Busy day for me today all day, so I'm not going to try to do more than half of this module, unless time frees up. I've got a three-day weekend coming up, but I'll probably be even more busy for that than I am normally. Sigh. Either way, I hope to finish part 3 (in two parts) of Serpent's Skull this week, as well as hopefully do the same for part 4—which I might also break in two.
This particular adventure is structured to be more of a hexcrawl—or at least small-scale graph crawl, more accurately—of the ruins of Saventh-Yhi, the ersatz Atlantean city deep in the faux-African jungle. (Sadly, it bears little real resemblance to Opar, and there's nobody at all like La.) The introduction calls it a "sandbox" but then immediately apologizes for scaring would-be GMs who read that. An entire adventure dedicated to exploring a ruined city, maneuvering against your rivals as well as hostile natives—I dunno if it's really my thing. But it's better than where this continues to go, as the rest of the adventure path essentially rips off Lovecraft's The Mound entirely, and has the players go into the ruined city of an underground serpent-people empire and preventing the resurrection of their serpent demon-god, or whatever. But, again—I'm strip-mining these adventure paths, and I may well not use much of what I find in any given one, as I create an entirely new context around which to hang it. I do suspect, however, that I may need to combine this with some other strip-mined adventures to really work. Either that, or I leave the second half of any putative campaign I run completely open-ended at this point rather than attempt to map them out. (This isn't a bad idea.) But I bring that up only to point out that I may find that as this adventure path gets into its second half, I may find less and less that's actually useful for me, because it turns into a completely different kind of adventure, and its one that I'm less interested in running than in the jungle exploration theme; a kind of African Queen meets King Kong as it starts out.
As an aside, I laugh, yet ruefully, at the fantasy setting convention of making stuff crazy old. Why in the world does this city have to be 11,000 years old? Do you know how long that is in years that we can comprehend? There are no ruins of anything that isn't simple mounds of rubble that's anywhere near that old in our world. The city of Troy, one of the most ancient sites for which we know anything historically valid, is 3,200 years old. Ur was founded only 5,800 years ago (estimated), and it was buried rubble (there's a reconstruction of the ziggurat on site, built in the last hundred years or less) but the first thing that we really know about it doesn't until 4,600 years ago.
This is the oldest stuff for which we have any reliable evidence other than fossils. 11,000 years ago was in the middle of the Ice Age, specifically the so-called Late Glacial Maximum, a smaller pulse that followed the bigger Last Glacial Maximum. The Great Lakes, for instance, were still covered by continental glaciers 11,000 years ago. The Fosna-Hensbacka paleolithic culture reaches the brand newly cleared (yet still Arctic in character) Scandinavian peninsula. In short; it's kind of absurd to talk about anything that happened that long ago. Yet in fantasy settings, everything has to be BIG especially the number of years that passed since something happened. In reality, there's no reason to talk about tens of thousands of years, when just a couple thousand is so much that the entire face of the world can be changed repeatedly.
Anyway, that's a pet peeve of mine. Without further ado; here's the adventure summary.
"City of Seven Spears" is an unusual adventure, in that there is no central plotline waiting to be explored and unfolded. When the PCs arrive in the ruined city of Saventh-Yhi, the actions they take are largely left up to them. They can explore the ruins at any speed and in any order they wish—and as they do so, the other factions who have come to the city do likewise.
Upon first reaching Saventh-Yhi, the PCs must locate a suitable entrance and site to serve their expedition as a base of operations. With this choice secured, they can move on to the task of exploring the city—each of Saventh- Yhi’s seven districts has several different goals the PCs can pursue, and with each they’ll begin to build up their expedition’s success and claims. Conflicts with both the indigenous tribes and the other competing factions in the region are all but guaranteed, and as the PCs forge alliances and make enemies, they’ll build their own storyline in the jungle ruins.
As they explore, the PCs begin to learn of the doom that came to Saventh-Yhi in those ancient times. Hints of a strange underworld below the city suggest the possibility of yet another lost city beneath, while the unavoidable presence of more serpentfolk is likely to raise concerns. Something dire is building in, or perhaps below, Saventh-Yhi, and by the time the PCs’ explorations of the city come to a close, they’ll have the proof they fear in the form of a half-mad refugee from the ruined city of Ilmurea below—an escaped prisoner of the serpentfolk who, once cured of her madness, can tell of the great peril building in the dark below.So the structure of this mining operation will heavily favor exploration of "districts", each with their own character, and there is a relatively thin plot that weaves its way through the whole thing.
PART I: THE GLORY OF SAVENTH-YHI The PCs were in the ruined city of Tazion at the end of the last adventure, and the journey from ruined city A to ruined city B is only twenty miles. They actually recommend that you "red line" (as in Indiana Jones movies) the travel based on the assumption that the PCs will have done enough of it lately. Saventh-Yhi is protected by a number of very D&Dish spells that keep its location hidden, but stuff found in Tazion gives up the location. The obvious answer to is enter via a river tributary, but climbing on sheer cliffs, with aerial encounters is also doable. It would be fun if they even had an opportunity fly in.
