Isle of Dread - Sea of Dread

 

So the party is on the 2 to 3 week journey across the western ocean, heading to the sea of dread to adventure on the Isle of Dread. At the border of the sea of dread is a very large area that has a massive seaweed forest beneath the waves operating large blankets of floating seaweed on the surface. This area is known about, so the captain of the ship is aware of it. Not just a dangerous area because of potential large ocean wildlife that could attack, but ships tend to get stuck in these great blankets of seaweed, but it’s the time of year, early summer, where the seaweed breaks up for a while. So rather than take the three or four extra days to circumvent the area its decided to travel on through it.

And not long into that first day a ship that has been stuck in seaweed for a couple of weeks is encountered. The journal label will eventually find when they get in there says thusly..

Last date: two weeks ago

“This is first mate Prellis. I continue this ships log post death of our respected Captain Barrat. We remaining crew of The Black Gull, proud buccaneers of the West Pacific trade routes, are wounded and out of food and fresh water are fading fast. While looking for our own prey, We came across an Ottonese vessel far from its home waters, full of foreign pirates, and found ourselves in conflict with the devils on these most remotest of waters. They blasted our lowest back deck with a strange fiery missile from a cannon with the visage of a devils face. Then they came aside and we took to a brief man to man battle on our main deck. Our dear captain fought with the ferocity of 5 men, but he was felled by a backstabbing attack. The rest of us bravely rallied and the intruders retreated to their ship, preparing another cannon blast. We have no cannon, but we do have Silas, our ships wizard, who summoned a thick fog to cover our limping escape.

We were not pursued, and we soon knew why. It was nightfall, and in the chaos we forgot we were near the great seaweed rivers. We immediately got stuck in the thicker mats of the green weeds. With our lower level taking on some water. we cannot hope to escape. To get free into the open water would mean the Black Gull shall sink fast. We are slowly dying now of thirst, great hunger, and festering wounds. We have left the ships warchest in the cargo hold. Though the hold is more and more exposed to the sae, we care not. What good is coinage to the dying?

Last date: one week ago

I am the last alive, and my nightmarish thirst and hunger will soon do me in. Over a handful of days those of us left thought we could hear the captain's voice. Telling us we will rise again and once more wreak havoc on all living things. They say the seaweed forests are a place those who die may rise as the angry and jealous unliving. Is this how we brave seadogs of The Gull go into the darkness?

Now I alone can hear. I thought I saw him, a ghastly and foul figure. He said I will soon be at rest but shall rise again to hate all life. What a fate. What gods of good would allow this? "

Trapped in seaweed, undead and giant octopus haunted,
and waiting for characters to enter. 

So this western pirate ship was attacked by an eastern (Asian) pirate ship. Wounded and stuck in the seaweed they eventually are all dead and are now undead. Several zombies and the captain has become a wight. They await any living beings to enter the crew deck for them to destroy out of the hatred they now have for the living.

Once in there, the zombies all failed their saves against the turn from the Dragonborn cleric. But the white stepped up and is a little more powerful than typical so he put up a good fight. Also, since I’m treating the ship sort of like a haunted house every turn a barrel or a bunk would get thrown at a character. but they took care of everything quite easily then they made their way down to the cargo deck, which was partially open to the sea. Clearly the seaweed blanket was holding the ship up and keeping it from sinking the last couple weeks. But as the seaweed’s been breaking up, it’s getting a bit dangerous do to the breach. But the journal says the ships war chest is down below so down below they go. 

cool animated water effects (you cannot see)

So in the cargo hold an octopus has been accessing through the breach caused by and enemy cannon. As the ship is tipping a bit it is at a slant and the water around where the octo hangs out is about 10 feet deep. I used tentacles from the free online image library that I could stretch out to grab at characters. 

Gotta put on pants for the island. Centipedes
and other stuff can crawl up into your biznezz..

                                                    

The female Tiefling bard was caught, and with bad rolls was in real danger of being dragged under by the now wounded octopus. That is an instakill.

