DMDC 12 - The Dungeon of the Reptile God I

Part 1 of the 2 Part, 5 or 6 Part Sub-Series!

Alright they're in the dungeon this time, so it's dungeon time again - still no dragons in sight but look they're just level 2/3 babies doing there best out here in a dangerous world. They'll find dragons eventually, I promise!

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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 rescuing their cleric outside the village of Orlane from the Reptile God’s cultists. Now with new information in hand, they set off east along the road to reach the swamp lair of the creature. This is the third episode about the AD&D module N1: Against the Cult of the Reptile God, so if you haven’t listened to the others I recommend you go check those out before this one, and then come back here afterwards. As you can tell by the title, it’s also a two-parter since there’ll be a lot to cover. With that out of the way, let’s see how the party fairs against the dangers lurking in the Reptile God’s Temple.

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Her head was absent and her body gave quick to rot, soaked in dark remains along the walk from her hut with the stinking residuum of fear. She fled her grounds when desperation overtook pride and paid for it with letting of life. Blood pooled beneath her corpse and traced along the miniscule trails between pebbles like disciples escaping the ruin of their prophet. Only moon and two she made coven with were there as she turned to dust.

The Annis knew this scene. She was its patron more than stars hanging in the dark. Her first coven broke when the other two gave to the pettiness alive in their bones and each slew a sister. She had brought demise to others on her own wish, and some were lost this sameway to intrusive vagrants not keen enough to leave them be. She knew what she was and she knew this scene.

‘Geegra bit it then,’ the Night said. ‘On the evening that mealwork was hers. No babes to show for her effort.

‘There will be others Nolra. What did you find inside?’

‘Her pots and pans and potions were tossed. The scuffle left nothing of use.’ Night dragged her gnarled staff in the mud and prodded Green. ‘Worthless. Agda again you chose poor."

Annis spat and plucked a branch of thorn that clung to her arm. ‘We are always fewer but the other hags will prove a stronger crop.’

‘Why not give chase now under darkness? Recruiting another can wait a while, your hesitancy has always cost us more.’ Night felt her bones quake and wrath fester in her blood. She could lead better. ‘Never are your words and hands far from death sister killer.’

Annis saw and stared hard and a minute came and went before either came down and knew they would need be three again to survive. A coven of two was not a coven and soon could turn to one of none. ‘We will seek another out. We will find another hungry like us. Eku-Orn-Nal keeps three faces and so must we.’’

‘And what if neither finds another sister Agda?’

‘Then no faces shall we have and returned to our homes we will go.’ Annis’ eyes grew cold. ‘Tell me sister Nolra will you perish first or shall I?’

Night said nothing and walked into the swamp to find another like them.

Annis stepped into the hut to see it as Night described and made a seat of a shattered pot. Her hump made her weary from travel. She caught sight of floorboard ripped open and inside she saw nothing and this made her smile. She closed an eye and covered the other with its same warted hand. Elsewhere the other eye opened and saw the swamp and a boat resting under treecrop on a northbound path and found itself balanced in a greyscaled dragonborn’s palm. On its hip sat the head of Green and of snake-cursed woman. The eye was passed to the palm to a purple tinted tiefling with horns curled back over his raven black hair. ‘No,’ Annis-In-The-Hut said. ‘This time I had chose well.’

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The players were riding a high at this point: they had successfully freed their ally, knew the location of the dungeon they were to go to, and were getting a good night’s rest before their journey continued. They set up camp within sight of the forest they would enter eastward along the road, and then turn south from in order to enter back into the edges of the swamp. I have a pretty straightforward way for handling watches during camp - this doesn’t have to be the only way you handle your group stopping in the wilderness for the night, and I’m pretty sure there are better ways to do it, but it’s worked well for me when I have a nighttime scene I want to throw at the players, or want to know who is trying to spot getting ambushed.

No such dangers this time, at least none they’re directly encountering. Pedwar did see a shadow lurking along the edge of the forest - unbeknownst to them this was the archdruid of the local area, Oreena Hollysong. She had shifted to see who was traveling throughout her realm, not uncommon for her, but seeing a band of armed adventurers she thought the better of visiting this night and scampered back into the woods. That wasn’t the only visitor they had, however. The rest of the watch that evening went fine, but elsewhere in places between worlds Olrune had a visitor.

