Content Warning: allusions to slavery, sexuality - both consensual, and allusions to non-consensual, human beings being eaten, desecration, the murder of innocents... Definitely a slasher-movie style R-Rating to this one.
I wanted to finally follow up on what happened to the party after the last adventure to give some closure to the blog.
After realizing she had real feelings for him and dealing with the loss of Jonas, Benne took her place as party magic user..
Purging the Grotto
To break her in, the party decided to clear the Grotto of the Ape-Men.The third foray was far more sedate. The party caught the last few cultists looting their quarters and put them down with extreme prejudice. Holden devoured one cultist alive.
Farewell Neela
One sarcophagus had more Islands crystals in it including the one Neela desperately needed
Neela took time to again scry on her daughter, and saw her condition deteriorating.
When they returned, she took the lost royal jewels found in the grotto and caught the first ship off the island to heal her daughter with the crystals. She promised to return, and I put her in a three-month time jail.
The Comet
The next night, I rolled for the weekly weirdness and got a doozy! A comet appears in the night sky and causes the dead to walk in a plague of the undead
I had to take a long time to figure out how to run this
Eventually, I decided to break it into three stages:
- An attack on my PCs' new home.
- Fighting to save lives in town.
- Purging the undead in a two-hex radius
I would give a random chance at every major location thereafter to have the location changed by the undead
I also added ghouls, zombies, and lacedons to various encounter tables
The Attack
I started with an attack on the tower. The PCs were celebrating their good fortune in different ways
Tarrant drank and wrote his journal of the affair before an early bedtime.
Mord was engaged in a celebratory threesome with Alil and one of the tower scullions.
Holden took powerful drugs bought in town and lay in a deep oblivion, glad not to dream if the Plane of Dissolution again.
Benne sat up in the highest room of the tower, frustrated, trying to understand the Earth textbooks and why Jonas had been so fascinated...
They had one Man-at-arms on guard. A fresh hire, as all the seasoned ones had died or abandoned the party in the second foray.
This is where the dice got evil
I chose Lacedons for the attack... ghouls fresh from the seas around the Purple Isles, but figured 2d12 might be excessive. I rolled 2d6 and got 8.
One group of three got into the servant's quarters and surprisedtyhe people there. Although they outnumbered the lacedons, the level 0 servants didn't stand a chance; all were dead or paralyzed before the first round was up. This did not surprise me.
Another three goals crept into Tarrant's room. I decided he had the least chance of being surprised, as he was awakened in the middle of religious devotions. But, a one on the D6 suggested he was. With four Claws and two bites, he was unable to save against paralysis, and succumbed before he could reach his holy symbol and banish the lacedons, or even cry out the alarm.
Mord managed to withstand the first couple of claw attacks even as the others perished. He even got a magic sword in his hand, shouted a warning to no one in particular before dying bravely cutting down the ghouls attacking him. His soul was sucked in by his sword Scarlett, and into the arms of the demon within.
I rolled separately to hear if Benne and Holden heard them. I used a standard surprise test, they would miss the ruckus on a one or two. Benne was so concentrated on her task that she couldn't tell the difference between the noisy sex that had been going on a few minutes earlier and the shouts of battle.
Holden burst into Mord's room a second too late. Has he lost the initiative, he was unable to save Mord before the death blow fell. He attacked a surviving lacedon and ripped it apart with his tentacles. But then, the two from Tarrant's room hit him from behind.
Benne managed to stab one with a dagger in self defense, then overturned a desk between her and the ghouls. It meant little, they grabbed her as she was trying to climb out the window and sank their teeth into her throat.
The End?
Neela, at least, gets a happy ending here. She returned home safely with the crystal she needed to mystically cure her daughter. And despite having spent several months as the sex slave of a mad wizard, and seen some dark and terrible things, she was willing to return to the purple island. She managed to hear the story of the destruction of Broken Cliff before she said sale again to keep her promise.
Mord, for his part, becomes the plaything of the nascent succubus inside his sword. I expect his soul is enough to set her free and unleash her upon the islands, where she will fit right in.
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Benne is devoured alive by the lacedons, a pale shadow of the sorceress she might have been. Her first Adventure in the Grottoes of the Ape-Men had opened her eyes to what she might have been. She also had hoped to discover what it was Jonas had discovered in those Earth High School textbooks. Those books are destroyed in the fire that follows when I spilled candle in her laboratory consumes the upper floors of the tower.
As for Holden, the Islands' chosen, I like to think that the Priestess Kadoz, might have wandered through the tower ruin a few days later, one of the sole survivors of Broken Cliff. Guarded by her Sahuagim minions, she collected his strangely corrupted body, dragging it back to where the Necronomicon waits to perform an unspeakable rite to awaken the champion the Islands crave...
For me, this is the end to the solo play. I haven't had the time to give this project the attention it deserves. It had a couple of false starts, and when I rolled the comet, it took me weeks to figure out how I wanted to play through it. It was quite a curveball.
I also understand why it is that my favorite solo play media, Tale of the Manticore and Legend of the Bones are done in podcast format. Writing it in novella format as I had done was fun, but extraordinarily time consuming. At the end of the day, I am an audiobook producer, and could have done this far more quickly using a mix of improv and recording. I might do that for the next one.
Venger Satanis has been very encouraging about this project. He really enjoyed seeing his module come to life in someone else's hands. Now he's encouraging me to do this all over again using his Gonzo science fantasy setting Cha'alt. And I have to say, the Black Pyramid does seem to be calling me. Perhaps this will be the launching-off point for a podcast so low play of exploring the strange alien world he has created in that trilogy of books.
In the meantime, I have learned a lot about what it takes to solo play in a way that is satisfying to me.
- It is definitely more enjoyable when make my notes in a pen and paper notebook. Trying to keep a digital Journal doesn't flow quite as quickly.
- Keeping a printed Playbook with all of my character sheets, relevant tables and the like together in one quickly referenced stapled document was a real Boon to play as well.
- Having a direction helps too. Like John from Tale of the Manticore (a big inspiration for this project) once put it, you have to be producing something in order for solo play to feel really motivating. In my case, this blog worked to some extent. But, I solo play much faster when I'm trying to create a review, or a recording, or when I am solo playing in order to create a dungeon. I suspect the podcast formula might give me better results.
Right now my life is full of uncertainty. I don't know how much free time I'm going to have in the coming year. Perhaps it will be a while before I am ready to produce anything like Crawling the Purple Isles again. Or perhaps it will be just the Escape I need I will keep my readers posted on my main blog, Welcome to the Deathtrap.
Very cool! Just now found this.
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