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<blockquote data-quote="Deuce Traveler" data-source="post: 6493955" data-attributes="member: 34958"><p><strong>Iron DM Round 1, Match 2- Deuce vs Waylander</strong></p><p></p><p><strong>Ingredients:</strong></p><p></p><p><em>Endless Quest</em>=> The endless quest of the villagers, always having to offer sacrifices to an elder god in order to maintain their survival.</p><p></p><p><em>Dicey Situation</em>=> The infernal machine used to experiment upon the body parts of new victims, and choice parts separated from food and trash.</p><p></p><p><em>Obsessive-compulsive Otyugh</em>=> Scavenger that the aberrations use as a method of clean-up underneath the settlement. Has several personal habits that alert others to its activities before feeding.</p><p></p><p><em>Void</em>=> The realm of the elder god that the village is cursed to travel into at night and can be stumbled into if the characters travel far enough through the wood. </p><p></p><p><em>Suspiciously Nice Village</em>=> The setting, a planes-travelling village that hops into different realms looking for victims. Filled with guilt-ridden, immoral villagers intent on entertaining and providing pleasures to visitors.</p><p></p><p><em>Wolf in sheep's clothing</em>=> The mayor (and elder god priest) presiding over the village. He is a small, bookish man with a pleasant demeanor and squeaky voice. Actually an intellect devourer and worshipper of the elder god.</p><p></p><p><strong>The Happy, Hapless Honoraries’ Horrific Happenstance</strong></p><p></p><p>An interlude adventure for mid-level characters. It can be used for any fantasy campaign setting that uses Dungeons and Dragons type rules, such as Castles and Crusades, Pathfinder, OSRIC, etc. With some tinkering, it could also be adapted to a more modern setting such as Call of Cthulhu.</p><p></p><p><strong>Hook:</strong> </p><p></p><p>After a long journey, the village of Hapville is a welcome and idyllic settlement nestled in enticing woods with small dirt paths leading in and out of it. The people are jovial and are celebrating a long-running festival. However, no one familiar with the local area can ever recall where the forest or the village had come from. Characters who are new to the area might not think the village’s location to be strange, but they may notice that the trees surrounding it are a bit out of place from those outside a two-mile ring around the village center. It’s the little details like this that adds to the weirdness. The people are overly friendly and inviting, the food wonderful, and the town perfectly kept and clean, but small details like the trees, the festival’s hedonistic abandon, Mayor Slump Beedlebottom’s insistence on making visitors the ceremonial guests of honor, and the excessive and nearly frantic generosity are suspicious. Still, the player character’s might take the villager’s up on their invitation and stay awhile for an inexpensive place to rest and feast. It is hours after night falls that they rudely find the horrible secret of Hapville.</p><p></p><p><strong>Background: </strong></p><p></p><p>The people of Hapville are cursed and they live on a plane-shifting, semi-sentient piece of the Void. The original crimes of Hapville’s ancestors are unknown, but among them once lived several mad cultists of the Void god Rotund’jere; an elder evil of undead and corruption that had long ago been imprisoned. But this elder evil influences reality in subtler ways, such as through his ever travelling village of Hapville. Each day, Hapville slips onto another world at a location far enough from civilization to escape large scale interest, but close enough to attract small bands of travelers. At midnight, Hapville shifts back into the Void and the villagers hurriedly turn in for the night for soon after the denizens of the Void enter into Hapville in order to conduct their experiments, create their aberrations, and feast. If the villagers are able to lure and keep over 750 pounds of human material (about 4-6 people), they find themselves safe. But if they go too long without satisfying the Void’s denizens, they themselves are apt to become victims.</p><p></p><p>Generations of villagers have lived this way, and the Void provides food, medicine, and raw materials enough for them to live an easy life. But with horrible and tortuous death a constant reality unless the villagers trap visitors, every night of their existence takes on an endless carnival atmosphere. Visitors are plied with physical contests, alcohol, sex and food in order to put them at ease and encourage them to exhaust themselves onto rest. At midnight everyone hurries to turn in as a cloud quickly blots out the sky, causing the temperature to drop (due to the Void’s influence) and giving a reason to quit until the next day. In truth, several destrachans (large aberrations) lumber into the village and approach the village inn, where visitors are usually put up to stay. The destrachans will overpower the guests and drag them to the caverns below the village (accessed by the mayor’s home or a nearby cave). Guests will be strapped to a conveyor with an infernal machine at the end wielding blood encrusted blades. The machine slices up the victims into smaller pieces of organs and limbs, keeping the victim in intense pain, but alive and fully conscious through necromantic magic. From there the destrachans conduct their experiments on the body parts, mostly in scientific observation, but sometimes in sadistic, chuckling enjoyment of watching limbs kick and organs twitch. The body pieces are then tossed as trash to a nearby otyugh for clean-up, ghoulishly eaten at random by a suddenly hungry destrachan, or thrown into a nearby pool where they later will emerge as a gibbering mouther to be released upon the next visited plane the following morning. The reasons that Rotund’jere finds these activities so important are inscrutable to the villagers. They are just happy to live another day.