The Witch of Underwillow

 

I placed the little village of Underwillow in the pass that the Class of '81 must go through to get back to their house in Parabor. My players had gifted me a map pack of a hobbit village, and I really wanted to use it. So I decided that Underwillow was a Halfling village. 

Also with this awesome map pack, I created a halfling tavern called The Smoke Ring that the players have since made a habit of stopping at when they come through the pass. Tifinin, who is a bard and who is played by an actual bard, wrote a song called "Round" after being inspired by a night of carousing here. 

Like, yeah, an actual song was written and sung during a game. Needless to say, Tif got Inspiration for that session. 

Anyway, the Witch of Underwillow is a short little module that can be completed in a single session. 

The premise is that a witch that holds sway over the village has stolen a child from one of the villagers. The townsfolk ask the players to go on a rescue mission. 

SPOILERS PAST THIS POINT! If you are a player and have this module in your future, you should probably stop reading now.

It's a pretty straightforward little adventure, but one of the things that is kind of cool about it is that it leaves the DM several options on how to play it. For instance, the DM can choose if the mcguffin is a doll or an actual baby. Maybe the witch is actually a Good Guy instead of a Bad Guy. Maybe there's a second witch. So it's pretty flexible and easy to customize. 

The basic plot is that as it turns out, the child is actually a doll and the villagers are being a bit dodgy about this little detail. But the players don't know that, so off they go to confront the witch in her lair. It being Dungeons & Dragons, the motive for the witch stealing the doll to force a confrontation with the players is a bit...how shall we say...contrived. So since I was shoehorning it into my campaign, I changed the story so that the witch was looking to get her hands on the Eye of Death and knew it was in the Class's possession. 

The witch's lair is underneath a willow grove, and consists of a creepy, subterranean tunnel. 

At one point, the witch will send a pretty scary dire wolf after the players. I think my favorite part was when Macterah, the druid, thought about trying to talk to it instead of going straight to combat. "Hey, I want to try talking to the wolf..." 

And that's when I hit the audio on tabletop audio and played a really scary, hair-raising audio of a wolf growl. The Class immediately abandoned that plan and ran like hell down the tunnel and ended up climbing trees. 

Which I kinda love, because that's a reasonable response, frankly. 

The Tomb of Crossed Words

I picked up The Tomb of Crossed Words by Richard Jansen-Parkesup many years ago, and I've run it for several groups. It's a great one for kids and low-level players. It's not terribly combat-heavy, and it's a great puzzle dungeon!

I've got two regular D&D groups: the Riverport Rebels, which consists of my daughter, my nephew, and my husband, and the Class of '81. When I ran it for the Riverport Rebels, we played in person, and I made up actual hands-on puzzles for the kids to solve. They loved the puzzles so much that it has become my regular DMing style. The Class of '81 plays entirely remotely, so I still do hands-on puzzles, but I translate them for Roll20 use. 

SPOILERS! If you are likely to end up as a player in this module, you should probably skip this next part. 

The premise is pretty straightforward: a monk, Brother Connor, is looking for a party of adventurers to investigate a legendary shrine that was dedicated to learning and writing, but lost to time. Local legend says that fifty years ago, a group of adventurers found the tomb, but met a grim fate. Only one of them stumbled back to the village to tell of it before dying of his wounds. 

 The players must answer a riddle given by a skeletal warrior and choose the correct door to access the tomb. Inside, the players find that all the books and scrolls inside are under a curse, their inks turned to smeared and running black oil. 

Encounters include: 

A room that must be passed through by passing by stone soldiers that block the way by advancing on anyone retreating from them. 

A pool of water containing a water weird and spectral beings that can be dispelled using a hint contained in a riddle. 

A room containing a beholder with amnesia. Not kidding. Having been mindwiped, he's more confused than aggressive. I have run this module at least three times, and been a player (I was along to help a new DM run the module) in it once, and never have the players of any group failed to bring the beholder with them out of the dungeon because they felt sorry for it. The Rebels named it Avalon, and the after they followed suite, the Class found out the Rebels had named the thing already and decided to just keep the name. 

A hidden room containing the Big Bad Boss, who turns out to be the undead leader of the doomed party of adventurers that brought the story to the village fifty years prior. He gives the players a choice...answer my question and fight me alone, or fail and fight me and a swarm of animated skulls. The players may ask 20 questions for yes or no answers to figure out the solution.  Every time I run this, the players scoff that the riddle will be impossible to guess. And no group has ever failed to get it right, and often they do it without even hitting their 20 question limit. Which I love, because I kind of feel like that doing a task you thought you weren't up to is a real confidence booster. 

I tweaked the story to fit the campaign, so the doomed adventurers have become the party of friends from the Elaria's journal. In that story, Elaria had been carried to the village by the mortally injured dwarf, Ingot. He died shortly after arriving, but she survived. Decades later, she returned to the tomb and hid the Eye of Death inside, knowing the cult was no longer there and figuring they wouldn't think to return to look. The specters in the room of the pool are the unquiet and changed ghosts of her friends, and the Big Bad Boss is none other than the leader of the original adventuring party (conveniently named Rufus, to mesh with the story in the module).  

The Class searches one of the libraries and find the relic, The Eye of Death, hidden in a clay urn. They take it and the beholder, and head back to Gillian's Hill. 

1. The Master's Vault (contains spoilers)

 The Master's Vault by James Introcaso is a really fun little module that is excellent for teaching people how to play D&D. It's also excellent for learning how to run a D&D game as a dungeon master. I've been running games since I was 15, but there's never an end to learning, and I was still fairly new to running games entirely on Roll20. Still, it was a great start to our campaign. 

