Greetings, fellow travellers.
I am toying with the idea of adding a different encounter to the island in the middle of the Candlemere.
Please bear with me - I'd appreciate your feedback.
The serpent's head rears up to 100 ft above the water of the lake and is camouflaged under a tangle of briars, small trees and bushes. The fortress was once built to watch the uneasy East and its growing Cyclops' empire.
Recently, a small group of serpentfolk, led by Sskahvo and Khavith, have entered the ruin and try to open up the way further down the outer corridor (the corridor is clogged here from an avalanche) which would give them access to the other rooms as described in the Serpent Skull AP.
Sskahvo and Khavith are accompanied by a serpentfolk expert (profession: miner), 8 degenerate serpentfolk and a dozen kobolds as slaves for manual labor.
Sskahvo, Khavith and the miner are serpentfolk with 3 class levels each, the others are unmodified as found in Bestiary 2. The rooms are more or less empty/void of the former riches, the thought lens is dormant.
Your thoughts?
I am especially concerned with (in no particular order):
- Timeline: is the Cyclops Empire and the Serpentfolk "in phase"?
- Are there similar structures in Golarion outside Mwangi (source?)? Where could they've come from?
- Would this mash up spoil the atmosphere of the area/the AP?
- What if the PCs want to explore further - would you grant them their way? At what level?
- The PCs would be about lvl 6 to 7 - could they tackle the garrison?
Thanks again for staying with me!
Ruyan.
You should label that spoiler as Serpent's Skull AP content.
Aye. Thanks for fixing it, Chris!
Ruyan.
On that note, I can't give input. Sorry.
I think it's out of theme for this AP. Slumbering secrets in the form of fae or cyclopes are one thing, but a group of intelligent excavators starts to communicate a different feel to the Stolen Lands. It takes away from the fearie-tale or psuedo-Arthurian feel and goes more into pulp.
The other big consideration: your PCs will want to turn it into a city. They likely already have plans on a city on the nearby BanditFort. Do you want to encourage adjacent cities like that?
However, if you want to do something like this anyway, an easy solution to "you can't explore down below yet" is to have a magical ward that requires caster level 13 to dispel, like they did a few times in Legacy of Fire.
I changed it up for a bit in my game, only in a completely different direction. Instead of the very boring encounter at the island, I replaced it with ancient dwarven complex.
Opening the main door required water being allowed to flow through some water wheels (like at a mill). The water then flooded the complex as the party explores it. The water wheels also "powered" the complex, activating the long inactive golems and half-golem dwarves.
Soon, the labor golems will awaken, and they will begin crafting more half-dead automatons. And they need fresh bodies to do their work...
The complex ties in with a demon the party is currently...interacting with. The crafty demon set up the dwarves to suffer from a nasty disease, and made the chief engineer a deal to find a cure. In this case, the cure was worse than the disease.
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I changed it up for a bit in my game, only in a completely different direction. Instead of the very boring encounter at the island, I replaced it with ancient dwarven complex.
Opening the main door required water being allowed to flow through some water wheels (like at a mill). The water then flooded the complex as the party explores it. The water wheels also "powered" the complex, activating the long inactive golems and half-golem dwarves.
Soon, the labor golems will awaken, and they will begin crafting more half-dead automatons. And they need fresh bodies to do their work...
The complex ties in with a demon the party is currently...interacting with. The crafty demon set up the dwarves to suffer from a nasty disease, and made the chief engineer a deal to find a cure. In this case, the cure was worse than the disease.
Your a GM after my own heart.