fiend to destroy the impostor and restore the Lawful reputation of devildom.

Into this situation comes the luckless party, hired by a local nobleman to accompany his rather weedy son on his first mission as a member of a holy order of knights (he got the job through generous donations by his father). The party will get a bonus if they finish off the ‘pit fiend’ but the penalty if the son dies will more or less wipe out that bonus.

The party will get wind of the trail of destruction pretty quickly as the ‘pit fiend’ is not subtle about what he does. Only when the party are closing to engage will the real pit fiend show up and he’s not fussy about stuff like collateral damage. In fact, if he can garner some more souls for his diabolical master, he will do so.

An Adventure for Every Monster - Devil, Lemure

Frequency   Common
No. appearing 5-30
Armour class  7
Move  3” 
Hit Dice  3
Percentage in lair 100%     
Treasure type Nil
No. of attacks 1
Damage per attack  1-3    
Special attack  Nil
Special defences  See below
Magic Resistance Standard
Intelligence Semi-
Alignment Lawful Evil
Size   M
THAC0  16
XP value 65 +3/hp

Lemures regenerate at a rate of 1hp per melee round so they are not usually destroyed by the wounds inflicted on them. They can be destroyed permanently only by blessed things (holy water, holy swords, etc). They are not subject to any form of sleep, charm or the like.

The party have been hired to (or perhaps have become involved with the efforts to) destroy a temple which worships a particular devil prince. Rumours abound of human sacrifice, sinister manifestations of diabolical power and an even darker secret at the heart of the temple.

The party should have little trouble defeating the cultists. They are mostly misfits and losers who saw the cult as a path to personal gratification. Their leader, however, is a different matter; a mid-level cleric who will give the party a hard time before ultimately being defeated.

But that’s just the start of this adventure. The dark secret at the heart of the temple is accessed through a hidden door behind the altar, and it is through this that the priest will dart. Down a shaft lies a network of tunnels, at the centre of which is a pool of oozing, festering slime, complete with semi-dissolved faces and slimy hands reaching out of it, etc. This is the pool into which the sacrificial victims’ bodies were dumped and now it has achieved a sort of semi-sentience.

If he is still alive, the priest will lead the party into the lower levels and once they are down there, he will throw a switch that causes all the passageways out to be sealed by sliding stone doors. This is the signal for the slime pool to start disgorging horribly melted humanoid figures – the lemures, who will hunt the party down through the network of tunnels and seek to drag them back to the pool, where – if they are drowned in the slime – they will rise again as lemures themselves.  If the priest has been killed, then there will be a booby trap which will be triggered as the party explore the lower levels.

The lemures are, despite their weak stats, ineluctable in their efforts to capture the party and drown them in the slime. There are ways in which the slithering menace can be defeated but will the party survive long enough to find them?

After a long absence...

Just to advise that I am still alive. However, I need to inform my readers that because of the demands of schoolwork on Junior Grognard, we have had to take the decision to suspend Team Adventure for a couple of months. It's not a decision that we took lightly, since we know that the players really enjoy it and were looking forward to it starting up again after Christmas.

I am still working on the Adventure for Every Monster series, which will be continuing soon. Since I'm not gaming (apart from running the CoC pbem), I've not got that much game-related stuff to blog about. But this blog is not closing down - posting will be intermittent until further notice.

An Adventure for Every Monster - Devil, Ice

Frequency   Uncommon
No. appearing 1 or 1-4
Armour class  -4
Move  11” 
Hit Dice  11
Percentage in lair 60%     
Treasure type Q, R
No. of attacks 4
Damage per attack  1-4/1-4/2-8/3-12    
Special attack  See below
Special defences  +2 or better weapon to hit
Magic Resistance 55%
Intelligence High
Alignment Lawful Evil
Size   L (10 ½ ‘ tall)
THAC0  10
XP value 4400 + 16/hp

The devil’s abilities include:

Fly
Wall of Ice
Detect Magic
Detect Invisible
Polymorph Self
Gate in 2 bone devils (70%) or another ice devil (30%) (60% chance of success)
Cause Ice Storm (once per day)
Charm Person
Suggestion
Illusion
Infravision
Teleportation (no error)
Know Alignment
Cause Fear
Animate Dead

The ice devils have been having a bit of trouble recently.  The city in which the adventure is set has recently come under the domination of a fire cult, whose clerics have been strengthening their power until they are on the verge of being able to wield fireball spells, a feat usually reserved for magic users. One particular cleric, a Priest Prince of the city, has been very effective at eliminating ice devils whenever they appear to try and restore the balance between fire and ice. This is also affecting the balance of power on the lower planes.

Hitherto, the ice devils have been using the manifest-fight-destroy model of operations but one particular ice devil, who is perhaps a little smarter than his fellows, has come up with a cunning plan that has resulted from a careful study of the opposition.

His plan revolves around the character of the Priest Prince, who is an arrogant and short-tempered man, handsome but violent. His shortcomings are tolerated because of his skills at devil slaying and his clerical powers. His looks have made him a hit with the ladies of the city, including one who has become perhaps slightly more obsessed with the Priest Prince than others might be. This is due in no short part to the efforts of the ice devil, who has used his Charm Person and Suggestion powers to convince the lady, through dreams, that she is destined to be the Priest Prince’s one true love. She is not particularly comely and, in reality, has no appeal for the Priest Prince. 

Now the ice devil has prepared his arrow, he merely needs to let it fly. The lady will begin to obsessively stalk the Priest Prince, who will brush her off brusquely, causing her to become even more determined. Eventually, he will lose his temper and either assault her or kill her to be rid of her. This will cause problems for him and the Fire Priests since the lady’s family is a powerful merchant clan who wield great influence in the city. Clashes between the spiritual and secular may well spill over into civil strife as there are many who resent the dominance of the Fire Priests.

The party will walk into this situation with little knowledge of the behind-the-scenes machinations.

There are several options for them to be dragged into this scenario.

1. They are hired by the Priest Prince to ‘deter’ the lady from making any further advances towards him. This can involve diverting her if one of the party has particularly high Charisma, ruining his image in her eyes by staging some sort of sham scandal, that sort of thing.

2. Maybe another party had tried option one before and had no luck. The Priest Prince does not need this sort of distraction at a time when he is due to lead a crusade against heretics in the northern wilds and so wants the lady out of the way – permanently. The party need to have her eliminated in a way that will not lead back to the Priest Prince and which will keep them out of prison as well.

3. The lady herself realises that on her own, she stands little chance of getting anywhere near the Priest Prince, so she approaches the party to see if their superior planning and intelligence can achieve what she has failed to do. The party need to come up with a way of getting the Priest Prince to see the lady’s obvious (to her) virtues and concluding a successful match.

4. The lady’s family are getting more than a little concerned about her infatuation and think that it’s for the best if she forgets about it. This is of course not going to happen whilst the ice devil is working his wicked plan. The party are hired to provide diversions aplenty (both social and personal) for the lady so that she has no chance to pine for her (clearly) unsuitable beau.

5. As with option four, but the family have already tried many different ways to break the lady’s infatuation and nothing has worked. Her father now suspects that something fishy is going on and wants the party to find out what. This will require the DM to devise the means by which the ice devil has managed to influence the lady’s mind. It will be no easy task to find and combat him, as he is a cunning and subtle fellow. 


If the ice devil thinks it has a chance, it may lure the party into the fire temple and somehow contrive for them to desecrate it (albeit unwittingly). This will enable the ice devil to gate in infernal support which will give the party a hard time.

Assuming they survive, the party may well become embroiled in the civil strife that follows any clash between the Fire Priests and the merchants. If the ice devils make a comeback following the weakening of the Fire Priests’ power, the party may well become a target for revenge attacks.

