Return to Night Below

[RedShirtNo5]

Hello fellow members of the Collective!

I'm preparing a new campaign, and planning to use the Night Below megamodule for a 3.5 campaign.

The twist is that 2 of my players have already been through the beginning of the module. Back in our 2E days, my old group went through a modified Book 1. They met most of the NPCs and eliminated the main villians - including killing off the bandits in the mines and tower and the orcs. They enjoyed the module, but they didn't want to go into the underdark to start Book 2.

I thought it was a shame, since I like the module - epic plot, sufficiently generic to integrate into the campaign, mix of RP and combat. But I wasn't going to railroad them.

After discussing it with the new group, I've realized that Night Below suits my needs (a preset mega-module instead of an "open" compaign) and theirs (40/60 mixture of RP and combat). And they are up for a heavy underdark campaign.

So, how to deal with the 2 players who have been through Book 1? My plan is to use Book 1 as a "Return to" adventure. Technically, this campaign is not the same "universe" as the previous adventure, so I'm not worried about continuity against the specific actions by the previous group. I'm more interested in simply making enough changes so that the 2 players with knowledge will see something fresh.

Here's the planned set up. Twenty years ago, a group of adventures came through Haranshire. They routed out the bandits, killed the orcs, and generally caused enough damage to end the kidnappings in the area.

The world hasn't been taken over, so maybe the aboleth scheme was moving much more slowly than described in Book 3, or maybe the aboleth simply waited a little while (to them) to resume the master plan. Maybe they continued kidnappings at a slow rate in other areas so as to avoid further attention. The details can be left till later.

So, I'm looking for any suggestions or comments based on the above, particularly for modifications to Book 1.

A couple obvious items:

1. Tauster has pased away. A new wizard has taken his place.

2. Count Parlfrey has passed away. Lyntern survived his short adventure 20 years ago, and is now the count.

3. Old Grizzler is still around, and probably the source of some distorted info on what happened (thus bringing the PC knowledge in line with the player knowledge).

4. The previous players never solved the New Mire problem. The mire is even larger now.

Any advice on what else might have changed? Any suggestions on what happened to the other minor NPCs? And what was the eventual fate of Jelenneth?

Thanks in advance for any ideas.

-RedShirt

 

[Seravin]

Heh. Good hunting to you and your players.
That said...

I like the Return to... motif. I was a big fan of most of the modules in that genre. This promises to be fun for everyone if only because the players will have some personal investment.
Keep in mind, based on Leopold's and my experience the characters will be around 14th level by the time they hit the City of the Glass Pool. The module didn't have that level of tactics in mind.
What level are your players starting at?

I would suggest that you go with the aboleth taking the long term approach - they slowed things down. After all, what is 20 years to them or their immediate alies? In which case they're going to slowly repopulate the orc caves and possibly the garlstone mines. Is Broken Spire still abandoned?

Whatever happened to Jelenneth though was long ago. You might want to consider a more recen kidnapped victim (Daphne comes to mind ).

NPC's. I like your ideas about Tauster, Lyntern, and Grizzler. They work particularly well.
Jelenneth: Either dead, captured, still surviving, or escaped. Any of these might work.
If she escaped she must have found another way out (long since collapsed and she got lost anyway-possbily teleported). She could be the replacement for Tauster, living with her husband Andren who's cleaned up the Hounds and tails.
If she survived, maybe she's near feral and definitely a higher level. Perhaps a dungeon delver now from Song and Silence. She might even have freed a few slaves for additional human contact (or dwarven, elven, etc).
I prefer happy endings. I'd say she escaped before getting to the City of the Glass Pool and somehow made her way out - perhaps shown the way by svirfneblin. She could have stories and maybe a bit of map.

Andren: He might be bitter about the loss of Jelenneth, but he will certainly not take kindly to anyone with orcish blood or who worships the evil deity who was aiding the kidnappers.

