Taking a brief break from writing up level 6 of The Hurricane Dungeon to talk about this year's Adventure Site Contest hosted by Coldlight Press. I'm not judging this year (I may have "overstayed my welcome" with such long and in-depth breakdowns of each submission), but I am definitely entering. My submission for the first contest, Etta Capp's Cottage, won a spot in the final publication. Last year's entry, Owlbear Hill, was a bit too ambitious and failed to make the cut.
I just turned in my submission for the third annual contest, though I actually finished it back in August (the contest didn't open until November 1). I've titled this one Ophidian Temple (not great, but precise... I just couldn't land on a better title that didn't sound dumb or trite). It's written for AD&D and intended for 4–6 player characters of 5th to 7th level. The elevator pitch for the adventure reads:
Drums in the jungle herald the return of the snake-men to their evil temple.
Blood sacrifices to their demon-god begin anew.
Who will stand against their evil plans?
The site began as a sketch map I doodled in one of my notebooks many years ago (probably early-2000s). Over the summer, I pulled my box of old, hand-written/drawn game materials out of the attic and scanned everything in: Unfinished adventures, house rules ideas, character sheets and sketches, etc. Forty years worth (sheesh!). This map was in that lot. It's pretty simple and has no liner notes or indications of what it was intended to be. I doubt it was anything more than a random scribble while I was working on something else. It had a pleasing shape though, so I decided to put it to use after many years. I love it that an idea from the past has found a home in the future.
The original map had a few problems I needed to address to make it an adventure worthy of a Classic Adventure Gaming title. For one, it's pretty linear despite the side branches; not very suitable for CAG-style exploration. The layout also creates several bottlenecks for both player characters and enemies that had the potential to make dungeon combat a series of hallway fights between opposing sides of 2–3 combatants. That happens frequently in D&D, and smart players know how to use bottlenecks to funnel large numbers of opponents into a manageable front line, but I wanted to open this one up a bit.
The layout and details I drew suggested a tomb structure of some kind, nestled in the back of a canyon or maybe a deep cave. There's also a throne room, which isn't necessarily out of place. Tombs are a bit limited in terms of monster selection, though, mostly undead, vermin, constructs like living statues and such. As I thought about what I would want to say with yet another tomb dungeon, I came up blank. More accurately, I couldn't find anything interesting to do with it that I (and others) haven't done a million times.
In my Keep on the Badlands sandbox campaign, I had a whole adventure area populated by yuan-ti: A hidden valley filled with crumbling temples, dinosaurs, a giant ape, and terraced gardens subsumed into the rain forest. Unfortunately, my players never quite got to the yuan-ti area and their temple went largely undeveloped (the players gave up two-thirds of the way into the valley).
The idea of the yuan-ti temple stuck with me, though. Yes, it's still trope-y as hell, but I've never done much with this type of setting other than when I ran my version of Dwellers of the Forbidden City back in the 80s. This despite my love of Tarzan novels, movies about jungle exploration and lost cities, and tales of dinosaurs and other monstrous versions of real-world creatures. A formative influence was watching Land of the Lost on Saturday mornings as a kid. The world-building in that show is incredible and would make for a banging campaign area.
With a yuan-ti temple in mind, I dropped the original map scan into Photoshop, added a grid, and then sketched out the contours of the dungeon, fixing some of the issues to make the site more interesting. I also dropped in a few notes about the dungeon contents.
This is almost identical to the final version I used.
As I started reading through the monster descriptions to sort out how I would place and use each encounter, I really fell out of love with the yuan-ti for this site. I never much liked them to begin with; they're not terrible, but they have a high degree of specificity and a fair amount of complexity, which is not something you want in an adventure site with a hard page limit. I planned on using the ophidians from Monster Manual II as minions of the yuan-ti, but then I realized they work perfectly fine as the primary antagonists.
I never paid ophidians much attention before now. My previous 20+ year campaign was firmly rooted in a classic, Northern European/Scandinavian-style fantasy setting, so snake-men were far from my typical antagonists. My 5e Badlands campaign was set in a Southwestern US/Meso-American-style desert region with adjacent jungles, which was perfect for using monsters I'd never really employed before. Even then, I overlooked the ophidians.
