The Gherkin Patch

Barrow of the Forgotten King by Ed Stark was a most excellent finale to the quest to capture the Golden Boar.  (This post contains a slightly disturbing image, so be warned.)

Part One of this write up describes the encounter-rich wilderness trek that sets the scene for the action that follows.

Before I move on to the module, a little more backstory.  The party had found the Singing Tor and completed their original quest to reunite Peter Chamberlyn’s body with his lost soul.  But they had now undertaken a new quest - to find the circlet that controlled the Golden Boar, and thus avert the doom prophesied for the Keoish army if they proceeded into the Hold of the Sea Princes without the creature amidst their ranks.

The circlet (they hoped) lay in the tomb of King Theron, a dwarven monarch who had ruled in these hills many centuries past.  And their enigmatic guide, Berna, had told them that this tomb was located in a cave complex which was also home to an oracle called Murthwanesta.

The cave complex had also housed a clan of Hill Giants, who had held the oracle in some reverence.  En route from the Singing Tor to the caves, however, the party encountered a trio of giants - a shaman and her two sons - whom Berna recognised as being from the caves, and who they managed to parlay with.  It emerged that there had been a change of leadership amongst the giants, and the new chieftan had less reverence for the oracle than his predecessor; indeed he declared that he would descend to her cave and take her as a wife, by force if necessary.  This attempt evidently failed, but then the new chieftan got up to fresh mischief by attempting to dig his way into the dwarf king’s tomb, which Murthwanesta had forbidden them to enter.  The shaman told the oracle who was furiously angry and told her to take her sons and leave; ‘a terrible disaster is about to befall those who would enter Theron’s tomb’.

From this, the party surmised that perhaps the Golden Boar was a creature somehow created or summoned by the oracle herself to punish the hill giants.

After a couple of days’ journey the party arrived at the cave entrance.  Following Berna as their guide, who had lived at these caves herself for a while as a disciple of the oracle, they descended into the lower levels.  Remains of slain hill giants were found on the way bearing injuries that might well have been inflicted by the tusks of the boar.

Murthwanesta the Oracle of the Earth was a large stalagmite in the centre of a pool of bubbling mud, which transformed as Berna approached and greeted her, the upper half of the rock formation becoming the upper torso of a woman of giantish proportions.

She confirmed that she had indeed unleashed the boar on the giants to punish them for their disrespect, though she had not summoned the creature.  It had been bound by her magic as a guardian at the entrance to Theron’s tomb, but the creature itself was linked to the circlet which was not of her making.  Since driving the giants out of the caves the beast had sauntered off and she was unable to recall it.  She gave the party her blessing to enter the tomb and retrieve the circlet and bring the boar to heel, and even borrow the circlet for a time provided they ultimately returned it.

And so on to the tomb, and the published adventure.  I’ll discuss this more from a DM’s perspective than a narrative one.  Barrow of the Forgotten King by Ed Stark is an adventure for a party of 4 x 2nd level characters.  The module as published is not a dwarf king’s tomb but that of a human one - I had to recast the descriptions of the place in dwarven terms, which I generally did on the fly with no great difficulty.

So how about the party being 6 x 6-7th level characters instead of 4 x 2nd?  Well, I dealt with this in three ways.  The first and most obvious way was to beef up some of the encounters by adding a few extra combatants - though I found that surprisingly few were required in light of the disparity.

Secondly, the module as published is written with the expectation that the party will take several expeditions to complete the adventure, with rest breaks in between.  However, the plot of the module involves some tomb robbers who are ahead of the party.  This was easily used as a device to ratchet up the tension - I turned these robbers into an expedition by agents of Monmurg to retrieve the circlet, and it wasn’t too long before the party learned of this from captives.  This lent a sense of urgency to their mission and forced them to slog it through in a single expedition.

Thirdly, the final encounter involved some more powerful adversaries than those in the published text - the ringleaders of the Monmurg expedition, on the trail of the circlet that controlled the boar.  Now I’ve mentioned that I was presenting this as a race against time.  It actually was a race against time in a very real fashion.  Although I wasn’t keeping a detailed track of time down to the last minute, I decided prior to the party’s entry into the dungeon that the following applied:

• If the party just stormed through without taking any rest periods, they would catch up with their opponents at a point somewhat before the final chambers of the tomb
• If they took one rest period, their opponents would arrive in the final chambers well ahead of them and retrieve the circlet, which could then be used to summon the boar - which would arrive only very shortly before the party’s arrival, thus giving the worn-down Monmurgians very little time to make best tactical use of the boar
• If they took more than one rest period, their adversaries would also have rested, and would ambush them with the boar from a position of strong tactical advantage - a potential TPK or TPC (Total Party Capture)

As it happened, the very first room in the dungeon was a puzzle room which had to be solved before they could proceed further (a slight re-arrangement from the published module in which this is the second room, but it better suited my purposes to have the puzzle as an opener).  The party asked Berna to perform a Divination to gain some clues about the puzzle, as it was a real head-scratcher for them.  They were still stuck even after this, and so it was suggested they bed down for the night and get some rest and do another Divination in the morning.  This cost them one rest period on my doomsday clock.