When the party first made their way up to Orlane from Fenskeep, they ran into a hag that was attempting to kidnap and then eat a hobgoblin child. Being the upstanding citizens that they are, they rescued the child and beat the hag into a bloody pulp. None of them were experts on hags, so none foresaw the other consequences that would follow. One poor decision they made was to actually take a charm they found in the green hag’s home - a pendant of an eye. This was an enchanted item of the hag’s coven, but for Sq’gee, with his patron being a god of sight, this was a trophy of their battle.

For the rest of the hag coven, this was their way to locate and harm those who had taken one of their members. Hags are creatures of nefarious intent, and a coven of three is needed to operate as a group. The two remaining hags, a night hag and an annis hag, now had a void to fill - but not before visiting misfortune on the party. 

Night hags are capable of walking through the ethereal plane, which you can think of as a layer of space in the reality of the Material Plane. They also have an ability called Nightmare Haunting, which once per day, can allow them to give a target dreadful visions. If they last at least an hour, the target doesn’t gain benefit from rest and their maximum hit points are reduced by 1d10. If this puts them down to 0, the target dies, and if evil the hag captures their soul. Olrune was the one unfortunate enough to be the target of the night hag’s ire, and the player was distraught to learn these consequences the following morning.

The party was worried about having to deal with the hags revisiting, but I didn’t want to just have the night hag stalk them during the night until they all died. The party could be protected anyway from a magic circle or from the spell protection from evil and good, so with a mark left on the players to heighten the tension I had the hags retreat into the swamp and the party march forth into the forest. That was the only excitement they had for this part of the journey, but I think I caught them by surprise enough with the hags.

The module has a number of random encounter tables you can use, and I did roll dice - it just so happened that they fell without anyone appearing to interrupt the party. That’s part of the thing with random encounters, you can have all these tables and expectations about what could happen and then nothing happens. The tables in N1 are also solid for low level parties, and have different encounters for when they are traversing through the forest, as well as the rushmoors, which forms the second part of the travel. But again, for the group, nothing happened other than a couple of spooky out-of-sight movements in the wilds.

Unlike the map of Orlane, which is printed along the back and front covers of the module, the Dungeon of Explicita Defilus is centerfold. There are two levels, both with different designs and encounters the players could come across, and much more expansive in comparison to Halls Under the Hill the players had encountered. This I think, too, is a signature of older modules - dozens of rooms where not much of significance occurs. I’m looking through the Rime of the Frostmaiden adventure which just came out for 5e, and in later stages and certain quests you can still see similar design to these older adventure maps, but I feel that we don’t quite get the same thing these days as going into a dungeon and collecting loot. There’s a kind of raw appreciation to be had for a time when the dungeon was, ultimately, the point and prize of playing.

I think it’s that difference of design that caught my players by surprise, as they stepped straight into the gaping maw of the dungeon and slid right down the muddy steps into total darkness. I made sure to describe the muddy, slippery wooden stairs at the entrance, but since they didn’t have anything to secure their descent I had each roll a dexterity save, and each fell to the bottom - and were greeted by four human guards, ready to capture interlopers who stepped into their god’s domain.

It went as well as you’d expect a group of characters against challenge rating ¼ or ⅛ creatures. With the guards dispatched and tied up, the party got their first important choice to make, with three directions of travel. Choice is a key point of the Reptile God’s dungeon, and if you take a look there’s a lot of hallway junctions for the players to run into. At this first juncture, the party took the western path, down a long corridor leading to an empty room with a murky brown pool of water, and for the party with killer frogs waiting beneath it. The party was caught by surprise, and pedaled back to the hallway, while the frogs receded likewise.

This ended up being a point of contention with the players. Sq’gee thought that they could try luring them into the hallway, where they could set up front guards and tackle the frogs one at a time. Instead, by having the frogs just go back into the room I had undone what their plan was. I believe the players were expecting that if they, essentially, took aggro from the enemy like you would in a video game it would follow you until it was dead, and I think that leads to another important lesson: your monsters know what they’re doing.

This has been an adage for a while, and I feel that it’s true no matter the type of enemy the players are facing. Whether it’s lowly kobolds or ancient demons, the monsters in your game are smart enough to figure out what they want to do and what’s in their best interest. You can get some real, visceral play going on if you start thinking about, for example, that movement in the game allows you to move, take an action, and then move again. So you could have legions of archers fire upon unsuspecting adventurers, only for them to move back to cover before the players turns.