The premise is that the player characters are alumni of a great teacher, Elaria Feywing.

The first part of the module is sort of a final exam sort of situation, where the players have to go into Elaria's basement and kill some Rodents of Unusual Size. The second part is when they come back together after a time for her funeral. In this campaign, were her last and favorite group of summer students, in the year 1481, Dale Reckoning.

I was planning to run this module as sort of a one-off for teaching purposes and then launch into our normal campaign, but my players really embraced the idea that they were ex-classmates. As it turned out, this unassuming little module turned out to be the basis of our entire campaign. I find the idea that the players are all ex-classmates and have come together for a common goal to be a whole lot less contrived than a bunch of random dungeons and dragons characters meeting in a tavern. 

So anyway, our four player characters, Macterah Danorae (a copper Dragonborn druid), Ivar Greenleaf (a half-elven ex-sailor rogue from Saltmarsh)), Atalaya Loravaris (a half-elven ranger from the High Forest), and Tifinin ("Just Tifinin"), a halfling bard, find themselves in the lake town of Parabor for their teacher's funeral. 

Of course, this wouldn't be a Dungeons and Dragons game if we didn't discover that their beloved mentor had been murdered. She leaves them her house and some cryptic notes that lets them know that they must embark on a series of small side quests that will take them to different areas of the valley. They must collect nine tiles and bring them back to the house.

The module contains three side adventures that the players can choose to do in any order before heading back to the house for the final challenge. They are, in no particular order:

The Staircase Cliffs

The goal of this adventure is to get the players to learn how to climb up an obstacle, in this case cliffs that look like giant stairs. There are holes in the cliffs where flying serpents will come out and bite the players, forcing them to fight from a precarious foothold.

If you are running this module, you might want to tweak this part of it simply because the players are first-level squishies at this point. And, as written, the mechanics for getting up the cliff are a bit dry. So use your judgment on how to run this part of it. 

At the top is a Dragonborn hermit named Alcaeus. He will take care of the players' injuries, feed them, and send them on their way with three of the tiles.

Vixthra's Lair

This is a hidden cave behind a waterfall full of kobolds, and of course, traps. This is probably my favorite of the three side adventures.

One of the reasons I really like running on Roll20 is because Roll20 allows you to set up traps on different layers and spring them on your players as they stumble into them. You don't have to roll to see if your player falls into the trap because it's right there hidden on the map. If your player moves into that square, boom. Player in a trap! It kind of gives you a more realistic, real-time feel.

But anyway, the traps make the fight with the kobolds a heck of a lot more interesting. There is a curtain in the back of the cave, behind which is a kobold shaman and a giant descending spider.

Very interesting low-level combat.

Here's another cool thing that I've noticed about Roll20: If you use Dynamic Lighting and you allow your players the use of working torches, your players will very quickly learn to throw the torches to illuminate areas before they enter them. I love this. This adds a whole other level of immersion and strategy to your game.

Three more tiles glow from the cobwebs in the ceiling.

Dolor Forest

This leg of the journey is to teach the players about rolling for abilities and role-playing. They will battle their way through wolves and oppressive gloom to reach a remote gravesite in the forest, the final resting place of Helene, The Elaria's late friend. She will ask the players a series of questions and they will have to role-play their way through convincing her and proving their worth. She has the final three tiles.

The Master's Vault

The player characters now make their way home and use the tiles to unlock a  mysterious door in the backyard. What's cool about this on Roll20 is that the module gives you a really nice puzzle page that the players will actually have to work in real-time. They will use the blue tiles and place them on a board in the correct order and when they get it right a word will pop up and the door will open. 

Inside is an elaborately tiled vault with a dias in the back containing artifacts on pedestals. A magical message is triggered and their teacher appears, confessing that she had become embroiled in a plot involving an artifact of power called the Eye of Death, and keeping it out of the hands of an evil cult.

When the players enter, the big bad villain, an evil necromancer who was responsible for the demise of their teacher, presents himself. He is accompanied by a team of skeletons, ready to battle the now second-level player characters. 

What makes this battle particularly fun and interesting is that there are columns in the room that shoot damaging radiant beams at random creatures. The radiant beams are triggered by the presence of undead. As long as the skeletons are still animated, the beams will keep shooting every round. And everyone in the room, regardless of what team they're on, is a potential target.

I actually set up my map so that it had beam trigger tokens on the map itself* (You do not need a subscription to pull this off). All I had to do was click on them and it would trigger an animation and a series of rolls that would tell me if it hit anybody and how much damage it did. So every round, one of these suckers would light up and target somebody.

It certainly added a layer of chaos to the fight, especially when the players figured out it was indiscriminately targeting everyone in the room! "Great, thanks Teach!" 

My players did really well. They emerged victorious and inherited Elaria's magical sword, a bag of cash, a few minor magic items, a map, and their teacher's journal.

Here ends the module.

Now, there are a lot of questions that the module doesn't answer. What's in the journal? What's the story with this cult trying to get their hands on the Eye of Death? Where is the Eye of Death now? What are we supposed to do at this point??

I thought it was a great premise for a campaign, so I answered those questions by writing out the pertinent parts of the journal. I also turned the map they found into an escape room-type puzzle to send them to the next leg of their journey. More on this in another post.

* The code for the macro is {{Radient Damage5=[[2d4]]}} {{Saving Throw=DC13vsDEX}} /fx beam-magic @{target|Caster|token_id} @{target|Foe|token_id}

It's inelegant, but it works. Like I said, you don't need a subscription to use this simple macro.