On Friday, February 2, 2024, we got together to play the latest session of our World of Greyhawk campaign. Characters are around 10th level at this stage, and in the previous session, they’d obtained the Staff of Xan-Yae, which when taken to her holy shrine far to the west would allow the goddess to protect the Paynims against the great horde coming towards it. And, also, their homeland of Veluna.
But to do so, they’d have to cross the Plains of the Paynims – a great steppe, home to peoples that had never featured in any of my Greyhawk campaigns. And also the remnants of the great Baklunish Empire, which had perished in the Twin Cataclysms.
So, out came Uncharted Journeys, and I plotted their route and the potential encounters they’d have along the way.
My feeling at this point is that Uncharted Journeys is a good start, but really, really needs more encounters with impact. And for a journey of two weeks, it needs more than just two encounters for that period – especially when the players rolling well reduce this to just one. I kept it as I rolled, because I had material for the journey’s end, but I’ll be doing a few house rules as I use it more, which I hope to detail here.
The structures around the journey, with everyone having a role, are great. It’s just that not enough happens in the journey for all those roles to come into play.
For this journey:
Journey Roles: Leader=Breen (bard); Outrider=Brenshard (rogue); Sentry=Faylinn (sorcerer); Quartermasters=Zincelli (artificer), Sir Tristan (paladin)
Preparation
Breen rallied the party; Brenshard studied the weather; Greg packed their gear efficiently. Zincelli failed to brew tonics – obviously there was a paucity of ingredients in the ruined city – and Faylinn tried to seek advice from the Paynim refugees who they’d been helping but couldn’t work out much about what lay ahead. (The net effect, a -4 to the DC of journey checks, and everyone started with Inspiration).
Travel Checks
Everyone succeeded in the much easier checks for their chosen roles, thanks to their preparation. (I’m a little worried that the travel DC is too low, especially as Preparation lowers it. The way it is set with a combination of terrain and weather works, but not well enough for this level of party). This reduced the number of encounters from 2 (for this length of journey) to 1.
The Buried Tarrasque
I had rolled a Monster Hunt for the encounter, but Brenshard used his Outrider ability to replace it with A Dark Place.
I described a dark hill that rose from the plains ahead of them, its dark rock proving a great contrast to the flat grasslands around. And – were those scales and not rock?
“Is it a tarrasque?” asked Sir Tristan.
He was correct, it was a tarrasque, slain by some unknown foe. This was more than a little uneasy, but Brenshard scouted it successfully to learn that it had been dead for at least a month, and none of those who killed it were around. Probably. Aided with this knowledge, the party did not give in to paranoia, and soon enough Zincelli was sawing at the corpse, trying to remove a scale for artificing purposes later. He was unsuccessful (a survival roll). Everyone delayed a bit to try and recover some scales – by the end, they had five of them, with some of the adventurers being better at descaling a tarrasque than others. But the scales were large and heavy, and the rest were left behind.
(The critical success effect of the A Dark Place group check is that everyone regains a hit die, but there hadn’t been enough encounters for it to be interesting. I think you need at least four encounters for an Uncharted Journeys trip for it to be effective).
The Lone Druid
We now reached the first of the encounter areas from the adventure. (I omitted a small fort inhabited by bugbears which had no relation to anything else in the adventure – in a wide open plains, why are you investigating?)
A great tower stood in the plains, made of unmortared stone. The iron door stood open: rusted and ancient. The staff beckoned them towards it, and cautiously they entered and made their way up the narrow steps to its apex. There were signs of inhabitation, though only from a single human.
From its height, they looked over the plains and saw a lone figure approaching the tower, old and bent with age. A large lion followed the figure. Was it stalking them? No, the party soon determined that it was a companion. They descended and went to greet the person.
It proved to be the druid Miyasherim, who had lived on these plains for over a century. She greeted them and listened to their tales of adventure and why they had come to this distant land. She was no follower of Xan-Yae, but she had information to impart: the location of the shrine, and of the High Priestess of Xan-Yae. She used her scrying bowl to show the priestess making her way to another tower, a twin to this one, even further west, beyond the shrine. But what was her purpose there? Miyasherim could not tell them. She invited the characters to shelter in her tower for the night, and all went to sleep.
That night, the elderly druid died, her last task completed. The party buried her, saying prayers to gods she’d never worshipped, and continued on their trek.
The Caldera
The shrine was at the northern tip of the small mountain range known as the Ullspurs, in the remnants of an old volcano. As the party approached, a stone giant and his ogre followers saw them and charged!
Running combats like this is always a joy. The party can take advantage of their ranged attacks, and the giant and ogre hit hard enough (and often enough) to be a threat. But not too much of one. To make things a little more interesting, I used the monster statistics from the Level Up: Advanced 5th Edition rules by EN Publishing. Not that much of a difference, but it did give the stone giant the ability to grapple someone and use them as a weapon! Not that it had much of a chance to do so: the party hit hard and effectively to quickly close out the combat.
Getting to the lip of the volcano, they peered down at a lake, at its centre being a strange building of black stone. The shrine! And so they carefully scouted it, flying over it first. Stairs led down into the building, and so the party descended.
The Shrine of Xan-Yae, Level 1
The first level had been taken over by a small group of bugbears – and a lot of untamed flora. It wasn’t long before the party engaged the bugbears in the central chamber. During the fight, they failed to detect (good Stealth rolls versus their passive Perceptions) the bugbears hiding in the bushes. But, because I was using a Virtual Tabletop (Roll20), I had actually placed the bugbears on the battlemap already. But they were obscured by the trees, and so Breen didn’t see them as she wandered past and was ambushed!
Once the bugbears were dealt with – and healing provided to Breen – the rest of the level was open to investigation. One of the bugbears had escaped and had run below (unbeknownst to the characters), but otherwise the rest of the level was clear. Decorations of griffons adorned the walls. In one chamber, star charts adorned the walls and windows in the ceiling allowed the party to see the sky – and at night, the moon and stars.
They prepared to descend another set of stairs and explore the next level, but we were now out of time. We’ll pick it up in two weeks! Until then!
Resources
The base adventure was A Gathering Storm by Troll Lord Games.
Additional rules came from Uncharted Journeys by Cubicle 7 Games.
The wilderness map was from Quick Encounters: Plains by Gabriel Pickard
I used monster stats from Level Up: Monstrous Menagerie by EN Publishing
Some tokens created using Roll Advantage: Token Stamp.