Hello everybody,
ie. everybody except Saredoc Sandheaver, Mustafa, Norr the Awkward and Rupert the Bright, of course!
After quite some time, I have finally started my very own version of Legacy of Fire. I have decided to customize and extend the adventures heavily, so in Howl of the Carrion King, the gnolls of the Three Jaws tribe are far more numerous than the adventure assumes. Thus, the heroes have to recruit allies for the upcoming battle in order to stand a chance against Kardswann's soldiers.
The PCs have already befriended Beshvi, the Nixie sorceress that lives at the waterfall north of Kelarane. They actually drove the Kulldis gnolls out of the old fort that had repeatedly spoiled Beshvi's "holy" pond. Being not a warlike creature herself, Beshvi offered to introduce the heroes to the savage Stormchaser centaurs that live in a isolated village in the foothills of the mountains further to the east. The centaurs are distrustful of strangers and are less than enthusiastic about helping them against the gnolls although the centaurs detest the hyenamen.
Yet there is a problem with which the PCs might help the centaurs and as one hand washes the other, there actually is a possibility for the heroes to assure themselves of the Stormchasers' help. The issue at hand is actually rooted in the clan history of the Stormchaser centaurs. Once the tribe has been favored by Gozreh and its brave warriors had been trusted by the god with the protection of a sacred artifact called the Holy Seed. To make a long story short, the Stormchasers failed their patron and lost the relic to the cult of Rovagug and thus, the centaurs fell from grace.
Shortly after the Great Failure, the last true priest among the Stormchasers fell ill and soon thereafter - yet not without uttering a mysterious prophecy that foretold a day when a group of two-legged heroes would come to the Stormchasers to finally succeed at the ancient Thunder Trial. The arrival of those heroes would be an omen that the restoration of the Holy Seed and thereby the redemption of the Stormchasers was close at hand.
The aforementioned Thunder Trial is a series of tests that the PCs must succeed if they want to forge an alliance with the Stormchaser centaurs. The ultimate goal of the trial is to summon a large storm elemental (Monster Manual III) and defeat it in combat. In order to enact the ritual, the heroes must first fulfill to prerequisite tasks:
1.) Catch at least 10 shocker lizards in the nearby Crackling Gorge - alive.
2.) Find 3 'frozen lighnings' (fulgurites) in the desert sand.
The frozen lightings are then arranged in a triangle and the shocker lizards are placed in the middle. Then the warriors of the clan would start to gallop around the mystic triangle in a circle while uttering the verses of an ancient prayer to Gozreh. While their hooves would raise more and more dust, the lizards would start to emit ever stronger shocks of electricity that are channeled by the fulgurites into a crackling ball of lightning that floats in the air over the triangle and increases in size as sight becomes poorer and prayer more intense. Finally, with a blinding flash of light and a deafening thunderclap, the storm elemental appears above the triangle and attacks the PCs.
So far I've almost finished the task of catching the shocker lizards for which I created a skill encounter according to the rules provided in the PDF 'Skill Encounters: Non-Combat Challenges' - which is awesome, by the way.
Maybe some of you find this write-up interesting, and maybe you also have some further ideas for consequences of failure. So just have a look at the first test of the Thunder Trial: Chasing Lightning.
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That is very cool.
In my current campaign (which they are only through to the final showdown with the Pugs in the Church), we have a Druid of Gozreh. This will link nicely into a story centering on his character.
Can't wait to see more about the rest of the trial.
Also, I'm interested in the PDF you mentioned. Where do I get a copy of that document?