The Sinister Secret of Zenopus' Tower –The Adventure

I recently formatted all my notes into a PDF format suitable for use at your table. This is 100% a fan-made conversion of existing work with bits of my own creation sprinkled throughout. I make no copyright claims to any of the source material. I worked it all up for my home campaign, but the originals remain popular adventures to this day. If someone wants to use my work as inspiration for their own versions, feel free.

A special shout-out to Zach Howard at Zenopus Archives. His enthusiasm for the Sample Dungeon in Holmes Basic, and his own homebrew expansion of it, inspired me to develop this adventure location for my players and include it in this adaptation. Be sure to visit his site to see the Forgotten Smugglers' Cave in its original glory.

>>The Sinister Secret of Zenopus' Tower for Labyrinth Lord

>>The Sinister Secret of Zenopus' Tower for OSRIC/AD&D

>>The Adventure Maps

>>Things to Do in Town Handout 

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Thus far in my campaign, the players have mostly cleared the manor house and explored much of the estate grounds. They fought pirates in the manor basement and discovered the fate of the missing alchemist. After a tragic expedition into the naga's lair below the bluff, they delved for a bit on the dungeon level (via the garden entrance).

Most recently, they found a boat pilot willing to take them into one of the sea caves. There, they battled a giant octopus, fought some more pirates, freed Lemunda the Lovely from captivity, and found a tunnel entrance into the bluff. They also noted a flooded tunnel to the east, accessible via a shallow shelf at low tide. At first, they thought to go north, further into the sea cave level where they assumed pirates would be waiting. Instead, they decided to take the opportunity of low tide to venture east.

They soon entered a side cavern divided in halves by a rushing river of fresh water that emptied into the sea cave nearby. The cave was protected by a giant crab, hidden beneath the sand, which got the drop on the party but failed to hit with its pincers. Upon defeating the crab, the party found a long stairway leading up to the dungeon level, where they entered a room with a sundial, a strange bronze mask, and a riddle. Figuring out the riddle, they caused the mask to speak and offer an answer to a single question. They asked about the "Philosopher's Stone" they found in the alchemist's secret cellar chamber in the manor, but the mask made no reference to the party's stone, speaking only of what the "legends" say about such an item.

Leaving this room, they next came into a crypt chamber with a dirt floor and smashed-open coffins. Within, a pair of ghouls dressed in finery feasted on the bloody entrails of one of the thaumaturgist's unfortunate goons. Horrified, the party attacked, but within moments two of their party had succumbed to the undead's paralyzing touch. Things looked grim for a moment, but after a flurry of well-placed blows, both ghouls lay dead.

Searching the various coffins and burial niches turned up a small fortune in gems, jewelry, and old coins. In one of the niches, the party found a tunnel that had been clawed to the surface, the exit of which the party had already discovered previously while exploring the garden cemetery. Dragging their paralyzed comrades out of the hole, the group returned to town, but from their discussions it sounds like they want to keep exploring the dungeon level and will return via the cemetery (they have more questions for the mask).

The Sinister Secret of Zenopus' Tower – Part 7: The Village of Saltmarsh

Seeing as how I wrote this series of posts in a disorganized manner, it is only fitting that I end it with the starting point—the village of Saltmarsh, the party's home base while they tackle the series of modules U1–U3. Curiously, though the module describes the "little town" as playing a "pivotal role" in the series, with a "web of intrigue" that affects the party's progress, the village is given short shrift in the module's manuscript.

Instead of presenting the village and its inhabitants, the module hands the task of designing the entire thing to the DM, with advice to draw a map, establish the local businesses, and set up the town's council (and its conspirators). Some may see the omission of these details as a flexible advantage for homebrew campaigns, allowing the DM to put his stamp on the adventure; others may see it as a failure of the adventure designer to do their job. It's why you paid money for the module, right?

Interestingly, the basic "plot" of Saltmarsh is similar to the Sample Dungeon's "plot" of Portown (smugglers using nearby sea caves to run their operation, in collusion with local bribed officials), so those two pieces clicked together very well, along with new details from Zach Howard's Forgotten Smugglers' Cave adjunct. I took the background information from those three sources and crafted my own background "plot" to account for the various adventure areas of the site. 

I started the campaign without a map of the village. Instead, I gave the party a handout list of the main buildings in town along with a brief description and details about what can be acquired/accomplished in each place. This was my tabletop group's first experience with playing early-edition D&D (Advanced Labyrinth Lord in this case), so I explained that town wasn't really a place for adventure but more of an abstract base for their characters to rest and reset between sessions.

