My husband and I move a lot and so we play a lot of two PC games where we each run a character and switch off DMing. Right now we're playing in Eberron. The PCs are me: Cait Phiarlan, elven rogue archer with a religious bent. Him: Raccoon, warforged artificer who was one of the last off the assembly line (the forgers were getting a little tired of making up names).
Anyway, Cait and Raccoon just finished doing a lot of quests in Sharn and the Mournlands (Queen With Burning Eyes followed by Shadows of the Last War. Both awesome modules). They are following the map on the amulet they found during the QWBE module to Xen'drik to see where it leads.
(My husband is a very "outside the box" thinker. After "The Forgotten Forge" module he used a number of mending/repair spells to fix the forge down there. When we recovered the amulet in QWBE, we went down to the forge right afterwards, made a copy, and then when Demise confronted us we handed over the fake and made our escape. So now it will be a race to the treasure!)
Anyway, we needed something to break up the "red dots moving across the ocean down to Xen'drik" cut scene so I had the ship stop in Pylas Talaer on Aerenal during a storm. That became the setting for "Strike on the Rabid Dawn".
It was surprisingly easy to reset the adventure for 7th level characters. I just dropped most monsters down to their "basic" forms. eg. the nessian warhounds became hellhounds, the hamatula became a barbazu, the harpy archer became a regular harpy, etc.
The PCs did well in the Lighthouse. A few insane Intimidate checks (nat 20!) and Diplomacy checks allowed Raccoon to convince the Hellwasp Swarm to leave Hiram and inhabit one of the dead bodies before leaving the Lighthouse. Another super Diplomacy check (nat 19!) plus all the hard work we'd done on the ship on the voyage up let us convince the captain of our Lyranean galleon to sail us to the Rabid Dawn. The sahuagin attack halfway over was cool. After it was over the lighthouse got struck repeatedly by lightning and fell into the sea. Kaboom! Raccoon: "I knew we should have looted it when we had the chance!"
The two ships almost collided since the Lyranean galleon sailed right into the cloud. Fortunatly Racoon specified to hit it at an angle and so some good Profession (Sailor) checks prevented an all-out collision (to the DM's (i.e. my) disappointment).
A watered down Captain Mange, a few wimpy pirates and the Chuul gave the PCs a run for their money. The chuul grappled Raccoon and they fought desperately while Cait went toe-to-toe with Mange. She kept missing and he kept slamming her. Finally she broke off to shoot the chuul, since she got her Sneak Attack against the grappling monster, and the chuul (realizing it couldn't paralyze warforged) made an awesome grapple check, moved with Raccoon still in his claws, and jumped overboard!
Fortunately warforged don't need to breathe either. There was a climactic underwater battle between Raccoon and the wounded chuul, but eventually Raccoon was victorious! After a lot of trouble he managed to get back on deck, only to find Cait was gone! A series of abysmal rolls had dropped her to -9 and then she miraculously stabilized. Both she and Cpt. Mange were gone.
Raccoon bullied some pirates who were busy trying to keep the ship afloat to tell him where Mange had taken the girl. They pointed down. He ran downstairs and found Mange just coming upstairs, whistling. They had another titanic battle and Raccoon managed to kick Mange's butt with a series of excellent rolls (and a crit with his Talenta Tangat).
Then he looked around wildly and decided to try a door.
He found it was the (single) erinyes' boudoir. A pale but now-conscious Cait, removed of most of her clothing, was being tied to some stakes pounded around the fiendess' bed. The erinyes was cooing, "It will hurt less if you don't struggle. And I promise, after awhile, you'll start to like it."
Raccoon sprang to the attack, of course, but the erinyes teleported to the other side of the oar galley. While Raccoon freed Cait, the erinyes used her charm monster power and Raccoon failed by one! He immediately realized how silly he'd been to attack without learning all the facts first. The erinyes (while telepathically warning Markosian) chatted with Raccoon and Cait for a bit, explained she couldn't help them betray her master, and wished them well.
Raccoon and a fully-healed Cait ran downstairs and interrupted the ceremony. I replaced Markosian with one of the sorc10 apprentices, took the others out, took most of the cultists out except for 2 pirates, and added a barbazu (and of course they interrupted the ceremony before the big devil could be summoned). A titanic battle ensued where good tactics by the PCs (and another friggin' crit from Raccoon) won the day. The erinyes disappeared as soon as Markosian fell, but she'll be back. Oh yes, she will be back.
In summary: rockin' adventure! Frank Brunner made my night.
So Cait and Raccoon left Pylas Talaer behind and sailed on to the mysterious continent of Xen'drik. Some weeks later they saw the jungle-shrouded coastline dimly through a steady fall of misty rain. Bidding farewell to Captain Bargaz and the Crawdad crew, they went ashore and found the villagers all mourning and frightened. Their matriarch had been killed and their Zombie Master was missing!
What followed was an almost straight-up Torrents of Dread from issue #114. I had to strengthen a few encounters, but for the most part it played out really well.
Since Cait and Raccoon were a fairly decent level I added the optional giant squid. Well, it just about tore them apart. They took severe hits and were forced to retreat. Fortunately Raccoon has an item that lets him charm undead, so they had lots of zombie followers that the squid ripped to pieces while our heroes ran. They came back more adequately prepared and took the squid out fairly quickly.