One of two drow who are on this trip. Going
to the tropics at the beginning of summer. It will be
bright and sunny a lot of the time. Smart. 

spring fishing look

but Jevan the drow coastal ranger jammed over, using a potion of freedom of movement and used his extra on Spira to free her. The octo sucked itself back through the breach to escape. This violent action of course caused the ship to go into full sinking mode, but they made it off the ship with the chest loaded with pirate treasure. They will open it up to find lots of gold and stuff beginning of next game. 

In the city sessions and this ocean voyage I have been using small random tables with like 3-5 possible encounters. For the city I would have items that had to do in part by what was going on in the campaign so far. Maybe an enemy or gang members they previously dealt with, or an NPC. For the sea voyage it was just this stuck ship encounter, a sahaguin attack during a storm, or a dragon turtle. I had maps and info to do any of it, and kept the details as basic as possible. I can always use one of these other encounters on the trip home. 

So next session its arrive at the island. Unless I feel like tossing another sea encounter in there haha.

Cheers. 

Tegel Manor Dynasty

Tegel Manor is one of those love it or hate it old school items. Even by Judges Guild standards, it was an especially wacky and crazy funhouse dungeon. It’s so chock full of wild shit (a huge undead, demon, and monster population in a relatively small area), it has the almost random feel of something written up on a weekend of heavy marijuana usage. I mean, just the butler in one of the front main rooms is described as a “Balrog Ghost.” That seems so random. And do demons like Balrogs even have ghosts when they die? Don’t they just go crying back to hell when you kill them?

I guess I can’t throw stones. I added even more weird crap to the mix as a very young teen with this. I had Green Warhoon Martians with radium rifles in one of the big rooms off the main ballroom, and pretty sure I had some kind of robot created by a mad scientist roaming around as well. As I got a bit older, I stopped trying to use it as a dungeon to be explored, and used it here and there over the years mostly as a mission based location. Characters arriving to find an item lost in the Wizard Tower or something, and only moving into a small area of the Manor and then leaving.

In these OD&D games I’ve been doing here and there since last year, I’ve thought about Tegel a bit more. I think all those old Dark Shadows episodes I’ve been watching on Netflix have affected me.

I thought of using the super-haunted house for these sessions, but the problem was my OD&D games are set around 200 years prior to the current time period of my 1st edition game setting. So rather than expect that the manor has been around in maximum haunting form for several hundred years, I thought that it might be interesting to check out the manor and the surrounding area before it was taken fully over by evil and the Tegel family (yes, I do not use the name “Rump”) more or less died out. A sort of Tegel supernatural soap opera like Dark Shadows.

I decided that the evil curse on the house/land began very early on in its existence. That even the first few generations knew something was wrong, and minor haunting went down. The house grew in size from additions, and the family carried on, despite certain cries, screams, moans, and whimpers from older parts of the mansion at night. And the people of Tegel Village carried on as well, generation after generation being used to weirdo happenings.

So I took four family members from portraits that were together in the list: Lady Rubianna, Riven, Rotcher, and Ruang. I don’t believe the 1-100 portraits are in fact linear and meant to be taken as having been in order of family members as they came along, but I thought it would be easier to take some who where next to each other in the list. I kind of also went with the description in that entry to some degree, thus “Rotcher the Radiant” is a handsome, charismatic, and fun loving person while alive. Here’s the family members in question and what I did with them for the current, living lords of Tegel.

Lady Rubianna: Mother of Riven, Grandmother to Rotcher and Ruang. Fled the mansion as a young lady 20 year ago, to have her child Riven in the big city of Tanmoor.
Lord Riven: when he reached adulthood, took his mother back with him to Tegel to reclaim the birthright. Brought loyal Tanmoor butler “Slappington” as well. Married a local girl soon after returning, and had two boys, Rotcher and Ruang

Rotcher and Ruang: Riven’s children with his wife Rhian (who has no Tegel Manor portrait). Rotcher is happy and handsome, Ruang is dark and brooding, taking delight in the suffering of things. Rotcher is a hit with the other local teens, and on Friday nights Riven lets a chaperone (in this case Terry’s elvish fighter/MU “Rose”) take them on an outing to the Tegel Tavern.

