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Hey guys,
I wanted to pick the brains of the community who have played/run Serpent's Skull. One of the most interesting features of the game is, of course, the lost city of Saventh-Yhi. However, the books surrounding this magnificent location are a tad threadbare as to the contents of the dungeons below the city ruins (at least from what I have read thus far). My player group is generally very exploration-hungry, and would probably expect massive dungeons existing below the ruins, and perhaps even find the sacred tomb of Savith herself.
With this in mind, I was wondering if anyone had suggestions as to a good Mega-Dungeon that could be woven into the campaign and would work well with the whole "Lost City" vibe of Saventh-Yhi?
TBH, from my previous read through, Thousand Fangs and Sanctum (parts 5 and 6) have ALOT of dungeon crawling. This would be a dungeon overload (YMMV of course). Your group will love the Underdark romp in Fangs. :)
If this is right up your alley, then I suggest Mike Shel's awesome Tomb of the Iron Medusa. Just change background names (like the Adella family) and flavoring to be more "serpent" oriented or alternatively make the Adella family into a Bonuwat or Bekyar slaves that toiled for the serpentfolk of old. Other things like changing a human ghost to a serpentfolk ghost, etc. Suasandra (BBEG) could stay as is because she's half fiend anyway.
It's level 14 but you could run it after Vaults of Madness with a little tweakage.
Funny story. I was GMing Skull and Shackles and used one of the characters background stories to throw in a buried treasure in the jungle idea. So I used an adventure from the Savage Tide AP, an old 3.5 AP. I described the location where they found the treasure to be part of a ruined city overtaken by the jungle. After they looted the treasure stashed in an ancient well. The PC captain looked around and said well we should explore the rest of this ruined city who knows what is here. I did my best to not act thrown by this. So I grabbed the "City of Seven Spears" from the Serpent's Skull AP and adapted it.
I treated the city as a large single location (i.e. a single dungeon) rather than multiple dungeon complexes. Just grab a bunch of fun dungeon rooms from any appropriate source and rather than connected them with hallways they are separated by jungle. For us this made the dungeon far less linear. It also made the idea of random dungeon encounters less strange as it was easier to imagine a random jungle creature than it is to imagine a random monster wandering a ancient collection of catacombs.
I used maps from Isle of Dread adventures, earlier installments of Serpent's skull, the generic "ziggurat" from the city, and a collection of small floor plans of small sites.
I recommend making it very unique. There are lots of dungeons, stone hallways and wandering beasts. This shouldn't feel like yet another catacombs.
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Well, if you're willing to do a lot of prep work I would suggest a couple of old school modules:
I1 Dwellers of the Forbidden City
C1 The Hidden Shrine of Tamoachan
Both are dungeon crawls and they'll love either one. They're highly rated as some of the best ever.
Creative Director
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Hey guys,
I wanted to pick the brains of the community who have played/run Serpent's Skull. One of the most interesting features of the game is, of course, the lost city of Saventh-Yhi. However, the books surrounding this magnificent location are a tad threadbare as to the contents of the dungeons below the city ruins (at least from what I have read thus far). My player group is generally very exploration-hungry, and would probably expect massive dungeons existing below the ruins, and perhaps even find the sacred tomb of Savith herself.
With this in mind, I was wondering if anyone had suggestions as to a good Mega-Dungeon that could be woven into the campaign and would work well with the whole "Lost City" vibe of Saventh-Yhi?
When I ran this campaign for my home group, I strung all the dungeons in Book 4 together into a multi-level dungeon under Savith's tomb; it worked pretty well! I had it set up so that there was a partially ruined teleporter that, once restored, would serve as a shortcut between the top of Savith's tomb and the bottom, and thus a shortcut between Saventh-Yhi and Ilmurea. Of course, to repair the teleporter the PCs needed to recover several power crystals that had been scattered across the many dungeon levels.
Alas.... it's been several years since I ran that game, and I did the whole thing more or less ad-lib so there aren't really any surviving notes to share, but using book 4's dungeons remains a relatively easy solution.
tough act to follow, but I also ran Serpent's Skull and planned a Dungeon Crawl of Savith's tomb though it never came to fruition. I used the Maure Castle (Dungeon Magazine) adventure as a base and tweaked it to fit Pathfinder and the campaign.
This delve was designed to happen after the adventure, for when I revealed to the PCs that Savith's tomb was warded by POWERFUL MAGIC they of course hounded me to explore it.
I like the idea of recycling, especially if it's new for the group. If you have a favorite crawl, add it to the campaign, or if you have your eyes on a module, tie it in.
Have fun!