This week, a description of one of the temples called Temple of the Drowned King.  This is actually the second location that my players were sent to at the beginning of the Sons of Moon and Sea campaign.  They were to check on a powerful artifact, to ensure its safety.  In reality, the two lizard folk shaman who guided them were members of a death cult.  They were there to steal the artifact.  The older shaman sacrificed her acolyte to open one of the blood-locked doors (which didn’t make it into the write-up).  Then, at the last, the entire party was betrayed by a higher-level rogue, the remaining shaman murdered, the artifact stolen, and the party left to suffocate, drown, or be destroyed by the chamber’s guardians.  The rogue used an item to open a portal and skip out on the party.  With just seconds to make a decision (the door, which was also closing, or the portal that lead to only-gods-knew-where), the party chose to jump into the portal after the traitor (a trainer at the local adventurers’ guild).  I used this as an opportunity to give them visions of possible near-future events and to move them forward in time one week.  This explained their absence in the city because I actually had two separate groups playing through two different parts of the campaign, and the temple group had been “on hold” for a while because Life.  It was a wonderfully intense session, since it included a “breath meter” as their breathe-underwater spells ran down, and they were completely surprised by the double-betrayal.

Whew!  All that said, if you want to check out the temple, click this link: The Temple of the Drowned King, part I

Post script:  I had each player roll a d6 before going into the temple.  Once they reached the inner chamber, that stat went up by one point.  This was a result of the residual power of creation saturating the chamber.  (1 = Strength, 2 = Dexterity, etc.)

 

---

 

 

This work by Jean Headley is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.