Tag Archives: horror

Fourth Session (10 page pdf) – “The Rotgut Ripper” – When strange and virulent diseases affect the PCs, their hunt becomes more deadly as it becomes clear their quarry is hunting them in turn. Will they be added to the Rotgut Ripper’s sick collection of trophies, or is an even worse fate incubating under the Stink?

In this episode, we finish out Dungeon #105′s “The Stink,” which I’ve slotted into the plot of Richard Pett’s Pathfinder module Carrion Hill, and then livened up by adding in a crazy bad ass serial killer. Hyram Crooge is mentioned as the guy who runs the junkyard and is secretly both a bugbear and a serial killer in the Riddleport material, but that’s all there is on him. I decided to make him a demented follower of Urgathoa, goddess of disease, who kills women and defaces them to resemble the goddess. He has killed a lot of people – the dead bodies ascribed to him by the locals are actually just the rejects, people he kills and then decides are not worthy (elves and effeminate male prostitutes especially sometimes get killed before he realizes they’re not women – to bugbears, humans all kinda look alike). Eventually some ghouls found him and they started incubating some hellish super-diseases. This plan was somewhat cut short by the tsunami that inundated Riddleport and its dump and generally messed things up. He was participating in the main Carrion Hill plot as a random cultist seeking forbidden knowledge, those guys always smell each other out. Crooge is a creeper, and so in his garbagey lair, he stalked the PCs looking for ways to kill them once they made their presence known.

This was a design challenge for me as a DM.  I don’t like to cheat/fudge especially in situations like this where it’s frustrating for the players anyway, so I didn’t want to just do a bunch of fiatting of how this guy could evade the PCs. Solo rogues are often meat for the beast anyway.

Here’s Hyram Crooge’s character sheet as the Rotgut Ripper. I did two things – one is really maximize stealth, with a +18 Stealth, Camouflage and Fast Stealth rogue abilities.  That worked out pretty well, he’d attack from a distance and as soon as he could move into concealment (which, as they were in caves made of garbage, was practically ubiquitous) he could stealth again.

The other was to try to maximize the Intimidate chain. He had +18 Intimidate, Intimidating Prowess (+STR to Intimidate), Cornugon Smash (free Intimidate on a Power Attack hit), Scent of Fear (special bugbear feat from Classic Monsters Revisited, which was worthless), and Frightening (up the number of rounds of shaken, and escalate to frightened). The plan was to scare people off to avoid being trapped into melee. This worked kinda OK, but not super – he really needed Dazzling Display so he could Intimidate more than one person at a time, but that requires Weapon Focus so however you slice it he comes out one feat short. Of course, Intimidate works a little too easily in Pathfinder so that could have made it too overpowering (and frustrating!).

And in the end, I know that in this adventure the PCs are racing the clock and have to face a bunch of foes without rest, so I didn’t want him to be too high a CR. On his home ground, playing him cleverly, he got a lot more done than he would otherwise against a whole party of fifth level folks. He’d make an awesome foe stalking a smaller number of PCs, so feel free and unleash him on your own groups.

After Crooge, I put in a Daughter of Urgathoa from “Seven Days to the Grave,” part of the Curse of the Crimson Throne AP. She had a big ol’ bucket of hit points and towards the end, she got lucky – down to 2 hp, she lasted 2 additional rounds due to bad dice luck on the PCs’ part.

Next time, we finish up Carrion Hill!  I suspect portions of the next session will be X-rated, so be warned.

Third Session (9 page pdf) – “The Stink” – As they seek the cultists who summoned the creature, the PCs head into the city’s garbage dump, freshly stirred by the tsunami, and discover some wonderful smells, as well as a friendly neighborhood serial killer!

I went onto the Paizo boards asking for good adventures to do a “Katrina horror” kind of scenario with, and both Greg Vaughan and Richard Pett checked in with some recommendations.  As a result, I am combining the Pathfinder module Carrion Hill with the Dungeon Magazine #105 “The Stink.”  That whole run of Dungeon mags was gold.

