DMDC 11 - Infiltrating the Cult of the Reptile God

So yeah, it didn't go great for the party last time but at least they made it out alive. They're short-handed and need to figure out how to proceed from there. It's not like they'll just cut their losses and bail out early right? They wouldn't leave their friend to perish at the hands of the cult.

Right?

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Transcript

Hey! This is the DM Discourse, a podcast about D&D, focused on the experience at the table from behind the screen. I'm your host Darrell, and today we’re picking up where we left off with the party cleric surrendering himself to the authorities of the village cult and the other members retreating from the tavern they fought, with the help of two members of the Dawn Guard. This is the second episode about the AD&D module N1: Against the Cult of the Reptile God, so if you haven’t listened to that one I recommend you go check that one out, and then come back here afterwards. For the rest of you, let’s see how my players get themselves out of this inconvenient situation - one that they definitely put themselves in.

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Dearest family,

I write to let you know that Julen and I’ve made it safe to the town of Orlane. I know Ma, gods rest her soul, always told us to watch out for trouble and that the clan cave is the only safe place in the world for a clueless bat like me, but I think we all know in our deepest thoughts it's getting too crowded there. Be assured that’s thinking I had long before I ever took Julen to wife and she told me the same.

Anyway, Orlane is a right nice place. Y’all should come up sometime, maybe bring some of those famous Sighollow Shrooms for the friends we made. The mayor, Zakarias, is a stand up fella, and so’s the family. Not sure about the dragonborn bodyguard of his, but Zak tells me they’re good folk. Can’t take a drink to save their life though, got the weakest constitution for celebration I’ve ever seen, and that counts Cousins Gilbert and William both.

A few of the locals stand out as a bit odd though. They got some kinda druid out in the grove along the edge of town - a caphryn, if you can believe it. Aint seen one of them moon goats in a dozen winters, now we got one for a neighbor. Keeps to himself, as is his right, but it's nice to know we have someone versed in herbs and such.

Don’t know what to make about the head priest either. Misha Devi runs the Temple of Merika here, one of those saints of Araowe. Told her we’re staunch followers of Faces Three in this household, to which Julen intervened by smacking my head sideways and saying we’d love to attend one of the services someday. My wife seems to have it that we’ll be making ourselves more comfortable by taking up a few of the customs. And we wouldn’t be the first to give praise to a couple gods anyhow.

Otton be sure to keep Olo and Obo out of trouble. The twins don’t do anything well but flying where they don’t need to be. Moschia, don’t forget your medicines on the regular and if you have any requests for your studies let us know, might be the hermit has something we can send on over. Also included is a bottle from the Orlane vineyards. Pa only have a little, you shan’t be drinking like you did during your adventuring days.

Julen sends her love to y’all, and so do I. Your best looking and second eldest brother, Galen Weaver.

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Depending on the supplement you pick up, you can have a lot of sandbox for you and players to explore with. There’s plenty of resources I’ve gone through that make it easy to just have that “world-at-the-ready” feeling. You may have to hammer out the final details yourself, or if you’re feeling adventurous, maybe even expand on the adventure to build off your own campaign ideas. With a bit of clever integration, all of those neat thoughts you have in your brain can be easily dropped bit by bit throughout other published content to give it a unique flavor.

That’s what I did here early on the module. By now the players were at least familiar with two of the secret organizations in my campaign: the Dawn Guard, who were sworn to the old royal lineage, and the Obfuscators, agents of the usurper the Prism Wizard. Here in the Drifting Isles, there was no sovereignty by the latter since the country itself fractured following the upheaval of the old dynasty, but I wanted to have events stirring in the background about that civil unrest. For the players, however, they’re understanding of the situation was less grey. The Guard were their good guy friends, the Obfuscators, a bunch of dickheads.

The motivations and validity of the organizations would become clearer to the players as the campaign went on, but for now it was good fortune for a couple of Dawn Guard agents to be greeting them at the backdoor of the Golden Grain Inn to bring them to safety. Sq’gee, whose conscience dictated him to surrender to the authorities for the murder he commited (albeit agianst a charmed individual), was swiftly taken into captivity by the constable, and the rest of the Inn scoured for the rest of the party.

