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Message: <blockquote data-quote="seasong" data-source="post: 553067" data-attributes="member: 5137">Yeah, that'll show him. Or rather, it would have.Amen.Tacked on, I admit it. The pony was intended to be a good source of advance intelligence, but it didn't work as well as I might have wanted.Doh! Can't believe I missed that.After seeing Imhotepthewise's use of the gargantuan fire beetle, I felt really small. Personally, however, I like my flooded mine - it's a real danger to the party, and it is an event rather than a pre-existing condition.My necromancer in this scenario certainly noticed <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f609.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=";)" title="Wink    ;)"  data-smilie="2"data-shortname=";)" />.Thank you from the bottom of my heart. This easily makes up for all the nasty things you said about the rest of the scenario <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f609.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=";)" title="Wink    ;)"  data-smilie="2"data-shortname=";)" />.What I really should have done is made the gargantuan fire beetle something creepy, too... like a Kafka-esque victim who, starving, is forced to eat the perpetually regenerating Tom Gallows to live. It wants to escape, but mostly it wants to eat, and when fresh meat comes in...Well, I named him what the necromancer would name him... But yeah, I coulda done better.As may be obvious, I created this scenario entirely around the diary element. The other scenarios had pretty much beaten that ingredient to death with the usual "find the diary, leads to adventure" and "the answer is in the wizard's diary" stuff, so I wanted something really, really compelling. As with many of my best NPCs, Tom Gallows just sprang, fully formed, from my forehead, leaving a nasty gash and an image that will plague my nightmares for years <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f609.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=";)" title="Wink    ;)"  data-smilie="2"data-shortname=";)" />.Once I had ole Tom, the necromancer was a natural cause-n-effect... and the underground tower was an extension of necessity. In my high-magic campaigns, fortresses, wizard towers, and similar such are usually designed with dragons, spells and so on in mind, and remoteness is a more flexible beast. I was also inspired by the "defense of X" threads cropping up all over ENWorlds this past year.I wanted Tom to have some sort of ability to hurt the adventurers, so I fit the fire beetle and flood into gates (a 1/2 fiend xorn and underground tornado might have been nice additions as well). Like I said, I should have made the fire beetle another creepy thing, but otherwise I thought this was pretty good.As with Tom, once I had the necromancer, Mud sprang to mind. I wanted to establish the fact that this necromancer was a real right bastard.The pony was, as I said, tacked on.Once I had all of these elements, I had to go about dragging the PCs into it. The location of the tower between dwarf and drow came to me with some difficulty - I knew that I wanted powers on either side, so that I could push the PCs into the tower from one direction or the other, but I didn't really want to use the drow or duergar. Had I not missed the blindingly obvious (having the drow raid the tower), I would not have been so hesitant.After that, it was just a matter of filling in the prose and bits and pieces of detail, and writing up the hooks.</blockquote>

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