Team Adventure - The Ghosts and Christmas Presents.

Three ghosts down, one to go. The fearless phantom swept into the room and headed for Gullhar, who the party had pushed to the front, figuring that the age attack would affect him the least. Garry the Gnome stepped up to support the elf and Ferros came in from behind to joint the fray.

Ferros and Gullhar’s attacks missed, as did the ghost. Garry weighed in with his magic daggers and scored a hit. The ghost had been badly weakened by Elysia’s Sunburst and succumbed to the gnome’s attack, dissolving into a cloud of ectoplasm.

As the party gathered its forces, and Alurax went to pick up and bring back the ancient Elysia, Alagon’s paladin-sense began to tingle and he felt that there was certainly something worth checking out down the staircase in the middle of the room. Elysia cast Leomund’s Tiny Hut so that she could shelter therein, whilst the rest of the party headed down to see what they could find.

At the bottom of the stairs, Garry and Lydia went left, following the passage through an empty room. Whilst they were doing that, the rest of the party, ignoring Adventurer 101, went right and ended up in a room where there were two large stone heads carved into the north and west walls. As Ferros and Alagon stepped into the room, the northern head animated and told them that they must not, under any circumstances, waken the western head or they would be overwhelmed by doom. The cleric and the paladin crept very carefully out of the room, managing not to make any noise. However, Garry, who had been called back by the party managed to trip over his own feet and fall, clattering to the floor. At this point, the western head woke, opened its mouth and from it poured a sea of squirming, slithering and crawling insects, which headed straight for the luckless gnome. 

He hurled an oil bomb at them, which took out a fair few, but the rest just headed round the fire and continued to advance. He used more oil to lay a fire wall which held them up whilst the rest of the party scurried through the room and down the corridor on the far side.

At the end of the passageway, the party found a room in which an ochre jelly lived. It had been a long time since the jelly had eaten a square meal and so it headed straight for Alagon, who was first into the room. Garry rushed into the room and with a combination of arrows, swords and oil, they managed to drive the jelly back until it was against the far wall. Garry watched as it squeezed itself into small cracks in the wall. He deduced that there must be a secret door there and hammered at it until it began to open.

Beyond it was a narrow passage into another room, in which lay the corpse of a long-dead adventurer. While Ferros started to animate it, Garry noticed that there was a barred window on the far side of the room. Beyond the window was another chamber, in which could be seen two suits of armour, each holding a sword. Garry tried to bend the bars with his hammer, but failed miserably and suggested that perhaps Larsh might want to lend a paw. The polar bear lumbered up and ripped the bars from their fittings.

As the dust settled, Garry clambered through the hole and found that there were in fact four suits of armour, one at each corner of the room. A passageway led off both east and west; the eastern passage emitted a faint blue glow that interested the party. Meanwhile, Garry had decided to try throwing a stone at one of the suits of armour. This was greeted with dismay by the party but they were on the far side of the window and could not interfere.

What do I have to do?  Put a warning notice on it?

As soon as the stone hit the armour, it – and its three fellows – animated and advanced on the hapless gnome. Alagon clambered through to help his fellow party member, but the attackers had soon brought the gnome down, assisted by the fact that the wounds dealt by their swords continue to bleed after they had been inflicted. His increased dexterity following the incident with the iron throne helped Alagon to avoid the deadly swords but Lydia and Gullhar were less fortunate, although they did managed to whittle down the animated armour, with some key bowshots by Alurax to assist them.

Once their opposition had been overcome, the party moved down the passage towards the blue light. They had already discovered that Garry’s wounds could not be healed with magic, and so they left him behind, bandaged and semi-conscious. At the end of the passage, they were confronted with a figure, sitting on a crystal throne, a sword across its knees. It was bathed in a column of blue light.  Whilst they tried to work out how to get the sword without disturbing the light, Alurax edged around the outside of the room, finding that on the far side a gateway had appeared that had not been there when they originally entered the room. Fearing a trap, he returned to the party.

