A2 Secret of the Slavers' Stockade: After-action Review

"Module A2: Secret of the Slavers' Stockade" is part of the A-series of modules, later compiled into the super adventure "A1-4: Scourge of the Slave Lords." The A-series modules were originally a set of tournament modules for GenCon XIII which were later expanded by TSR into full dungeon modules with a little more meat and a little less linearity.

A while back I cajoled a friend of mine to run the A-series for our group so that I could experience them as a player before I run them myself ... our group usually plays 5e (it's the Jungles of Chult group, and we also crawl in this referee-friends homebrew dungeon with a different set of characters), so we don't do the A-series games often, but we did finally do the first half of A2 last night (A1 we did last year some time ...).

In A2, the characters, having dealt with the temple and "undercity slave pits" detailed in "A1: Slave Pits of the Undercity", move on to deal with the slavers' fortress-stockade in the hills above the city of Highport. The first half of the module A2 deals with the fortress itself, while the second half deals with the dungeons beneath (they were originally separate parts of the first round of the tournament at GenCon XIII).

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So last night we tackled the upper stockade, which is basically a fortress full of hobgoblins. The walls are manned by regular posts of guards, there's a full roster of hobgoblins in the barracks (which number we learned about partway into our foray), and it generally seems like a tough nut to crack for players trying to infiltrate their way in. We were given a couple goals: 1) free the slaves (for a pittance per freed slave or a major boon for all of them freed), 2) a bounty for each hobgoblin killed, and 3) a serious bounty for proof that the slaver leadership was dealt with.

Given those goals and looking up at the blank face of the walls ... we were paralyzed by a lack of information. We searched the dry moat around the fortress for secret entrances to no avail (and magically slept some guard dogs along the way), and ultimately decided to climb our way up into the gatehouse with a thief with a rope.

We managed to distract guards on the walls with an illusion of apes attacking the walls (supported by another attack of real apes elsewhere on the walls) and make our way to the nearest door ... and heard voices behind it. Still wanting to be sneaky, we went around to the other side of the gatehouse, and there ambushed a couple of door guards and a "squelcher", a goblin thing that left behind oily black footprints (turns out it was a "boggle"). We killed them under a silence spell; then dithered long enough that more guards showed up and we had to fight them, and then they went to ring a gong.

This almost alerted the entire fortress, except my Elf character knows the hobgoblin tongue, and she called out that it was all a false alarm, and our referee was generous with the reactions that he rolled.

Ultimately, we managed to capture a few hobgoblins, and another character of mine, a thief/magic-user, charmed one of them with a spell. This was our breakthrough; we talked the fellow into taking us to the leadership so that we could talk through a business deal, and he went for it. While he led his one friend along seeking the leaders, the rest of the party followed behind under cover of invisibility 10'.'

Finally, we found ourselves in a courtyard with a fountain; a number of clearly badass NPCs showed up wondering who we were. A brief parlay ensued (actually, they offered to join my main character's chaotic cult with an absurdly high reactions roll ... but the rest of the party wanted to kill, and so they fireballed the bad guys while my guy's tears of failure and loss turned into steam from the fireball in front of him). And with that show of force and murdering of the leadership, we impressed the hobgoblins into surrendering the slaves to us and possibly hiring themselves out as mercenaries for my cult.

Whenever we play again, we'll be tackling the dungeon ...

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Long story short, we didn't actually interact with very much of the module. We interacted with maybe half a dozen of 39 or so keyed locations on the map for the stockade. So from a player side I can't speak to the wealth or dearth of good material ...

What I can say is that I seem to recall reading somewhere (can't find it now) that A2's stockade was a notoriously difficult module to tackle for players, given that it's a fortress full of alert guards, and without much information where to aim a decapitation strike or to seek for treasure. It seemed to live up to that trouble in our play-through--sure, we had a generous DM who allowed our pathetic attempts to call off the alarm work, but if we hadn't done that, we'd have faced the entire garrison of hobgoblins, and even the -2 AC of our pregen ranger might not have saved her skin. Plus, one of my characters has a ring of invisibility, which is about the most useful thing ever for sneaking and all.

On the flipside, though, we dealt with the leadership easily once we got them out into the open where we could fireball them from surprise (hold person knocked another badass NPC out too). So the session was also a reminder that player chutzpah is probably more important a thing than any character's attribute scores ...

But the REAL thing I wanted to comment on was ease of use at the table--because it was clearly NOT easy to use at all, and made it clear to me that I'll have to do a lot of prep work with this module before I actually run it. Our game ran for maybe five hours, but the amount of material we covered could probably have been done in three. Our poor referee had to keep flipping back and forth through the book, digging through the room descriptions for key information.

The map of the stockade is split with two different color-codes. Half is shaded blue, the other half left white; we originally thought that must mean that a space is open to the air or not, but in retrospect I suspect it actually delineates tournament areas from module areas. In A1, at least, the module declares which areas are which; but A2 has no such delineation, letting the referee muddle through on his own (unless I'm blind and it does say it somewhere in the description).

Beyond that, it seemed like several rooms involved his checking the map several times for orientation, and checking the description to make sure he had everything prepped in his head. And still sometimes he had to go back ... e.g. the module is "supposed" to open with the characters climbing a rope up the wall left behind by an escaped slave; but our referee, reading that a rope hung below a guard post, assumed that each guard post must have a rope hanging from it. Only later did he redact it (fortunately without us having climbed any yet), when he finally read the relevant information that it was the escaped slave's rope.

All in all, it was a fun adventure--infiltrating a fortress was definitely a test of our wits! And it seems like the information within was solid, just not well-presented. Perhaps with a little more preparation (or editing), this module could be run smoothly and would provide a great challenge for characters who think they can solve every problem ...