By the time they were done, the party had been brought across the bridge to the more secluded part of town. They followed their new allies, Dorian and Llewellyn, to the Grove of Stately Elms, a narrow trail of majestic elms and thick shrubbery. At the end of it was a ramshackle hut where the town druid-slash-hermit, Ramne, lived, and was a bit of a signal to me that the adventure would start to accelerate on this point out.

There’s a lot of freedom that Against the Cult of the Reptile God offers for players. As I said last episode, it gives descriptions of every point they’d want to explore, without trying to guide them along a strict path of plot points to follow. One of the other great things that could happen (and sort of did happen to my party) was that the cultists in town would actually try to kidnap the player characters and bring to the dungeon of Explicita Deflius. Depending on when the opportunity presents itself, such as the players sleeping at the inn, the players could kidnap them. Alternatively they could kidnap other targets in town who weren’t yet under the naga’s spell.

However, knowing that there was a party of individuals capable of disrupting their plans and having already captured one of them, the cult members chose to accelerate their timeline. That’s something to remember always, that it’s in your best interest to react to the players actions in terms of plot advancement. Villains, much like your players, have their own ideas and agendas and you should feel free to have those move forward with or without the player’s knowledge of it. We’ll get to having that feature in broader strokes later on when we revisit the Dawn Guard and the Obfuscators, but for now let’s just focus on the local scale.

Ramne is well aware of the cult, much like any other higher level NPC, but isn’t keen on trying to make moves against them on his own. Plus, he’s got other problems to worry about beyond the scope of the players. The module goes so far as to recommend avoiding having Ramne as a primary character of the story, or having the players rely on him too much. If you have players rely on an NPC too much, they’ll expect to be saved at the worst moments, or know that if they have questions they can always rely on one of them to provide answers. It’s perfectly fine for there to be characters that exist in  your world that provide insight to the players that they didn’t have before, but they can’t and shouldn’t know everything. NPCs aren’t there for them to rely on when it gets tough, or to become the stars of the show while the party becomes second fiddle. As the module reads, “it’s their adventure, not Ramne’s.

The way I played him also fed into this. I used another one of my homebrew races, bipedal goatfolk called caphryn, to throw in some other unique flavor of my campaign ideas. At some point in the campaign’s history, one of the moon shattered and these sentient goats descended in chunks of rock to the planet, taking up residence where they could find. I think Ramne is the only caphyrn they’ve met up to now, and since none of the players have expressed interest in playing one I’ve been able to maintain that mystery of never having to explicitly give statistics or background other than “yeah the moon blew up and then these guys came down in their rock ships.”

Between that and the players walking into a flora filled hut, I think they got just about everything they needed to know about Ramne. Even though the druid himself was knowledgeable about the cult, I still gave the initiative to the players to decide what they wanted to do. And as any group shorthanded and barely skirting around level 3 does, they saw themselves having only really one option: they had to rescue their friend. It was at this point Ramne chose to pipe up, not by giving them explicit detail about the cult and all their plans, but by offering a magical item: a cloak of Elvenkind. The elven cloak is a classic D&D item that goes back even before the hobby, but in this iteration of the game it has one super useful ability: with the hood drawn up, you have advantage on stealth checks, and others have disadvantage on perception checks to spot you. Aside from things going totally sideways or magical alarms, you aren’t being seen by anybody.

I wonder sometimes if I maybe went too quickly for the next part of the adventure. With Cht’hoo still reeling from the poison at the tavern, the only real contender to stealth around town was Pedwar, the drunken dwarven monk, and holy crap did he shine in this moment. Not even just from having the cloak, but also enjoying the ability to use his talents and skills in a solo-focused scenario.

It went as thus: Pedwar donned the cloak and headed back to town, starting with where Sq’gee had been taken by the constable. He headed south and saw a squad of guards escorting the cleric, hooded, eastward in town across the river they came from earlier. The guards had no chance of spotting Pedwar in his element, so he was able to easily follow them to the footsteps of the Temple of Merikka. There, Sq’gee was passed off to the charmed priest of the temple, Misha Devi. She commanded Sq’gee be taken inside and escorted to the dungeon below the temple.

This was the part in particular I wonder about reconsidering. The module has an entire dungeon level dedicated to exploring the places beneath the temple, which, ultimately, the players didn’t do any of. Pedwar wanted to figure out where his friend was being taken, so he ran up some trees and jumped over to the side windows of the temple. I thought it would make sense that Misha Devi would keep some kind of clue about where they would end up taking those that they capture, so ultimately he did find it. I think reconfiguring what was supposed to be an additional dungeon crawl into a single narrative scene was the right call though - I wasn’t keen on having one of the players sit there for an extended period of time waiting to play while everyone else tried to rescue them, even if it did mean they were bypassing a decent chunk of the module.

