DMDC 13 - The Dungeon of the Reptile God II

The Party Without A Significant Identifier Yet is back with more exploration of the dungeon of Explicita Defilus! We're getting close to finishing this quest, since it's more inevitable than eventual that they succeed. Unless I've just been setting this up this whole time to talk about how I wiped the party because of my own knack for underestimating encounter deadliness.

Bad move on my part if that's true.

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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 continuing our playthrough of the N1: Against the Cult of the Reptile God AD&D module by Douglas Niles. This is the next episode of this sub-series, and part two of the dungeon delve of the module, so if you’re up-to-date you’re in the right place! Otherwise head back a couple episodes to catch up with what’s going on. We last left our heroes exploring the hallways beneath the swamp where the vile spirit naga, Explicita Defilus, plots all her machinations. They interrogated a yuan-ti who revealed the true nature of the villain they seek, and now it’s up to them to finish what they came here to do: free the people of Orlane of her influence.

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What is there to say of blood? Plenty. The Idoans, those dragonborns as they are commonly called, say that when their god Ido fell from the heavens upon the earth the races of dragonkind were made. From it’s splintered scales were the first of the dragon lords, high rulers of wisdom and strength to guide those born of it’s blood, their “lesser” kin, to prosperity and fortune. However, even the term lesser is incorrect, although perhaps the closest we have in our Ro’elnan speech to use. As anyone who has spent time conversing with dragonkind could tell you, they do not view any within their origin grouping to be above or below others, for as they are able to be reborn in earthen clumps to experience life anew one soul can spend a life a kobold servant and the next an ascended scion.

At least, that is their belief. Countless scholars have dedicated their lives to researching Idoan regeneration. It is largely regarded as truth that dragonkind are born in earthen mounds, leading some credence to their mythological origins, but beyond further examination by animancers (a school of study neglected entire by the Academia de Capital) there is little evidence to give these much credence in the field of magical studies.

There is one unifying belief between all dragonkind as well, which is to say the utter loathing they hold for their “impure relatives.” This includes yuan-ti, naga, and other creatures closer to snakes than dragons in resemblance, but whose origins similarly go back to blood studies according to the archival records. As anyone who has spent time conversing with dragonkind could tell you, these creatures and all of their kind are thieves of their lineage.

The prevailing theory has to do with the studies of one archmage of the Idoan Empire, Nhur Athemon, who is suspected to have ruled the southern reaches of this continent somewhere around 800 BA, or Before Ascension (of the Prism Wizard, naturally). Where he retrieved his subjects is unknown, but the story goes that Nhur Athemon experimented with blood samples of various dragon species on humanoid races, to varying results. The Dragon Lords of the time period took it upon themselves to cleanse Nhur Athemon’s keep of all the research he has conducted, so there is naught to verify any theories we students with an interest may have concocted in the late evenings imbibing coral bone and pacswill. It doesn’t help that the fortress that once served as Athemon’s home, Fenskeep, is now rife with brigands and criminals.

There is no denying that these particular creatures are real. Yuan-ti and naga both have reported sightings in the Southern  Area, now called the Drifting Isles. Given the current political climate I doubt I will see any advancement of the study done in my lifetime, and will simply contend myself with traveler’s tales of dangerous hisses and rattling scales in the dark nights in that swampland.

Siri Keenfall, Lady of House Keenfall, Amateur Arcane Historian

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The dungeon of Explicita Defilus is a big dungeon. It won’t surprise you to learn that my players don’t explore all of it, nor should they feel obligated to. I know that there’s a nagging sensation in the brains of at least one of them that compels them to want to try and explore every possible nook and cranny, and if that’s a party that you have feel free to accommodate them. But, if you so happen to have a group that doesn’t need to know every tidbit of information about the dungeon and is happy to continue along a critical path, that’s just as well - what I think is most important when it comes to dungeon exploration is the assurance of player agency. They’re going to look at the maps and the graph paper and wonder about what danger is lurking around the undrawn corners and doorways. So let them wonder, let them discover, and pick what they wish to find out about.

The party didn’t want to find out what was elsewhere in the dungeon right now though. After a long day’s trek and a couple of rough encounters they were ready for a well-earned nights rest, but as the die fell we knew that wouldn’t be the case. The random encounters in N1 rely on a roll for a d6 on “every third turn” but I don’t think I’d run the module this way or even use something like that down the road. I feel like these old-school modules are already chock full of encounters, so I don’t need to worry about them running into trouble. Instead I just had them do a check while resting.

