Lighthouse Frighthouse - chrisman/skookums-and-dragons GitHub Wiki

Meta

  • date: 7/11/2019
  • players:
    • Spezbar: L5 White Dragonborn Arctic Land Druid (Alex B.)
    • Thundaarn: L5 Bronze Dragonborn Tempest Cleric (Eric)

Intro

The trade routes coming out of Blue Harbor have dried up. Rumors include stories of monsters in the harbor destroying ships, and also of the residents of Blue Harbor succumbing to madness. What exactly is true, nobody's sure. You've been sent to investigate and restore the trade routes to the region.

TLDR Recap

What is context exactly?
  • Trade has stopped out of blue harbor
  • Water Monsters?
  • Craziness?
  • Enrique’s Empanada Emporium
  • They use windows in this town
  • Billy is really into to Dave Mathews Band
  • Spezbahr fingerguns
  • No one sweats like Billy
  • Spezbahr & Thundaarn experience ego death and unity with the world mind
  • Limp mushrooms
  • Spezbahr surpassed the mushroom
  • The mushrooms can perceive
  • Spezbahr caught in a net by fish?
  • Spezbahr turns into a shark. The fish’s natural predator
  • Talos is a fungus
  • Fish worship shoes
  • Fish don’t want your god
  • Billy is promised a lighthouse
  • Lighthouses are scary
  • Potatoes might be gods
  • Potatoes are definitely gods

Recap

INT. Enrique's Empanada Emporium

Thundaarn bursts into the Enrique's Extraplanar Empanada Emporium proclaiming, "Talos will save you if you come with me."

Spacebar makes Thundaarn's non-existent hair billow dramatically, and then approaches the bar after everyone ignores Thundaarn and orders flavored water.

Enrique gives Spacebar a beer and he chills it with Frostbite.

The locals reveal that their Lighthouse has been stolen, but a fat, raving halfling named Billy is dancing madly with his fire poi as a replacement lighthouse of sorts. One asserts that a cyclops took it so that it can destroy the ships in the harbor.

EXT. The Point

The pair notice a large hole in the ground and some gouges in the earth and rock around it.

A bit away from the Point, there are some footprints and strange, unusual mushrooms.

As Spacebar investigates the mushrooms, Thundaarn is mesmerized by Billy and envious of his ability to so beautifully express himself through the art of dance.

Spacebar reaches for a mushroom and it moves. He grabs for it and the mushroom scoots 10ft away.

Intrigued, he chases it and snatches it up, plucking its tendrils from the earth. As he goes to smell it, the mushroom swells up as though it was breathing and then snaps closed, shooting a cloud of spores into Spacebar's face.

Spacebar trips balls and becomes a disembodied collection of thought an energy and has a thought bonding orgy with some other disembodied entities.

The mushroom speaks to Spacebar in a tiny voice, "Hi."

"Hey buddy."

"Hey buddy. You seem sad. You seem lonely. Are you alone?"

"No, look, Billy's right over there."

Spacebar asks Thundaarn to come sniff and talk to his mushroom.

Thundaarn resists, but Spacebar convinces him that because Talos is in everything, the mushroom is also Talos. Thundaarn is convinced and also trips balls.

He is amazed when the mushroom speaks to him and assumes it is Talos.

He refers to it as Talos for the rest of the session.

The mushroom convinces the duo to climb down the cliffs to the rocky beach below.

EXT. Tide Pools, Harborside

A hooded figure beckons them to a cave under the cliffs, as a ship is destroyed by the alleged "cyclops."

Both dragonborn are stricken with sanity-breaking fear, Spacebar breaks into laughter and Thundaarn calls down lightning from Talos to smite his unbelieving companion.

The two are assaulted by a large group of small fish-like creatures.

A long, distressing battle with lots of nets ensues and Spacebar is almost drowned until he manages to escape the grasp of an eyepatched fish person and turn into a shark. Thundaarn does a lot of lightning and thunder stuff and manages to kill a few of the creatures and scare away the rest.

They are lead into a strange, breathing phosphorescent cave by the cloaked figure, who looks like a zombified fish person with the same phosphorescent tendrils growing out of him.

INT. Fungal Cave

The cave releases spores and the duo begins to trip balls again.

"Talos" (the fungal collective entity) gives the duo intense visions of the history of the fish people and their ability to create gods via belief and shows them the lighthouse sprouting legs and walking into the sea.

Spacebar picks up a red crab and whispers to it, "Go tell Billy we're gonna get him a lighthouse," and it scurries off up the cliffside.

The two march out into the sea to slay the false god.

EXT. Middle of the harbor

Thundaarn calls the false god from the depths of the sea and a battle ensues. Spacebar flings a massive shard of ice from the whirling waters into the lighthouse and Thundaarn takes control of the storm and calls lightning bolts down from it into the beast.

After an arduous battle, the lighthouse god is slain and the two turn to see a large gathering of fish people fall to their knees and begin to chant and wail. The duo feels the sudden rush of power that comes with being converted into a demigod.

DM Notes

behind the screen lie spoilers abound

Madness at the Lighthouse

a one-shot for D&D 5e

Seriously scaled back for 2 level five players. But this could easily be a high level adventure.

DM's Summary

The mad, mad, mad kuo-toa have been driven out of the lake cavern and away from their nesting caves by the aboleth. They have taken refuge in the shallow caves along the shores of Blue Harbor near the lighthouse. They started worshipping the lighthouse, hoping it would come to life and drive the aboleth from their home. Well, guess what? It did come to life! But now it's running amok and smashing up ships.