Jungles of Chult Session 3

our intrepid adventurers:
Nugiri (lizardman monk)
Takashi (human magic-user)
Nebin (halfling barbarian)
Qinsela (human druid)
Iedos (tiefling paladin)
Nsi Losi (human fighting-man)
Thrice-Orphaned (goliath fighter)
with River Mist and Flask of Wine (cat-man fighter and thief) as guides
and hired slingers Olol and Benge
and hired porters Adoun and Biango


The last session ended with half the party that had originally set out dead, and the other half plus newcomer Qinsela, safely returned to Port Nyanzaru a little bit richer. Nebin and Takashi immediately blew their gains on booze and possibly hookers, and ended up in debt to merchant princes Jessamine (Nebin, for 100 gold) and Jobal (Takashi, for 400 gold). Takashi was also beaten and robbed while drunk, and had to begin this session without clothes and with a few hit points fewer.

Bumming around town for a couple days, the adventurers were able to gather a few rumors:

Firstly, while carousing, Nebin and Takashi learned of the new tavern-brothel the House of Flowers and Fruit, wherein beautiful men and women with brightly colored skin and floral petals rather than hair work as courtesans. These creatures, who call themselves the Flowers of Puljra, only appeared out of the jungle recently. Nobody has ever seen anything quite like them--they seem dryad-like, and there is a weird tree now growing in the courtyard of the House with weird fruits that almost look like fetal-position-men ...

Secondly, within the last few weeks, giant saltwater crocodiles have begun to attack the supply-ships that shuttle supplies to and from Fort Beluarian to the north east. The commander of the Fort, one Liara Portyr, has publicly offered a bounty of 100 gold for the head of each such crocodile brought to her, and a lesser bounty of 10 gold for any regularly-sized crocodile. Given their encounters with crocodiles last session, the players quickly turned their noses up at this offer--"Needs to be a lot higher bounty for us to do that!"

Thirdly, they heard of a priestess of Torm seeking passage down the Soshenstar River to Camp Vengeance, forward outpost of the Order of the Gauntlet (a militant clerical order bent on eradicating the undead menace in the jungles ... and not doing a very good job of it). When the party approached this Undril Silvertusks, half-orc priestess, they learned that she had a packet of letters and orders for Commander Niles of Camp Vengeance, but that she didn't have any money to pay for an escort--she was looking to add her skills to any expedition headed down the Soshenstar. Hearing this lack of coin, the party quickly and politely said, "Maybe next time, good luck!" and elected to seek money elsewhere.

Lastly, the adventurers were approached by a messenger from merchant-prince Wakanga (cue Black Panther jokes at the table), the only magic-user from among that illustrious number. The messenger indicated that his master would like an audience with the adventurers who traveled up the Tiryki River and returned, as he had a business offer regarding a site further up that river. Seeking him out, the party learned from him that he had heard from another expedition of a tomb dug out in the hills southeast of the swamp with the Sailback Shrine--a tomb of the Yuan-Ti, the serpent men that once filled the jungles of Chult, but which now linger only in deep places and old stories. This tomb, presumably of the Serpent-Kings, Wakanga believes to contain magical artefacts from of old, and he would dearly love to get his hands on such--if the adventurers were willing to delve into its depths and return especially with books of spells or magical manuals, Wakanga would be more than grateful and shower them with thousands of gold.

So the party elected to outfit themselves for a second expedition up the River Tiryki. I reminded them that they could hire NPC mercenaries and porters, just like our regular B/X games, and they hired two slingers and two porters, as well as retaining the services of River Mist and Flask of Wine, Tabaxi jungle-guides. They also bought a second river boat, these hirings and purchasings leaving them broke again ... and set out southeast along the river's length.

And on the first day out from Nyanzaru, rowing south for the Tiryki's estuary, someone spotted dark shapes moving under the water toward their boats. Fearing crocodiles, they began rowing furiously for shore--the boat with Thrice-Orphaned the goliath made the beach, but the second boat was still on the water when snake-like heads emerged from the water, grinning with glinting teeth. Takashi was in the second boat; he cast a sleep spell at the monsters ... and because sleep affects lowest hit point creatures first, he only managed to lay the rest of his boat under an enchanted slumber. The snake-necked water monsters took advantage of their suddenly sleeping prey and grabbed (rolling randomly) Biango the porter and Iedos the paladin into the water and away to be eaten elsewhere at their leisure.

An auspicious start for the expedition! After that, we settled into the routine of overland travel, mostly rolling no encounters for the day. Because River Mist and Flask of Wine are familiar with the Tiryki, I allowed that they don't have to make navigation rolls along its length.

Day 4 -- evening -- A party of four humans approaches the camp and asks to share shelter. They are led by Abiol. He claims that he and his comrades were out hunting, but found no quarry. When he hears the party are making for the tombs of the serpent-men, he tells them that the tombs are cursed. Come morning, Abiol and his company continue northwest for Nyanzaru while the party continues south.

Day 6 -- morning -- The party is ambushed by a large number of lizardmen. But Nugiri parlays; he learns that these are the Hsaathi Tribe, distantly related to the Hsa Hsi lizardmen near Nyanzaru (and with a random roll, Nugiri is of the Hsa Hsi himself). The leader of this group is Isaath, and he says to Nugiri, "Give us your tail, and we will give you ours. What tribute do you offer to pass through our territory?"
"I will cook for you," Nugiri offers, and the lizardmen find it acceptable when Nugiri cooks up two weeks of rations for them as a feast. Then Isaath gives Nugiri a javelin as a token of friendship, and he and his company allow the party to continue unmolested.