Anyway, the city has seven big spires, one corresponding to each of the districts, and there are magical effects from these spires, because they're actually gigantic magic nodes or something. There's a pretty nifty map on page 9 that could (and should!) be used for cities that aren't abandoned ruins. The first thing that it gives GMs is the ability to have PCs research/learn the history of the city. While this may sound rather dry and academic, it is actually well in keeping with the pulp tradition (you ever read At the Mountains of Madness?) and they at least try to make the stuff useful and/or helpful in some way other than just fake history of a fake city for its own sake. One of these secrets is the secret of activation of the seven spires or steep ziggurats (or spears, as they're called, although they're big stone towers, not spears.) Other than that, the expectation of the module is that the PCs will interact with the various factions within the city, as will the other factions of explorers, and that doing so will prompt conflict that has been simmering but not boiling over for some time now in the city anyway.
And the first encounters, at the entrance, are some pterosaurs and crocodiles (I have stats for both in FANTASY HACK already.) Then there's the ghost of the traitor of an ill-fated Pathfinder expedition that stumbled across the city by accident, killed his group hoping to claim all of the glory for himself, but himself died for his trouble. An aquatic cryptozooligical dinosaur analog (the mokele-mbembe) lives in the lake in the center of the city.
At the opposite end of the city from the river entrance is the Ivory Gate, and some other potential encounters, including another potential entrance and egress point. This is guarded by some troglodytes, and gibbering mouthers (see last post; weaker shoggoths, basically.) Finally, in the far SE corner, there's an aboleth researching the city, and enslaving people to help him explore it.
Each of the next parts refer to the various districts. Because this post is already getting long, and it may take a long time to go through each of them, I probably will not do very many of these right now, and come back later for the rest.
PART II: WRATH OF ANGAZHAN Angazhan is a gorilla demon in Paizo, who plays a similar role to Demogorgon (or at least part of Demogorgon's "portfolio") although James Jacobs (the creator of the character) once told me explicitly that he started off with the idea of "what if King Kong were a demon lord?" Anyway, this describes the Military District, at the far north of the map. It's inhabited by Angazhan-worshiping man-apes, led by "high gorillons"—Barsoom white apes that are intelligent rather than merely savage monsters. Patrols wander the district that are made up of two man-apes with a dire ape brute. The PCs entering this area will be met with hostility, and the aggressive nature of the districts leader means that a peaceful alliance of any kind is unlikely. It can be conquered militarily, although that means killing a lot of man-apes and probably the white ape leaders too.
The district has an old fortress, magically semi-preserved, and this is where the white-ape warlord lives. He's got dire ape bodyguards, and a witch-priestess man-ape (woman-ape?) In addition to plenty of man-ape soldiers, dire ape muscle, and a few white apes, there's the spire, of course, which gives a modest bonus on intimidating people (huh?) and there's a petrified winged half-fiend dire ape. If he can be "restored" from petrification by some magic (which I don't like, really—you remember that the reason that Medusa scene from Clash of the Titans was actually one of the most effective and tense was because turning to stone meant you were dead) then he's too savage to do anything except attack everybody around, and then flee if it looks like he's going to be beat, so he can get revenge on his rival that turned him to stone and then retake the district as the true warlord who should rule it again.
Other than wandering monsters, there are a number of "posted" monsters. A swampy area that's partly submerged is the home to a Sarcosuchus (an actual prehistorical animal) which is essentially a gigantic "dire crocodile". There's a tribe of keches, six in all, who are like carnivorous man-ape eating lizard-apes covered with leafy coverings. They go back to the original 1e Monster Manual 2, if I remember correctly. There's a lair of three chimeras with green and black dragon heads, so they don't breathe fire like my FANTASY HACK chimera does. I'm not sure if I'm enthralled or irritated by the D&D style dragons with their weird array of breath weapons, though—I really doubt I'd change this. Then there's an advanced gigantic jungle bat, and I mean really big.
Finally, there's a building with a number of shadowy undead (three shadows, specifically, and a greater shadow.) I don't have anything specifically like a shadow, but it's a pretty iconic D&D monster that is kind of like a ghost—but different, of course. I'd probably create one using the ghost as a starting point and just describing it a bit differently.
PART IV: PRIDE OF THE FALLEN This is the central district, and refers to the Government offices that once were here. Today, it is the home of "degenerate serpentfolk"—snake men who are insane and primitive and don't even know that a city of their people lies below their feet. A crocodile-headed rakshasa (one of the many, many, many versions of demons that D&D entertains) rules them as a pseudo-god. As with the apes, its unlikely that you can make an alliance with these guys, so the only way to set up your basecamp here is to kill enough of the bad guys to pacify the district. The bonus to this spire is to Sense Motive (these are quite silly, in my opinion. It's not worth it to bother activating the spires just to get some lame minor bonus to some social skills.
There are guards and patrols of snake men to fight, a frog-man witch doctor, zombies, and a flooded arena with a gigantic two-headed snake in it (a head on each end, to be specific—weird and unnecessarily so.) And then in the ruby Senate dome, you'll find the rakshasa, assuming that he hasn't come out to see why you're killing all his snake men patrols already. As is demons' wont in D&D, he can change his appearance at will, cast all kinds of spells, dominate via Jedi mind trick all kinds of minions, etc.
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