That’s the kind of call you make at the table, and I think what makes for a great pre-made adventure to use. It’s flexible to accommodate for the actions and consequences of the players. If the module says something like, “at this point the players will do X so it can lead to Y,” that isn’t inherently a bad thing, especially if the players are getting into the scenario that’s setup for them, but you can’t always count on players to do the things you expect. Generally players aren’t expected to surrender when confronted by overwhelming odds - so it was a surprise for me when one of them did, and threw away any notion of where this party would find themselves a lot quicker.

In this case it hastened the events to follow. From overhearing Misha Devi and analyzing the documents he found, Pedwar discovered a caravan of captured villagers and traders would be heading east out of town that very night. He returned back to the group and informed them of this, with enough clues in hand to help them take the adventure into their own hands and deal with the threat of the naga. The NPCs they’d met up to this point, were given the exit I needed them to have. Dorian and Llewellyn were able to try and pursue the tracks of Desleigh, the Obfuscator they were tailing, and Ramne was able to return to whatever other matters he had to attend to. For the duration of their journey, however, he let them keep the cloak of elvenkind.

One of the nice things about N1 is that it’s prepared for eventualities going forward. The players could’ve asked Ramne for help, or he could’ve loans them his animal companion. They could’ve gone out and looked for trails of troglodytes to follow through the swamp back to the hideout. All that the module talks about leading into this second part is that the players get a good idea that the base of the cult isn’t in town, and with a caravan heading out that’s something they were sure of.

I think there’s a couple ways that I could’ve sprinkled this information in if they hadn’t had to try and rescue Sq’Gee in the first place. They probably would’ve ended up kicking the doors down of the temple and infiltrating it that way, or maybe trying to mask themselves as charmed in order to discretely gather information about the cult’s true whereabouts. If you wanted to run this adventure you probably could just have the party find out wherever makes sense best for you, maybe not even giving them a solid idea of where to start looking other than outside of town. In fact reading over the text again I think that’s the idea they were going for? The module says it could take days of false leads and losing tracks before the group ends up finding the actual temple of Explicita Defilus. A different game for a different time.

That’s kind of just how the night ended up going, frankly. I had some arbitrary combat as the party set up an ambush on the eastern side of town. They took the cultists by surprise and were able to dispatch a number of them (non-lethally this time, except for the troglodytes accompanying the cultists) with relative ease. Olrune, the Tiefling Sorcerer, was still trying to find footing with his playstyle. He had taken up Shadow Blade, which is a spell that gives a kickass sword of solidified gloom, in order to try and do more damage because I believe at the time he was trying to increase his damage output rather than making use of utility spells that he was capable of. However, given his build he wasn’t able to make real good use of it so he ended up relying on just hurling magic missiles at enough foes until they fell over. I think the player ended up keeping it for thematic purposes, but has a better idea of what he wants to do during combat and other such situations.

With their friend rescued and informed, the party was ready to head out into the night and make camp before the long trek to the dungeon. The next part, aptly titled the Trail to the Reptile God’s Lair, actually has a cool map of the Greyhawk setting that it used as well as the expected scenarios and encounters while making their path there. It doesn’t take up a lot of real estate in the grand scheme of the module itself, but as anyone who's played at the table can tell you it’s easy to get bogged down from surprisingly challenging random encounters. I also like to throw in some narrative encounters foreshadowing the awful things about to happen, but we’ll save that for next time.

That’s all I’ve got for today’s episode - so far Against the Cult of the Reptile God had shown a ton of flexibility in what I wanted to do with it, and what you could do with it as well. The dungeon we’re gearing up towards is more linear but has some clever design that makes it memorable yet challenging for a first time crew to tackle. The party at this point is level ⅔ because I’m nefarious in rewarding my players, but since the module is for low level adventurers that sort of turns out alright in the end.

As always, I’m always up for hearing any concerns, comments, or criticism. Feel free to email me at dmdiscoursepodcast@gmail.com or reach out to me on Twitter @DMDCPodcast. Appreciate y’all out there, thanks a bunch for listening. As always take care, and have a great week.