When they took the rest at this very early stage, I was a little worried.  At this point there was less of a sense of urgency because they hadn’t encountered the Monmurg expedition and didn’t know they were in competition to retrieve the circlet.  Though every additional day would cost the 25,000 strong Keoish army another day’s delay in its progress, but I don’t think this weighed as heavily on their minds as it should.  Because of this early rest, they could not afford to take any more rests before the deadly ambush occurred.  Fortunately, this was the only rest period they took - though they came perilously close to taking another on several occasions!

It might seem mean or unfair to have started the doomsday clock from a point before the party knew they were involved in a race.  But I had no idea they would take a rest in the middle of trying to solve that puzzle room at the dungeon entrance when I planned this.  When they did, I elected to be ’sandbox’ about it - I’d already decided the Monmurg expedition was in the dungeon ahead of them and I didn’t want to rewrite that fact for the players convenience.  Sometimes I do have events happen for narrative reasons - like the bit in Part One where the boar popped up and attacked the party when Voss’s hunting party were conveniently nearby.  But other times I just let the chips fall where they may.  That’s my style.

So what was the dungeon like?  A nice little dungeon crawl, basically.  Plenty of interesting encounter areas with terrain features and traps.  Naming no names, but some folks on the bloggers network have lately been rewriting history by saying that D&D editions prior to 4e typically involved dull encounters with single creatures or handfuls of identical creatures that didn’t interact with other creatures in neighbouring rooms.  Honestly, I have read people saying this!  This description of D&D doesn’t resemble any edition or adventure I have played in or DM’d since, oooh before some of my readers were born I suppose.

The dungeon is extremely linear, but this is actually well suited to the feel of the adventure particularly when presented as a race to try to catch up a competing party.  The player’s adversaries have left various minions and animated creatures to try to slow the party down, and there are a few evil creatures in the tombs that the bad guys managed to bypass without fighting - in the published adventure this is a bit poorly rationalised (rationale is usually where I find published modules fall down, but then we are a very rationale-conscious group), but I added a stronger rationale by giving the Monmurg party leader, Xera, an ability that specifically empowered her to co-opt evil creatures to her side (I won’t go into too much detail about this as she activated her escape plan at the end and they may run into her again).  By the way, in the module as published, the big baddie is called Xeron.  Xeron, Xera - you see what I did there?

We had some nice cinematic moments in which the player characters experienced some horrors.  Sylvian the elven archer getting stuck in a web and covered in a swarm of tarantula-sized baby tomb spiders was, um, pleasant.  And Jonathan Flynn succumbing to ‘Horrific Rot’ brought a cackle of evil mirth to my lips.

(Don’t worry, he’s cured now!)

The final combat was epic.  We finished it in one session, which was nice.  The party reached King Theron’s resting place, the final chamber in the dungeon, to confront a worn-down Monmurg party, backed into a corner, who scrambled to set up an ambush against the foes who were suddenly upon them.  Their ace was the boar that had only recently arrived in answer to the summons of the circlet.  There was a frantic battle to try to shoot down the wearer of the circlet who was directing the boar’s actions.  The boar was meanwhile chewing up one party member per round, tossing them aside like matchsticks and leaving them unconscious and bleeding out on the floor (luckily for them, no actual casualties, but a pretty tense fight!).  At one point people started saying ‘it’s time to pull out’ and morale starting taking a nose dive.  Then Dylan’s invisible raven familiar succeeded in snatching the circlet off the head of its wearer!  The familiar got batted out of the air with a morning star within seconds and there was a scramble to retrieve the circlet from the floor.  Then Berna remembered her ‘mage hand’ spell and snapped up the unconscious familiar still clutching the circlet in its claws.  She popped the circlet on her head and it was all over for the Monmurgians.  It’s great when a crafty familiar and a well-placed 0 level spell can turn the tide of a battle!

Treasure-wise, I always find myself cutting stuff out of published modules, and this was no exception, even though the module was designed for 2nd level characters.  I wouldn’t even call our campaign a low-magic one, but there’s just too much awesome loot at too low level in almost every module I’ve ever read.  I’ve always found it strangely ironic that in D&D from 3e onwards, there’s been less of a need for characters to possess magic items to make themselves distinctive, because there are so many ways in which characters can be customised and acquire interesting abilities without the need for them.  And yet, 3e onwards have taken stronger steps than previous editions in building a default expectation for magical loot into the structure of the game (including magic kit in CR calculations and so on).  Entitlement, much?

So, I cut out one or two items and changed a couple of others.  There’s one exciting ’signature’ magic item which I left in, because I’m not so stingy that I won’t let a surprise windfall drop once in a while.

As the party emerged triumphant, two of the hunting parties (Voss’s, and a group of Axewood elves) were spotted riding along a ridge in the distance and were flagged down by the party (cue police sirens in the background).

A celebration was had, the party divided their spoils and traded some unwanted items for more desirable alternatives with the elves.  Voss reported a successful disruption of the war council that Monmurg had been trying to arrange (which the elves had also turned up at). Thus all the boxes were ticked, the three story threads in the adventure now resolved.

And so, onwards.  Monmurg or bust!