</p><p></p><p><strong>Involving the characters: </strong></p><p></p><p>The characters may discover that something is wrong through a number of ways.</p><p></p><p>First, they may be alarmed by Mayor Beedlebottom’s odd behavior. The slight, bookish man with a pleasant smile and squeaky voice is actually an intellect devourer and worshipper of Rotund’jere. Although he claims to speak for the village, only the most decadent of the other inhabitants seem to be at ease when they approach him. Like most intellect devourers, Beedlebottom is a hedonist and overly enjoys food, wine, pleasure and pain. He gravitates towards any newcomers he feels can most provide for his appetites. Also, he is always on the lookout for a new body, and interested in any newcomer that shows squeamishness and sensitivity to pain. He prefers smaller human bodies to inhabit, as strangers are less prone to see him a threat when he appears diminutive. He has on very rare occasions ensured a visitor survived when he (her) found them entertaining and immoral enough to keep around. Because of this, his small entourage of handlers is quite varied in physical appearance as they come from different birth worlds, unlike the rest of the villagers who have lighter skin and hair. Beedlebottom becomes a little more aggressive and touchy as he drinks through the evening and night. He is also distracted often, as part of his mind transmits information about the current world he is in to his masters in the Void.</p><p></p><p>Second, the villager behavior towards visitors might alert the characters that something is amiss. The villagers are completely in the dark to the goings-on of the campaign world and nearby towns and cities, and will try to play off their lack of knowledge while prodding the characters for news. Also, they act oddly towards even non-charismatic visitors. There are three other visitors in the village besides the characters: a fat, pedantic merchant, his spoiled daughter, and their bloody-handed bodyguard. Despite the rude behavior of the three, the merchant has a buxom lass on his lap, his haughty daughter is distracted by the villagers plying her with wine and pearls (jewelry uneaten from the oytugh’s past victims), while the bodyguard is drunk and fondling his second or third lass of the day. The three are crude and conceited, but the villagers rush to sell them wares and laugh constantly at even the flattest of jokes. The villagers see visitors as sacrifices towards their own survival and feel an odd sense of duty in making the visitors’ final day of life worthwhile.</p><p></p><p>If the village is going beyond its quota of 750 pounds of human material, any charming characters with a charisma of 17 or higher might be pulled away by whatever villager they are with and warned to flee. The villager will not say why even if threatened with violence, but will insist that the character must leave before midnight for his or her own safety. If a character physically forces a villager out of the surrounding forest, or takes an item from the village, the villager or item will quickly turn into vapor after one hour of exposure to ‘reality’. Anyone who stays in the village, breathes its air, and eats the food provided for more than three days becomes a being of the Void and will suffer the same fate if they ever leave.</p><p></p><p>Third, after midnight it is the sleeping merchant, daughter and bodyguard that are grabbed and dragged away by the destrachans. Despite his drunken state, the strong bodyguard is able to slip the clawed hand off of his mouth long enough to shout a shrill, ear-shattering scream. He also kicks a vase in his room on his way out. The destrachans move swiftly, but if a character is awake and reacts quickly he will see large humanoid shapes carrying off three people into the shadows and towards the mayor’s house. If the character instead waits to ready equipment and gather his allies, he will find a trail of pearls left behind by the daughter’s broken necklaces. Finally, if the party members were all in exhausted sleep, the otyugh’s mealtime song may wake them (see next paragraph). </p><p></p><p>If the party acts fast, tracks the creatures to the mayor’s home, and quickly discover the hidden passageway into the tunnels below, they may be able to save all three bound prisoners before they are placed on the conveyor and diced up by the infernal machine. If they take too long to figure out where to go, it is likely that all three of the prisoners meet a gruesome fate. The strong fists of the bodyguard are chopped off and turned into animated disembodied hands, various pieces are eaten by the otyugh and destrachans, and the remainder of the parts tossed into the pool and combined into a gibbering mouther that will be set loose upon the next visited world to act as a probe of sorts for the consciousness of Rotund’jere. If the party still has trouble finding a way into the tunnels below, the otyugh kept to clean up the nightly mess suffers from obsessive-compulsive disorder, and conducts an odd wailing song as it stretches before mealtime, and again after. The loud, haunting sound echoes through the tunnels and can be heard throughout the village, likely waking even the deepest sleeper. Following the sounds will lead PCs to either the mayor’s house or a nearby cave connected to the chamber with the infernal machine. Villagers will not attempt to stop the characters from entering the tunnels below, since it matters little to them whether the characters are drug or walk to their doom.