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zippdementia · 4 years

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Part 80 Alignment May Vary: Mirrors of the Abyss (Welcome to My Game)

The next part of our adventure is taken from Mirrors of the Abyss, by Ryan Durney. I highly recommend it as a rare high level adventure. Very much worth a purchase. I will be covering huge aspects of it and it will not be spoiler-free, though it is a random enough adventure that there is PLENTY we won’t see on this playthrough and some additional material for our own story. Art is taken directly from the module and is illustrated by Ryan Durney. The purpose in using it here is to show off how beautiful and professional the product is, not to claim such images as our own. I sincerely hope it inspires you to purchase the product!

Chamber 00: The Fossil Ossuary and the Woods Beyond

The first chamber is made up of two challenges. The first is trying to figure out a way to escape from the about-to-collapse cave the players find themselves in. The second is to confront two potential allies and figure out which one is telling the truth and is safe to bring along and which one is a demon in disguise.

Light reveals brown strata of crumbling clay and 3 sets of petrified skeletons pressed into the walls, floor and ceiling. The total size of the traversable corridor is only roughly 8 feet by 16 feet, ending on all sides with rubble and tiny alcoves that may or may not be natural. Your arrival has disturbed heavy stone above you, as you can hear the sound of straining rock and sometimes the trickle of powder and grit spilling downward onto you from the cracks above. It would appear that you don’t have a lot of time to find your way out before all of it collapses.

The first puzzle is a pretty straightforward riddle, and easy to solve if the players can find the clues spread around the cave. Our group does and there isn’t much more to say about it. The riddle is about a set of fox skeletons (Esheballa’s whole theme is about fox creatures) and which of the dead foxes was her favorite. They solve the riddle together and get a fox’s skeletal paw as a reward and the cave opens into a mysterious forest. Here they find all their food and water has dissipated and they must find a way out or starve.

Before long, they come to a series of standing stones and here find a familiar face: Remus, the Paladin friend of Carrick. He is still bleeding from a head wound and facing off against another crew member, one they don’t recognize, who calls himself Janson. The men tell the players that in order to proceed, one of these two has to be killed at their hand. The other must go with them.

Now, this is a really tricky puzzle. Before the game begins, the DM has to roll for this encounter to determine, randomly, which of the two men is telling the truth and which is a traitor in disguise. After this is determined, another roll tells you WHAT the traitor is (whether demon, doppleganger, ooze, or any number of other interesting possibilities) and a third roll tells you what their motives are. But it gets even trickier than that. Depending on the roll, both men may be traitors, or NEITHER may be traitors.

In this case, I won’t say what I rolled, but the players are stumped for a long while on this. Remus (if it really is him) seems confused and doesn’t have access to his magic to prove he is a Paladin. Furthermore, as Janson eagerly points out, Remus would be the perfect disguise to fool the party, as Carrick has a deep bond with him. Janson himself they don’t know, but he tells them that Remus murdered the crew in front of him, questioning them first to get details of the ship so that he could impersonate the Paladin. For his part, Remus claims to remember nothing of how he got here, only that Janson was never aboard the ship, he’s never seen him before.

Some basic questions don’t help the situation: Janson and Remus both seem to know enough about the crew and the ship to verify their stories. Finally, Daymos asks a great question: "The crew who were murdered, tell me their names.” Daymos then looks to Carrick and Imoaza to see if they can verify the names. Janson starts going through a list of names and he mentions Star. This is a hint to the players, because they know Star was left behind on the Air Planet. With this, Imoaza comes up behind Janson and strikes him with the Drosselgreymer.

Janson screams out and runs off into the woods, Imoaza and Milosh giving chase. The woods are confusing, though, and Imoaza is soon turned around and has to go back or else get lost. Milosh, with his tracking abilities from his Ranger class, manages to catch up to Janson inside a huge mushroom covered patch of woods and there he confronts him.

Janson is a doppleganger, a special one, who extends his arms into mauls and tries to use the environment to catch Milosh. He smashes Mushrooms and they release Hallucinigenic spores. Milosh is actually resistant to such things and manages to escape this trap, but the Doppleganger rolls poorly and falls prey to the effects of the spores, giving Milosh time to get some free hits on him. Still, Janson is beefy and finally leaps across the woods at Milosh, mauls raised to strike... and Milosh blows his head apart with a blast from his gunarm.

The players regather at the standing stones. Here they give Carrick a longsword and heal him but are still cautious, not sure they trust him. They are instructed by him to dig up keys around the area (instructions left in his head by Eshebala). They do so and are informed that these keys are needed to traverse the 193rd layer of the Abyss safely. With that, portals appear between the standing stones and the players enter a random one.

Chamber 15: Her Chambers

Chamber 15 is where the players go next, randomly. It is actually a resting point, with the opportunity for two players to gain big bonuses in the dungeon, one granted by Eshebala herself and the other granted by one of her rivals, her brother and former lover.

This is an odd room to roll for the first real challenge of the dungeon, as it is a respite from action and a chance for players to rest and recover, which right now they don’t need. The chamber is filled with, ah, lewd objects and art and the players are supposed to touch these objects. What they touch determines Eshebala’s reaction and whether she decides to try and, ah, bed one of the players.

In this case, she chooses Daymos, who is attracted to a number of, ah, toys in a drawer by Eshebala’s massive bed. She appears, whisks the other players away, and offers to teach Daymos the dual meaning of pleasure and pain. Daymos chickens out, though, not willing to commit to the act without knowing exactly what he’s getting himself into, and putting in a plea for the safety of his companions. All of this makes Eshebala extremely bored and boredom leads to annoyance. She decides to punish Daymos by attacking him, clamping down on him with jaws turned gigantic and vulpine. Daymos manages to dull the onslaught somewhat by surprising Eshebala, saying she is acting out on him what her baby foxes did to each other (a reference to the fox riddle, earlier). This shocks her and she teleports him away before she can tear him limb from limb.

Daymos, even at level 15, is NOT a tough customer. He has incredible magic and psychic powers, but his hitpoints are merely 50 (a combination of poor Constitution and bad hitpoint rolls). This attack takes nearly half his life away, even halted as it was.

Meanwhile, Imoaza has been in a different chamber. When Eshebala sent most of the players away, Imoaza was snagged from limbo and brought before Eshebala’s brother, Daragor.

You have been whisked into some kind of bizarre and tumultuous cafeteria for demonkind. All manner of dangerous archetype turns spits or clutches huge rib cages as if they were holding a mere sandwich. Demons the size of barns carry trays of globular, clotted foods to tables, wading through a foot of discarded bones. The biting coppery smells, and the sound of ripping and gnawing, en masse, is enough to push you over the edge, if not for your mind's blatant curiosity for why you sit at the fanciest table in this nightmarish mess hall for monsters.

Daragor tells her he is giving her a “cheat,” something she can use to survive the dangers ahead. Why? He wants her to win Eshebala’s game so that he can win a bet he foolishly placed on the players. He tells her to keep her eye open for his mark as he has hidden items around the games that can help them. Then he sends her teleporting off and the party is reunited in the next chamber.

... which, this post was really an addendum to the last post. It was one large session so while we added Daymos to the group and got the new dungeon started we didn’t get very far into it. We are playing again in a couple of weeks, so keep an eye out for A Pissed Off Librarian.

#Mirrors of the Abyss #Dnd 5e #Alignment MAy Vary #Eshebala #Dungeons and dragons

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