For Thursday- We will make ruins and underways of the city. The old city, just make it a dungeon crawl. Make all the puzzles, but make it a lower level puzzle. Moral puzzles. Use puzzles that involve lore, but keep the lore simple, well referenced. Keep the lore to one page per piece of lore. Make the reward the cursed sword. Make the seer Fritz’s in to the Mage City.
To preface the Steinsgard Underbelly, The party is made aware that there may be things that they would all want when the Sheriff comes begging for their help. He also offers them a fourth member to aid the party, Enter Jared. The Sheriff needs to clear out the Underbelly of unsavory characters, including a cult of some of the most powerful and unseen denizens of the city who enjoy ritual sacrifices, whom hoard the library to a recently passed and highly paranoid mage (he was a weird guy).To the sheriff’s knowledge there aren’t any monsters in the Underbelly, in fact he swears by it.
If the party decides to enter the underbelly, they should start in the Threadbare district, one of the oldest districts in the city, and coincidentally, where may tailors put their shops. The entrance would be behind the Sleeping Giant Inn & Pub, in a back alley basement entrance hidden under a pile of trash. The proceeding room would be a small and cramped basement, with another door in it, this time made no longer of shoddy craftsmanship, but of strong dwarven design. From then on the halls down which seemed to go on and down endlessly are made purely of old dwarven construction, still pristine, but far older than anything else in all of Steinsgard, save the sword.
Steinsgard Underbelly:
Goblin Cult to the Pale Raven
Puzzle room
They find a cave in an offshoot of the staircase
They find the library of the Paranoid wizard (last door, the furthest down, but there’s a shortcut through the Cult hideout)
Goblin Cult
They’re in the middle of a bloody ritual
Goblin (6)
Goblin Boss (1)
They are trying to commune with The Pale Raven
Goblin (2)
Goblin Boss (1)
Imp (1)
Spined Devil (1)
They are all asleep
Roaming Crawling Claws (5)
Roaming Imps (2)
They are hanging out playing card games after a failed ritual/ communion
Goblin (4)
Imp (2)
Puzzle Room- the riddle is
Sometimes I wonder and sometimes I wander, And sometimes on my path I ponder, The question I ask is not who I have been, Nor that which of me that you may see, But what, do tell, I will never be?
The door opens to a lush forest
Deep in the forest, after at least 1 encounter (not including the Boggle)
Monsters include
Boggle (just have one as an introduction)
Aurochs (2)
Dryad (2)
Green Hag (1)
Pixie (6)
Cave
The cave opens up to a massive cavern, vaster than they can see
They encounter
Slithering Tracker (1)
Vargouille (up to 5)
The cave opens to a big pool of glowing water
Monsters may include
Cave Fisher (1)
Carrion Crawler (2)
The wizard’s library
They encounter guarding monsters, i.e.
Shadow Mastiff (2)
Animated Armor (2) and Flying Sword (1)
Rug of Smothering (1)
Flameskull (1)
Ghost (1)
Griffon (1) and Pseudodragon (1)
They encounter the Library itself (pass perception check)
It is trapped
Magic trap-
Fire Breathing Statue- Pg 122 DMG
The books are booby trapped to burn
Fire Breathing Statues from DMG faced towards the books.
Once they encounter both of those, the party finds loot (roll for it), and the sword Dainsleif There is also note of one living friend of the wizard. He is a seer off to the north, and seems to be the wizard’s source of books and tomes. It seems he may have access to the libraries in Godunn
After all this has happened, the basic idea is turn the story into a norse version of Journey to the West