The Outlands Odyssey Part 4: Behind the Screen

Using the Outlands encounter table, I rolled the following encounters in advance: 

Day 1, 3 encounters. 1: Indep village; 2: A squadron of Modrons (19 Monodrones, 4 Duodrones, 3 Tridrones, 1 Quadrone). 3: Living Land. 

Day 2: The Temple of Tvashtri! I had rolled “Bandits”, but decided this was the place to drop in my home-made puzzle dungeon instead. 

Day 3: 1: The Walking Castle of Tiac Rami No. 2: A Petitioner Village. 

Day 4: 1: Relative Terrain. 2: Abrians attack (14 abrians, to be precise). 

I rolled no night encounters. 

The Indep Village I made up at the end of the session before. The small hamlet of dwellings was called Hamlet, because the people that live there aren’t fancy talking people. They’re self-sufficient folk. The party set off at night-time, which shifted the timing of things a bit, but it was no trouble. 

Rolling in advance, I knew that an encounter with a horde of modrons would be tough if they all wanted to kill 12-Bar. The addition of a ridge and a warning from some bison seemed a good way to prepare the characters for an encounter without just making it a straight-up fight on an open prairie. If there’d been no rogue modron in the party, I’m pretty sure it would’ve been a fully RP encounter. But hey, the world exists on its own terms. 

Next up was the “living land” encounter. I’d only loosely planned this, but it came down to nature checks in the end. I figured the faces might move if closely observed, but no one stopped to check. No bother. 

The party then got to the entrance to the Temple of Tvashtri. This is a custom dungeon I’ve made for the Outlands, with puzzles, mystery, and danger. Given Tvashtri’s roots in Hindi religion, I used the Tigawa temple as the template for the upper entrance chamber to the dungeon. 

The entrance: grass grows inside this sheltered chamber. On either side of you are two windows cut through the rock. Ahead stands what appears to be a door. It is perfectly circular. At the top of the circle, writing is cut into the rock in two different scripts. At the centre of the door is a brass doorknob. Set into it is a clear, hexagonal crystal. Two dark cast iron spindles stick out from between the doorknob and the door, like the hands of a clock. One is two foot long, ending in a small black circle at its tip. The other spindle is one foot long, and appears to have been snapped. 

The writing is in Gnomish and an obscure Prime script. (If you have a Prime character from an unusual world, or an odd part of their world, then let it be in their script. If no one speaks either language, change the Gnomish to Common.) The Gnomish says “PEEK IN”. The other script says “PEAK ENTRANCE”. The door can be opened by turning the dark-ended spindle to 6 o’clock and the broken spindle to 12 o’clock, and then either looking through the clear crystal or trying to turn the brass doorknob. Touching the doorknob or looking through the crystal at any other time causes a phantasmal force (DC 13) to be cast upon the creature. The illusion takes the form of a swarm of snakes that appear to burst out of the crystal and attack the character. As a phantasmal force, the snakes are only visible to the victim; but the victim is absolutely certain that the snakes are real. Rolling the INT save for the player without their knowledge and describing the outcome is likely to enhance the effect. On a failure, they take 1d6 psychic damage per round, which to them feels like poison damage.

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