Day 7 -- night -- During the watch of Takashi and Nugiri, the pair notice a party of about a dozen humans attempting to sneak up on their camp. They quietly begin to awaken their comrades, starting with Nebin and Thrice-Orphaned (I think?). In the midst of shuffling around, they alert their would-be ambushers that they're awake and a battle ensues as the humans rush into the camp whooping and hollering and brandishing javelins.
It's a stiff fight, but only because the jungle-dwellers roll a couple critical hits. Otherwise they're not well enough armed to carry the battle, and so the last three left standing after a couple rounds surrender. Nebin and Qinsela interrogate the survivors, who are clearly cannibals; one is named Angim, and all of the jungle-men have teeth filed to points, and an inverted blue triangle tattooed on their foreheads. This is the mark of Ras Nsi, whom they serve, Angim explains. "Will you let us go now? You mighty warriors have defeated us, and we will trouble you no more."

But the party wasn't buying it, and they put their attackers to death. Among the bodies they find a scrollcase with a scroll of grease inside, and also a xalam, a kind of lute.

Day 8 -- mid-day -- Sprained ankle rolled on my non-monster encounter chart. Cured with a cure light spell, no trouble after that.

Day 9 -- morning -- River Mist, who is guiding the party through the jungle, reports back that she has spied an ambush of grungs ahead. "They are good to eat if well-cooked," she adds at the end, and Nugiri and Takashi both get a hungry gleam in their eyes.
The party wishes to counter-ambush the frog-men, and so they send Thrice-Orphaned and Nebin ahead as bait while the rest sneak around to flank the grungs. This plan works out perfectly, and six of the seven grung are quickly killed while the last is subdued and tied up. The party never learn his name; what they do get out of him is that he knows where "treasure" is, and he will lead them there, and says, "Then you will release me, because we will be friends, because I have shown you treasure."
"Lead on," the party responds, and so he leads them down the river a ways to the submerged altar and the idol of the hermaphroditic god/dess Olokuna that the party found in the river last expedition.
The grung indicates the altar; the party searches it and finds only a collection of arrow- and spear-heads. Much disappointed, they kill their prisoner; Nugiri hangs the corpse on the erect stone phallus of the idol, much to the disgust of Nsi Losi, who is of Good alignment.

The party then chooses to cross the river at this point--on the other bank they will head due south through the jungle and ultimately end up to the southeast of the Sailback Shrine and swamp, which is where they want to be.
Alas! in crossing the river, they manage to disturb a giant snapping turtle that was resting like a giant rock in the shallows. Fortunately, only the last two of the party disturbed it; unfortunately, that included Nsi Losi, the second character of the player who had already lost Iedos.
Rolling randomly, the turtle attacked Nugiri first, but its snapping jaws closed on air as the lizardman monk nimbly dodged away and fled to the river bank. Next, the turtle won initiative, and as Nsi Losi was the only character nearby, it snapped at him, and Nsi Losi collapsed in the water in a bleeding heap that began to dead-man's float downriver ...

The party shot missile weapons at the turtle, only serving to enrage it so that it continued out of the river toward them on the bank ... until Qinsela remembered that he can cast charm animal. So he cast it, and calmed the turtle and told it to just go back to resting, while the party fled up the bank and continued into the jungle (and while a new character was being rolled up ...)

Day 10 -- evening -- The half-Elf Vilnus arrives in camp, following a group of shiny beetles. (She?) joins the party, as the jungle is not a safe place, and perhaps they can help her in her quest to collect the myriad beetles of the jungle ...

Day 11 -- mid-day -- A roll of "no progress" on my non-monster encounter chart. At this point, I also required the party to roll for navigation to avoid getting lost, as they're moving through actual jungle rather than following the path of the river. They get back on track the following day.

Day 13 -- morning -- Just after the party breaks camp, the jungle is suddenly shaken with sound like of thunder, with the crashing of trees, and with the ground itself tremoring. The party quickly scatters--"It sounds like something's coming that you don't want to be in the way of!" Sure enough, a huge beast with an incredibly long snake-neck, elephantine legs and body, and a long whip-like tail crashes past, heading toward the river. The party wonders at its passing, and then continue on their way.

Day 14 -- mid-day -- River Mist admits that she's lost; fortunately, Nugiri has been paying attention to where they are, and thinks that they're in the general vicinity of the ridgeline with the tomb, their goal. After a fair amount of time exploring, the party is able to discover a worked entrance cut into the northwest face of the ridgeline. A stone slap used to cover the entrance, but a tree growing by the door ultimately cracked the stone and sent it tumbling away sometime in the past, allowing the cave inside to issue foetid airs.

Leaving their two slingers, their porter, and their two boats concealed in a copse of trees, the party entered the Tomb of the Serpent-Kings. (I've scattered a number of dungeons throughout the wilderness of Chult, including Skerples' tutorial dungeon from the Coins and Scrolls blog. I've been curious about it for a long time; Chult with its Yuan-Ti seemed like a perfect place to drop it in. For those of you playing--don't cheat! But even if you do, I'll probably have changed things anyway ...)

Entering the musty tunnel, the party found themselves in a corridor with four branches and one large door at the end. Each of the branches ended in a small chamber with a clay sarcophagus in the shape of a serpent-man in repose. Breaking open the first of these, the goliath Thrice-Orphaned took some damage from breathing in a gas that escaped from within. Otherwise, the party discovered a skeleton of mixed human- and serpent-bones, as well as a gold amulet formed like a serpent twisting back on itself.

