Centuries ago, the priest-king Kyuss sacrificed his nation to fuel his lust for divinity. He left legions of the hungry dead in his wake, along with a ruined city that now hides the truth behind the coming apocalypse. A man became a god in this worm-eaten city, and the secrets hidden there may hold the key to his defeat. "The Spire of Long Shadows" is the seventh installment of the Age of Worms Adventure Path, a complete campaign consisting of 12 adventures, several "Backdrop" articles to help Dungeon masters run the series, and a handful of poster maps of key locations. For additional aid in running this campaign, check out Dragon's monthly "Worm Food" articles, a series that provides additional materials to help players survive this campaign. Issue #339 of Dragon presents a magical pool owned by Manzorian that can give the PCs just the edge they need to survive what awaits them in the "Spire of Long Shadows." Pgs. 59-89
When an attempt to arrange an early inheritance backfires, a man of lesser ambition than Vanthus Vanderboren would no doubt withdraw into his sister's manse to hide under her skirts and pray that the truth of his patricide remain hidden. Fortunately for Vanthus, lack of ambition has never been a problem. Now the Vanderobrens' prodigal son slinks east along the coast of Blood Bay, lured by rumors of an incredible prize kept in a smuggler's hideout called Kraken's Cove. Yet what he is destined to find there is far more than a lucrative bit of banditry. What awaits him is the savage tide. "The Bullywug Gambit" is the second chapter of the Savage Tides Adventure Path, a complete campaign consisting of 12 adventures appearing in Dungeon magazine. For additional aid in running this campaign, check out Dragon magazine's "Savage Tidings" articles, a series that helps players and DMs prepare for and expand upon the campaign. Issue #349 of Dragon magazine looks into the region surrounding Sasserine, and provides useful information if your PCs wish to explore this area more thoroughly than they do in the course of this adventure. The hidden caves of Kraken's Cove have long served the pirates of the Crimson Fleet as a place to stage their smuggling operations. When their latest cargo backfires, the PCs find themselves faced with something far worse than murderous pirates. Pgs. 12-48
The Free City: a shining gem in the crown of cultured civilization. Beneath the surface of this bustling metropolis is a rot, festering in the darkness, manipulating the lives of those unaware of its presence. Now a small adventuring band from out of town may be in over their heads. Their actions in Diamond Lake have attracted the wrath of one of the city’s hidden masters. A gang of infiltrators and an enigmatic mastermind plot their destruction, and only tracing the rot to the root can stop the onslaught. "The Hall of Harsh Reflections" is the fourth installment of the Age of Worms Adventure Path, a complete campaign consisting of 12 adventures, several "Backdrop" articles to help Dungeon masters run the series, and a handful of poster maps of key locations. For additional aid in running this campaign, check out Dragon's monthly "Worm Food" articles, a series that provides additional materials to help players survive this campaign. Check out issue #336 of Dragon for five attractions to tempt your PCs to spend some of their hard-earned loot. This issue of Dragon also features an Ecology of the Spawn of Kyuss, one of the central creatures featured in this campaign. Pgs. 34-60
The crown of the kobold king will be anointed in blood. Five children from the town of Falcon’s Hollow have gone missing, dragged off into ruins underneath a cursed dwarven monastery. Soon they will be sacrificed to the crown, all to the glory of the twisted King of the Kobolds. If they are to be saved from this gruesome fate, brave heroes must follow their trail to the monastery and plumb the depths of its trap-laden and monster-infested halls.
A "web Enhancement" adventure for the D&D 3.5 Frostburn supplement. Arctic / Frostfell / Cold Several decades ago, a down-on-his-luck half-elf known as Captain Kerakes lost his ship after a run of bad luck in a game of dice. So when an investor approached him with an offer of a new ship and three-month mission, he jumped at the chance. His new employer was a rich but somewhat miserly nobleman named Jarren Skein. Having heard rumors of the glacier dwarves and their amazing weaponcraft, he had become obsessed with obtaining some of their weapons as trophies. Skein made Kerakes the captain of a ship called the Rusty Walrus and promised him a sizeable commission upon his return with the desired glacier dwarf weapons. The PCs must board the wreck of the Rusty Walrus and defeat the undead that infest it. Later, the ghost of Captain Kerakes begins to wreak vengeance on Jarren Skein s heirs. The PCs must determine the reason for the string of murders and track down the perpetrator.
