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. 

The Temple of Oblivion – Part 3: The Temple Ruins

<< Part 1

<< Part 2

The campaign began in 2016 as an ad hoc test of Roll20 and an introduction to 5th edition D&D for one of my long-time gaming friends. I never intended it to be a full-on campaign, but more people joined the "playtest" and before I knew it, we were gaming online every week. The party ballooned at one point to 7 players plus 3 NPCs, but by the end, after a series of interpersonal conflicts/meltdowns between some of the players (and, in one instance, between myself and one of the players), the group had shrunk to 3 PCs plus 3 NPC followers. 

Most of the first half of the campaign was fairly free-wheeling, with several different, mostly unrelated adventures. By the second half, however, the party had discovered an evil idol with a curse, and became the quarry of a trio of mind flayers who were after the idol. The curse prevented the party from simply throwing the idol away (it reappeared among their belongings the next day), and also served as a psychic "homing beacon" for the mind flayers as they pursued the party.

The mind flayers already possessed one of the idols after the players missed an opportunity to retrieve it, and were actively using it to summon other aberrations from their alien realm. Working through their human proxies—the Cult of Khoss—the mind flayers harried the party across my campaign world, with the PCs barely staying one step ahead of their pursuers. 

The party discovered the hidden location of a third idol (of three needed to open a dimensional portal), but a moment of carelessness caused one player's NPC follower to fall into the clutches of the cultists, who sussed out the idol's location and secretly implanted the NPC with an intellect devourer (a fact the party never discovered until it was too late). The compromised NPC was allowed to be "rescued," and he rejoined the party as an unwitting and unaware mole.

The party raced the cultists to find the third idol, but failed. As part of that failure—to the players' utter horror—the intellect devourer burst from the NPC's skull, killing him instantly. (Regrettably, this was one of my finest DM moments as the NPC was popular with the players and his grisly death really caught everyone off guard). The loss was even more painful because one of the players had innocently put the NPC in a position to be captured in the first place.

Having gained sufficient levels to take on the enemy, imbued with a burning desire for revenge, and gifted with some inside knowledge from rebel cultists seeking release from their thralldom to the mind flayers, the party decided to end their constant harassment by attacking the source.

Thusly, they came to these ruins and made their way through the secret entrance to the temple complex. Originally, these ruins were intended to be the setting for several low-to-mid-level dungeons, including parts of the Caverns of Thracia, but the party didn't glom on to the site early in the campaign, so I repurposed it for the high-level conclusion instead. The climactic battle would take place within the Temple of Oblivion, where the party would confront the mind flayers who needed all three idols to open the dimensional portal and bring through their elder brain master.

By this point, we were all feeling a bit fatigued. We were more than 110 sessions in when the party made it through the secret entrance shrines, and I was definitely ready to wrap up the campaign and move on to something new. So, I presented the players with a choice of entrances into the pyramidal complex via one of the two smaller pyramids. I then roughed out two gantlet-style point-crawls, rather than developing full-on dungeon levels that might have taken the players another 15–20 sessions (or more) to get through. 

One pyramid was already opened by the mind flayers and full of their thralls. This was a route that was "cleared," but difficult to sneak through without getting noticed. The other pyramid was still sealed and could be opened with the idol the party possessed, but it would require them to overcome the monsters and perils present in the point-crawl dungeon.

They chose to navigate the unopened pyramid (the Temple of Death), so I designed a dozen or so encounters and a path with several detours so as to not make it a completely linear experience. Success in certain areas made it possible to avoid other encounters, whereas failure took them down side-paths that ate up valuable time and resources. The players were aware that the mind flayers' plans were underway, and that the longer the party took to resolve this situation, the more difficult the path forward would become.

I'm not going to post the full point-crawl write-up like I did with the secret entrance shrines, as I'm not terribly proud of using this method, but bits of it were good and I am fairly happy with the encounter design work. I will, however, post a summary of the point-crawl below the cut for those interested in what occurred.

The following is the map and general key for the temple ruins. I'm also including links to a full-sized "clean" version of the map, as well as a version with an isometric grid. I'm extremely proud of this map and regret that I was only able to use it for a short period at the end of the campaign. I hope to repurpose it for a future site, but hopefully it will inspire others to make something of it as well. 

I built it as an homage to one of my fave AD&D modules: I1 Dwellers of the Forbidden City, as well as the superlative Caverns of Thracia by Jaquays (which I renamed as The Caverns of Eternal Night). In the beginning, I wasn't certain what would go in the Halls of the Ancient Ones, but when I retooled the map for the high-level group, I determined that it would be the extended lair for a nasty beholder, another holdover aberrant god of the ancestors of the hillmen who once lived here. It also fit the eye motif well, which was kind of a happy accident.

The Temple Ruins

>> Full-size "clean" version (no grid)

>> Isometric grid version (scale = 20x20-ft. squares)

Adventure Sites I Is Now Available!

I had the pleasure of being a finalist in Ben Gibson's Adventure Site Contest over on his Coldlight Press blog. The contest guidelines were to present a short lair or dungeon setting on 2 pages (plus map) that could be played straightaway, and completed in a session or three.

My submission, Etta Capp's Cottage, is part of a compilation now available on DriveThru RPG for the low, low price of free!

Adventure Sites I

I'm proud to have been selected for inclusion and am thrilled to find myself in the esteemed company of some of the OSR's luminary creators.

I look forward to next year's (?) contest and am already looking through my catalog of previous adventures for a worthy submission.

The Temple of Oblivion – Part 2: The Secret Entrance

<< PART 1: The Temple Valley

The party learned of the existence of a secret entrance into the temple ravine from the cultists, but I left it up to the players to decide how they wanted to proceed. There were a number of obvious ways into the area, and by this point the players ranged in level from 7th to 9th, so they had the resources to try any number of approaches. The party had some additional info about the site they acquired during their previous adventures which, combined with the visual details they could see from the vantage hill, gave them a fairly good overview of what they would need to do.

