Team Adventure - Turning Turtle

We rejoin the party having just finished the Tomb of the Holy Avenger.  Lydia the somewhat aged paladin (now in her forties as opposed to eighteen) got word that something called the Chrysalis was awakening. This was clearly serious enough to arouse her intense alarm and she at once declared her intention to set off south to the city where her order of paladins was based.  It was called Vergez and was a coastal city on the shores of the sub-tropical Southern Ocean.

It took them a week to get there and they arrived on October 3rd.  Although back home, it might have been autumn, here the climate was a pleasant Mediterranean one, with blue skies, sunshine and warm waters.

Lydia headed straight for the headquarters of her order, suggesting that Alagon accompany her as this was a matter that concerned paladins and all warriors of virtue.  On the way, Alagon had the strange experience of hearing a voice inside his head, urging him to attack and destroy anything evil. He realised that it was his sword, the Holy Avenger, talking to him telepathically. The sword identified itself as Whitefyre and told Alagon how much it was looking forward to smiting evil.

At the paladins’ HQ, Lydia vouched for Alagon as a fellow holy warrior, and they managed to get the others admitted. The senior paladin was surprised by Lydia’s appearance; he realised that she had encountered some serious undead and promised that if she survived the forthcoming mission, he would see if they could find some rejuvenating magic for her. This came as good news for Alagon; he had been forming a close relationship with Lydia but now had to come to terms with the fact that she was old enough to be his mother.

The senior paladin explained that nearly a thousand years ago, a powerful magic user had embarked on a process that would eventually lead to his becoming immortal and acquiring the powers of a devil. This process involved a chrysalis which would complete his transformation over a period of nine hundred years, a period that was now almost up. The party’s mission, if they chose to accept it, was to find the chrysalis, believed to be on an island in the Southern Ocean and destroy it. Lydia, of course, accepted immediately and Alagon was keen to join her quest. The rest of the party decided to go along for the ride.

Before they left, the senior paladin told them that the order had attempted a divination to find out more about the location of the chrysalis. It had not been particularly successful, but he gave them the short verse that had resulted from the spell. It read:

Ancient guardian lies in wait
Mongst the weeds, hard by the gate
Snapping mouth and vap’rous breath
Bring a searing, grisly death
Mighty Shassar is its name
Known by men as Sailor’s Bane

They made their way down to the docks to hire a boat and crew. On the way, they bumped into Ferros, who they had not seen since entering the city. He explained that he had not been allowed to bring his zombies and skeletons into Vergez and had eventually decided to leave them outside. Once he was in the city, he was contacted by a representative of the church of Foik, who informed him that he had been selected to set up a new temple nearby. He would therefore be leaving the party forthwith and would not be accompanying the party on their latest mission.

(DG note – this arrangement had to be made because Ferros’ player had chosen not to rejoin the campaign after the exams break. Along with Garry the Gnome’s player, they now had other commitments; we wished them well and thought it best not to NPC their characters, since they might want to come back at some point).

The party managed to find a ship for hire and a crew to go with it. After some argument about whether to pay a crew or steer it themselves (quickly abandoned when nobody had the right skills to do so), they set off on the journey into the Southern Ocean.

A week later, the lookout in the crow’s nest sighted land on the horizon; not a very large piece of land but land nonetheless. As they got closer, it became clear that it was a rocky island and waves were breaking some way from its shores. Alurax sent Eristar off to see what she could discover and send the results back to him. He reported that the island was surrounded by a coral reef, apart from one narrow entrance. There was also a small area of beach on one part of the island which suggested the party’s landing point.

Elysia was keen to use her Fly spells to ferry the party across the reef-enclosed lagoon but Alurax took the initiative and ordered the captain to sail through the gap in the coral and head for the beach. The ship slipped into the lagoon and as it made its way towards the beach, Alurax’s Trident of Warning started to pulse an alert. The fighter concentrated on what it was sending and soon realised that a huge dragon turtle was heading straight for the ship.

Awesome Mini or what?