The Sinister Secret of Zenopus' Tower – Part 6: The Naga's Lair

 

 

This penultimate post represents the final piece of the kilodungeon site. It uses the dungeon portion of the original AD&D adventure: N1 Against the Cult of the Reptile Gods. I'm actually not a big fan of the module as published. It's very railroady, and the cult activities in the village of Orlane are meh. The actual naga's lair with the troglodytes is pretty well done, however, and it snaps perfectly into the overall site concept. 

Its inclusion also gives me a third "faction boss" to use as a counterweight to the two magic-users competing over the site. She is gathering her forces to first take over the Sea Caves level and expel the pirates, then take control of the Dungeon level to capture its wealth and power. Once she accomplishes all that, she will send her enthralled human minions to subvert and undermine local authorities, and take over the human settlements in this desolate region on the periphery of civilization.

The entrance to this site is down in the swamp below the manor bluff, but anyone looking off the cliff can potentially catch a glimpse of the berm. The entrance can be reached either by sea or by scaling down the steep slope to the NE. There is also a back way into the dungeon via the Sea Caves level. In fact, several of the naga's minions are enthralled pirates who were captured in those caves by her troglodyte agents.

I got rid of everything in the module up to the naga's lair, though I kept some of the swamp description and its wandering encounter table. I added two other entries—a mud viper and 1–3 giant lizards—to make for an even six encounters, and I renamed the module's 1 HD "giant leech" (AD&D) to a "huge leech" instead (Labyrinth Lord's giant leeches are 6 HD creatures).

The Sinister Secret of Zenopus' Tower – Part 5: The Estate Grounds

Although this is Part 5, the following material is actually the third section of my dungeon notes. I had no real plan going into this series of posts so I didn't consider a logical order of information before diving in with the manor house in Part 1. In my writeup, section 1 is the Intro and Background, section 2 is the Village of Saltmarsh, section 3 is the Estate Grounds and Manor House, section 4 is the Dungeon level, section 5 is the Sea Caves level, section 6 is the Forgotten Caves level, and section 7 is the Naga Lair.

With the Estate Grounds, my intention was to create areas of interest in the property around the Manor House, mainly to provide a more organic entrance into the overall site and to facilitate multiple entrances into the various dungeon levels. The map of the grounds started as a "sketch" in my head that I transferred straight onto the battlemat during the opening session. (Ignore the compass rose in this image; I flipped the site's orientation after this point.)

Original Estate Map (scale = ~50' hexes)

The Sinister Secret of Zenopus' Tower – Part 4: The Forgotten Caves

Finally getting back to this series after reviewing thirty submissions for Ben Gibson's Adventure Site Contest 2, including my own submission. No winner(s) have been announced yet as the final reviews continue to trickle in, but I'll certainly post the big announcement when it happens (should be soon).

In Part 1, Part 2, and Part 3 of this series, I described several of the major pieces of a kilodungeon I smashed together from various old adventures: specifically the Manor House and Sea Caves from U1 Sinister Secret of Saltmarsh and the Sample Dungeon from the Holmes Basic Rulebook. Part of the Sea Caves level borrowed a few rooms from a third dungeon—Zach Howard's excellent Forgotten Smugglers' Caves. This post will cover the remainder of that dungeon, which is situated between the Zenopus Dungeon level and the Sea Caves.

Since Zach has already written up this entire thing on his own blog, I don't want to repeat too much here if I can help it. Instead, I have received the author's permission to reference his material so I'll simply cover the things I changed or added to suit my own purposes. I didn't change very much of the content, as the adventure is already well-designed; I simply reworked the map to fit the other levels, and integrated the material into my backstory of the site, tweaking a few things here and there to make it better fit the overall dungeon concept.

The original Forgotten Smugglers' Caves (FSC) is an add-on to Holmes' Sample Dungeon, taking the details of the smugglers' cave and imagining a whole hideout, abandoned long ago due to a curse perhaps laid upon the caves by Zenopus himself. The Sample Dungeon sits below the seaside village of Portown in the original writeup, and characters can find info about the FSC there.