</p><p></p><p>If the characters decide to turtle up and not investigate any of the disturbances, the destrachans go to find them after finishing up with the merchant, daughter, and bodyguard. They will attempt to separate the group if they can with sonic attacks, in order to make the task easier on them. They do not care what structures they destroy or villagers they kill in the pursuit of the player characters. Captured characters will find themselves bound and placed on the conveyor, hoping to be rescued before being diced by the infernal machine…</p><p></p><p><strong>Goals:</strong></p><p></p><p>The goals of the characters should be simple survival, though this will be very difficult after midnight. If they stay within the village and its forest, they could attempt a series of ambushes against their pursuers (Beedlebottom, destrachans, gibbering mouther, etc). If they attempt to escape the village, they will find themselves in the Void where the chances of survival are severely lessened. The best bet they have is to survive until the morning jump out of the Void. Whether or not the characters will find themselves in a different region of their initial world or a different plane entirely is up to the dungeon master.</p><p></p><p><strong>Future Plot Threads:</strong></p><p></p><p>Once the characters know about the danger of the village, the DM may use it and the Void as further plotlines. Maybe the characters decide to end the curse of the village and disrupt whatever inscrutable plan Rotund'jere had in store. Such would likely require plane hopping, research and the collection of rare magical and mundane items. Or perhaps the solution is simpler, though difficult in execution; where the characters have to bring normal food to the villagers to eat during the day instead of 'Void food', then protect the village from a siege when it leaps at night back into the Void for enough weeks that the villagers are returned to normal and can flee into a normal plane. Or maybe the characters have to fight the semi-sentient 'village' itself and 'kill' it before it hops. An imaginative DM can take this in many different directions.</p></blockquote><p></p>
[QUOTE="Deuce Traveler, post: 6493955, member: 34958"] [b]Iron DM Round 1, Match 2- Deuce vs Waylander[/b] [b]Ingredients:[/b] [i]Endless Quest[/i]=> The endless quest of the villagers, always having to offer sacrifices to an elder god in order to maintain their survival. [i]Dicey Situation[/i]=> The infernal machine used to experiment upon the body parts of new victims, and choice parts separated from food and trash. [i]Obsessive-compulsive Otyugh[/i]=> Scavenger that the aberrations use as a method of clean-up underneath the settlement. Has several personal habits that alert others to its activities before feeding. [i]Void[/i]=> The realm of the elder god that the village is cursed to travel into at night and can be stumbled into if the characters travel far enough through the wood. [i]Suspiciously Nice Village[/i]=> The setting, a planes-travelling village that hops into different realms looking for victims. Filled with guilt-ridden, immoral villagers intent on entertaining and providing pleasures to visitors. [i]Wolf in sheep's clothing[/i]=> The mayor (and elder god priest) presiding over the village. He is a small, bookish man with a pleasant demeanor and squeaky voice. Actually an intellect devourer and worshipper of the elder god. [b]The Happy, Hapless Honoraries’ Horrific Happenstance[/b] An interlude adventure for mid-level characters. It can be used for any fantasy campaign setting that uses Dungeons and Dragons type rules, such as Castles and Crusades, Pathfinder, OSRIC, etc. With some tinkering, it could also be adapted to a more modern setting such as Call of Cthulhu. [b]Hook:[/b] After a long journey, the village of Hapville is a welcome and idyllic settlement nestled in enticing woods with small dirt paths leading in and out of it. The people are jovial and are celebrating a long-running festival. However, no one familiar with the local area can ever recall where the forest or the village had come from. Characters who are new to the area might not think the village’s location to be strange, but they may notice that the trees surrounding it are a bit out of place from those outside a two-mile ring around the village center. It’s the little details like this that adds to the weirdness. The people are overly friendly and inviting, the food wonderful, and the town perfectly kept and clean, but small details like the trees, the festival’s hedonistic abandon, Mayor Slump Beedlebottom’s insistence on making