Each of the other three chambers held similar sarcophagi; they dealt with the others by standing well back when they broke the seals, allowing the gas to escape without anyone being close enough to breathe it in. All in all, they found six golden amulets within the sarcophagi, as well as a silver snake-ring inside one of them.

Turning their attention to the door, the party found a huge door barred on their side with a heavy bar of stone on iron hooks set into the door. They quickly identified it as a trap, that when the stone was lifted, the hooks would rise, and a hammer would fall from the ceiling to strike anyone at the door in the back ("We need to lure the big monster inside here and set off the trap," one of them immediately quipped). To prevent the hooks rising, they tied them off with ropes set into the floor with iron spikes, and then as a further safety measure they lifted the bar up from either side, rather than from in front of the door. The ropes held and the hammer didn't fall; and opening the doors, the party found a larger room with three more sarcophagi and another chamber offset and containing the horrid statue of some grotesque serpent-man god.

These sarcophagi they approached the same way as before--but lo! they contained restless skeletons rather than poison gas! Skeletons that were quickly quashed by the party's attacks. At this point it was getting late, and one of our members had already fallen asleep briefly at the table, so we decided to wrap it up for the night with their discovery of a once-secret tunnel that was now revealed beneath the grotesque idol by the slow action of water over the ages.

What secrets does the tomb hold within its depths? Find out in approximately three weeks, the next time I'll be able to run Tomb of Annihilation ...

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Remembrance for the Dead
Nsi Losi (human fighting-man 1), Biango (NPC porter), Iedos (tiefling paladin 1), Tehran Atzi (human cleric of Ubtao 1), Sound of Distant Rain (cat-man rogue 1), Chiratidzo (human druid 1)

Jungles of Chult: River Mist and Flask of Wine

Using the "Into the Unknown" ruleset from +Anders H, which is a Basic hack of 5e D&D, for running WotC's Tomb of Annihilation.

Of course, I screwed up the above "boxed text" because the published book of ToA contradicts itself. Jobal is described on the one hand as giving out information including the whereabouts of River Mist and Flask of Wine; while their descriptions (later on) contradict that information flatly. Alas, because Jobal was the first of these characters that the players interacted with (and I was several beers in and blithely trusted the book), I had Jobal citing River Mist and Flask of Wine as employees of his. Fortunately, this "situation" resolved itself somewhat when the players did something else before returning to Jobal for a guide, so by then Jobal and the Tabaxi could have had a "break" and terminated their relationship. And my players elected to hire the twain specifically because Jobal said they were untrustworthy ...

Anyway, I'm writing these NPCs up because the "stock" 5e NPCs are bags of enormous hps but worthless skills (9 hit dice, but +2 to hit, i.e. the same as a 1 hit die first level character? why don't bonuses scale with hit dice??). I'd rather they have a fair chance of dying, but also of being useful--and I'm going to give them to the players as "characters" for them to run for the duration of the expedition, to lessen my load (and if their player characters die, maybe they take over as the guides).

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River Mist
STR 11
INT 7
WIS 12
DEX 16
CON 14
CHA 12

Fighter (Deadeye) 4
hp 26
AC 15 (2 studded leather, 3 dex)
proficiency +2
equipment: studded leather, longbow, handaxe, shortsword, backpack

referee fiat abilities: herbalist -- has a nose for useful/valuable flora in the jungle (subject to further fiat for what precisely that means); track -- double proficiency bonus for tracking creatures through a wilderness

River Mist is a tabaxi female who wears an eyepatch over her right eye. She is evasive about the cause of her missing eye, sometimes alluding to a long-ago accident. River and her brother, Flask of Wine, have been acting as jungle guides for those leaving Port Nyanzaru and its environs for an expedition into the jungle for several years. Mostly, they act as guides for those wishing to hunt or capture large jungle beasts like shield-heads or dagger-backs, but they have also led several expeditions up the River Tiryki all the way to its source in Ataaz Ahiya, the Weeping Gorge.

River (as you might call her for short) is the face of the twain, the one actually willing to converse with strangers and to put herself out there. Nevertheless, she is at home in the wilderness, and is happy to be out among the trees, seeing and smelling new things, and hunting strange new creatures.

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Flask of Wine
STR 10
INT 13
WIS 12
DEX 16
CON 9
CHA 8

Rogue (Thief) 3
hp 8
AC 15 (2 studded leather, 3 dex)
proficiency +2
equipment: studded leather, shortbow, handaxe, machete, backpack, deck of cards

referee fiat abilities: gambling -- double prof for games of chance; trackless step -- double prof for being stealthy in forest

Flask of Wine is a tabaxi male, brother of River Mist. The twain have acted as guides in the jungles of Chult for several years, and feel they have a general grasp of the dangers in the jungles.

Flask (as he is known for short) is a laconic creature who rarely utters more than a sentence at a time, if he speaks. He isn't shy, per se, and is more than glad to join in a bout of drinking and carousing, going mug-for-mug of palm wine with any others--though palm wine doesn't make him any more lugubrious, and perhaps rather quieter--he just doesn't offer much verbally. Perhaps he heard the old Viking advice that those who say nothing, though they know nothing, may seem to be wise; while those who say much, though they know much, will certainly seem foolish.

Flask of Wine had taken a liking to Sound of Distant Rain to play card games with him, gambling small amounts as they traveled. Alas, their games were cut short by the death of Sound in the Sailback Shrine, killed by a mysterious psychic emanation from the creepy monkeys they battled in the catacombs. On return to Nyzanzaru, he took much of the wages paid him by the players and paid with them for a small sacrifice to the Cat Lord for the spirit of dead Sound ...