Stories of misfortune are often exaggerated, especially when they have been retold many times. For that reason, most people aren't taking seriously the claim that a sea monster living along the coast is eating whole ships full of sailors and swallowing entire families. But there's no denying a few facts -- the town of Lochfell is losing its citizens to a sea monster (one that walks on water no less), someone is stealing that same town's dead, and ships are beginning to choose other ports for unloading their goods. Such a scenario could doom the residents of the small port town to either a monster's gullet or the poorhouse. No one seems to know whether the town's two ongoing problems are connected, but the sea monster never leaves behind a corpse to bury. Is it collecting bodies for some dark purpose? Or did some more powerful evil creature create the sea monster to do its dirty work? Someone in Lochfell knows the answer, and it's up to the PCs to find it out. Lochfell’s Secret is a short D&D adventure for four 15th level player characters (PCs). The story is set in and around the port town of Lochfell. You can place the action in any section of your campaign world where a coastal town on a bay might exist. If there is a small town that the PCs visited in a past adventure but haven’t returned to in quite a while, so much the better. As always, feel free to adapt the material presented here as you see fit to make it work with your campaign.
Folks have been vanishing from the Stink, a disease-filled rubbish quarter of Sunhill. City officials recruit the heroes to investigate the disappearances, putting the PCs on the trail of fiendish Locathahs, followers of Incabulos, with ill plans for the surface world. Dungeon adventure in a sewer.
Side-Trek adventure When your PCs gain access to the teleport spell, their whole world changes. That simple spell opens up instantaneous, long-distance travel. No more long overland journeys or dangerous retreats through hostile territory. All it takes is clasped hands and a word from the wizard, and poof! The PCs are where they want to go. Except that it isn’t that simple, because teleport isn’t foolproof. The off-target teleports are a matter of scattering your PCs someplace else on the map and forcing them to get their bearings and make the long overland journey anyway. But this Side Trek focuses on the really intriguing column on the teleport chart: “similar area.”
Temple of the Gleaming Sands is a short adventure for four 5th-level characters that features monsters, spells, and items from the newly released Sandstorm book. You can use this scenario to introduce the new material on deserts and arid wastelands into your campaign, or you can just use it as a site-based adventure in a desert area. The scenario is set in a remote area of the desert that very few humanoid travelers visit. The temple from which the adventure takes its name has lain forgotten for centuries and is now inhabited only by monsters who use it as a base. The area around the temple should be inhospitable enough to discourage humanoid settlement.
It should have been the end. When the bloodthirsty adventurers burst into his throne room and mercilessly cut him down, the tale of Merlokrep, last king of the ill-fated Truescale Tribe, should have ended. But the fates weren’t yet finished with the Kobold King, and now a dark power has brought him back from the dark beyond to wreak his vengeance upon those foolish adventurers who destroyed his tribe.
A free short adventure for four 4th-level characters by Mike Mearls Looking Glass Deep is a flexible, site-based scenario that presents you with the details of the ruined abode of the wizard Urlen Sparlek -- and the gang of outlaws that now occupies the place. This 10-page adventure by Mike Mearls is designed for 4th-level characters. Unlike some site-based scenarios, Looking Glass Deep features a dungeon full of monsters that take proactive steps to defeat the player characters (PCs). Tzarrik the hobgoblin sorcerer is an intelligent tactician with the ability to spy on the party almost at will when the group is within the Deep. His ragged gang of followers work together as a team under his command to repel attackers. Throughout the course of the adventure, the characters have the opportunity to locate an artifact called book the key of the way , discover the mysteries of the throne of the Deep -- and perhaps, in the end, even gain themselves a new headquarters.
Beneath the jungle-covered ruins of an ancient human temple lies a small outpost of grell that have taken to hunting the nearby area by night. Sangkon Bhet is a fairly typical example of a small grell outpost; the monsters occupy convenient ruins or caverns for a time as they search out new places to move a colony that has over hunted its previous locale.
This adventure takes place in the Moonsea of Faerûn. The players have been brought to Melvaunt to search for the missing scions of the city's great families. To the north, in Thar the orc tribes converge on the ruined fortress of Xul-Jarak, flocking to the banner of a charismatic warlord. There, he intends to sacrifice the scions of the great families of Melvaunt in a bloodritual to Gruumsh. The players will escape Melvaunt, search along the wilderness of Thar for the Fortress of Xul-Jarak, and then explore the dungeons of the ruined fortress and hopefully rescue the scions before they are sacrificed. There also is a Web Enhancement by Eric Cagle on the archives of wizards of the coast's website designed to scale the adventure to level 8. For example, it replaces the Owlbear with a Tyrannosaurus. This is an easy to scale adventure with much of the player's difficulty coming from intelligently avoiding problems, choosing how to approach each floor in the most tactical way, and quickly adjusting when something goes wrong. The adventure has sidebars including common orc battle cries (In Orc!), ready to use orc names, weather and random encounter table in Thar, a description of what happens if the party fails or partially succeeds, and suggested minis for each of the encounters. There is even an extended description of the bloodspear ritual, an event the party is not meant to encounter in a normal run. The appendix is detailed for all the humanoid characters including the scions and their equipment, the named villains, and variety of unnamed orcs the party will encounter. The fortress also offers an opportunity to introduce the players to the Underdark and the Zhentil Keep. There is a passage to the Underdark the players can accidentally explore, and return to later. Emissaries from Zhentil Keep have come to watch the ritual and have their own motivations. These npcs provide an opportunity for exposition and role playing at a point which otherwise might be combat heavy, acting as a valve for the first floor - helping or hurting the party with subtle magic should the difficulty be off.