There are portions of the mansion that are now very haunted, and dangerous for strangers to wander into it. Even for Tegel family members; Lady Rubianna one day wandered into the East Wing, and was possessed by the vampire portrait of an ancestor when she stopped to admire it. Since then she has laired in a nearby sea cave, and has been gathering undead to pester the land.

So with Terry’s Rose character in place working for Lord Riven as a bodyguard to the teens, the rest of the party are a group of adventurers passing through on their way to the big city. This particular one-shot (more or less) is supposed to be telling a story to a degree, so a bit of a railroad job compared to my dungeon sessions for OD&D. So I just thought that a couple of decent role-play situations, combined with some breezy location based fights, would fill up the session and give me some good “phone it in” ease of DM’ing in a semi-public setting. Nothing too complicated for me, or ponderous for the players.

So after camping near some gypsies, and getting their fortunes read (including some semi-vogue warnings of what might be in store in Tegel), the party came up on the village proper. They passed the large monestary that is to the north on the Tegel area map, but alas there was no monk character so didn’t feel compelled to get them to go there. They decended upon the town hollow, and found zombies prowling the town square in the rain. Nice combat (wherin one character almost died, but I decided to go for -10 and die rather than the -5 I had been using for OD&D), and got the party involved in Rose and the Tegel kids who were at the tavern on their Friday outing. So a bit of tavern role-playing, with the happy go lucky teens of Tegel hanging out with Rotcher and Ruang, and the older townsfolk brooding in their beers over strangers and walking dead being afoot.

Lord Riven came with some guards from his manor eventually (the characters learned that the local constabulary were cowardly Keystone Cops who rarely showed up when there was monster trouble) to investigate the zombie fuss, and offered the PC’s a job. In the less-haunted part of Tegel Manor, Riven had butler Slappington serve drinks, while he and his wife skittishly told of the mother possessed, and the need to stop her haunting the area for the sake of the Tegel kids if not the village folk. The party agreed, and went to spend the night at a two-story several room guest house nearby.

The PC’s took up residence in some of the rooms and the lounge, falling asleep to the occasional howl or spooky laughter from the haunted parts of Tegel Manor across the way. The vampiric Lady Rubianna came to Rose in the master bedroom, and offered her info on some of her own family secrets (Rose came to Tegel because her uncle had mysteriously died in service to Riven and the family) if she convinced the party to leave Tegel. She fled the guest house before summoning a hoard of rats to attack all in the house. That was a fun little scramble, with PC’s fighting rat packs as a thief character ran around behind the scenes using secret passages in the walls.

The next morning it was off to the sea cliff, where before the stairs down to the waves they had to pass a local mausoleum. A small hoard of skeletons, led by a couple of wights, came pouring out of the mausoleum to combat the party. The cleric of St. Cuthbert tried a bit of turning here and there, but the battle was ultimately won through cold steel and elbow grease. Fun fight.

Then down into the caves, to first face Rubianna’s Wraith, then on to the lady herself. It was a fairly quick battle, as the cleric used hold person and the save was failed. I know, I would probably not let a hold person work on a full vampire, but Lady Rubianna was still alive and human, just possessed by the vampire spirit. After a bit of treasure looting, the group dragged Lady Rubianna out to the daylight, where the ancestor spirit retreated back to its portrait, and Lady Rubianna was cleansed of evil and returned to her family. Happy little ending to a nice little session.

I’ve really loved this idea of a Dark Shadows inspired Tegel Manor prequel setting, and I’m for sure going to do more with it. Plenty of opportunities for chilling adventures as the current tenants of Tegel Manor try to hold off the encroaching evil; even though we all know how it will eventually turn out in the long run. So more Tegel Manor family fun in the future I hope, with at least some of the same great players.