Semheis: Middle aged now and hopefully wiser. Maybe 5th-6th level. He's probably calmed down quite a bit unless there were continued threats. If New-Mire is threatening Milbourne now then he may be focusing his interests on that.

Lafayer: Also older - maybe finally retired. Perhaps he and Semheis have changed roles. Lafayer could be in Milbourne and Semheis doing the rounds.

Kupier: Retired. Maybe the were-bear kid (Maxim) has taken up his mantle as a 1st level ranger.

Garyld: Retired or dead. Maybe one of the previous adventurers (if a ranger) has taken his place.

Rastifer: His store is taken over by somebody else trying to get rid of the stuff.

Darius Carmen: His son has taken over the stewardship of Milbourne

Squire Marlen: Maybe dead. Maybe not. Keep the personality.

Oleanne: Middled aged. She might sense the unnaturalness of the New Mire. Will probably be friends with Maxim and Shiraz. Probably knows about the lizardmen and the dragon in the Shriken Mire.

Shiraz: I see her mostly as a fey and unchanged by the interveneing years. Perhaps more experienced.

Shriken Mire: Maybe the lizardfolk are stirring for another attack?




Other things to think about (and you may already have):
1) Is this module going to be run as-is? This is important because those treasure levels are going to jack up the power of the characters. I decided to do it as is, and it seems to be working fine - but I only have one power-player.

2) Where is Haranshire in relation to at least one city big enough to sell items and buy items.

3) Are you going to give characters downtime to make things? I do in my game, but I try to balance it by giving them some sense of urgency. This is tricky, you want them to use those feats but not spend all that bloody gold making items.

4) Be mindful of the map scales. The tunnels and caves are huge and most of the monsters can rarely see all the way across any of the caves.

5) When the characters go against the Trolls in Book 2, make sure they're about 6th level or that they're adequately prepared for trolls at the very least. The map scale here is important. I played the trolls only moderately bright. Their guards were far reasonably far out and when the alarm was raised the reinforcements only took double moves; at least initially. After a couple of forays they started running until they holed up completely.

6) New Mire is bigger. Milbourne and Harlaton are going to be in trouble and this could be a lead-in for adventurers.

7) Decide how that Ring of Water Command is going to be activated. I had a 2 stage activation - the player got some powers once she met with the King of Water Elementals and some more once she was able to turn over some more information to him about his son who was now forced to serve in the City of the Glass Pool. The end result is that the characters didn't get full use out of it until about 9-10th level - when the mage was getting the same high-level abilities.

8) The orcs were defeated. What happened to the keys to the massive doors? Were the doors even closed?

9) What happened with the Water Elemental at the Eelhold? Is it going mad because of the Ring of WEC? If so, Milbourne is falling on hard times with their eel fishing becoming dangerous and the mire approaching from the south.

Anyways, those are my first thoughts.....

 

[RedShirtNo5]

Doh! Double post.

 

[RedShirtNo5]

Thanks Seravin, that's great food for thought.

Let's see. We're starting at 2nd level. I only have 4 players at this point - elf fighter, gnome "tunnel" druid, human(?) rogue, and human paladin/sorcerer. No prompting, but it fits the RP potential of the game very very well, although not having a wizard or cleric will hurt them. But we might add a 5th player after a few sessions, and they'll be able to pick up some NPC muscle.

Places:
With 20 years, aboleth could get a delver to cut a new passage nearly anywhere. I think the spire is a red herring, and is still abandoned. Mines are re-populated. So I need a good location for the 2nd group of bandits.

On the NPCs:
Jelenneth. My inclination is that she is captured or somehow surviving in the underdark. The S&S prestige class makes sense. I do like the idea of using her as a source of info. Maybe she somehow made her way to a "neutral" area, a place with outcast drow and the like, such as a trading post.

