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Message: <blockquote data-quote="(un)reason" data-source="post: 9198869" data-attributes="member: 27780">Dungeon/Polyhedron Issue 91/150: Mar/Apr 2002part 3/12Side Treks - The Rock and the Hard Place: A short high level adventure? Not often you see one of those. A young thief stole a powerful magical gem from a wizard without realising what she had. As soon as it was out of his anti-scrying protections, both the upper and lower planes immediately noticed and dispatched an Astral Deva and a Gelugon (to be up or downgraded in rank if you’re scaling this for other levels) Both have currently assumed human form and are trying to get her to give them the gem without causing widespread panic, while she tries to escape. These attempts at subtlety probably won’t last too long once she runs into the PC’s and begs them for help. Will they figure out which one is the good guy and persuade her to hand over the gem, get tricked and hand it over to the bad guy, fight them both, or even kill everyone involved and take the gem for themselves, which will obviously bring escalating extra-planar retaliation in the future plus the danger of being corrupted by the gem but hey, it’s all XP opportunities. A pretty entertaining little scenario that doesn’t railroad you into one solution and has lots of ideas for long-term consequences whichever path they choose, this definitely seems worth including if your stay in town is getting a little boring. Bogged Down: Swamps, why’d it have to be swamps? They’re even worse than deserts for turning all that heavy metal armor into a liability and forcing you to regularly replace your gear. While staying at a coastal village, your low level PC’s (too low level to fly or otherwise skip overland travel) experience a big storm, flooding out the roads and trapping them in the area. (unless they abandon all their gear and swim) They’ll have to stick around and help out with the repairs for the next few days. Fortunately it won’t just be mundane drudge work, as a monster comes out from the swamp and attacks. You’ll have to go in there and hunt it down before it strikes again. It turns out to be a bog mummy, which is quite a stiff challenge for a group of 1st level characters. Just as challenging is figuring out why it’s there in the first place. Two of the other villagers murdered him, hence why he came back rather than resting in peace. But you’ll only find that out if you talk your way through some of the other swamp encounters rather than just attacking everything you see. So like a certain other series of swamp based adventures, this is one where you could solve the immediate problem but miss the underlying one and move on none the wiser, or pay attention, get the good ending and the extra XP that goes with it. I do like it when they do that, so this is another one I’d have no issue with using if my players were in the right level range and terrain.</blockquote>

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