Saturday, November 22nd, I introduced a few friends to D&D / TTRPGs. For this exploration, I used the Old School Essentials Classic Fantasy set. I mocked up a group of pre-generated characters, one for each of the classic fantasy classes, and a small dungeon for them to traverse. The game was set in the Mythic Pinelands (working title), a region I've been working on which functions as an allegory of the New Jersey Pinelands. It's part of a larger setting of relative unimportance at this moment-- except to say it's 15th-century adjacent.
© Pinelands Preservation Alliance
It was a clear, moonless night in the Pinelands. The pines themselves twisted and intertwined over the beaten path of the Poorman's Road. It was pitch black, except for the swing-swinging light cast by a mule-mounted lantern. The mule, Grumtilda, was flanked by six adventurers.
They were:
William Raney, the devout Cleric. He recited words of a god of nature under his breath as he walked.
Algernon, the learned Magic-User. He stroked his beard slowly, remembering an old folktale.
Jonathan Sinful, the Thief. He shuffled along; thoughts filled with all the shoes he hoped to steal.
Westside Longbow, the Elf. She lit up a hand-roll with a match and puffed it while leading the mule.
Hydil Tinkerson, the Halfling. His need to snack had got to him-- he'd swiped a scone from the baker,
Twink Wink, the Dwarf. They were the loudest of the bunch, discussing any topic in graphic detail.
© Warner Bros
The party had been tasked with delving into the old manor in the abandoned cranberry settlement of Friendship; they'd come from Ferdsmire, where the heir son to the Ferdsmire family had gone missing, last seen heading much too close to the old manor. The sheriff who'd hired, them, Obed Jolef, had also offered additional payment to return a second missing person: Huldah, a local red-headed footpad who the sheriff seemed oddly concerned about. The party quickly acquired their treasure-carrying lantern-wearing mule and hustled off into the night.
Passing the last of the thick cedar swamps, the Poorman's Road opened up, and the stars reflected in dark waters of tens of abandoned cranberry bogs which made up the old village of Friendship. A few remaining farmhouses and storage houses were still among them, but most had been lost to time, living on only as piles of dry, decomposing wood and old fallen chimneys. But that was just fine, because it meant few monsters could hide in the old homes and ambush the party. They continued on, following the walls of the dikes, heading for a dark copse of old oaks near the center of the complex. Despite their age, the oaks did a poor job of hiding the peaked roof and strong stone walls of the old Friendship Manor.
The manor was a place the people of the Pines generally avoided; whether the supernatural or the fantastical, there was nothing good to come from the old place. The Friendship family, despite their name, were an odd sort: reserved, quiet, and dutiful to the people of their village, yet secretive. Even in a world with such monsters, the five-foot thick stone walls of the manner seemed overkill, especially as the stone was carted in over weeks and months from the north, to support a crypt and two floors, plus the walled garden. But when the richness of the cranberry business had gone sour as the merchants and farmers of Vaxwharf could better conduct their wares along the roads better connected to the Coastal Commonwealth and across the sea to the Old Land of Vaast, the Friendship family waned. They became more secretive and less dutiful, neglecting their villagers until all of left nigh one hundred years ago. The Friendship family seemed to die off soon after-- whether they left their home and just all laid down in the crypt and waited to pass was still unknown.
But that sort of history was lost on the adventurers, for the most part. They approached the open portcullis of the manor under an old, de-topped post oak. Wanting to scout ahead, Jonathan Sinful clambered up the stories of the old guard tower and peered over. The tower itself was open; it seemed like the roof had caved in a bit ago. Before he leapt right in, Jon noticed the thick, waxy spiderwebs which had been spun into the room below. There was a central funnel he could leap down. He promptly did but fell headfirst into the web of the giant crab spider who had taken up residence inside. It crawled out and began to analyze whether he'd make a good enough meal to kill promptly or let slowly starve. The rest of the party decided to investigate, and upon encountering the spider, Westside cast Animal Friendship to tame the beast. After a shared bit of chicken, the taming was successful, and the spider followed Westside like a 5-foot-wide dog.
© Joel Satore
While Westside was busy taming the spider, Twink's dwarven sense for the earth allowed them to detect some sort of hollow or hole below one of the larger flagstones on the bottom floor or the guard tower. While a few of the party members dug, William and Algernon shined their lantern out into the courtyard to watch for enemies. There, stopped in its tracks, was a skeleton. It watched, them, either with mouth agape in horror or lack of jaw muscle.