Nobody wanted to be the one to enter the blue light, so they used the zombie that Ferros had just animated. The zombie shambled forward into the light and picked up the sword. As it did so, the blue light flickered and went out. Simultaneously, a deep rumbling sounded from somewhere in the dungeon.  As if that were not bad enough, eight identical swords landed on top of the zombie, causing him to fall to the ground with the original.

Soon, water was pouring into the room, swirling around the knees of the party. Ferros ordered his zombie to throw the swords to him, one by one. As the water rose, the luckless zombie did just as instructed and Ferros passed the swords to Alagon to see if they were the Holy Avenger. The second sword turned out to be the right one and the party began to struggle their way back upstairs to Elysia. The water was rising all the while and once it had got to the chests of the gallant band, they decided to make use of Larsh to carry Garry and lead them to safety.

Making it back to the room where they had left Elysia, they found that the water was coming full force through one of the passages that led off the chamber. Leomund’s Tiny Hut was now a bubble of water-free space into which the party piled hurriedly. The torrent was roaring down the shaft up which they had come, and they realised that it would probably not stop until it had filled the entire dungeon. They only had about an hour or so before the spell failed and with that, they imagined that they would swiftly drown.

It was at this point that somebody remembered that the party had acquired the ability of water breathing during their encounter with the statues that sprayed golden dust, way down at the (now drowned) bottom of the dungeon.  With the urgency suddenly off, the party waited until the dungeon was completely filled with water, then moved the Hut to the influx point and swam through it into the bottom of the lake (you will remember – if I put it into that session’s write-up – that there was a lake behind the hill into which the dungeon was built.)  They managed to struggle ashore and lay there for a while, catching their breaths.

When they had recovered, they walked round the hill to find the old ruined temple, with their horses still waiting for them (and, presumably, Ferros’ zombies and skeletons). They pitched camp for the night and the next morning woke to find that Garry’s hearing had returned. His wounds were also slightly recovered.

Whilst they were getting breakfast ready, Elador returned. He had left Wolf at the town to see if the Council of Elders could do anything for him, and had now popped back to see how the party was getting on. Quite how he knew not to teleport into a flooded dungeon is anyone’s guess but he’s a high-level wizard; he knows a lot of things.  Shocked to find his sister an extremely elderly woman, he hit upon the plan of using Polymorph Other to turn her into an elven version of herself. She would then be a 113-year-old elf, which is the equivalent of a human teenager.

As this was taking place, a strange shimmering globe appeared, floating above the ground. It halted just outside the ruined temple and out stepped a very special visitor. It was the extremely high-level cleric from the Christmas-themed adventure.

This lovely little mini painted by Brian from Lead Legion.

He had come to visit them and bring them a special gift – an egg box. No, not an Xbox – a box with six crystal eggs inside it. He explained that there was one for each of them and that they were in fact crystallised time from another universe outside our own. If the members of the party were ever in a situation where they needed to reverse time, they could crush the egg and that time would be released into our universe, forcing the party back five minutes into the past. The party realised that this was a very effective present, and made a mental note to be frugal with the eggs.

As a special gift to the party, the cleric also invited them to visit his winter world for a day or so, to recuperate from their wounds and recover their strength. He then dropped them back at the ruined temple again. 

As the cleric was leaving, he suddenly remembered that he had a message for Lydia. He told her “the chrysalis is awakening”.  She suddenly appeared very alarmed indeed.  When the party asked her what it was all about, she explained that in her homeland, far to the south, there was a legend that an evil magic user had constructed a chrysalis to give himself immortality in his bid for power. Many had discounted the legend as mere fable but the paladins of which she is a member took it seriously and warned about the awakening. Now that day is close at hand and she needs to travel to her homeland and seek out the chrysalis so that it can be destroyed. Is Team Adventure up for it?  We shall have to wait and see.