They had some good thoughts too: they wanted to set up illusions in front of the door, making the wall appear as if it were stone. Unfortunately for them, no one had that capability, so they opted to just rest in the front room. They were interrupted by a group of giant lizards who came over after all the commotion with the yuan-ti. Not a difficult fight, but the group decided resting out in a mostly open space was a bad away. They ducked into one of the back rooms the lieutenants were using instead, and were able to regain their coveted hit points.

They set off from their down the southern passage, tracing along the wall until they came upon the secret door that Jarvis had told them about. He had been telling them the truth as well - they found it at the end of the passage, and a raft big enough for their group to get across the crocodile pool. There were no doors in this room, and a shallow pool with crocodiles in its depths. Luckily for the party, the crocs didn’t disturb their boat as they made it across. They stayed in it as well - had they decided to disturb the waters, it would’ve become a much more exciting encounter.

They came to the intersection that was the end of the first layer of the dungeon. One direction  led to a muddy den, a tight and wet lair they weren’t keen on exploring. This actually had a giant weasel protecting treasures they could’ve collected, but instead they chose to explore the other directions. There wasn’t anything down one, just a dead end, so they took the longer hallway that led to a set of barred doors. On the other side, a familiar enemy - troglodytes. No need to spare innocents here. The troglodytes were laid low in a few rounds, in what was largely an empty room with a few scattered coins.

Before we move onto the next room I wanted to visit the eastern side of the dungeon, which went completely unexplored by the party. If they wanted, they absolutely could have gone back across the crocodile pool and took a look at what dangers awaited them. When you boil it down, the dungeon just has three different hallways you can take that meet up towards the end of their mid-sections, and then after crossing the pool leads almost directly to the lower level. I think this is a great dungeon! No matter the path they pick they’re bound to run into some danger. On the eastern path there was a green slime, rooms of the human cult members, and some other rooms containing the stuff they needed to keep living down here. At the end of it all, a pseudo-boss fight with a harpy, with a great horde of gems for the party to collect should they prove victories.

That’s not what happened though, and that’s ok. If you see content that excites you, you can always drop hints to your players about what awaits for them to explore in a particular direction, but don’t feel bad if they decide, “NAH MAN I WANNA GO FIGHT THESE FROGS.” What’s important is that these pieces of the adventure came together for the party to experience and craft the story. Plus there’s nothing to say you can’t use the same ideas here on a dungeon later on, that you could even create! Once you’ve seen a dungeon and got a good idea of the layout you want to do, all you really need to do is jam those rooms chock full of the stuff you like. You can get some great studying done by looking at other dungeons, and eventually all that knowledge just collects in an oversized file in your brain to start making your own. Plus it’s just fun to make dungeons.

Let’s move onto the second level though. This section opens up with a new description. These aren’t carved but muddy tunnels, here there’s timber supporting the ceiling. Trickling water is accompanied by a horrid stench. It even comes along with a grosser table of wandering monsters, should your party decide to spend some extra time exploring. That’s just as useful a tool as overland random tables, you can give each layer of a dungeon its unique flavor by customizing not just the contents of a room and the descriptions thereof, but by also what creatures they can expect to run into.

By some strange turn of events, the party ended up going directly to the most direct path leading to Explicita Defilus. There’s a back entrance on the other side of the floor requiring them to go through anywhere from two to seven different rooms, complete with a boat that leads into the naga’s lair. The alternate approach is much more direct: a series of finished rooms that end in a secret doorway leading straight to the front entrance of her lair

The second level brings the players to a large, mud caver. A set of stepping stones show them a path forward from here, but even then there’s three ways out. Far to the left is a giant spider’s lair (you can detect a recurring theme) and if the group proceeds in a northwesterly fashion it’ll lead to a series of monster rooms and a subset of caverns with a veritable troglodyte clan. Like I said earlier though, the party ended up avoiding these more dangerous locales by cutting right from the entrance, southeast, and then left at an early fork taking to them to the finished rooms of this floor, starting with the aptly named “Chamber of the Dead.”

I’m looking at the script now and I figure it’s a good time to talk about what I do for leveling up and XP tracking - flat out, I don’t. Every creature the party fights has an XP value associated that can be divided and awarded to players, but it’s not something I do at my table these days. If anything I just opt to do milestone leveling, so that if they hit a particular story beat or mastery over their current skill set, I’ll have them level up. That’s not to say that crawling through all of those dangerous rooms on the alternate path wouldn’t have given them some kind of tangible reward, or perhaps an early level up prior to their showdown with Explicita Defilus, I just thought nows as good a time as any to tell you that you don’t have to worry about tracking experience points down to the smallest value, or you can even just reward them “chunks” by finishing quests. Something like the equivalent XP reward when to get back to town with the naga’s head in tow.