Andren. Hmm, your comment on Jelenneth gives me a thought. What if it's not Jelenneth who takes Tauster's place, but Andren. He's bitter about loosing Jelenneth. He studied as a wizard to gain power, explored some caves, but never found the right path into the underdark. He's bitter at himself and at the last group of adventurers for failing to find her. He's only 3rd or 4th level.

Speaking of which, in the prior campaign, the PCs didn't go into the underdark. But in this world, they could replace the group discussed in Book II.

Semheis. Agreed, he's probably 5th level, and calmer now.

Lafayer. I like the idea that he's retired and has taken Semheis's place. Possibly he fought the wraith in the gleaming glade and lost a level, so he isn't any more powerful than 20 years ago.

Kupier. He's now 48, not quite old enough to retire yet. But he's training Maxim to be his replacement.

Garyld. Maybe not as old as originally suggested by the module, but definitely retired. Finally moved in with Capella.

Rastifer, Darias Carmen, Oleane, Shiraz. Agreed.

Squire Marlen. Yep, dead, but someone just like him took his place. Actually, in my campaign he got dominated by some of the kidnappers and ordered to kill Parlfrey, but that didn't necessarily happen in this world.

Other minor NPCs probably don't need to be changed, the players won't remember them anyway.

I definitely need a new kidnap victim. Daphne? Sorry, my brain is stuck on Scooby Doo.

I'm thinking Barthelew got took over the Barron of Mutton, got married, and has a couple daughters. But if one of them gets kidnaped, Andren has lost a fiance and a niece? Too much? To strong an incentive for him to cooperate early? Maybe the kidnap victim is something simple, like the daughter of whomever took over Rastifer's.

Onto the other points.

1) I'm tempted to run it as is, but they are pretty good power-gamers. On the other hand, with only 4, they'll need the cash to boost their power to survive.

2) I'm thinking 5 days by horse to a large city of 3000 (3000gp limit), 12 days by horse to a large city of 9000 (15000gp limit).

3) It's interesting, since there are no wizards or clerics. I don't know if the sorcerer or druid will take item creation feats. I usually schedule some downtime, but I have the villians adapt and introduce new issues if they take too long.

4) Time to read up on listen checks.

5) Thanks for the advice

6) Maybe the goblin tribe is growing very large, and becoming bolder.
For Shrieken Mire, I like the idea that the lizardmen are gathering again. Hmm, not sure how Inzeldrin fits in.

7) The 2 stage activation concept is excellent. Tieing it to an RP opportunity is very good way to break up combat-heavy Book II.

8) The doors? Err ... I suppose that either the keys were lost or recaptured from the bodies of the prior adventuring party, or new keys were forged. 20 years seems like plenty of time to do that. Hmm. But maybe some minor NPC is still holding onto one key. If the players stumble on this, they can hypothetically bypass one of the bandit groups.

9) I'll just delay the decay of the sympathy spell. The prior group didn't investigate this.

Very usefull to get the thoughts written down and start fleshing it out.

Thanks!

-RedShirt

 

[Seravin]

Heh. The Daphne reference was a scooby doo reference. Not sure why I was stuck on the scooby gang either, but it sounded funny at the time.

I'm having fun running as-is and the players love the treasure compared to the other 3e game I'm running. It's not that big of deal as long as you're prepared ahead of time on exactly what is available. There's always taxation or robbery.
Heh - my favorite bit was when the party handed over 70,000gp to the bad guys.
If you're going to run the monsters as-is you'll have to run the treasure as-is. Most of the encounters throughout all the books blow the EL guidelines and the extra power helps. Just decide if the players can buy or sell the magic items and at what markup/markdown.

I like the Andren angle as the Tauster replacement. For the kidnappee, it could be his niece - it sucks, but bad things happen to good people. What might be just as good (and just as cliched) is the paladin/sorceror's relative gets kidnapped. Maybe he/she is a student of Andren? Or perhaps Lafayer or Semheis gets kidnapped and has some links to the party? To avoid cliches, then the daughter of whoever took over Rastifer is probably sufficient.