I replaced the koprus with a pair of 5th-level psion Inspired, who were on a dastardly secret mission. One was controlling the bullywugs through her use of psionic dominate dorje. Cait got dominated and pumped Raccoon full of arrows, but in the end they both triumphed!
After restoring order to the village and earning the respect and friendship of the villagers, Cait and Raccoon took a few days to recover on the tropical island. Then a small village boy came up from the beach one morning to report that a large raftlike ship had beached a mile away, and off of it had come a withered elven woman wearing a mask and a host of guards. This, of course, was Demise and her Emerald Claw soldiers, looking for the hidden treasure that Cait and Raccoon are after. So our intrepid heroes...did something I'll type up in a bit, because it's long! But Torrents of Dread was a really cool adventure and I enjoyed running it (and my husband enjoyed playing in it).
So the villagers of the Isle of Dread tell our heroes the following about the cave they're seeking. They say it was built long ago, so long ago that no-one knows who built it or why, or even what is in it. It was inhabited hundreds of years ago by a tribe of villagers who worshipped dinosaurs. The rear of the cave was a set of carved stairs going down, but the dinosaur tribesmen bricked it up.
Two hundred years ago a Khorvarian ship, dreadfully lost or possibly looking for something, came to the island and - whether maliciously or out of a misunderstanding - killed all the dinosaur tribesmen. They threw the bodies into the sea and made camp around the cave. The next day, the soldiers broke down the cave wall and descended below, leaving two behind to watch.
The two last watchmen were standing guard when, perhaps thirty minutes later, they heard shouts of panic and cries for help from the stairs leading down. The soldiers rushed down the stairs to help their friends and found themselves in a huge, emtpy cave with many passages leading off in different directions. There was no sign of their fellow soldiers. Confused, they started to call - then they heard the rumbling from behind them.
They ran frantically back up the stairs but it was too late. The spirits of the slaughtered dinosaur tribesmen, angered and restless, had rebuilt the wall in some way that made it impenetrable. The soldiers were bricked in, doomed to madness and starvation. No-one has gone to the cave since.
But first, the necromancer elf had to be dealt with. Cait and Raccoon snuck down to the beach and saw a large, round raft with a wooden railing and full of boxes and barrels floating a few feet into the lagoon. On the beach was one Emerald Claw guard.
Figuring they could easily take him, Raccoon charged and Cait began firing. And they were right; they did easily take him. But then the "raft" revealed itself to be a horrid elder tojanida which promptly took some rather large bites out of the PCs. Bleeding and terrified, Cait and Raccoon retreated. The tojanida was too slow to follow them so it picked up the dead soldier, flipped the body onto its back, and swam a few hundred yards out into the lagoon to await Demise's return. The PCs decided to leave it there.
They began hacking their way through the jungle, following the tracks of Demise, her four soldiers, and some large creature that had ogre-sized footprints but weighed too little to be an ogre. They hadn't gone more than an hour or so when they heard the sounds of something huge crashing through the jungle. They hid, but not well enough to escape the notice of a bizarre two-headed tyrannosaurus rex! (used the multiheaded template from Savage Species). What followed was a brief and bloody fight wherein Raccoon got swallowed, but rather ingeniously escaped by retrieving a gaseous form potion and pouring it into the t-rex's stomach. When the t-rex unwillingly went gaseous, Raccoon plummeted to the ground. The t-rex thrashed around, trying to figure out what had happened to it, and our heroes soon finished it off.
They went another hour in the jungle before hearing the tinkle of windchimes. Following it, they found a clearing containing a hut and numerous painted dinosaur skulls, skeletons, and strange bone carvings. A woman greeted them. She noticed the t-rex teeth they were wearing as trophies and thanked them for killing "the perversion". She said her name was Marta, and that she was the last of the dinosaur tribe. She said she had had visions of the PCs, that they would destroy the unnatural t-rex that had been terrorizing the jungle, and in return she would tell them how to enter the sealed cave. She gave them a block of special incense to burn over the offerings of a dozen slain animals to appease her ancestors' spirits.
She also gave them refreshments and bug repellent, and Raccoon and Cait rested a while and talked to her, finding her both intelligent and witty. When they were rested they bid Marta farewell and continued on.
It was dusk when they arrived at the cave and found Demise had set up camp. She was nowhere to be seen, presumably in the one tent by the cliff wall. Four Emerald Claw soldiers sat around the fire and a tall figure robed entirely in black, including billowy black sleeves that went all the way to the ground, stood by the tent.
Raccoon crept up silently and brought out the dorje of psionic dominate they'd taken of the Inspired last adventure. With his high Use Magic Device ability and a ring of telepathy he'd taken from the other Inspired, he successfully dominated all the Emerald Claw soldiers while remaining unnoticed (I'm glad I didn't give that dorje a lot of remaining charges!). Then he ordered all four soldiers to attack the black figure while he and Cait fought from concealment.
The robed figure turned out to be Demise's personal bodyguard, a Boneclaw (from the new MMIII). Demise made good use of her spells (came out of the tent with greater invisibility going, vampiric touched Raccoon and almost turned him blind, too). The Boneclaw took out two soldiers before it went down, and Demise almost escaped but Raccoon and Cait killed her first with good tactics. They searched the bodies, cleared out the camp, pressed the two remaining Emerald Claw soldiers into service, and settled down for the night.
All of this was my own invention. I was hoping I could steal something from 115 for the actual mysterious caves but my mail forwarding service is being slow and not sending it to me. Jerks. Oh, well, I'll figure something out!