When I started the Sons of Moon and Sea campaign I had one idea: there are missing scouts, and the party is supposed to find them, or find what happened to them.  This was the initial session for the campaign, thrown together on the spot.  We were using D&D 3.5 at the time, and then only loosely.  I nearly killed the party with the centipedes, and a couple of our most memorable failed rolls happened here.  The cleric was using a staff, poorly, and whopped herself in the forehead when it rebounded off the stone floor (the player’s description).  The rogue was wielding dual blades and managed to stab herself in both thighs when the player rolled two 1’s (my decision based on the critters’ size and the player’s role-playing).  After the cleric prayed for a blessing there were no more critical fails.  They started rolling 20’s instead.  🙂

The original map is gone, but it was created entirely randomly.  At each door or intersection I rolled two dice for length and width of the next chamber, then two more for number and position of exits.  The emerald was the players’ addition, as was the secret door.  They asked, I gave it a 20% chance, and rolled something like an 18.  The idea that the hidden chamber was a temple to a lost death god was also their idea.  Basically, without knowing it, they wrote the background for the campaign.

Click here for the description of the Temple of the Drowned King.  It includes a rough map of the sinkhole, a few chambers of the temple, and a little of the cave/tunnel system that leads to the Eidechse village and the sea.

Adventure well!

~Jean Nadira

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