Alurax fired arrows at the incoming target and Elysia blasted it with Magic Missiles but it seemed that this did nothing to deter the attack; the dragon turtle hit the ship and nearly knocked it over in the water. Gullhar and Alagon were thrown into the water and the dragon turtle turned and began another run. As the paladin and the elf scrambled to grab the ropes that had been flung to them (and the sailors who had shared their fate), the ship was hit again and this time it completely tipped over. Alagon and Gullhar were flung across the ship by the ropes and landed near one of the longboats that had become detached. They swam as fast as they could to get out of the water.

Elysia and Alurax clambered up onto the side of the ship as the dragon turtle headed towards them for a third attack. This time, it reared up its head and blasted Elysia and the sailors with scalding steam; because of the damage that it had already taken, this was not as bad as it could have been.  The sailors leapt into the water, as did Elysia. Alurax ran along the hull of the ship and leapt onto the dragon turtle’s head, trying to stab at it with his trident. He missed. Meanwhile, Elysia used a Polymorph Self spell to turn into a smaller dragon turtle so that she could communicate with the monster.  She pleaded with it to allow them to pass because they were trying to destroy an ancient and evil magic user. The dragon turtle declared that it was loyal to Maldred, who had given it the lagoon for its own and refused to aid the party. As it prepared to blast Elysia in the water, Alurax stabbed at it again with his trident and this time, he was successful. The dragon turtle sank down into the waters of the lagoon, taking the doughty fighter with it as he struggled to pull his weapon out.

Regular readers will recall that during the adventure in the Tomb of the Holy Avenger, the party had managed to gain several handy new powers, one of which was water breathing. This stood Alurax in excellent stead as he managed to pull his trident out and return to the surface.

Meanwhile, Gullhar and Alagon had managed to use the longboat to rescue Elysia and Lydia and as many of the sailors as they could fit in. They rowed the longboat to the beach and returned to pick up the rest of the crew. As they rowed in, they spotted, about forty feet beneath the clear waters of the lagoon, the wreck of an older ship that had clearly not been so lucky when it came to the attentions of the dragon turtle. Whilst the crew, Elysia, Gullhar and Lydia dried out on the beach, Alagon and Alurax decided to go down and see if they could bring up whatever it was that the ship had been carrying. They had a profitable time, with some precious metal ingots, jewellery, gems and magic items recovered.

Further up the beach, there was a cave entrance in the cliff. The party decided to investigate. Beyond the cave was a passage into the interior of the island. At the far end of the corridor, Alagon found a heavy iron door but beside that, there was an eerie obelisk made of a sickly green stone with sinister runes carved into it. He sensed it was evil but as soon as he approached, he found his strength leaching away and he could barely stand up in his armour. The party dragged him back and he found himself recovering, albeit slowly.

Nobody wanted to pass the obelisk after seeing what it had done to the paladin and Gullhar even tried to lasso it and pull it over, hoping that by doing this he could drag it down the beach and into the sea. However, it was firmly fixed to the floor and refused to budge, despite Gullhar giving it his best shot.
Lydia then suggested that if the loss of strength was all that happened if they approached the obelisk, perhaps they should just crawl past it and out of its influence on the far side. This is exactly what the party did, with Alurax going first, followed by the others. They found themselves in a large room faced with glassy black stone.

Probably the wrong Obsidian Chamber picture.

 A deep trench ran across the middle of the chamber, bridged by a slab of rock. Alagon approached the bridge and glanced down into the trench to find that there were two bodies at the bottom; one a human and the other a gnome. Knowing better than to move across the bridge without checking it out, Alagon and Gullhar decided to test it. Gullhar rolled a gold coin across the bridge and as it passed the five foot mark, it vanished, reappearing at the bottom of the chasm. They then threw another coin across the bridge, and this time it hit the far side with no problem.

Gullhar, in a flash of inspiration deduced that the bridge was an illusion beyond five feet and that this was clearly what had happened to the two adventurers whose bodies had been seen. Elysia flew the party across and they regrouped on the far side.

Unfortunately for them, the far side was already occupied by a pack of hungry shadows, eighteen in total who came swooping out of the darkness, eager for battle. Alagon and Lydia stepped forward and tried to use their ability as paladins to turn the undead. Alagon succeeded in turning six of them, but Lydia was less successful. Elysia used her Wand of Illumination’s Sunburst facility to reduce four more of the shadows to virtual impotence; they fled back into the darkness.

"Ooh look lads, they've got no cleric!"

