Knoll of the Dead: Atmosphere, Hazards, & Random Encounters

Last week was about The Astral Web, so we’re back to the Knoll of the Dead this week.

This post is about the general atmosphere, hazards, and random encounters within the knoll. All these are meant to give the knoll a spooky and dangerous feel.

General Atmosphere

The lair is a knoll of dead, twisted, thorny vines that reeks of decaying flesh. The thorns drip a thick, black “sap.” The vines constantly rustle with (un)life. Looking into the vines will reveal (roll 1d4):

1. 1d3 skeletal rats scurrying in the vine.
2. Same as above, but zombie instead of skeleton.
3. A skeletal songbird building a nest.
4. A zombie songbird groaning.

Hazards

Reaching into the vines runs the risk of being scratched by the thorns. Make a Dex save (add armor bonus) to avoid all damage. If the save is failed, the character takes 1d6 hp damage from the poisonous sap (save for half damage).

Burning the vines produces a poisonous smoke that causes 1d6 hp damage every turn a character is exposed (save for half each turn).

Random Encounters

Every turn that the characters are in (or adjacent to) the knoll, the DM will roll 1d6. If the party splits up, each sub-group will get its own roll. On a “1” the group will encounter a wandering monster. Roll 1d8:

1. Noise from the walls/ceiling. Roll on the noise table above.
2. Zombie/skeletal bird flies past the characters (it won’t attack).
3. Human footprints (bare feet).
4. Spray of black, poisonous sap falls onto a character. If the character has an open wound, take 1d4 points of damage (save for half), otherwise symptoms will resemble a really bad case of poison ivy.
5. 1d3 live/zombie/skeletal (determine randomly) giant rats.
6. Skeletal/zombie fox (1d6-1 hp).
7. Skeletal wolf (1 HD).
8. Zombie boar (2 HD).

Conclusion

That’s it for this post. Next time will probably be the specs for the monsters.

Note that this is part of an ongoing series. If you’re interested in the the previous posts:

• Part 1 was a play report of the players who went through the knoll.
• Part 2 was the map of the Knoll.
• Part 3 was an overview of the adventure.

See you next time!

History of the Astral Web, Part 1

The next series of articles are going to cover the in-world history of the Astral Web. It’s just a really high level overview. I’ve always been turned off by campaign settings with hundreds of pages of background, so I was avoiding that when I wrote this. I always imagined that this was written in-world as a struggling middle school student’s essay because she was desperate for extra-credit to pass history class.

I originally wrote this history as 15 or so eras of history. Rather than give a huge post, I’m going to post each era on its own.

The first bit starts in the near future…

The First Step

In the late¹ 21st Century mankind achieved success in its first experimental terraforming project on the planet Mars. For the first time in his history, man could now live in relative comfort away from Earth, his home planet.

It was originally estimated that the Mars project would take almost a century to complete, but widespread scientific and popular interest resulted in an explosion of available resources. In the end, the planet was livable in less than half the expected time. For many the project was not completed soon enough. UNICO, the United Nations' Interplanetary Colonization Organization,² was flooded with applications from families desperate to leave an over-crowded Earth for life on a new, spacious frontier. Twenty million applications were approved, but over ten times that many were rejected.

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1. This originally said the “mid 21st Century.” I wrote that nearly 30 years ago, and we’re no closer to Mars than we were then. I guess I need to give humanity some extra time.↩

2. I bothered to make sure this organization had a pronounceable acronym. Counting this one mention, the acronym is only used one other time. The name is never used again.↩

Knoll of the Dead: Adventure Overview

About a month ago, I started a series for “The Knoll of the Dead.” Then I went on vacation. I didn’t bring my notes to Alaska with me, so I started a new series about The Astral Web instead.

Now that I’m back, I have a quandry. Do I interupt the Astral Web series to return to the interupted Knoll series? Or do I leave the Knoll series interupted for months until the Astral Web series is complete?

I decided to split the difference. I’m going to “interleave” the two series. Last week was Astral Web, this week will be Knoll of the Dead, then next week will be Astral Web, etc.

The series so far

Part 1 was a play report of the players who went through the knoll.

Part 2 was the map of the Knoll.

Adventure Overview

This was designed as a one-shot introductory adventure. As such the back story is intentionally simplistic and lame. This isn’t Shakespeare.

The “hook” is that the characters can’t get food from their local pub because the barkeep hasn’t received his shipment of “land fish.”¹ He offers the players a small reward to return with the shipment.

This leads to Bomo’s[^bomo] Land Fish Ranch. There they meet the halfling Bomo and learn that his stock of Land Fish is being eaten by foxes. The foxes are really undead animals. The characters will have their first encounter here, and follow or track one of the foxes back to its lair.

Here the players should eventually encounter Edrick, a level 3 necromantic druid hermit. Edrick has been sending his undead woodland creations out to fetch food for him. Edrick is quite mad, however, and the amount of food being returned is far more than he’ll ever need.

Like I said, this isn’t Shakespeare.

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1. Land fish are just chickens. The trick is to never call them anything other than "Land Fish." When the players ask what they look like, describe them like you would describe a chicken to someone that’s never seen a bird before, but use the word “scales” instead of “feathers” and “fins” instead of “wings.” If the players don’t get it, they’ll think its something weird and novel; if they do, they’ll chuckle at the joke.↩