Smoke still rises from the shattered buildings and ruined streets of the troubled town of Cauldron, yet if not for the actions of a band of heroes, it would not exist at all. A sinister cabal of cultists bent on plunging Cauldron into the prison plane of Carceri had awakened the volcano below the town, and amidst the attacks of dragons and fiends from the outer planes, these heroes were able to evacuate the city and then strike at the cultists in their lair near the volcano's heart. Now, this cult, the Cagewrights, lies shattered, their members put on the defensive for the first time. All that remains is to finish the job, but the surviving Cagewrights still have some surprises left in their mysterious stronghold under the snake-haunted ruins of Shatterhorn. "Strike on Shatterhorn" is a Dungeons & Dragons adventure designed for four 18tth-level characters. This adventure is part of the Shackled City Adventure Path that began with "Life Bazaar" (Dungeon #97) and continued with "Flood Season" (Dungeon #98), "Zenith Trajectory" (Dungeon #102), "The Demonskar Legacy" (Dungeon #104), "Test of the Smoking Eye" (Dungeon #107), "Secrets of the Soul Pillars" (Dungeon #109), "Lords of Oblivion" (Dungeon #111), "Foundation of Flame" (Dungeon #113), and "Thirteen Cages" (Dungeon #114). The Adventure Path concludes in Dungeon #116 with "Asylum." Pgs. 56-82
In this adventure, the player characters discover the illegal actives of an ambition Red Wizard operating out of an enclave in a small town. This adventure is short and a great way to introduce players to Red Wizards. For a group willing to use diplomacy fighting they can cut down there combat. The adventure is found on pages 284-287
What's happened to the Pearl Tower -- an ancient lighthouse built to warn ships away from a treacherous reef? Ships are disappearing, and the busy part of the trading season is just about to start. Could someone have taken over the lighthouse and wrecked the ships?
The city is gripped in fear! The Ripper has returned after a 125-year absence and is once again carving a trail of blood through the slums of Millers Court. Also returned is the ghost of Mari Kell, his last victim from more than a century ago, and she haunts the streets where she was killed. The city watch is at a loss to solve this supernatural mystery, much less apprehend the Ripper himself. All the clues point back to the hovel where Mari Kell was slain long ago. If the heroes are brave enough to enter, will they find the Ripper himself there?
This adventure can be used as stand-alone or continuing the arc started by Death in Freeport. Terror in Freeport leads the PCs deeper into the intrigue they began to glimpse in Death in Freeport. The investigation takes them from the corridors of power to the bowels of the underworld, with terrifying insights into who really controls the city. They discover that the Brotherhood of the Yellow Sign has its claws in the town's power elite, but thanks to some clever camouflage by Sea Lord Drac. they may not find out just whom the serpents control until it's too late. As the adventure begins, the PCs are contacted once more by a very nervous Brother Egil. He tells them that while staying with Lucius one evening, he awoke to find a burglar in the roomstealing a scroll. Egil is certain that the Brotherhood have penetrated further into Freeport than anyone imagines. He wants the PCs to investigate Milos's other ties to the city and find out what's being done about the temple of the Unspeakable One. The PCs search the cultist's lodgings and discover it has been carefully gone over, and several possibly incriminating books are missing. But the burglars overlooked one thing: a Tome with a diagram of the Lighthouse of Drac sketched onto the back page, marked with the letter V. Upon leaving Milos's lodgings, the PCs come upon a gang of orcs beating up a hapless messenger. They lend a hand, only to discover they've been tricked - the messenger makes off with Milos's book! A chase through the back streets leads them to the boarded-up building the y discovered in Death What they find isn't encouraging. There is a guard posted out front, courtesy of "V"- -Verlaine. head of the Captains' Council. Meanwhile, down below, the cultists continue to have the run of the caverns-— in fact, they have been shipping their unholy relics to Verlaine's own home!
A powerful artifact lies deep in the vaults of a House Kundarak bank. Can the PCs steal it without getting captured in the process? "You'd be mad to even try it. Assuming you could get inside the compound, somehow avoid the guards and traps, and open one of the best vaults in Khorvaire, you'd still need to get back out. And then, even if you succeeded, the dwarves would still hun you down!" Tergil, commissioned salesman of exotic pre-owned goods. Bank heist adventure with lots of guards. Pgs. 16-29
Most adventurers like to think that when their number is finally up, their colleagues will bring them home, either to be raised or at least returned to their families for a proper burial. But how far will the PCs go in order to do right by a fallen adventurer? And will they draw the line at hauling his coffin out of the Underdark? Pgs. 20-40