They opted to try to find the secret entrance and avoid a frontal approach using either force or bluff. From the vantage hill, they headed north, winding through the gullies between the hills. They encountered swamp trolls in some flooded ruins, and then entered one of the main valleys to the northeast of the temple mound, passing into the zone of corruption.

They crossed the valley and began moving south toward the eastern face of the temple mound in search of the concealed stair. During this part of their exploration, they encountered a band of hillmen patrolling the valley. With the band was one of their shamans, who was already infected by a juvenile mind flayer. The levitating creature was being led along by ropes, and appeared to be psychically scanning the valley for intruders. Fortunately, the encounter distance was outside its detection and the party avoided the hillmen.

The party found the secret cliffside stair and ascended it, where they learned that they needed to "unlock" the secret entrance by performing a series of rituals in each of six separate shrines. They were ultimately successful, though they struggled in a few places. They also managed to avoid fighting the harpies in the aerie.

I created the image to the right as a vertical map for Roll20, which worked really well to convey the creepiness of the site and give a sense of scale for what was to come (1 square = 5 ft., both horizontally and vertically). The imagery of the façade depicts the ancient civilization's aberrant "gods": a mind flayer, a "frog-demon" (slaad), and an "evil eye" (a beholder, which wasn't immediately obvious to the party). 

Each of the shrines can be entered from the façade map, and contains a small puzzle complex that, when solved, releases one of six switches to open the main seal to the secret entrance. The individual shrines are described after the cut below.

As with Part 1, I've stripped out the 5e-specific monster stats and details (including specific saving throws and ability checks) from this write-up for a more generic presentation and easier adaptation if anyone wants to use this in your own campaign.

The Concealed Stair
Hidden among the foliage at the base of the eastern face of the temple mound is a winding switchback stair that rises precipitously up the steep, vine-shrouded hillside. Carved into the cliff at the top of the stair is a shrine complex which protects a secret, ritualistic entrance into the valley. Using this route to enter the temple ravine is not a simple matter, however.

The Temple of Oblivion – Part 1: The Temple Valley

When I was bringing my first 5e campaign to a close, the PCs were trying to rid themselves of a curse they had acquired after finding and removing an evil idol from a warded vault deep beneath the earth (intending to have it destroyed). The idol depicted a tentacled, demonic figure that they could not rid themselves of—no matter what they did or where they tried to leave it, it always reappeared among their belongings.

Part of the curse revealed the party's location to sinister beings from beyond (mind flayers) who sent their minions to attempt to retrieve it. These minions included gnolls, frog-demons (slaad), and members of the Cult of Khoss. The cult misguidedly thought they could subvert the mind flayers to their cause, but soon found themselves under the thrall of the alien geniuses.

A faction of the cultists who remained free of the mind flayers' control made contact with the PCs and divulged that the mind flayers' base of operations (and the source of the idol's cursed power) lay within the Howling Hills of northwestern Remedios, among the ruins of an ancient civilization that once worshipped the mind flayers. The cultists provided the party with another piece of crucial information: The mind flayers already possessed two similar idols, but needed the party's third idol to open a portal to their beyond-realm, through which "something" would emerge to conquer this world.

Finally, the cultists gave the party directions to the site. The cultists' plan was to convince the party to go to the temple and do the dirty work of wiping out the mind flayers (or at least distracting them) while they freed their enthralled comrades and escaped the area. Whether the party succeeded or not was irrelevant to the cult (Glorious chaos!); they simply wanted to extract themselves from a situation that had gotten out of their control. This was the background for the campaign's grand finale.

Adventure Site Contest

Ben Gibson over at Coldlight Press hosted an adventure contest for short, 2-page scenarios, so I entered a 1e/OSRIC version of an ettercap lair, titled: Etta Capp's Cottage. 

I posted my 5e version of this "lurid lair" a few years ago, but reworked it to not only convert the adventure to a different system, but also to trim out and adapt the writeup to fit the contest guidelines (and fix a few map details). The contest version isn't dramatically different than the original, but I had to lose some of the details (most of which were either campaign-specific or backstory bits that weren't essential to running the scenario).

With judging complete, I didn't win the contest, but my adventure was selected for inclusion in a for-free publication on itch.io in the future. Congratulations to the contest winners, and thanks, Ben, for hosting the contest...it's always fun to share my work with others and get feedback to improve my dungeon design.

Here is Ben's review of the adventure, along with reviews from contest judges EOTB and Owen Edwards YT channel (review starts at 16:52).

When I first posted the 5e version, my players had avoided the encounter initially, but they returned to it a few sessions later and vanquished the ettercap-matron. I also included the encounter in my Badlands campaign (modified to fit the desert-canyon locale) for a different group of players, and ran a hastily-converted version for an OSRIC one-shot. The two versions are very different, gameplay-wise, but the creepiness of the adventure setting really worked on all the players.

Here is the 1e/OSRIC version I submitted if anyone wants to download a copy, but I encourage everyone to pick up the Adventure Sites publication from Coldlight Press once it's released. It sounds like there were some great entries and I can't wait to get a look for myself.

The Dolmen Tomb – Area 20: Chieftain's Crypt

More than a dozen ancient skeletons grasping bronze khopeshes and outfitted in lamellar armor and wicker shields are laid out on straw mats lining the dusty floor. Against the north wall sits a carved stone throne, upon which slumps the mummified body of an obviously-important warrior wearing a bejeweled iron crown. In his gnarled right hand, he clutches an exquisite battleaxe which glows softly in the darkness of the crypt.