Which right now, they’re hoping to do. The only creature in this room, swollen from moisture that permeates throughout the entire floor, is a central pillar smelling of death. Upon closer inspection, the party finds a coffer corpse. Visually these things resemble zombies, but are the result of failed or incomplete death rituals. They’re far deadlier, but also not included as part of the default set of monsters in the 5e Monster Manual! There’s two ways you can quickly solve this and we’re going to cover both.

The first is a quick internet search. In this day and age, there’s literally hundreds of resources you can pull from, whether from the DMs Guild or other 3rd party retailers, that have their own supplemental monster manuals. There’s also free stuff you can find! If you do a quick search of “coffer corpse 5e”, within the first page you’ll get some homebrew options in varying levels of challenge for you to pick.

However, if you want to get creative, you can easily do this yourself by adjusting a few of the stats on a default monster’s block. You can think of it as adding a template, like the way the MM talks about adding the shadow dragon template to any of the dragon options  you could throw at your group. So let’s start with the base zombie, which wouldn’t be a challenge for a second or third level party. I recommend giving it a higher armor class (12 to 14 should be good), double or even triple it’s health if you have a particularly deadly group of players, and have it deal more damage. You could also take an ability from a different monster to give to our coffer corpse zombie, but let’s try taking the ability from the manual. Give it something like this: when the coffer corpse takes more than 6 damage in a single round, it falls as if dead. Let the players act on their turns, without signaling really that the encounter is over. On the coffer corpse’s next turn, it gets back, and have everyone roll a DC14 Wisdom save against being Frightened, as if casting the Fear spell, and any character that succeeds doesn’t have to make that save again for the next 24 hours. The same rule applies as above, but now you’ll have players beating the hell out of it to stay down, or maybe it only does that fluke once. You could also give it an ability that once it scores a hit on a character, that character is grappled, and the coffer corpse gets to do an extra 2d4 damage on every subsequent turn that the target is still grappled.

See? Super easy! You do this once, you’re gonna be able to do it a thousand times, whether it’s because you’re running a module from a different edition or the situation your players got themselves into doesn’t quite fit the stat block you find out of the book. Plus you now have a starting point to make your own entirely homebrew monsters. There’s some pattern to the math that we don’t have to get into now that, ultimately, will start becoming clear to you so you know when to adjust an encounter for the players - sometimes, even in the middle of a fight.

The following room contained the Cells of the Doomed, where a number of prisoners were kept. One of them, described as a prosperous merchant, I gave a “big city air” about him, unhappy to be here and unhappy to be out in the countryside in general. The party didn’t take too kindly to this, and ended up blackmailing him to help them upgrade their ship down the road if they ever took it to the city he was from, Ukesh. Spoilers, they go to Ukesh. They tell the prisoners they’ll come back once they deal with the naga and break the charm she has placed over the surrounding area.

It’s in the next room the party   meets the fourth and final lieutenant of the yuan-ti cadre: Garath Primo, an evil cleric more than happy to make these undead thralls for his master. There was no nuance of morality here, no attempts at converting one side to the other. I grabbed the priest NPC sheet from the back of the Monster Manual, and it was initiative. I also threw in the wight that was supposed to be in the next room to this encounter, just to make it less one-sided against the cleric. A few rounds later, the players had thwarted the snakeman and his sinister assitant, and proceeded to the Altar of Evil in the long row of rooms, where the secret entrance to Explicita Defilus’ lair was hidden behind the statue of the reptile god. I didn’t expect them to guess or expect that right off the bat, but they certainly did. With a bit of prying along the altar, they revealed the hidden passage that led them straight to their serpentine foe, coiled atop her horde of treasures taken from her victims.

And we’re going to leave it right there! There’s a few more notes I wanted to make about this encounter and how I had set up some things that led into it, so in the next episode we’ll wrap up the printed text in the module and how I had an aftermath celebration for the party once they got back to Orlane. If you’ve been keeping up and are keen to look, the Spirit Naga challenge rating of 8, much higher than the players are expected to be capable of handling, but I think the way I approached it will give you a good idea about how you can plan for similar scenarios in your games without having to just adjust the math on the fly.

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