The other eight attacked, but stiff resistance by the party and another Sunburst managed to wipe them out and the party took stock; only Lydia had been hit and had some of her strength drained but she soon started to recover again. Whilst Alurax climbed down on a rope to investigate (and loot) the bodies in the chasm, the rest of the party waited at the head of a long passageway lined with glassy black stone, sloping downwards into the dark.

Once Alurax had finished, he led the way down the passage, choosing to slide all the way down on the glassy stone. The rest of the party were a bit more circumspect and as such found a skeleton in the passage about thirty feet down. They checked it out and found some more magical items and money on it.  Alurax, in the meantime had discovered that at the end of the passage were two large bronze doors, which did not seem to open when he pushed at them. He decided to wait for the rest of the party so that they could try and get the doors open together. What was beyond them?  There was only one way to find out.

An Adventure for Every Monster - Displacer Beast

Frequency Very rare    
No appearing  2-5
AC 4
Move 15”   
HD 6
% in lair 25%
Treasure type D   
No of attacks  2
Damage per attack 2-8/2-8   
Special attacks  Nil
Special defences -2 on opponent’s attack dice
Magic resistance Save as 12th level fighter +2 on die
Intelligence  Semi-
Alignment Neutral
Size  L
THAC0  13
XP value 475 + 8/hp

The party is approached by a man who needs their help urgently. He explains that following a terrible magical accident, a friend of his has been lost in the ever-shifting interdimensional vortex that surrounds the planes of existence. He needs to get her back before she becomes insane and mutated by the powerful energies that crackle across the dimensions. To do this, he needs to create a Displacer Beast King. Just like a Rat King, the Beast King consists of a number of Displacer Beasts joined together at the tail; they then acquire power beyond those of normal Beasts and can rip holes in the fabric of reality when they jump.

If the party can find and capture sufficient Displacer Beasts to make a Beast King, the party’s new friend says that he can join them together. All they have to do then is wait for the Beast King to make its first jump and then enter the vortex.

All is as represented; the party’s first big task is to find and capture a number of Displacer Beasts. That’s not going to be easy, considering they can displace themselves at will.

If the party can complete this stage of the mission successfully, then they will find their new friend more than able to carry out his part. When the appropriate magic is used, the tails of the Beasts will fuse and they will become a Beast King. The first displacement that the Beast King makes will indeed rip a hole in reality, allowing access to the interdimensional vortex.

This is a wild and frightening place where the laws of physics and indeed, reality in general do not work, or work in very different ways. Matter itself can be distorted and warped. The party’s friend will use possessions of the missing woman to try and locate her which should work well enough. What she will be like when she is found is another thing. The DM can decide or roll a d6 to find out.

1. Relatively unaffected; traumatised and with perhaps a phobia or two. Will return to normal once brought back to the Prime Material Plane
2. Temporarily insane due to the things that she has seen; this will last for 1d12 weeks once she returns to the Prime Material Plane, during which time there is a chance, albeit small, that her ravings will reveal important information about dimensional travellers and goings-on in other planes.
3. Permanently insane – as above, but there is no recovery possible (unless it be by wish). The party’s friend will be upset but will still pay the party their fee.
4. Mildly warped; will have randomly decided body part twisted or moulded into a new appendage, or will have acquired an ability similar in character to a mutation.
5. Severely warped; will be different in body shape (but still human in flesh) or may have acquired extra appendages, limbs or heads. Very unlikely in this instance to be sane. 
6. Transformed; has become a different substance, perhaps rock, jelly, slime or similar. What little consciousness there is left will be wholly mad by now. There is a good chance that she will attack the party and her old friend.

The DM should also keep an eye on how long the party stays in the interdimensional vortex; too long and they too will start to exhibit the same symptoms. They may well see things whilst there which will affect their mental stability; the DM can be inventive and use whatever sanity rules exist in his/her campaign.

The boys are back!

Trampier - the master

Very sad to hear of the death - at such a horribly young age - of Dave Trampier. For my money, he was the best artist D&D had; his illustrations summed up how I visualised my dungeons and the one above is for me, THE archetypal dungeon scenario. He was a man who helped to make my memories, and is now a memory himself but what images he's left behind for us to remember him by.

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.