Jungles of Chult Session 2

Beware the crocodiles of the Tiryki River ...

The crocodiles will eat you

our intrepid heroes:

Sound of Distant Rain (cat-man rogue)

Terahn Atzi (human priest)

Nugiri (lizardman monk)

Takashi Kaga (human magic-user)

Nebin (halfling barbarian)

Chiratidzo (human druid)

with River Mist and Flask of Wine (cat-man guides)

The last session ended just into the expedition up the River Tiryki, after five days of travel following the river, the characters led by River Mist and Flask of Wine and porting a rowboat with them through the jungle (despite the river being right there ...)

Picking up where we left off, on the morning of the sixth day, Chira noticed a strange little creature at the edge of camp as everyone else was breaking things down. The thing looked like a root knotted into a six-inch high humanoid form, with pebbles for eyes and mouth, eagerly watching the party. It was sitting on a mess kit. Chira informed the party as to its presence, and Takashi, miffed as he realized that the thing had taken his mess kit, mage handed the kit up and as it rose through the air, the little creature jumped off and ran away.

Takashi discovered an empty wasp nest left in his bag in the mess kit's place; and Chira informed everyone that the thing was a Chwinga, a kind of nature spirit that is generally harmless though sometimes mischievous.

Continuing on, through the evening, the characters noticed eyes watching them from the river--insectile eyes from rocky carapaces. Asking their guides after these sightings, River Mist informs the party that these must be Aldani, the lobster-men the haunt the waters of Chult. "Don't take what's theirs, and they won't bother you," she says, and then continues the hike.

Day 8 -- morning -- Chiratidzo heads down to the river as camp is breaking to wash his face. As he crouches there, he gives a shout--"There's something in the water!"--as what looks like a waterlogged tree drifts toward him and the rest of the party comes nearer. Then the log surges out of the water with a huge splash, and a giant crocodile's jaws close around Chira, snap his back, and the crocodile beings to drag his body back into the river. The rest of the party threw missile weapons at the crocodile, but to no avail, and the reptile and its prey both disappear under the waters of the lake ...

River Mist and Flask of Wine shrug. "The jungle is dangerous," River Mist says, and then she and Flask continue to lead everyone on.

Day 9 -- diseased bite -- Sound of Distant Rain saves

Day 10 -- morning -- the party comes across Quinsela, or "Quin", another druid, now out hunting alone. He agrees to accompany the party, knowing that the crocodiles along the River Tiryki are deadly things to contend with ...

Later, the party comes across a kind of idol rising out of a series of rocks in a kind of calm area of the river. The idol is an obelisk, vaguely carved, dedicated to Olokuna, other than a maze-like vulva and stone phallus rising from near the water line. An altar of flat stone lies just under the water, covered at the moment with worked stone offerings (stones with carvings of hands, crabs, phalluses, mazes, vulvas, etc.); Sound of Distant Rain deposits a flask of palm wine on the altar for deceased Chiratidzo, further offering a prayer to the Cat Lord for the man's dead soul ...

Day 11 -- physical barrier -- the party runs into a cliff blocking their path; they decide to backtrack for a day rather than attempt to climb or circumvent it

Day 13 -- morning -- Flask of Wine calls Sound of Distant Rain forward to look at something--it's a dead body, half-eaten by a mouth-dragon and now abandoned in the bole of mighty tree-roots.

Day 14 -- morning -- The party enters a small mango grove and Flask of Wine (from scouting ahead) comes back with broken fruit on his shoulders. "There are mad apes ahead," he says and brushes himself off; he is immediately backed up by the sound of screaming apes from behind and another thrown fruit. Nugiri steps out and catches some thrown fruit, and also grins broadly at the two apes he can see.

The apes interpret that as a threat and charge into combat. One runs all the way forward while the other throws rocks from behind; but Sound of Distant Rain hates monkeys, as do the rest of the party, and they quickly kill both apes (though one does knock Nugiri out with its fists before dying from other melee attacks)

River Mist then points out that the swamp containing the Sailback Hill/Shrine is within a day's travel, if anyone were interested in checking it out. Everyone agrees that it sounds interesting, and so the party moves to the east bank of the river (they've been hiking down the west bank), and they find a wide swamp with both stork-men and sail-backs lurking in its midst.

The stork-men with the evil-eyes

Almost immediately, the party spies a group of stork-men between them and the sail-back hill; Sound of Distant Rain and Flask of Wine sneak out to (bag?) them, but Sound decides to talk instead. Fortunately, one of the several stork-men speaks the Common tongue, though hissing like a swan; "These are our swamps! What do you offer to move through them? Give us shiny things!" The party gave a mirror and a disassembled mess-kit, and I rolled an 11 for reactions, so that was enough. "I am Sssra," the lead stork-man declared. "You may travel our swamp. And let me say, the best place to rest is beneath the banyan outside the mouth of the sailback shrine," it adds.

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The party deposited the boat in the banyan "grove" matching Sssra's description; they felt a supernatural sense that it would be "good" to camp there, indeed; then they headed for the dungeon in the open mouth of the sailback hill.

The mouth opened onto a stairway down (the gullet); this led down to a three-way fork; the party went west and found themselves in a stairway that ended in water. Nugiri checked under the water and didn't seem to find anything. The party then glanced down the east way, but ultimately went down the south way into a large chamber with stone pillars rising up that look like they support the stone spines of the hill that make it resemble a sailback. There were pit traps around these pillars; then entering the main chamber, the party saw a ruby, pulsing slowly, in the jaws of a small stone sailback on top of an altar against the south wall; the other walls were carved to resemble up-curving ribs. The altar was dedicated to SUCHOS, a god like an animal-headed Egyption god, but with a dimetrodon head.