I think this has a lot to do with two things: One, the MMII is not very good. There are some standout creatures for sure (though the best of these were introduced in earlier modules), but most are either meh or borderline stupid, or just variations on another monster (the Fiend Folio is full of this as well). The second problem is the artwork. It's boring.
There are four artists listed: Jim Holloway, Harry Quinn, Dave Sutherland, and Larry Elmore (who did the awful cover). I honestly don't like Elmore's art style, and the way that ogrish-looking creature wields his halberd is completely backward. I attribute Elmore's art with the decline of AD&D (contemporaneously, not causally) and so it triggers a certain revulsion in me, perhaps unfairly. Same with Harry Quinn. His stuff is just ugly and uninspiring. I didn't care much for DCS's art back in the day, although I pored over every inch of his illustrations, but now I have a great deal of respect for his giant-sized contribution to the look of the game (and modern fantasy, for that matter). His work in the MMII is not his best, however.
Jim Holloway accounts for maybe half of the illustrations. I love his character stuff and he has a great eye for setting up a (usually comedic) scene that still looks like classic D&D, ridiculous situations that you could see happening to player characters. His creature designs, on the other hand, leave a lot to be desired. They're not bad, per se; just bland and static, lacking any of the dyamism or creativity in his character illustrations. Behold: The Ophidian. *Yawn.*
He looks like he just got out of bed. Yeah, it's a snake with arms, big deal. It's so dull, your eyes sort of wander over it and then move on. He should be coiled upright, weapon and shield raised, baring his fangs dripping with poison, setting his beady, soulless eyes on his prey. Instead, we get this and it sucks. I imagine these guys were rushed by the production deadline, underpaid (or not paid), and just DGAF because the company was falling apart around them. Still, what might have been otherwise remains a tantalizing dream.
In any case, the ophidian! It's not bad at all. They're natural minions with 3–4 hit dice, so in the same upper class as creatures like jackalweres, wererats, and ogres. They have natural armor the equivalent of mail, and can use weapons and shields to boost their combat numbers. Their bite attack isn't that great, but an extra 1–3 damage attack is nothing to dismiss, either. Their venom inflicts a lycanthropy-type disease that slowly turns the victim into an ophidian over the course of 2–3 weeks. (It was this mutability that gave me the idea for the big boss: A snake-ape hybrid demon.) The disease is easily curable though, so unless it goes untreated, it's not too big a long-term threat (and a non-existent one if the adventure is played only as a one-shot). Still, it's a neat idea that could spin into all sorts of complications for the party in a long-form campaign.
That's basically it: Snakes with weapons. Perfectly simple for what I want to do here. Moving on, when I think of jungles, I always think of giant ants, so they're in as well. D&D giant ants are no joke. I talk about this in another blog post for the Hurricane Dungeon. The 3 HD giant soldier ants have a poison sting that is poorly written in the Monster Manual and completely mistranslated in OSRIC, but even the 2 HD workers can be nasty in numbers. An unfortunate wandering encounter of just two worker ants chewed through a 1st- and 2nd-level party in my Sinister Secret of Zenopus' Tower campaign, resulting in a near-TPK.
I also wanted a plant monster of some kind that wasn't a yellow musk creeper or shambling mound (both of which are present in the Hurricane Dungeon levels). There are the weird flowers and the wolf-in-sheep's-clothing from S3 in the MMII, but I remembered there being a couple of other plant creatures as well. While flipping through the book, I came across the mandragora (which I am committed to using somewhere as it's kinda neat) and the mantrap just below it, which turned out to be precisely what I wanted. Neither plant creature is illustrated (another frequent art problem in the MMII), so it's no wonder they went overlooked by me all these years.
Using plant creatures in subterranean settings is always challenging for a designer without resorting to a hand-wavey magical solution. In this case, I created a collapse in the ceiling through which the jungle has entered the complex, allowing for an organic (and logical) scenario to unfold. Another recurring problem with plant monsters is their lack of mobility, making them easy targets for missile fire and spell casting, so I threw in a few giant boring beetles to make this encounter harder tactically. Boring beetles are most certainly not boring, however; they are jaw-droppingly deadly with 5 HD, plate armor carapace, and a mandible attack that does frikkin 5–20 damage. One of these nearly demolished our party of 4th-to-6th-level characters in Prince's campaign.