Kevin, Tommy’s player, was out sick.  Which was fine, because his character was also afflicted with disease, one of the themes of the day.  To tie it all together and fit it into larger campaign events, I retrofitted The Stink substantially.  It was easy to inject by just making Riddleport’s junkyard man slash serial killer, Hyrum Crooge, one of the Keepers from Carrion Hill, and then make him the principal of The Stink. The Stink suffered from not having a strong villain anyway.  I changed the bad guy mobs to ghasts that spread the six new plagues in the adventure – in the original a lot of text was spent on those diseases but chances to contract them were few and far between.  I remedied that by making the ghasts’ bite transmit one at random. (Or, conversely, biting a ghoul, which unfortunately meant that Serpent’s pet snake has like two different diseases now.) Two of the party members being monks means that’s not as bad as it could be.

I like how when the players invest in the game world it pays off.  They found the desecrated statue of Sarenrae and Paul (Serpent) immediately put two and two together – undead, disease, females desecrated from the waist down – and determined that the dark goddess Urgathoa was involved. Then, something started toying with them, attacking from the dark and melting away when they investigated… And left them a present, a female corpse mutilated to resemble the goddess.  For anyone with a good bit of Knowledge: Local, the inevitable conclusion is that the victims of the Rotgut Ripper that have been found – usually effeminate men or elves left disembowled – are actually just this killer’s rejects; the good ones he brings home and treats real nice…

I think it came across well; our gamer groupie Georgina was in attendance and she declared it “creepy.”

Next time, more Stink, and then we recur back up a level to Carrion Hill for the finale!  Then, on with Second Darkness.

Our aspiring pirates get their first taste of honest ship-to-ship combat in the third installment of our Pathfinder campaign, Reavers on the Seas of Fate – “Water Stop.”

Third Session (12 page pdf) – The crew of the Albers goes foraging on an island to replenish their stores, and comes across some escaped slaves.  Of course, the Chelaxian naval frigate bearing their former owner arrives shortly thereafter.  Just as they discover a goblin pirate ship!  It’s hot three-way action in a naval boarding action.  And then it’s off to Riddleport!

This was a stretch session.  I had planned for them to get to Riddleport and get into that this session, but the character who has lived in Riddleport and has most of the hooks for them wasn’t going to be there.  So I figured I could expand the travel part enough to fill a session.

Leafing through some random supplements, I found a couple things that struck a chord.  In WotC’s Stormwrack, there is an adventure called “The Sable Drake,” basically an encounter with a goblin pirate ship.  I had thrown some canoes full of goblins at the PCs last time, supposing they came from a village on the nearby island.  By converting those to goblins on two ship’s boats from the Sable Drake, it was a lead-in.  Then in Atlas Games’ En Route II: By Land Or By Sea, there’s an encounter called “Water Stop” detailing some escaped slaves hiding on an island; the PCs meet them and then their old master shows up looking for them.  This was perfect; I wanted to start pulling in elements from PCs’ backgrounds, and most of them have a beef against the Chelaxians.  Ox had been the slave of Captain Marcellano, a Chelish seafarer.  Thus I mixed the two together.

It wasn’t too hard to convince them to go onto the island and poke around; they thought maybe the goblins came from there and they’d get to kick some more ass.  They came across the slaves and managed not to kill them (the way the encounter’s written is that the poorly armed commoner-type slaves surround the PCs and try to get them to surrender to figure out if they’re likely to rat them out; somewhat dangerous in that often PCs take any manner of threat as an invitation to maximum overkill).  The slaves tell them about a “weird black ship” in a hidden cove and then the Chelaxian Navy ship Raptor appears and approaches the Albers to see if they have seen some missing slaves.  Soon, they’re both going after the goblin ship, who the PCs finger as having drug off a bunch of escaped-slave looking people.

Really, the tough part about all this was that in Golarion, goblins are all total meatheads.  It was hard to believe they could pilot a ship, even with a wererat captain and a handful of adepts.  But hey, you work with what you’re given.  I changed them substantially from the “leet ship” in Stormwrack to a barely actionable converted fishing ship.

In the end, everything worked out for the PCs and the slaves.  The PCs hoped that the goblins would whittle down the Chelaxian marines enough that they could take them; they were quickly disabused of that – one of the things I wanted to get across before they took  up their future life of piracy is that the Chelaxian navy is no one to screw with. They were pretty sober as the goblin ship took three massive broadsides and sank to the bottom.