A small swarm of mosquito-bats attacked the party here, but were easily dispatched ...

Furthermore, there were four other exits from the room ... the party checked one and found a collapsed corridor; checked another and found a closed door; but looking down the south west corridor, they found a series of natural caverns, of which one held a crevice in its floor filled with glittering coin. The party went for the coin, but were surprised by a "nest" of creepy monkeys with blood-red hands hanging from the stalactites on the ceiling of the chamber. Sound of Distant Rain was foremost in the party seeking the coin in the crevice, and he suddenly keeled over dead, clutching his head; Takashi also fell over, blood pooling from his nose, but not quite dead.

The creepy-monkeys with blood-red hands

While Nugiri saved Takashi and Flask of Wine ran forward to save his friend's (Sound's) body, the party elected (after a first intuition to run), to fight--and because they killed one monkey and injured two others with a variety of spells and attacks, the creepy monkeys fled deeper into the cave after failing a morale check.

"Let's loot this thing and get the hell out of here!" Nebin cried, and then the party quickly grabbed what they could of the coin (including 2 scrolls) and then fled back to the large room with the pulsing ruby-heart. They pitoned the little sailback statue's mouth open and took the ruby, but heard the grinding of stone nevertheless--the mouth of the cave had closed! Placing the ruby back re-opened the closed jaws. The cat-men thought they might be able to run fast enough to grab the gem and then make it out ahead of the jaws, but the party balked in the end and elected to return later.

So deciding, they checked one more room and found a tomb filled with sarcophagi for sailbacks. Opening the most ornate one, Teran forced open the sarcophagus and breathed in a poisonous cloud, but lived ... inside they found a sailback skeleton plated with gold, which they took ...

With a couple thousand coin (from the monkeys) and a gold-plated skeleton in their possession, the party went straight for the river with their rowboat and began to row their way back down the River Tiryki toward Nyanzaru. On the river, flowing downstream, their movement doubled to 10 miles per day (one hex per day).

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Day 16 -- evening -- rare plants, zabou, 4 "doses" of zabou mushrooms which the party collects (Quin as an herbalist can pick them without trouble)

Day 20 -- evening -- croaking of giant frogs ahead--the party decides to accept another roll on the encounter die in the future to avoid the frogs now ...

Day 21 -- morning -- as Teran hauls the boat down into the water of the river, a giant crocodile surges out of the water with a high initiative and snaps Teran up in its huge jaws. Teran is instantly killed and dragged away into the water, leaving the party bereft of a third member ...

Except the hindquarters are Tehran's, not a zebra ....

Day 22 -- back in town! (now everyone can get XPs)

In Nyanzaru, the party went to Jobal, whom they know collects hunting trophies, to sell the gold-plated skeleton to him. Jobal is sad to hear of Chira's death, but is glad to buy the skeleton off of them for 250 gold. During this conversation, Nebin brings up the mosquito-bats they killed (and the bodies they saved) trying to sell them to him too, but Jobal shows his colors, racist against "lesser" folk by "belittling" Nebin. "What, did you step on that? How cute!"

The party then also sold their 4 "doses" of zabou to Jessamine, who has been interested in rare plants.

And in the end, Nebin and Takashi caroused. Nebin ended up in debt to Jessamine 100 gold and in love with Talara, halfling wife of a local halfling merchant, Haban Widewater; and Takashi ended in debt to Jobal for 400 gold, and furthermore beaten and robbed so that he starts the next adventure slightly injured ...


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Remembrance for the Dead
Tehran Atzi (human cleric of Ubtao 1), Sound of Distant Rain (cat-man rogue 1), Chiratidzo (human druid 1)

Encounters in Chult -- Non-Monster Encounters

In Tomb of Annihilation, "While characters are exploring or camping in the wilderness, roll a d20 three times per day of game time, checking for encounters each morning, afternoon, and evening or night. An encounter occurs on a roll of 16 or higher." (Tomb of Annihilation, pg. 193)

On the result of an encounter (16-20), one is then directed to roll percentile dice on the "Wilderness Encounters" table on the next pages (194-5), which includes columns for different terrain types, including Beach, several types of Jungle, Mountains, Rivers, Ruins, Swamp, and Wasteland. These different terrains have different values for the various creatures that haunt Chult and its environs--but almost every entry is a creature of some kind, implying combat (6 out of 90 entries are with non-creatures, while at least half a dozen more are with neutral or friendly NPCs).

There follows a description of each encounter in pages 196-203, of the number of creatures or the nature of the non-creature thing found. These are generally good entries, though I find it irritating how many of them coyly resolve into non-encounters if the players don't provoke the creatures, e.g. of the dinosaurs, the Ankylosaurus, Brontosaurus, Hadrosaurus, Pteranodon, Stegosaurus, and Triceratops all ignore the characters unless attacked, touched, or bothered. And these aren't the only entries like that. Which is to say, if I roll an 18 on my d20 and then a triceratops encounter, inform the players, and then they walk away, nothing happens ... over the course of hundreds of hexes of travel this will become dozens of dice rolls to nothing, sapping my time and my players' interest.

All of which is a longwinded way of saying, these wilderness encounters need sprucing up!

First, because it seems to me that travel should involve a variety of mishaps/encounters not necessarily all of which involve creatures, I'd like to rewrite a table of non-monster wilderness occurrences that I use for wilderness travel in my homebrew game. (other blog-entries may include creating more specific wilderness terrains and resulting encounter tables, and/or nesting the results on the ToA tables with greater random variety)

"I hope we don't run into any mouth dragons out here ..."

