Issue#5 Echoes of Ebonthul
Is anyone out there? It can be hard to know with lock down in my home state keeping us in our homes and in our heads, waiting for the day when we're free to rejoin the world. The people I used to see on a daily basis have become distant echoes and that counts double for strangers on the internet.
What was I talking about? Oh yes - Issue 5! It's done, so once again I'm placing the latest adventure in a little glass bottle made of internet and hurling it into the dark ocean of... ocean'y'ness?
Hooks
What's that? You want to know how to connect this adventure to the others? Well everything's connected...or nothing is... Let's see!
- The Path of the Masked Mage, If you haven't resolved the mystery of the masked mage from Issue #1 this adventure provides a possible connection to that plot line. Lady Briarthorn had sent a another group to investigate the origins of her former captor but now that expedition has vanished. It's up to the party to locate them and find out what forces are behind their disappearance.
- The Race is on! Sirona's library in Issue#4 is something of a time capsule - the perfect place to find a map pointing to the long lost island of Ebonthul. Unfortunately the scholar the party used to help translate it made a copy and set off on a rival expedition. They've had a weeks head start and if the party isn't quick they'll snatch up all the gold and glory for themselves.
- To the Rescue! If your party has become attached to a particular NPC in your campaign you could introduce this adventure by making them one of the missing persons whom the party are seeking.
As always choose a hook that will offer the biggest buy in for your table - now onwards to the adventure!
Pages 1&2 - A Start & The Sea monster!
These pages set up a simple hook for groups playing this as a one shot and then jump into some action.
The Missing Adventurers
I
feel the elements of a game that players create themselves offer the
greatest opportunity for engaging them. To this end the identity of each
missing NPC is a blank space for your players to fill. This
puts a little pressure on you as DM to weave their ideas into the session. For example - If one of your
PC's is seeking a pious cleric with a drinking problem feel free to
include a holy symbol and an empty bottle in one of the tents in the abandoned camp.
The zine has spots for four missing adventurers; 1 Dead atop
the statue, 1 hiding within the hold of the giant construct and 2 inside
the Writhing Masses in the arcane engine room. You can always add more
for larger parties by adding more Writhing Masses to the final combat or using an ancient diving suit to hide in the bilge of the giant construct etc.
Once our missing adventurers are established we jump into the action. I like my players to occasionaly feel 'out of their depth'. Giant monsters can be good for that because they can be sooooo big they attack the environment rather than the party. This particular scenario is a bit of a bait and switch where we quickly replace our giant sea monster fight with a sinking ship skill challenge.
The 'monster' is only going to stick around for two rounds but it's highly likely the party will sling some spells and abilities at it. To help with that here is a quick and dirty stat block.
After putting a hole through the parties ship the The Guardian dives out of sight, its task of keeping the interlopers away from Ebonthul accomplished. The possibility that it could reappear at some point should instill a little fear in the group and add some tension to our adventure.
A quick side bar on Armour & Swimming.
Logic suggests any character in armour that falls overboard is likely to sink like a stone. However it also suggests that a character is unlikely to be strapped into their armour whilst sailing. So do we drown our fighters and paladins or steal their plate mail?
If it were me I'd risk losing the armour over the character. Then I'd place some armour within the abandoned camp for them to find. It could even be a mithral chain shirt or something similar belonging to the person they're seeking or that has been recovered from the ruins.
Page 3&4 Map of Ebonthul
Whether your party saved their ship or washed up exhausted and half drowned there are four locations for them to investigate within the ruins:
1. The Abandoned camp (Confirmation that our missing adventurers were here)
2. The Ziggurat with it's star covered door (A simple puzzle for the players to unlock)
3. The Pit (an alternate way into the ziggurat)
4. The Statue (The key to the ziggurat and a clue to the fate of the missing adventurers).
Consider putting a telescope within the camp for them to find and through which they can examine the other locations nearby. This allows you to feed them a bit more information and guide their decisions about what to investigate next.