They are also an anomaly. Of all the giant beetle species, they are the only ones that include any treasure type at all, and theirs is a doozy! A combined C, R, S, T on the treasure tables is comparable to a low-grade dragon's hoard, with mid-range chances for lots of gold, platinum, gems, jewelry, potions, and scrolls, and modest chances for copper, silver, and electrum coins and a couple of magic items to boot. Our group in Prince's campaign stumbled across a beetle in its lair and made out like bandits. The beetle's description doesn't say why this is, though it mentions a communal intelligence in some cases. My theory is that this is a misplaced treasure type, a publishing error that belongs somewhere else. The only creature with a similar type is the triton (C, R, S, T, X).
I picked two other monsters to reinforce the serpentine theme of the place. The necrophidius, or "death worm," is an interesting creature. It looks like a human skull with fangs on top of a skeletal snake's body, but it's not an undead; it's a golem-like construct created to serve as either assassins or guardians. I've used them on several occasions and, while they might not be that tough physically, they are quite deadly. They have a hypnotizing effect that renders victims who fail their save helpless. On top of that, their venomous bite paralyzes, which also renders victims helpless. It doesn't say this in the monster's text description, but I added a reminder in the adventure key that their bite against a helpless victim, according to the rules, would be equivalent to an assassination check on the assassin's table. This creature is perfectly capable of one-shot killing any of its victims. That's nasty.
The other choice was a couatl. I've always enjoyed putting little places within an adventure in which the party can get some sort of boost or helpful aid. I hid the couatl in a secret treasure vault and trapped it inside a "good" version of an iron flask. That seems like the sort of prisoner an evil snake-man cult would keep. If the party frees her, she can cast some healing/recovery spells for them. I left open the possibility that a Lawful Good character could persuade her to help their fight, but they would have to be of the Lawfully-goodest type and their current situation would need to be dire for me (the couatl) to intervene like that.
Finally, I created the main antagonists: A snake-man priestess, who is mostly just a human cleric with snake-like features including scaly skin (natural AC) and poison fangs, and the snake-ape demon "god" who isn't present unless the party dicks around and allows the priestess to complete her summoning ritual.
Speaking of that, I included several environmental effects in the temple as well. One of these is the ever-present sound of frantic drumming and droning chants by the cultists as they work to bring forth their demonic master. While the party is present, the pace and intensity of the drumming/chanting increases, signalling to the PCs that they better get a move on. The players won't know it exactly, but they have 24 turns (4 hours) to put an end to this or the snake-ape demon arrives in the main temple and will add to the difficulty of the final fight.
Another effect is that the temple is filled with clouds of herbal incense being burned in copious amounts in the summoning areas. It smells unpleasant but isn't harmful in the outer areas. As the party gets closer to the central chamber, however, the smoke's narcotic effects can overcome them after just ten minutes. This will require the party to either figure out a way to remove the smoke, or beat down the cultists in less than 10 rounds. Otherwise, poison saves to avoid falling unconscious are on the menu. Anyone who stays unconscious in the smoke will eventually die of an overdose. The smoke stimulates the snake-men but is not toxic to them.
A third effect is the pollen of the mantrap plant. It is so fragrant and pleasing that it nullifies the smell of incense in the chamber, and has a hypnotizing effect as well. Victims who fail their saves are compelled to approach the main plant, which then envelops and digests them in its leafy fronds. Lovely.
I placed several traps also: A spear trap in a central hallway and paralyzing darts from the walls in another chamber. Both traps are triggered by stepping on certain floor tiles, and the snake-men know which ones to avoid. The third trap is in the necrophidius' lair, and its a simple tripwire that closes and locks the entrance door to split the party and allow the necrophidius to more easily kill its isolated prey.
I don't recall how I selected the treasure. After so many random stocking rolls made for the Hurricane Dungeon, it all kind of blends together. I'm certain I chose the Staff of the Python to reinforce the snake theme, and maybe gave the priestess the Cloak of Protection, but the others feel randomly rolled. Who knows? I was very generous with the money, however, though much of it is hidden and/or tricky to obtain.
Players who defeat all the monsters and find all the treasure can expect to net about 175–250,000 xp, depending on how much magic treasure they keep or sell. This is around 35–50k each for a party of 5 PCs, which is enough to go from 4th to 5th level, or 5th to 6th level, and a fair chunk of the way from 6th to 7th.
You can download the PDF here.
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