So, per the rules, per day that the characters spend in the wilderness, roll three d20s. A result of a 16-20 indicates an encounter; the first and last such rolls indicate an encounter on the "Wilderness Encounters" table from the book, but the second/middle roll indicates a further roll on this table:

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Non-Monster Wilderness Encounters

1-3 -- Bad weather -- half movement for the next 1-6 days

4-5 -- Lamed mule/Sprained ankle -- cannot move forward until the injury is healed, either by magic or by 1-3 days of rest

6-7 -- Spoiled rations -- 1-2 weeks of rations are spoiled by mold, maggots, etc.

8 -- Lost supplies -- the party loses ... 1) 50' rope, 2) 100-600 gp, 3) 1 week of rations,
4) tinderbox, 5) lantern and 1-4 flasks of oil OR 2-12 torches, 6) 50' rope and roll again ((or one useful item at random))

9-10 -- Heatstroke -- a character at random is incapacitated and cannot act until they take a full day of rest

11-12 -- Wrong turn -- not lost per se, but no movement for the day as all "progress" must be retraced back in the proper direction

13 -- Venomous bite -- a character at random must save against poison or using CON, or die; neutralize poison or other such spells would naturally be handy in such a situation

14 -- Diseased bite -- a character at random must save against poison or using CON, or become infected with a debilitating disease; the character loses 1 STR per day of travel, and a week of full rest is required to overcome the disease; during the "crisis" another save v. poison or with CON is required, and failure indicates that 1 point of CON is permanently lost

15-16 -- Good foraging/hunting -- no rations are needed for the day due to plentiful game/forage

17-18 -- Bad water -- 1-3 characters must save against poison or using CON, or contract a debilitating disease per (14)

19-20 -- Physical Barrier -- the party has hiked into a box canyon, cul de sac, bog, mire, etc. etc., and must backtrack; no movement unless a thief with ropes climbs a way through, or a druid demonstrates a path, or some other rule or narrative is invoked by the player characters to pass through

Some Tribes of Chult

I'm about to start running Wizards of the Coasts' Tomb of Annihilation (2017) semi-weekly (my friend will continue running his homebrew dungeon for us every one Saturday, and I'll run ToA every other Saturday), but the Chult that's described seems so paltry (but far and away better than that piece of garbage FRM1: Jungles of Chult (1993) that I just read ...). One city and a couple forts, and that's it for the human inhabitants? That's all we get for a fantasy-Africa-themed setting?

My knowledge of medieval African civilization isn't great, but I'm going to need more than Port Nyanzaru to hold my interest in the setting, so I'm going to introduce a couple tribes who live in the hinterlands around the city right now, with the intent to fill in more as the sandbox picks up/focuses.

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The Ido:

a northern alliance of tribes, the port of Nyanzaru was originally an Ido city--the Ido city, in fact, while the balance of the tribespeople lived in smaller towns in its hinterland, supplying the port with its foodstuffs and tradegoods. When the Omuans came northwest escaping the destruction of their kingdom, they coopted the city for themselves. The Ido still populate the hinterlands in well-regulated towns governed by Oloyas (chiefs), and also make up a large fraction of Nyanzaru's population--and are not entirely happy with being supplanted by the Omuan migration.

Among other things, the Ido are known for their excellent bronze work:

As excellent metalsmiths, they make fine swords, spearheads, shields, armor, etc. that are the envy of other tribes. Ido hunters are proud of their weapons and use them to bring down elephants and triceratopses, etc., the bodies of which are apportioned with the heart and the back right leg to the Oloya, the tusks, the liver, and the back left to the hunter-killer, and the rest of the animal split amongst the tribe/village.

It is the responsibility of the Oloyas to maintain watch on the coasts or on the jungle for pirates or undead or both (as the case may be), and to call up his warriors to deal with any trouble. These warriors include both foot and cavalry (horse- or dinosaur-mounted!).

The Turkana:

nomadic herders that follow their herds of zebu cattle, goats, or the smaller species of hadrasaur (the latter being nomadic only around large bodies of water, and being of tribes who do not consider fish taboo but willingly eat it). The tribes of the Turkana move with their animals, following good grazing, protecting their animals from predators and raiders and meanwhile partaking in raiding against antagonist tribes.

The various Turkana tribes maintain a sophisticated oral history of their mutual raids, antagonisms, and friendships; bloodfeuds are long remembered, but so are friendships, especially the close friendships between so-called "banter brothers". Men who are banter brothers may banter/insult/joke with each other as brothers may, regardless of the tribes each other belongs to ... there are oral epics detailing banter brothers bringing their tribes into friendship after centuries-long hatreds, but also tragedies of banter brothers driven to the bleakest ends of human emotion by the mutual hatreds of their tribes' larger wars.

Turkana tend to have little physical wealth other than their herds; their main possessions are their unique wrist-knives, the stools that they use both as seats and as head-rests, and the staves that they carry as walking- and beating-sticks.

The Turkana are great drinkers of palm-wine, which they must acquire by trade or by raid, being too nomadic to cultivate/brew it; in the stories, banter brothers are often born in the midst of a palm-wine drunk taken by an entire tribe while one of the banter brothers is a foreigner ...

The Ik:

semi-pastoral mountain-dwellers, the Ik grow what they can during the agricultural season (I need to figure out wet/dry seasons for a calendar in this setting ...) and supplement that with hunting and gathering, especially when they can't grow anything. They dwell on high plateaus and mountain crags in villages that are almost entirely woven together with stockades of tight-woven brambles containing family huts with individual courtyards. Such stockaded villages, built on secluded heights, make Ik villages fairly well defended against monstrous or human raiders--the only real terror are the flying pterafolk with whom the Ik compete in the heights, and against whose flying raids the stockades to little good.