Page 5 The Pit
Here I'm trying to offer the party an open ended challenge. It's unlikely the entire party will have a high enough constitution to get through the flooded tunnel without drowning, (unless they find an air pocket). This is meant to prompt creative solutions from the players. There are spells and other abilities that could negate this challenge and that's fine too - it just means a member of the group has a chance to shine and spends some resources ahead of the final combat.
Page 6 The Statue
The other way into the ziggurat is through the front door and that means climbing the statue, (although the party can't initially know this).
Falling from the top of the statue at level 5 could easily mean insta-death. This is intentional. The group don't necessarily have to climb the statue to progress through the adventure so this scenario lets them decide their own level of risk, (just be certain the players understand that risk).
As with the pit, the party may devise a way to reach the top in relative safety or their prepared spells and abilities may offer a shortcut. Either way their reward is the sixth gem from the ziggurat door and the dead body of one of the missing adventurers. I've suggested rolling to see which invented NPC this is to maintain impartiality but go with your instincts on how the various players in your group will respond to having an NPC they just created killed 'off screen'.
Speaking of the dead body - There are lots of ways the clues sprinkled through the adventure could be interpreted. I'm going to offer you one sequence of events below but feel free to invent your own.
The Dead Sailor's Tale
You and your companions have arrived at the fabled island of Ebonthul. You're here to uncover lost treasures and make your fortune. Spirits are high as you make camp amongst the ruins.
As the days progress you can't shake the notion that a distant voice is talking to you, just beyond the edge of hearing. The effect is strongest in the shadow of the massive statue on the eastern edge of the ruins - the dark stone it holds aloft seems to swallow the light.
The leader of your expedition orders the stone retrieved from its lofty perch. The nimblest among you climb the statue with pitons and rope and manage to lower it to the ground. Many want to return home with this prize but the expedition leader claims greater treasures still remain and persuades the crew to stay a few days more.
Below the ziggurat you find the machine. Many are loathe to approach it, (not certain it isn't in fact a living beast), but your leader is unafraid. They seem strangely familiar with the instruments within and order the stone brought aboard - for safe keeping.
Horror beyond horror - you have seen your companions transformed into monsters! You have glimpsed the writhing terrors nested within that accursed rock. You fled, taking the sixth star from the door and sealing them all below. You cut the rope on the winch that descends into the pit lest they try and follow you that way. Desperate for safety you climb into the palm of the statue where you cannot be easily surprised. The wound in your side throbs as your frantic pulse beats in your temples - the last thing you see is the stars wheeling overhead.
The Back Cover
On this page I give you a tiny random table to flesh out the setting a little. I imagine Ebonthul as the ruins of some sort of 'Future-Past'. The elements included here are trying to evoke a sense of familiar technology with a fantasy twist.
The Fold Out
So the party have made it into the ziggurat! We get a twist in our tale and discover the monster that attacked their ship is actually a gigantic construct. The conclusion of our adventure awaits inside...
The Cargo Hold
Here we have 'treasure' and a missing adventurer hiding from their companions.
This NPC's sanity is likely to be near breaking point and the party may have to work to get straight answers out of them, (You could give the player character who knows them advantage to do so).
I haven't told you how much treasure is present here so the question is - How much treasure do you want your party to have?
Level 5 is the beginning of the next tier of play as the party move beyond local adventures and start playing a larger role in world events. Giving them some funds could help set up the next phase of your campaign and invite them to make some longer term plans. Remember though, instant fortunes don't go unnoticed.
Whatever GP value you decide to set for this horde here are some unique items you can include for added flavor.
- A highly sensitive Talking Mirror that makes all history checks with advantage but needs to be convinced that you'll appreciate the information before telling you what it knows.
- A Clockwork Bird that can be used to deliver short messages as per the animal messenger spell.
- An air tight stone jar full of 'Red Sand'. If placed near a tiny, non magic, non living object for one minute the Red Sand will rearrange itself into an exact duplicate of that object, (this property doesn't function in darkness). After one hour both the duplicate and original disintegrate into red sand. The amount of sand and the size of object it can imitate increase with each use, (small to medium to large and so on). Keep it away from light! There are entire worlds that are now nothing but giant deserts of red sand.