Sanity

This game makes use of the optional Sanity rules in the DMG for a spooky horror, Call of Cthulhu kind of game. Every time the players see or experience something crazy (like the first they see a deranged fishman monstrosity) have them roll a sanity check.

Example Sanity DC

Difficulty Example
10 Seeing a kuo-toa
16 Seeing a kuo-toa mushroom zombie
20 Having a mushroom induced out-of-body experience
30 Seeing a 40 foot tall walking lighthouse destroy a ship in two blows

Scenes

  1. Arrival in town, hanging at Enrique's
    • "Somebody stole our lighthouse!"
    • "What'd it do grow legs and walk off?"
    • "I heard there's a cyclops monster out in the harbor smashing ships!"
  2. Investigating the Point
    • the cliffs crumble down to the sea like the lighthouse was dragged into the harbor
    • webbed footprints, odd clumps of seaweed, leading town to the tidepools
    • mushroom sprouts surrounding the site: sprouts will use rapport spores to try to get the players into the myconid cave
  3. Tide Pools
    • kuo-toa ambush: two groups of 1 whip + 2 kuo-toa try to drag the players out into the sea and drown them. Will flee if gravely injured, or if they become outnumbered.
    • myconid cave: sovereigns will use hallucination spores to show the players them and the kuo-toa being driven away from the underground lake by the aboleth.
  4. Harbor
    • Lighthouse
    • Entrance to Underdark
  5. Underdark
    • Aboleth

Resolutions

I'm not offering the players a tidy resolution to the problem. Here's an attempt to anticipate what they might choose to do:

  • Kill the godling!

  • Kill all the kuo-toa worshippers, thus cutting off the source of the godling's powers, allowing it to revert to its form

  • Convince the kuo-toa to worship something else (like returning to their favored god Blibdoolpoolp), or some other smaller idol of their choosing/making

  • Summon Blibdoolpoolp to kill the godling?

  • Gain the kuo-toa's adoration, de-deifying the lighthouse, gaining shitty god powers in exchange for agreeing to run off the aboleth

Stats

Snorplopt, Eye of the Coast

A newborn god

An infant god. Doesn't really listen to the prayers of its worshipers directly but feels a sort of mindless obligation to act out the primary wish of those who created it: make it back into the Underdark and vanquish the aboleth so that the displaced kuo-toa can return home.

Use the spectator stat block with the following modifications:

  1. Increase the hit points by at least 100%

  2. The "bite" action is a punch (blugeoning)

  3. The "Eye Rays" are light beams from the lighthouse lamp.

Kuo-Toa

They don't know what they're doing. They buzz with insane energy and never stop moving. They've never been to the surface before and everything is brand new. They claim the tidepools as their new territory and will defend it. They worship the lighthouse in hopes it will drive out the aboleth so they can return home.

Myconid

Passive, peaceful, mostly non-interventionist. They want to show the players what happened so that they can maybe fix things so they can go back below.

Use the standard stat blocks: https://www.dndbeyond.com/sources/mm/monsters-m#Myconids

Aboleth

Use the Reduced-Threat Aboleth

or, for an even easier opponent, use chuul

Blibdoolpoolp

A 20 foot tall naked woman with the head and claws of a lobster. She's insane.

If the players somehow manage to summon Blibdoolpoolp, use the Kraken stat block, and:

  1. Shorten its reach to 10 ft.

  2. Add some warlock spellcasting (Great Old One)

  3. Change lightning damage to psychic damage

  4. As an action, it can cause madness with its gaze

Appendix

Resources

Madness table

Why: The short term madness effects are a little too mechanical, and a little too harsh. I don't want somebody to spend an entire combat trying to become un-stunned, and I don't want anybody to accidentally murder their friend because "You attack the nearest creature." I instead wanted something a little more RP and a less mechanical, and doesn't potentially harm any nearby friends. Plus, I wanted things that were a little more insane and a little less mild inconvenience.

How: Didn't quite get to 20. To use, roll a D6 and a D8 together. D6 is effectively a coin toss: evens, roll on the first 8, odds roll on the second 8.

Edit: also see these madness tables:

  1. d100_insanity_effects
  2. Alternative Indefinite Madness Table

Table:

  1. You hear somebody whisper your voice and giggle.
  2. You're afraid your teeth are going to fall out and bees will swarm from your empty gum sockets
  3. This is not your skin. Whose skin is this? Where is your skin?
  4. There are cats hiding everywhere and they're trying to steal your thoughts.
  5. The moon has a face and it is angrily judging you, rolling its eyes, and gnashing its teeth.
  6. Suddenly there are birds everywhere and they are watching you.
  7. Everybody's head is scooped out in the back, and contains a single lit candle. You can't help but wonder what would happen if you blew out the candle.
  8. Everything that happens to you is yet another fulfillment of the prophecy.
  9. Pineapples are straining and bursting from every seam and orifice. Some humans are animated, sewn sacks of pineapples.
  10. The pixies are trying to poison you. Don't eat that, you fool! It's poison!
  11. Gravity has suddenly reversed. If you don't find something to grab onto RIGHT NOW you are going to rocket into the sky and by hurled into space.
  12. You know for a fact that everything that happens is controlled by a combination of random dice rolls, and the decisions of a handful of people playing a tabletop role playing game. You can tell others, but they don't believe you.
  13. A large potato with eyestalks and tentacles floats three feet off the ground, and follows you around. Nobody else can see it.
  14. You are unclean. You must wash yourself. So unclean, so filthy.
  15. None of this matters. It's only a dream.
  16. Something precious was stolen from you. You don't remember what it was. But you must find it.

contribute | resources | rules

⚠️ **GitHub.com Fallback** ⚠️