The Ik are too disparate and semi-nomadic to have permanent villages or seats of power, but their homeland in the heights means that they have constant access to the caves and dark places under the thrust-up earth where strange things dwell. They have a great respect for serpents and other chthonic spirits, and their alliance of tribes maintains a number of permanent oracles and pythonesses who live within the caves close to the underworld spirits, whom the Ik (and other peoples) may approach when in need of a better understanding of the turnings of the spirit world.

The Ik also have a great respect for blacksmiths--esp. those of the Ido, or the Albino Dwarves--and will seek such folk out for certain spiritual affairs.

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The Turkana and the Ik are modern tribes, not medieval ... like I said, my knowledge is lacking and based on what little I've read. Would that it were more! (and I ultimately intend it to be)

This post is sparser than I intended, but as a mere starter I hope to develop more as the players head out into Chult at large and run into villages, herds, townships, etc., etc.

Hoard of the Dragon Queen (2014, D&D 5e) -- a Review

I've been looking at my copy of "Hoard of the Dragon Queen" (2014) again, and recently ordered "Rise of Tiamat" (also 2014 ... God help me), because my friends and I were all a little disappointed that I let the adventure peter out at Chapter 4 (and there were 8 chapters in "Hoard ..."), and I recently saw some reviews of Pathfinder "adventure paths" at Against the Wicked City (this in particular) that suggested a way to "sandbox" the Pathfinder games--and I was hoping to do the same with "Hoard ..." (and I was wondering why I let it peter out to begin with?).

I originally picked up "Hoard of the Dragon Queen" (HODQ) out of a kind of forward-looking nostalgia--I wanted to be able to say that "we had played Hoard of the Dragon Queen when 5e first came out" the same way that someone might talk about first seeing the Drow when they first appeared in the TSR "Against the Giants" modules. It was when 5e was first coming out, and I had agreed to run a game for my group (and we're still playing 5e together, just not HODQ), and this particular module seemed appealing because my own character in B/X is the originator of a different kind of dragon cult (dedicated to the Black Dragon, whose wings are the night, whose scales are the stars, and whose darkness will one day cover the earth ...).

But the game petered out less than halfway through the book ... Why?


SPOILERS


... Surely everyone knows by now that a dragon attacking the town is the first thing that happens ("Chapter 1"); but when I ran this thing, I first sent the players on a normal dungeon crawl from town. Only on their return did I sprang the dragon-attack, because to me that felt more natural, that they were returning to town, rather than just arriving.

After the dragon attack, the players are instructed (by "important" NPCs) to go on a fact finding mission to the camp of bandits allied with the dragon ("Chapter 2"), thereby discovering that the bandits are amassing treasure to take away to help summon Tiamat, queen of dragons ... and then they're supposed to return to the camp afterwards, to find the bandits already gone and to explore a dungeon there ("Chapter 3"). But as soon as my players found out that the bandits meant to haul their stolen goods to Baldur's Gate (and beyond), they elected to try to cut the bandits off on the road, completely ignoring the dungeon in "Chapter 3" of the book.

So I made up (out of whole cloth) an overland adventure to get the players from the original town to Baldur's Gate, with their speed determining whether they catch the bandits or not. By good choices and by luck, the players arrived in town around the same time as the bandits ... and my group being who they are, they tracked the bandits down to their inn in-town and burned the building down around them!

That was the last session in the "Hoard of the Dragon Queen" that we played--not because I was at all discouraged by the PCs' actions (you better believe the authorities were going to come after them, and the dragon cult too!), but because as I read further into the book, I couldn't see how this would affect anything "up the line". (And yes, this means that we actually only played the first 2 of the 8 chapters in this book--shhh, my players don't know that!)

See, "Chapter 4" is a whole "on the road" thing about how the PCs hire themselves into the same caravan as the north-going bandits and just kind of tag along, with some filler encounters along the way--and with the bandits' and their loot already burned in a fire, this clearly wasn't going to fly!

Then "Chapter 5" is a roadhouse where the caravan stops, and under which exists a secret tunnel to a swamp-castle ("Chapter 6") through which all that treasure gets secretly ported by lizardmen ... (still not relevant to the situation as it developed) ...

And in "Chapter 6" the PCs are supposed to assault the castle to find the teleportation circle in its bowels that lead to ... a hunting lodge in some mountains ... (wait, where'd the treasure go?) ...

"Chapter 7" is a description of the hunting lodge, which is ... bypassed by the treasure the PCs are supposed to be following? (actually, by this point, the treasure for the titular hoard is an after thought ... really the PCs are just supposed to follow the crumbs to "Chapter 8" to fight some things in a floating ice castle) ...

"Chapter 8" is the floating ice-castle, which can be reached without even bothering the hunting lodge (I don't mind the sandboxiness to that, exactly, except ... why isn't the treasure just ported directly to this castle, where it's supposed to end up anyway? Why all that "on the road" crap to some other place--unless it's just level-grinding filler??).

In retrospect, clearly, I just should have made up some adventures that explain everything, and still taken the PCs to the flying ice-castle ... I guess ... except that would have defeated the purpose of buying a book with an adventure I ostensibly wanted to run, instead of just making it all up myself.

... All that said, looking at "Hoard of the Dragon Queen" again, I think I can see a way to make it into a sandbox about cutting off treasure-caravans and disrupting the Cult of the Dragon in that way ... and now I'm waiting for "Rise of Tiamat" to arrive in the mail, to see how functional or dismal my attempt at rewriting everything might be.