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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Pielorinho" data-source="post: 1299770" data-attributes="member: 259">LONG! I used to have a long thread detailing my changes to the adventure, including some journals written by mad cultists, but the thread seems to be gone forever now.  Here are some recaps of what I did, in order to make the bad guys in town connected to one another and not quite so random: Six months or so ago, a group of sorcerers, little rich kids with too much time, discovered a grimoire describing how to summon an eldritch knowledge-spirit/demon thingy.  Thinking it'd be fun, they went through the ritual process. Part of the ritual involved kidnapping a guy and driving him slowly mad, then sacrificing the lunatic and rendering his fat into candles, used during the summoning ritual. They did the ritual, and it summoned an illithid (since  it was the first illithid used in my campaign, I changed their backstory a lot).  The illithid's arrival drove the last vestiges of sanity from the cultists, and it quickly enslaved them.  It was from the Far Realms, and it saw the potential to transport all these tasty humans back to its home dimension as slaves/snackpacks.  To transport the whole town would require a huge ritual, so it began preparation. First thing it did was to summon more servants from its lands -- the Gray Men.  (These were just grimlocks with a new appearance -- they are totally gray except after they've fed on a person's dying breath, at which point they gain color and the person's body begins to melt away like softening wax over a period of hours). The Gray Men set up a lair in the warehouse district, wherein they could do more ritual planning. Unfortunately for them, this area was under the control of a small gang of wererats, sort of the local mafia, and gang-warfare erupted between the two groups. The adventure begins with the PCs seeing the latest element in this gang warfare, in which the Gray Men trick the wererats into attacking an innocent merchant and spray them with a belladonna solution that forces them into hybrid shape.  While this happens, the illithid sneaks into the mayor's house and takes over. The wererats are willing to give the PCs what little information they have -- where the Gray Men are laired, for example.  If the PCs don't ask, they don't tell, and the PCs will have to follow reports of the Gray Men's kidnappings and murders of victims in the warehouse district. Eventually, clues will lead them back to the cultist's bookstore.  The gibbering mouther in the closet was actually the coalesced nightmares of the sacrificed lunatic -- this closet was where he was held captive and driven insane.  I described it as an amorphous cloud of stars and blackness, in which screaming severed heads floated, impossibly distant and yet swooping in next to you.  The confusion effect was due to the distorted distances and sense of space near the mouther; the blinding effect was due to distant stars suddenly flaring up close.  Attacking it meant hitting the severed heads inside it. I replaced the mouther in the basement with three vargouille, heads seated on the bodies of kidnapped townsfolk who had been sacrificed to form guards for the cultists. And that takes us through the first section, minus the journals of the head cultist. Daniel</blockquote>

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