visitors the ceremonial guests of honor, and the excessive and nearly frantic generosity are suspicious. Still, the player character’s might take the villager’s up on their invitation and stay awhile for an inexpensive place to rest and feast. It is hours after night falls that they rudely find the horrible secret of Hapville. [b]Background: [/b] The people of Hapville are cursed and they live on a plane-shifting, semi-sentient piece of the Void. The original crimes of Hapville’s ancestors are unknown, but among them once lived several mad cultists of the Void god Rotund’jere; an elder evil of undead and corruption that had long ago been imprisoned. But this elder evil influences reality in subtler ways, such as through his ever travelling village of Hapville. Each day, Hapville slips onto another world at a location far enough from civilization to escape large scale interest, but close enough to attract small bands of travelers. At midnight, Hapville shifts back into the Void and the villagers hurriedly turn in for the night for soon after the denizens of the Void enter into Hapville in order to conduct their experiments, create their aberrations, and feast. If the villagers are able to lure and keep over 750 pounds of human material (about 4-6 people), they find themselves safe. But if they go too long without satisfying the Void’s denizens, they themselves are apt to become victims. Generations of villagers have lived this way, and the Void provides food, medicine, and raw materials enough for them to live an easy life. But with horrible and tortuous death a constant reality unless the villagers trap visitors, every night of their existence takes on an endless carnival atmosphere. Visitors are plied with physical contests, alcohol, sex and food in order to put them at ease and encourage them to exhaust themselves onto rest. At midnight everyone hurries to turn in as a cloud quickly blots out the sky, causing the temperature to drop (due to the Void’s influence) and giving a reason to quit until the next day. In truth, several destrachans (large aberrations) lumber into the village and approach the village inn, where visitors are usually put up to stay. The destrachans will overpower the guests and drag them to the caverns below the village (accessed by the mayor’s home or a nearby cave). Guests will be strapped to a conveyor with an infernal machine at the end wielding blood encrusted blades. The machine slices up the victims into smaller pieces of organs and limbs, keeping the victim in intense pain, but alive and fully conscious through necromantic magic. From there the destrachans conduct their experiments on the body parts, mostly in scientific observation, but sometimes in sadistic, chuckling enjoyment of watching limbs kick and organs twitch. The body pieces are then tossed as trash to a nearby otyugh for clean-up, ghoulishly eaten at random by a suddenly hungry destrachan, or thrown into a nearby pool where they later will emerge as a gibbering mouther to be released upon the next visited plane the following morning. The reasons that Rotund’jere finds these activities so important are inscrutable to the villagers. They are just happy to live another day. [b]Involving the characters: [/b] The characters may discover that something is wrong through a number of ways. First, they may be alarmed by Mayor Beedlebottom’s odd behavior. The slight, bookish man with a pleasant smile and squeaky voice is actually an intellect devourer and worshipper of Rotund’jere. Although he claims to speak for the village, only the most decadent of the other inhabitants seem to be at ease when they approach him. Like most intellect devourers, Beedlebottom is a hedonist and overly enjoys food, wine, pleasure and pain. He gravitates towards any newcomers he feels can most provide for his appetites. Also, he is always on the lookout for a new body, and interested in any newcomer that shows squeamishness and sensitivity to pain. He prefers smaller human bodies to inhabit, as strangers are less prone to see him a threat when he appears diminutive. He has on very rare occasions ensured a visitor survived when he (her) found them entertaining and immoral enough to keep around. Because of this, his small entourage of handlers is quite varied in physical appearance as they come from different birth worlds, unlike the rest of the villagers who have lighter skin and hair. Beedlebottom becomes a little more aggressive and touchy as he drinks through the evening and night. He is also distracted often, as part of his mind transmits information about the current world he is in to his masters in the Void. Second, the villager behavior towards visitors might alert the characters that something is amiss. The villagers are completely in the dark to the goings-on of the campaign world and nearby towns and cities, and will try to play off their lack of knowledge while prodding the characters for news. Also, they act oddly towards even non-charismatic visitors. There are three other visitors in the village besides the characters: a fat, pedantic merchant, his spoiled daughter, and their bloody-handed bodyguard. Despite the rude behavior of the three, the merchant has a buxom lass on his lap, his haughty daughter is distracted by the villagers plying her with wine and pearls (jewelry uneaten from the oytugh’s past victims), while the bodyguard