- The Coral Crown. Whilst wearing this crown your clothing and hair billows as if underwater and illusory fish swim through the air around you.
- The Qinggong Spear (magic weapon - requires Attunement)
Whilst wielding this item you can use the dash action to move in any direction, (including vertically). To change direction during this dash you must make contact with a piece of solid terrain such as a wall, rock, tree branch etc. If you are in mid air at the end of your turn you fall.
- The Mask of the Magic Eater (3 charges - requires attunement)
When a creature you can see within 60ft casts a spell, you can use your reaction and 1 charge to force them to make a DC 13 constitution save. On a failure they take necrotic damage equal to 1d6 + the level of spell cast and you regain hit points up to the same amount.
The Control Room
This is the operational heart of the construct but I've disabled it so that your players don't drive it out of the adventure. If the party want to take control of this wondrous machine they'll have to deal with whatever is draining the power and that means heading to...
The Arcane Engine Room
Here we find some creepy aberrations doing some crazy magi-tech stuff with a shiny black crystal. This ritual happens at the speed of plot and is always 5 rounds away from finishing at whatever point the party stumble across it.
I've put some curly mechanics into this fight so lets break them down.
The Writhing Masses are here to protect The Stone and hopefully buy enough time for its lair actions to make things interesting.
The Stone is the center piece of the encounter. If the PC's can destroy it whatever evil thing is happening here stops happening (more on that later). Be sure to use the spreading cracks and other details to communicate to the players that they are on a timer.
The stone has two things it can do to try and protect itself
- Pull characters from the engine room into it's weird demiplane.
- Spawn Passengers there to attack them and maybe cross back with them to the engine room if they make their next save.
You can describe your demiplane in any way that suits your game. In mine an alternate version of the engine room floated in a starry void amidst various 'flotsam' from the material plane. The Astral Sea or Limbo from DnD lore are closest to what I imagine.
The Passengers personify the threat the stone represents - they don't just want your blood, they want your identity! I've built them to go down easily but become more of a threat each round.
I would spawn them in within movement distance of PC's but not so close as to force opportunity attacks if the PC's try to seek a better position.
The Passenger's Dark Mimicry trait causes attacks against them to have a 50% chance of hitting any PC they're grappling but what if more than one Passenger is grappling a character? I would play it something like the Mirror Image Spell and assume the chance of hitting a PC diminishes the more monsters are grappling it, (this situation is already dangerous enough).
What if the party try to damage the machinery instead?
One of my groups always looks for shortcuts and opted to smash the machinery 'charging' the stone in order to stop the ritual. This is the kind of creative thinking I don't want to discourage so I had to choose how to handle that.
If you like you can arbitrate the effects this might have in your game on the fly OR you can assume an attack on the machinery is an attack on the stone using the same AC and hit points but narrating the effects as if it is the surrounding technology taking the hit (shhhh don't tell the players).
Victory
If the party destroy the stone within 5 rounds then disaster is averted. They have a marvelous machine full of treasure and have probably found the people they came here to find. The Guardian may or may not be in working order after the fight (and depending on what you want for your campaign from this point).
Defeat
In the zine I note that the end result of the ritual is the entire island of Ebonthul being transported to the Stone's nightmarish pocket dimension.
But why? What do the forces within the stone gain from this?
Here's one possibility for you to consider -
Long ago the mage-priests of Ebonthul destroyed the world! Not the world the party knows, not exactly, another version of it. So they tried to fix it by splitting reality in half. Now there were two realities. The one they broke got sealed away inside the stone along with all the nasty things that show up when you permanently damage the fabric of space time. The other world got to continue on as if the apocalypse had never happened. It was genius really - providing the nasty things never figured out a way to cross over and reverse the process...
So there you have it - either the party are triumphant and rich or they have some
plane hopping craziness to endure to make it back home and set things to rights.
I myself have one final battle to set the world of kickstarter to rights with Issue#6 Flaming Fandango In Faratusa - I'll see you then!
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