Lurid Lairs: Owlbear Den

While the Gloomy Forest is a dense, old-growth woodland, it also lies in the highlands of Brackleborn province. The underlying terrain consists of steep-sided hills, with deep valleys running between them. Climbing the hills involves rigorous activity that eats up valuable daylight, meaning the party has tended to follow the maze of gullies, culverts, and channels that characterize the forest at ground level. They haven't quite realized how many areas and encounters are up on the hillsides that they've simply wandered beneath without ever realizing it.

Some of these encounter areas are lairs, the denizens of which populate the wandering encounter tables. If the players can locate a lair and wipe it out, then that creature type might disappear entirely from the tables. While a lair persists, it also generates an additional encounter check if the party wanders within a certain distance of it. Thus, wiping out a lair of monsters can have long-reaching exploration benefits.

I've sprinkled lots of these encounter lairs across the Gloomy Forest map: peryton nests; an awakened grove full of intelligent animals, plants, and myconids; a bullywug village; an ancient cemetery; an ettercap nest; etc. 

One such lair is the following owlbear den, a bit of content I cribbed from my old Frozen North campaign. With a few minor flavor changes from a Viking-style setting to a European/fey one, the content works just as well here. Reusing adventures is something I'd always avoided in the past...no idea why. It saves so much time and effort, and let's me revisit the adventure with a fresh perspective. With the right changes, I've even reused adventures for the original players and they didn't catch on.

As with most monsters in the 5e Monster Manual (particularly the classic monsters), I've had to de-neuter their archetypal special attacks. I don't know why 5e took away some of the core monster abilities (like the owlbear’s classic hug attack, or the rust monster’s ability to eat magic weapons and armor...it just makes no sense). I digress; my owlbears will hug the crap out of you. Changes to the core monster are described below.

Owlbear Den

This is the lair of a sleuth of owlbears—(8) “sows,” (6) juveniles, and a massive “boar.”

The Heroes of Brackleborn -- Game-Play Report (Sessions 4-6)

My regular group only meets from 7-10-ish PM and we always have dinner along with it, so we often only get an hour or so of actual gameplay in and not a whole lot happens. I've condensed the next three gameplay reports into one post to save time and knock out several sessions to catch up to the present-day campaign (the following sessions occurred in May, 2020.)

Previously...

After the party came to the local lord’s attention, he tasked them with entering the Gloomy Forest and rescuing his daughter, Emelia, who has been kidnapped by bandits. The party accepted his mission and set off for the Gloomy Forest along the Gold Road where they encountered a trio of bandits accosting a local hunter. Making short work of the thugs, the party captured one and learned some info about the bandit leadership.

The Heroes of Brackleborn -- Game-Play Report (Session 3)

Previously...

The heroes entered a series of rat tunnels and confronted a “rat-man,” who managed to escape. After rescuing the innkeeper’s son, the party finds some loot as well as clues to a sinister plan, but they are left with more questions than answers.

Session Events

The party returns to the burned-out building to further investigate the clues. There, they suss out a plot to poison the town. The two sealed barrels in the cellar turn out to contain liquid poison — a LOT of it. There are four tunnel exits in the old cellar; the party knows that one leads to the cellar of the inn, while a second tunnel leads to a hidden exit in a culvert on the edge of town. Checking out the other two tunnels, the party follows the third one to a hole that opens deep in the shaft of the town well, just above the water line. The fourth tunnel forks in two directions: one heads toward the bakery and the other toward the keep. Both passages end abruptly, indicating that the tunneling was still in progress.