There are times in your life when you want to use a monster one of your friends has written. Well, perhaps it’s never happened to you, but it’s happened to me.
So, here’s the result: Buried Temple of the Death God. Which demonstrates that I wanted to use as clichéd a title for the adventure as possible. As the monster was released as OGL (that is, not using the DMs Guild community program), I had to release the adventure as an OGL product as well, so that’s why it’s on DriveThruRPG rather than the DMs Guild.
The designer of the monster? James Introcaso. He designed a monster that I find very fun and evocative, and it’s at the heart of this adventure. So, the entire point of the adventure was about making it the showpiece encounter.
However, along the way I put it into an adventure where it’s likely the correct choice is not to fight the monster. The experience of the adventure is instead the exploration of this ominous location. First, you discover a town that has slipped into a great hole in the earth, then you discover what’s happened to its inhabitants, then you discover what lies below, and finally you discover the monster.
The cumulative effect of all these revelations is that, by the end, the players are nervous and possibly terrified. In the session where I ran this, the adventurers turned and ran. And there the session ended.
Your players might be different. They might stay and fight. The monster is difficult – with a challenge rating of above the level of the adventure – but I can imagine good groups can defeat it. That’s great, and you’ve got a story there as well. However, if you do run it, I’d love to know whether your players chose to stay or to run!
It’s not a long adventure. It’s likely to take most groups about 3-4 hours. It’s easily dropped into any campaign. It’s written for level 6-8 characters, but you can probably scale that by changing the quantity of monsters encountered; for greatly divergent levels, substitute in monsters more in-keeping with the level. The monsters (save the last one) aren’t the focus of the adventure, but they add to the theme.
The design – for a four-hour adventure – is short. It’s a total of two pages of text, plus another page with the monster statistics. There’s two pieces of boxed text, but I haven’t used it for all the locations. Instead, I’ve given the DM ideas for the location, and then let the DM invent additional details. The boxed text is used to evoke the scene for the beginning and the ending locations, and give the DM pointers on where to go from there. There’s no map, nor any art save the cover. Margins are far too thin for such matters (and the cover art is public domain).
Although the works of H.P. Lovecraft were on my mind as I designed this, I don’t think it’s of that style of horror. There’s horror, but also call-backs to the works of Michael Moorcock and Robert Howard. Lovecraft discusses the alien; this adventure is, at its heart, about the works of man when morality has been lost. The decisions of men in the corrupt past emerge in the present day with horrifying consequences. Those of men in the current day? That’s a tale for another day!