The noble was Marcello Marcellano, the son of the guy who owned Ox.  I expected him to go to greater lengths to try to kill him, but he played it cool.  A shame, I built a pretty good 4th level swashbuckler using the new class from Tome of Secrets (Adamant Entertainment) and the duelist feats etc. from Way of the Duel (Sinister Adventures).

They went back and started diving the goblin ship for loot…  It was funny, they encountered a reefclaw and after beating it all borked their Knowledge: Nature checks so that they were “sure those things live in large colonies!”  (They’re solitary).  They made the checks in the open and came up with the alternate interpretation themselves.

Selene, Vincenz, and Thalios Dondrel son of Mordekai are now at large in Riddleport as well, so I’ll have some good NPCs the PCs are very familiar with to use.  Next session’s based on Pulp Fiction!

The second session of our new Pathfinder campaign, Reavers on the Seas of Fate, went off like gangbusters.  Hearken to “The Tale of the Sea Bear.”

Second Session (15 page pdf) – Insanity and chaos reigns as the crew of the Albers investigates the derelict Sea Bear.  Soon, they are turning their suspicions against each other.  And then, things get out of hand.
Later, the survivors struggle against the uncaring sea and the fury of random encounters!

This is the second part of the intro adventure I was running as a heavily modded combo of Maiden Voyage (3e, Atlas Games) and the new Mysteries of the Razor Sea (3.5e, Sinister Adventures).  In this episode, the PCs board a ghost ship that had its mainmast replaced with a native totem pole.  As you might expect, things started getting weird fast.  I was impressed with how much the players went with it – I started passing them notes about “You think person X is acting suspicious” and they just up and started stabbing one another.

Fun scene – Ellis went running down into the hold to stop Ox and Bull, and Ox failed a Perception check so he got “a figure suddenly looms behind you in the hold!”  He stuck his pike right through the poor sea dog’s chest.

The biggest DM dilemma I faced was when the PCs had the good idea of tossing the skeletons overboard.  The skeletons, incidentally, were the new Pathfinder “bloody skeletons” that have fast healing.  I had the totem pole raise them back to full unlife with two rounds of its drumming (it couldn’t attack with animated objects during those rounds).  So Chris, quite innovatively, dumped them overboard when killed.  The big question – can a skeleton swim?  I ruled yes just to keep the heat on, but await the rogues’ gallery’s dissection of the physics involved.

I’m really happy with how the NPCs are working out.  Thalios Dondrell and Vincenz especially are being treated like “real people.”  In find that by portraying NPCs as competent, but not infallible Mary Sues, PCs respect them – it’s just that most NPCs you meet in games are such one-dimensional chumps, they don’t get that.

After the ghost ship, a pretty large percentage of the crew was dead, including the navigator.  I am using a combination of the Stormwrack (WotC) and Broadsides! (Living Imagination) sea/shipfaring rules, so as they wandered the seas they exercised their skills trying to follow the charts and keep safe and on course as storms hit.  They weathered a big one, but got blown somewhat off course and got their rigging fairly jacked up.  They’ve come up on some islands they think delimit the Gulf of Varisia and stopped in a cove to refit, and had a more lighthearted combat with a dozen demented goblins.

I love the Paizo take on goblins; they are well and truly insane.  Dangerous in their way, but spend half their combat actions running around like butt monkeys instead of actually fighting.  One clambered up to the crow’s nest and was doing the Pantsless Goblin Victory Dance over the shrieking Old Pete when Ox finally got to it.

Seems like everyone enjoyed themselves!  Wogan was happy to get a wheellock pistol off the dead captain of the Sea Bear, Serpent was happy that his snake had the biggest kill count in the goblin fight, Ox liked being able to go nuts and kill allies, Sindawe liked the massive combat, and Blacktoes… liked fleeing a lot, I think.

As a final bonus – it turns our our group played Maiden Voyage once before!  I didn’t remember because I was a player then and GMing now, and it was like four years ago.  Here’s the session summary of our Eberron party going through Maiden Voyage! I think you’ll see some similarities and some differences…