Listen/Spot checks. One think I noticed is that every +1 that user has, is equivalent to 10feet. So if you have a +5 to listen, it's equivalent to hearing at 50 feet what people will hear right next to them. Realizing that has helped me quite a bit when trying to eyeball a situation on who hears/understands what.

Lizardmen and Inzeldrin. Not sure what to do here. My players have never investigated. Inzeldrin is probably mostly uncaring. I see her as a god-like figure to the lizardmen and she uses them as a useful set of tools but otherwise provides no direction. If someone were to come into her swamp to wipe them out though, she might get a little cross and have to set the two-legs straight and then maybe set the lizardmen straight after that.

The trolls are going to be a mother. There's no way around it. I ended up playing them over-confident and not very supportive of each other and there were still a couple necessary raise-deads after two or three forays.

Also note that the random encounter charts don't have any down time on them. Every random encounter produces something. Personally I'd only check a few times a day unless the party is especially noisy or something. There were many times I just didn't bother at all.

Adapting villains and downtime. I kept the villains fairly disconnected and solitary in my game (at least at first). So the kidnappers were on their own and couldn't/wouldn't expect help from the orcs. Ditto, the orcs wouldn't expect help from the mind flayers. They're all too disconnected.
They also don't want to draw attention to themselves if they can help it. So they'll fortify positions and if they get an easy opportunity they'll take it. But they won't extend themselves too far. It's a siege mentality, but it's an exploitable weakness for the party. It also keeps the party from getting wiped out by the mind flayers before they're 3rd level.

That said, the evil priests have had links in the cities my party has gone to and they've run into some of their plots. They're disconnected, but the priests know to look for (and now avoid) my players.
Are you using a home-brew world? Home-build gods? Regardless you'll have to figure out how the evil priesthood fits into your world, where their powerbase is, why they're allied with the kidnappers, etc. Lots of good RP there if you like.

More this weekend if I can manage....

 

[Seravin]

Oh.
One other thing. I dressed up the shrine to Jubilex a bit.
Used a Svirnfneblin Wizard6/Oozemaster10 - or about that, I don't have my notes.
Poor little Vog. He was just your average svirfneblin - insane, but average. Think Gollum from LoTR. He fed potions of haste and flying and invisibility to his ooze companions. He was nice and civil unless you didn't 'stay away' from the shrine. Then he got a little not-nice.

Note that my players were around 12th-14th level when they made it to the shrines. They took on the dragons first. Vog was fun. He used silenced spells and was usually invisible. His only attack spells were magic-missile and transmute rock to mud.

If you think the shrine needs some dressing up, he's not a bad addition.

 

[Seravin]

More random thoughts

Book II
If Carmararen rewards the party, she has the ability to trade some goods to get the magic scrolls and potions.
Who is she trading with? In my world I decided that this community was a splinter of a much larger one not too far away.

The derro: Where do they come from? The community near the end of book II is more of a guard post than anything else - certainly not a city or a township of any sort. Again, I decided there was a larger community further off and that these derro were imported from there. This larger community is probably near the larger svirfneblin community, thus explaining the antipathy.

Also, by the time the party starts wandering below ground, you might want to start introducing more rumors of missing people. Bandit raids are at an all time high since 20 year ago....etc.

Decide what the government line is going to be if the party gains a good reputation and starts telling people that there are mind flayers in dem dar halls. In my world the government took it as seriously as they could and the party got a few reports of other bandits being discovered and taken down - though the dark passages were too terrible for anyone to go very far in.

anyways, just random thoughts.

 

[Seravin]

Random thoughts strike again...

Just finished a major milestone of the conversion process. Next it's onto the Shaboath. Should be fun.

Things to consider in Book III.
0. Teleport. Will you allow it? Or do what they do in the Forgotten Realms and allow a 1 mile range?

1. The Fire Giants - They came to the rift from somewhere. Where was it? If the king's son dies by lava, and the big guy shows up, who is it? An avatar? A proxy? A 15HD Fire Giant with 15 levels of Barbarian might get the party's attention.