is drunk and fondling his second or third lass of the day. The three are crude and conceited, but the villagers rush to sell them wares and laugh constantly at even the flattest of jokes. The villagers see visitors as sacrifices towards their own survival and feel an odd sense of duty in making the visitors’ final day of life worthwhile. If the village is going beyond its quota of 750 pounds of human material, any charming characters with a charisma of 17 or higher might be pulled away by whatever villager they are with and warned to flee. The villager will not say why even if threatened with violence, but will insist that the character must leave before midnight for his or her own safety. If a character physically forces a villager out of the surrounding forest, or takes an item from the village, the villager or item will quickly turn into vapor after one hour of exposure to ‘reality’. Anyone who stays in the village, breathes its air, and eats the food provided for more than three days becomes a being of the Void and will suffer the same fate if they ever leave. Third, after midnight it is the sleeping merchant, daughter and bodyguard that are grabbed and dragged away by the destrachans. Despite his drunken state, the strong bodyguard is able to slip the clawed hand off of his mouth long enough to shout a shrill, ear-shattering scream. He also kicks a vase in his room on his way out. The destrachans move swiftly, but if a character is awake and reacts quickly he will see large humanoid shapes carrying off three people into the shadows and towards the mayor’s house. If the character instead waits to ready equipment and gather his allies, he will find a trail of pearls left behind by the daughter’s broken necklaces. Finally, if the party members were all in exhausted sleep, the otyugh’s mealtime song may wake them (see next paragraph). If the party acts fast, tracks the creatures to the mayor’s home, and quickly discover the hidden passageway into the tunnels below, they may be able to save all three bound prisoners before they are placed on the conveyor and diced up by the infernal machine. If they take too long to figure out where to go, it is likely that all three of the prisoners meet a gruesome fate. The strong fists of the bodyguard are chopped off and turned into animated disembodied hands, various pieces are eaten by the otyugh and destrachans, and the remainder of the parts tossed into the pool and combined into a gibbering mouther that will be set loose upon the next visited world to act as a probe of sorts for the consciousness of Rotund’jere. If the party still has trouble finding a way into the tunnels below, the otyugh kept to clean up the nightly mess suffers from obsessive-compulsive disorder, and conducts an odd wailing song as it stretches before mealtime, and again after. The loud, haunting sound echoes through the tunnels and can be heard throughout the village, likely waking even the deepest sleeper. Following the sounds will lead PCs to either the mayor’s house or a nearby cave connected to the chamber with the infernal machine. Villagers will not attempt to stop the characters from entering the tunnels below, since it matters little to them whether the characters are drug or walk to their doom. If the characters decide to turtle up and not investigate any of the disturbances, the destrachans go to find them after finishing up with the merchant, daughter, and bodyguard. They will attempt to separate the group if they can with sonic attacks, in order to make the task easier on them. They do not care what structures they destroy or villagers they kill in the pursuit of the player characters. Captured characters will find themselves bound and placed on the conveyor, hoping to be rescued before being diced by the infernal machine… [b]Goals:[/b] The goals of the characters should be simple survival, though this will be very difficult after midnight. If they stay within the village and its forest, they could attempt a series of ambushes against their pursuers (Beedlebottom, destrachans, gibbering mouther, etc). If they attempt to escape the village, they will find themselves in the Void where the chances of survival are severely lessened. The best bet they have is to survive until the morning jump out of the Void. Whether or not the characters will find themselves in a different region of their initial world or a different plane entirely is up to the dungeon master. [b]Future Plot Threads:[/b] Once the characters know about the danger of the village, the DM may use it and the Void as further plotlines. Maybe the characters decide to end the curse of the village and disrupt whatever inscrutable plan Rotund'jere had in store. Such would likely require plane hopping, research and the collection of rare magical and mundane items. Or perhaps the solution is simpler, though difficult in execution; where the characters have to bring normal food to the villagers to eat during the day instead of 'Void food', then protect the village from a siege when it leaps at night back into the Void for enough weeks that the villagers are returned to normal and can flee into a normal plane. Or maybe the characters have to fight the semi-sentient 'village' itself and 'kill' it before it hops. An imaginative DM can take this in many different directions. [/QUOTE]
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