The Fearless DM

I ran an adventure last night- that was meant to be a dry run for one of the adventures I’m running at DDXP. This one ended up being cut from my schedule (it was supposed to have run in slot 12, but my flight is leaving out of Indianapolis too early for me to squeeze in this last game)

So I get to tell you about it here:

I wrote a 2-part series about characters that ended up shipwrecked on the Isle of Dread, actually on an outlying island. The original X1 Isle of Dread is big- it’s really big enough for a significant chapter of a campaign on it’s own, possibly an entire Heroic Tier of adventure.

But in this case, I just need to fill a 4 hour slot without going over time. So in this adventure, the PCs are shipwrecked survivors (along with a few civilians) who  encounter a sea witch named Kallisti. While the PCs are diverted on another encounter figuring out how to get rescued, she kidnaps the remaining survivors of the expedition, enchants them , and drives them underwater. The survivors are held hostage, and the PCs are given demands.

Her ultimate goal is she wants the PCs to lure a rescue expedition, which she plans on also attacking. But her real goal is she wrecks their ship with her pet kraken, and she turns the humanoid survivors into Sea-devils. She plans on creating an army of them. 

The players, of course, mount a rescue of their own. They first run across Kalisti and her sea devils driving their hapless victims (other survivors of the PCs expedition) into the ocean. (I have to come up with a way that keeps the players from stopping this happening.. in my run last night, I set it up so that the party was split, and only two PCs were there to witness this. Those two PCs successfully killed 5 out of 7 sea-devils before I had the bad-guys take the last of the victims underwater).

Then the party reunites, they discuss their situation, gather clues, they meet some merfolk (I used watersoul genasi as my merfolk), and find out what the deal is. They get the water-breathing ability as a gift of the merfolk.

They get a brief, then..assault on Kallisti’s underwater lair.

In the backstory of the lair, the merfolk once inhabited the coral caves where Kallisti lives now, and once controlled a gargantuan kraken. Kallisti the sea-witch has taken over, kidnapped the merfolk princess as a hostage, and has now united her personal sea-devil guards, as well as a tribe of ixitchitl and some sharks. Just..anything bad you can find underwater.

The kraken’s cave originally had a “fail-safe” device (built by the Mer) to collapse the caves if the beast ever got out of control. Kallisti has of course taken over the Kraken, and has re-keyed the fail-safe and turned it into a puzzle.

What followed was fairly straightforward- they chose to assault the back entrance, through the kelp forest. They got the drop on an Ixitchitl patrol in the kelp forest and fought them.. then moved into the lair. They found their survivors, still awaiting transformation into sea-devil.They found the frozen mer princess.. and they found Kalisti herself..fighting her in the coral halls of her lair.

Finally, the puzzle.

Here it is:

Puzzle: The Six Demon Names

The original version was a stone and coral disc, with colored gems arranged in a circle, which you had to choose two, and once you pressed them, it either set off the fail safe, or (if you chose wrong)  it shocked you for 2d12 damage.

Kallisti bound the trap with the names of six demons:

The gem colors are :

brown - Red - orange - yellow - green - blue- indigo - violet- sepia

The demon names are

• Oni
• Raven
• _(blank)_
• Nalfashni
• Gog
• Etrigano

(As you can see, the third name has fallen off the disc.)

There were a number of other demon names on the floor nearby, and each nameplate fit perfectly into the third slot, but only one was correct. Those names were

Abaddon, Balefire, Archimond, Slaanesk, Mordikul, Cemest, Rakdos, Vulgrim, Korvalg, and Hulgur.

How would you approach the trap? I also left it open ended, the players could have abandoned the trap and allowed the Kraken to live. But they would have paid for that later, I suppose.