2. Sunkenhome - Is it really a drow city? I've always envisioned it as a better place for a Rockseer city. Perhaps as the place they fled to when the drow and the elves went at it. But eventually the Rockseers went too far. They consorted with dark creatures - perhaps even Jubilex and eventually ended up sinking their own home. The survivors fled to the caves where the ropers are and that strange crystal statue. Even from there they had to flee though to where they currently live.
Try this link here to see what I did for current banshee. I'm tempted to raise her to 18th lvl though.

3. Isle of Shadows. What do these creatures do all day? I think there's some great role-playing opportunities here. They're plotting for the eventually decay of everything. Might they be possible allies for the party against the aboleth? Nothing overt - but perhaps a spell or two. Who knows? They've been dead so long they're thought processes are certain to be alien.
If they're not destroyed they could be the source of more adventures.
Also, if you have access to the Return to the Temple of Elemental Evil, check out the Doomdreamer prestige class and the Insanity domain.

4. Szandur. She has an ally who can cast Contingency on her. Additionally, she doesn't have access to teleport in her spellbook, so someone may have gotten her to her island. My conversion of her gave her Craft (trapmaking) because of her little retreat. Perhaps she supplements her time as a trapmaker?

5. If you haven't already, pick up and look through Underdark. It has some potentially cool stuff that could be applicable. It's almost a must-have sourcebook in my mind.

6. The aboleth have other slave routes. Where do they come out in the Sunless Sea? I'm guessing at least one on the other side from where the party enters.

7. My players got the map for the Sunless Sea from the Rockseers last week. They immediately pegged on the fact that Shaboath seems to be an island - but Aljayera still thinks its underwater at this point. I had to do some fast backtracking. Perhaps it's just an island near the city, not actually the city itself.

8. Finally, the map of Shaboath is nothing but this huge oval with a number of scattered buildings. No streets. Nothing. It needs to be fleshed out. I'm going to try my hand at it, but if somebody has already done something I'd be deeply appreciative.

/end random thoughts.

 

[Seravin]

Other notes on things I've just finished looking at.
Shaboath is about 3300ft. east-west and 2550ft. north-south.

It apparently sits on an island about 3 miles long and a mile wide.

The sunless sea is roughly 30miles long ne-sw and 25 miles e-w.

The place is huge.

 

[Hammerhead]

I'm also in the process of converting Night Below to Third Edition. However, I'm also trying to make the module more fun, improving on it. For example, the 2nd Book seemed far too combat-heavy; most groups lose interest about halfway through Book 2, and never make it to the much more interesting City of the Glass Pool and Sunless Sea. Furthermore, using 3.0 XP, levelling progression seems to fit the book's reccomendations in the first part. PCs are generally about 3rd when going into the Keep, 5th into Orc Lair, etc.

However, in Book 2, PCs level much more quickly from massive amounts of XP gain from the hack and slash. To counter both the boredom and massive XP gain, I eliminated the Quaggoths from Monsters at War, replacing them with the Grells. In my group's experience, the Quaggoth fight was entirely uninsteresting and too easy. The Hook Horrors would probably have massacred them if a real war was happening, and the Grells make more interesting opponents.

Another real boring part of Book 2 was the Slime Temple and Smooth Caverns; while some parts of these areas were great, others were tedious and boring. I'd reccomend combining the best of these two areas.

A further problem presents itself in converting the Savant Aboleth. One person reccomends taking them as is, so they're something like Aboleth Wizard 12 Cleric 12. How idiotic. You could give the Savant Aboleth Mystic Theurge levels, which would increase both Divine and Arcane casting without being particularily overpowering. However, some Aboleth will not be able to cast certain higher level spells they depend on, unless you increase their level even more. A simpler and better option, IMO, is to just make some high level Clerics and some high level Wizards/Sorcerers.