Adventure Site Contest 2 REVIEW: The Pit of the Muirneag

The Pit of the Muirneag

Author: Stooshie & Stramarsh
System: Labyrinth Lord (Advanced Edition Companion)
Party Size: 4–6
Level Range: 5–8

The Pit of the Muirneag (‘Beautiful Girl’) is in a rugged gorse-filled and lightly wooded area that sees snow for 7-8 months of the year. The pit was a holy shrine dedicated to the earth goddess Muirneag as it was a bountiful source of gems, and the goddess gave her people the Iron Egg. Last winter a calamity befell them and the holy site was attacked. The reports say that white demons emerged from a blizzard and slaughtered all, taking the riches for themselves. Recently however trappers and hunters have went (sic) missing as have some brave traders who use the nearby trail as a shortcut across the hills.

The referee's background provides further information as to what's going on here: The shrine to the earth-goddess was a facade. The site is actually dedicated to Ogremoch, one of the Elemental Princes of Evil (Earth) from the Fiend Folio. The events of last winter were precipitated by an archmage named Sloop, along with a mother-and-son pair of white dragons, who attacked the shrine with the intention of stealing the shrine's relic, an item known as the Iron Egg. When the archmage realized the false shrine was actually an elemental cult, he nabbed the egg and fled, bailing on the white dragons who then took up residence in the sacked ruins (I think). 

The Sinister Secret of Zenopus' Tower – Part 3: The Sea Caves

In Part 1, I reconfigured the Manor House from U1 Sinister Secret of Saltmarsh. In Part 2, I adapted the Sample Dungeon from Holmes Basic. Next, I took the excised map sections from both and created a Sea Caves level. Part of this level (the explored part) serves as the pirate base. Another dungeon level—derived from Zach Howard's excellent Forgotten Smugglers' Caves—exists between the Dungeon level and the Sea Caves, and I incorporated several areas from that into the Sea Caves level as well. I'll cover the full FSC level in an upcoming post.

By this point in the campaign, I had a pretty solid sketch map of the bluff's macro-area, showing the exterior orientations/positions of the house, the tower, the gardens and estate wall, and the not-so-obvious areas such as the sea cave entrances and a "muddy mound" in the salt swamp below the bluff. 

More importantly, by the time I got to mapping out the Sea Caves level, I had already shared the sketch map with the players, who did a really good job scouting out the whole area before delving too deep. This locked in the positions of certain sea cave entrances that had to connect with the finished Dungeon level map.

To start with, I took the bluff coastline from my sketch map and aligned it to the 4:1" grid on a blank Photoshop canvas (24" x 24", 7200 x 7200px). Then I took the sea cave segments I carved out of U1, the Sample Dungeon, and FSC, and aligned their grids to my map grid. I then reoriented and repositioned the segments to fit the bluff layout. 

I wanted the U1 sea caves to point west, to match the repositioned west wing of the manor from which the pirates signal their ship and guide the longboats into shore. I also increased the map scale for the U1 piece from the original 5' per square to 10', same as with the manor maps, to open the spaces up a bit. Green arrows indicate where the original sea caves will connect with the sea.

The Sinister Secret of Zenopus' Tower – Part 2: The Dungeon Level

In Part 1, I rearranged the old manor house from U1 The Sinister Secret of Saltmarsh to serve as the anchor point for the rest of the other adventure maps. Next, I took the original map from the Sample Dungeon in Holmes basic and sized it to the same 4:1" grid I used for the manor map. The grid in the Sample Dungeon map is hand-drawn and inaccurate, so I aligned the central vault (area A) to the accurate grid and adjusted all the passages and rooms that branch out from it. Then I placed an overlay of the manor outline over area A.

Original Sample Dungeon Map with Manor Overlay (scale = 10')

To fit the geographic location in my campaign world chosen for this site, the Sea Caves need to face south instead of west. To make that change and keep the basic flow of the dungeon, I also need to reposition rooms H, I, K, L, and M, as well as the connection from room J. 

The Sinister Secret of Zenopus' Tower – Part 1: The Manor House

I started running a 5e campaign for my girlfriend and three of our friends who were interested in trying out D&D. I was already pretty disenchanted with 5e and planned to run Basic D&D for them, but then two of them purchased the 5e Players Handbook before I could establish my intention. Since I was already running a 5e campaign online and knew the ruleset well, I just started up a 5e tabletop campaign for them.

By the time they got to 5th-6th level, however, they were becoming overwhelmed by the number of options and character-build decisions they had to contend with. So I began explaining the gameplay of  earlier versions of D&D, similar concepts without the constant decision trees and build mechanics. They wanted to try it out, so I brought their 5e campaign to a conclusion and began setting up a new campaign.

