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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Libertad" data-source="post: 8089778" data-attributes="member: 6750502"><img src="https://i.imgur.com/0BPX82F.png" alt="" class="fr-fic fr-dii fr-draggable " data-size="" style="" /> The Lost ChildrenThis is one of the darker adventures in Unbreakable, with a bit of a horror tinge to it. It is designed for 3 to 7 characters of 5th thru 10th level, which is a pretty wide range; albeit the adventure says that it is optimized for 5 PCs of 8th level. The Lost Children takes place in the environs of Kankala Lake Village and the surrounding mountainous terrain, with Nepalese inspiration throughout. A pair of shapeshifting monsters known as <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lakhey" target="_blank">lakhey</a> preyed upon orphaned children of the village for generations, spacing out their murders over time so as not to tip people off too much. Although an old woman who escaped them long ago, and a village girl worried about the loss of her adopted brother, will put the PCs on their trail.The adventure opens up as the PCs are going through a mountain pass. Coming upon a stray goat with a tag stating its ownership and home, Kankala Lake contains the closest center of civilization. The people here are subsistence farmers and herders, and have little to give besides food and a place to sleep. The goat belongs to Kiran, a farmer and father of five plus the orphan boy Imay. An elderly couple also passed through the village days ago, commenting upon being childless and wishing they could adopt a child like Imay before leaving for the lake. Not-so-coincidentally, Imay disappeared not long after. Kiran is already stretched thin tending to his biological children, and PCs may pick up that a part of him is relieved that he has one less mouth to feed.Further investigation will lead the party to Punthakhu Maincha, an elderly woman selling marionettes in the shape of people, animals, and demons. If the party’s polite enough to sit around for a spell at her behest she will speak of times past, including various hints about the lakheys and how the intelligence of animals is often taken for granted. She’s dismissed as being senile by other villagers, but her tales have a hint of truth, for in reality Punthakhu Maincha was one of the few children lucky and skillful enough to escape the lakheys’ capture.Eventually the proper adventure hook will come in as Daxa, one of Kiran’s daughters, approaches the PCs to find Imay, believing that the elderly couple kidnapped him. She has no money or items of worth to pay the party besides a doll, so ideally the PCs will be the more charitable types in seeking out this danger.In reality the elderly couple are just a pair of normal good-intentioned people, but the lakhey fear that they may expose them, for they already killed Imay. One of them took the boy’s form to accompany them out of the village and plans to drown the couple in the lake.The majority of the adventure is a wilderness trek with several set-point encounters that lead the PCs closer to the lakheys. The monster at one point will try to misdirect and trick the party by taking on the form of Daxa, although only one of them will do this at a time. There are points when canny animals in the area will warn the PCs of trouble directly or otherwise, such as a crow giving warning caws as the PCs approach a shallow graveyard full of the lakheys’ victims. Said corpses are now undead skeletons of children who aren’t initially hostile, but can be appeased and laid to rest via good role-play. The skeletons are mute and thus pantomime, and give the PCs hand-puppets imbued with single-use spells as a reward, along with their spirits aiding the party in combat with the lackeys later on.The next major encounter is a bamboo hut where the lakheys live, and the ghost of a mouse can offer the party information in exchange for food, telling them about the lackeys. The hut is also home to the ghost of Ratna, Punthakhu Maincha’s sister who was unlucky enough to die and can offer to help the party if they play a game of <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bagh-Chal" target="_blank">Bagh-Chal</a> with her. She’s a bad player and sore loser and will attack the party if her ego’s bruised. If peacefully parlayed, Ratna will explain how she and her sister had an abusive mother and did not believe Punthaku Maincha about the lakheys after she escaped. But her mother believed the part about the lakhey’s hut bearing treasure, and sent Ratna out of the house to steal from it. Ratna died at the monster’s hands when they took the guise of an elderly couple promising to give her a better life..The final encounter takes place down at the lake, the elderly couple are bathing down by it. The lakheys, disguised as Imay and Daxa, are near a second bamboo hut and will try to trick the party into distrusting the elderly couple. But they do not trust the PCs to do things properly should they seek to kill the “monsters,” and will try to trap the party in the hut which they’ll then set on fire before going down to the lake and doing the dark deed themselves. That is, unless the party escapes and catches up in time. The waters by the lakeshore are home to a strong whirlpool, and the lakheys will use the murkiness of the water to conceal themselves from attacks if possible and shapechange out of sight to further confuse the party. If the PCs managed to pacify the skeleton children, their spirits will manifest as a damaging aura attack that hurts the lakheys and halves their speed.Statwise the lakheys are fiends who can see in the dark and have advantage on saves versus all magical effects. Their primary means of attack is via multiattack with claws or a manifested glaive which can cause the target to bleed on a failed Constitution save. Said glave deals more damage with every strike it makes against such a wounded target. They can shapechange into other humanoids, but besides this they don’t have much in the way of other major attacks or abilities.There are two major ways for the adventure to resolve. Either the lakheys are defeated, or they trick the PCs into killing the elderly couple. The latter has a grimmer resolution, as the party receives news several weeks later of the village being wiped out,* but if they brought the monsters to justice then they can lay Ratna’s soul to rest. Three new magic items are also provided at the adventure’s end: Animal Friendship Bracelet (discovered at the grave) that can allow communication with animals; Chattering Coal (lakhey’s hut) that acts as a magical voice recorder that is activated when spit upon; and Bowl of Nourishing (reward from the elderly couple) that can turn a single grain of rice placed inside into a bunch of <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yomari" target="_blank">yomari dumplings</a> that can feed five people.*kind of wondering what caused the lakheys to go nuclear, considering that they’ve been the type to play the long con for decades.Thoughts So Far: This adventure is more of a side trek or encounter in terms of its brevity. There aren’t really any mandatory fights per se, and all of them can be resolved either via role-play or in the last case the party falling for the monsters’ trick. This means that PCs may very well nova the final fight by dumping their major spells and rest-based abilities then and there. Another factor is that due to being fiends, a party with a paladin may very well easily see right through the lakhey’s trickery, although given that the second one is located at the lake near the end it’s not so much an adventure bypasser as the party having an advantage: “okay you know this child’s actually a shapeshifting devil, but now you have a shapeshifting devil on your hands!” I did like the lake fight, which makes up for the enemy’s lack of ranged attacks by dividing the party’s attention between safeguarding the couple and defeating the monsters.Join us next time as we overthrow a rakshasa tyrant in the midst of a dreadful monsoon in the Lost Rathi!</blockquote>

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