Against the Cult of the Reptile God

Against the Cult of the Reptile God is definitely an oldie but a goodie. It's got a lot going on with it and you will get a lot of hours out of it if you choose to run it for your group. This is not a side quest by any stretch.

For the Class of '81, I set the location for this module in the same place that I located the Masters Vault and the Class of 81's home base, which is the town of Parabor. So they are definitely motivated to get to the bottom of what is going on with their town.

In the Riverport Rebels campaign, Regus, the Duke's steward, requested that they go out to the town because several people were going missing and the mayor had requested the Duke's help in getting to the bottom of the town's problems.

And I changed the "reptile god" part to it being a larger faction of the undead cult that is the nemesis of the Class of '81. With that minor change, it fit really well into my campaign.

Spoilers! 

The town's problem is that it has been infiltrated by an evil cult that is brainwashing the townspeople to become evil savants, ready to do harm to those who are not in the cult.

Ironically, I opted not to run another module that was based on a plague. I figured we needed a break from plagues. So instead we did an oppressive cult that turns its members into mindless zombies. Please enjoy this irony with me.

An interesting thing about this module is that it could go one of three ways depending on what the players do. It could be a straightforward battle against the evil cult. It could be a rescue if the players get separated and some of them get captured. Or it could be an escape, if the entire party gets captured. It could literally go either way.

So anyway, this is a module that starts out with a good bit of role-playing. The players can spend a lot of time in the town talking to various people and gathering clues. There is also the potential for combat if the players are not diplomatic and careful. One of the two taverns is being used as a town base for the cult.

Some of the townsfolk are not in the cult and could potentially be good allies for the players. In fact, the other tavern is run by some good honest folks. The Riverport Rebels were actually advised by one of these allies to not split up and not eat or drink anything if they went into the bad tavern. Literally the first thing they did when they walked in was forget that advice. Tijitsu and Peter plopped down at the bar and ordered lunch and Stephanie went exploring upstairs.

So of course she got jumped by cultists. Alerted by her screams, the men leaped  to their feet before they could eat (and get drugged) and ran upstairs, joining the fray. Stephanie, seeing that her companions had the fight well at hand, used all of her actions to set the tavern on fire. It ended up burning to the ground.

The Class of '81 were only marginally more careful. They are a lot more cautious as a group than the Rebels are. However Tifinin was nearly seduced by the bacon being fried in the kitchen. He opted to stay behind when the rest of the group poked around elsewhere, and was surprised by the cook, who threw the pan of bacon at him in a surprise attack.

The rest of the Class returned to find Tifinin in a wild rage. He had defeated and tied up the cook, found a can of red paint in the basement, and covered the first story of the tavern in rude graffiti. The unconscious cook had "bacon waster" written across his chest in red paint.

If you run a game in Roll20, the first thing your players will learn how to do is put graffiti on your maps. I almost fell out of my chair when I scrolled the map down and saw what he had done.

The players will eventually find their way to the corrupted temple. There are three levels to that. This is where the Class of '81 picked up the non-player character Cirilli, who is now a permanent part of the campaign. She is a module NPC That one of the priests had locked up in a cage and who was resistant to the brainwashing.

From there, the players will go on a long trek through the wilderness to a muddy subterranean outpost that the cult is using for its brainwashing facility. There are prisoners here as well as cultists and a variety of creepy crawlies, troglodytes, and other creatures. At the end of this will be a few increasingly difficult encounters involving undead, a necromancer, and a spirit naga. 

I like this dungeon because it's interesting terrain.  It's very muddy and water filled. Part of it is so flooded the players will have to use rowboats to get through it.

There is something for everyone here, so while it's a very old module, there's a very good reason it's still around.