I waffled between using OSRIC or Labyrinth Lord for the ruleset, but ultimately chose Advanced Labyrinth Lord with a few house rules (such as Ascending AC) thrown in, just to make the transition from 5e a little easier for the players. I've already wrapped up my other, online 5e campaign as well, and told those guys if I run anything for them in the future, it's going to be OSRIC...period.

For this new campaign, I decided to mash together a few low-level Basic/AD&D adventures: U1 The Sinister Secret of Saltmarsh, the Sample Dungeon from the Holmes Basic rulebook—commonly referred to as The Tower (or Dungeon) of Zenopus, Zach Howard's expansion of the Sample Dungeon (entitled The Forgotten Smugglers' Caves), and the dungeon lair in N1 Against the Cult of the Reptile-God. I also planned to expand some of the dungeon levels to provide bridging material for the individual adventures. My goal was to turn the various pieces into a multi-level, interconnected adventure site (a "kilodungeon") that had many different things going on within it.

Rotting Effects in D&D

As I re-acquaint myself with the rules of Basic/Advanced D&D, I'm remembering some of the odd bits and pieces of the game that we had to figure out for ourselves back in the day. One of these bits is the effect of "rotting" as a result of a select few monsters found in the game, most notably the mummy and the violet fungus.

5e uses a system of damage types to reconcile many of these incongruities from earlier editions, so for these monsters (and others like them), the game applies a set amount of damage and classifies it as "necrotic." In the case of mummies, the victim continues losing hit points from necrotic damage over time and can't heal until a Remove Curse spell is applied, whereas violet fungi get 1d4 attacks that do straight necrotic damage (up to 4d8 in a single round, which is nasty but not that dangerous to mid-level and higher characters), with no other lingering effect. It's a simple system that makes clear exactly what happens to the victim (one of the things 5e tends to do pretty well), but doesn't carry the same degree of threat as their AD&D counterparts.

For the AD&D versions, both creatures' rotting effects are extremely deadly at any level, but the actual physical results are not entirely clear. I started running a campaign for my tabletop group using a hybrid of the "Advanced" versions of Old School Essentials and Labyrinth Lord rulesets, but I lean heavily on AD&D to help with some of the behind-the-scenes granularity, and to adapt some of the monsters and magic items that aren't in OSE or LL.

"Why not just run AD&D?" you may ask. Ease of entry, mostly. The girls have only ever played 5e and were getting overwhelmed by the increasing complexity of the game as they leveled up, so I wanted to give them an easier set of rules to manage that still provides a fair range of flavor to play with. I also need to re-acclimate myself to the "old ways" of running the game, so it seemed like a good way to go. My plan is to ease them into AD&D as they get more familiar with how the older system works.

In any case, I dropped a single violet fungus into the dungeon I'm running, but as I read the Monster Manual entry, I found it to be fairly vague on what happens when the fungus touches someone. They get 4 attacks as a 3HD monster, and if one of their branches makes contact with a target: 

The excretion from these branches rots flesh in but one melee round unless a saving throw versus poison is made or a cure disease is used.

This immediately brings up several questions in my mind:

1. No damage is listed, so what effect does "...rots flesh..." have?

2. Does it matter where you are hit? AD&D doesn't have a hit location rule, so do we make one up or does the rot simply kill you outright?

3. Obviously, if you fail the saving throw vs. Poison (also categorized as a save vs. Death), you have one round to apply a Cure Disease or the rot takes effect, but why is it not Neutralize Poison instead to match the save category (as far as I know, avoiding disease does not involve a saving throw)?

4. It's not an issue in OSE/LL, but in AD&D, Cure Disease has a casting time of 1 turn (10 rounds). Does this mean you need to start applying it within one round (minute), but you then need 9 more rounds of uninterrupted casting to avoid the rotting effect? Neutralize Poison has a casting time of 7 segments, which seems more usable under these circumstances, but you would still need to cast it within 3 segments of the victim being touched or, presumably, the rot would kill the victim before the spell was complete (unless, again, you simply need to start casting it within 1 round to prevent the effect).
   

The online consensus seems to be that if a violet fungus hits you, then you will die in one round if you fail the save and have no Cure Disease spell available. That's pretty rough, especially since the text does not say explicitly that the victim dies.