That’s what I felt made sense for  the frogs. Sure, they’re animals, don’t especially have anything awesome going on, but all the same didn’t see a whole lot of reason to leave their area of comfort just to get stabbed to death by a bunch of pesky adventurers. The party ended up having to tackle the frogs on their turf, and did so without any real trouble. This was, after all, an entryway encounter, all things considered, but it showed that they can’t expect similar behavior across the board, and they shouldn’t either.

Done with being knee deep in sludge the party made their way to the southern portion of the room, which raised up back into a hallway. There was, actually, a secret room to the north that there was some of the cult’s hidden treasure. The party didn’t find it, however, but that’s alright since there wasn’t anything special they needed to find there anyhow. If you’re going to have an item that the players will need to use in order to succeed, I’d say that’s done best by just dropping it along whatever path they take. Whether this is a path determined by requirements in order to advance, or you’re just letting them pick whichever hallway seems best and you throw it into a chest they “happen” to find.

Which is exactly how they discovered the Scroll of Counterspell that I gave them. It wasn’t part of the module, just something I thought would come in handy. If you check out the stats for a Spirit Naga in the 5e monster manual, you’ll see that they come with a pretty hefty set of abilities that could flat out roast your players before they made it to round two. You could lower the health and attacks of the enemy, but if done in excess I find it can lead to a more artificial difficulty. Instead I think it more helpful to come up with something that could lead to a more creative solution by work of the players - they’ll feel rewarded for their own clever thinking and not just because you decided to take it easy on them. Of course, sometimes, you’ll need to take it easy on them when you mess up or underestimate how difficult an encounter will be, but at least that’s something you can easily do on the fly.

Let me get back to how they got the scroll.  At the next juncture, the party headed down the eastern hallway that showed two further locations to go. To the right, was a corner leading back down to the central areas of the dungeon, and the left was a slightly ajar doorway, where voices could be heard on the other side. Pedwar, with his cloak of elvenkind, made his way to the door and confirmed a number of individuals inside. Since he was sure they hadn’t noticed him, he called the party forth and they got the drop on an enemy familiar to them by this point: yuan-ti.

There were three of four snake-skinned humans here, higher level devotees of the Reptile God. Two were assassins and a fighter. The yuan-ti were much tougher than the charmed guards the players had run into earlier, and with good reason. They were called here by blood. In my setting, all of the snake-eqsue creatures have a dormant configuration that requires them to obey a hierarchy when in place. Most of the time, this doesn’t matter, especially since it’s been centuries since the proper rule of dragonkind and their curse-born kin, but when somebody like Explicita Defilus shows up, even if she isn’t yuan-ti, there’s a kind of cultural expectation for the yuan-ti to follow suite. Such is true for the trio here, as well as the yuan-ti they met so long ago on their first trip to Fenskeep.

This information they learned from Jarvis Inigar, the fighter whose life they spared after killing the assassins. It was clear to them that Jarvis was not truly here of his own desires, merely answering the call that ran through his very veins. However, with the other yuna-ti dispatched and the naga’s power sure to wane at the hands of the adventurers, he had an opportunity that the party gave him: to flee, as far as he could from this place. As far as they were concerned, he had answered their questions and had made up for trying to murder them. He also tipped them off to the true nature of Explicita Defilus, as well as a way to get to the lower level of the dungeon.

I don’t think this is how it would’ve played out if I had just run them as normal humans as the module expects. There isn’t mention of any yuan-ti in the module, and I don’t think this early on in the game either outside of the Forgotten Realms setting, but I saw reskinning these enemies into something more thematically focused as an opportunity to good to pass up. Never forget that’s something you can always do with a published adventure, pull it apart and put it back together the way you desire. And, of course, there’s nothing wrong with keeping it the way it is either.

Jarvis did tell them of one other, the cleric, whose room was at the far end of this short hall of a lieutenant’s quarters. In it they found a chest protected by a glyph of warding that the party bypassed, and inside a few handy items: a set of robes, a mace, some potions of cure wounds, and the scroll of counterspell, perfect for the encounter to come.

Which we will talk about next time! Thanks as always for listening. We’re halfway through now talking about the N1: Against the Cult of the Reptile God module, and for me so far running it has been a joy. It gets some more great table moments in the near future, so stick around for those upcoming episodes as well. I also mentioned that I’m reading Rime of the Frostmaiden, and I’m not only reading it, I’m actually running it for my home game right now. It’s been a blast so far, and I’m looking forward to continuing to play it in the coming weeks.

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