© RMBZ
William, invested with clerical power, followed the will of Asion, a god of nature and the land. Although neutral on most matters, the good books of Asion told that the processes causing undeath were unnatural, and therefore it was the responsibility of all worshippers to return to dead to rest with brutal and violent force. William was all too happy to comply, and with a few words from his good book he slammed his mace down on the skeleton's forehead, who seemed powerless to do anything. It immediately disintegrated into a pile of bones.
Twink had successfully pulled up the flagstone from within the guard tower and cut through the dirt and roots with their battleaxe. They revealed a small, one-humanoid-wide tunnel. It seemed logical to follow this loose end, so the whole party crammed in single file and shimmied down the tunnel, sand in their eyes and praying for it to hold. They came to a thin piece of wood on the other side, which Jonathan cut through with his knife. On the other side, he saw a dirt-walled pit with iron bars installed in the ceiling. It was some sort of rudimentary prison, which Jon quickly discovered was holding Huldah, the red-headed footpad. She spoke to Jon and told them a patently insane man with a penchant for raising the dead and lots of rants about the death of his sister had captured her and held her in this cage for about five days, since she'd been in the manor looking for loot to steal. After much deliberation, and many questions asked of the traumatized burglar girl (the sheriff's bastard daughter), the party decided they'd wait for the patently insane hooded man (whom the identity of was unknown) and hide Huldah away, forcing his hand to open the lock before all jumping him like a nerd outside a schoolhouse. Jon attempted to open the large padlock on the ceiling bars, and did crack it, while breaking his pin off inside-- the loud snap immediately drew footsteps into the room.
The hooded figure strode into the room while Jon and Hydil attempted to hide in the shadows of the cage. Those shadows were promptly dispelled by the lantern held by the hooded figure, who was then flanked by a pair of slavering undead ghouls. Seeing the two adventurers down in the hole and no Huldah, with a whistle the hooded figure sent his pair of ghouls down into the fray. The four other fighters pulled out into the cell and made short work of the two ghouls. Algernon took the moment to strike out at the hooded figure with a magic missile. The red ray of pure kinetic energy shot out of the cage and turned a right angle, slamming straight into the broach of the hooded figure's cloak. He gasped, clearly a male, but last thing the adventurers saw of him in the fray was him slamming into the floor. Once the ghouls were dispatched, Algernon ascertained that the paralytic poison from the undead beast's claws could be extracted and coated on weapons and arrows. The adventurers promptly did so and then scaled the cell walls into what was once the parlor. Huldah went back out the tunnel to wait for the party with Grumtilda. The hooded figure was nowhere to be seen, so they carried on to the north.
The next room they entered was a sizable dining chamber. Unlike the parlor, this room was immaculately clean and dusted, with lit sconces and candleabras and a table set for a meal. The adventurers observed this and theorized that the hooded man had meant to invite Huldah to dinner. She'd mentioned he'd been talking some craziness about his sister's death. "Weird," the adventurers collectively went, and then moved on into the next room. It was a hallway, with a large bay window to the north, a door to the east, and a door to the south. William and Algernon peered out the window and saw something shifting around out in the stables. But their were more important things to do. The party caught the faintest sent of a stew being cooked to the east. Hydil's stomach led him on, and since he was up front, the party followed.
In the kitchen, the party barged in to a beautiful vegetable pottage being cooked by a pair of zombie butlers, immaculately dressed in tidy formal wear. They were quite unaware of the adventurer's presence, or at least weren't trained to care, because they went right on cooking and preparing the pottage, bread, and roast. William saw this as the perfect opportunity to take the duo of undead by surprise and smashed them to bits and smite them back to the underworld with his mace. They noted the entrance to the carriage house to the east, a spiral staircase leading downstairs to the cellar, and a door that ostensibly led outside to the stables. They decided to turn back and close ranks, heading back to the hallway they came from and into the southern room. Herein was a well-kept and well-lit study, with rows of shelves, some of which still held musty books. But it was clear some had been removed last moment, as papers and drawings were strewn on the floor from the desk. One letter the party picked up divulged a truth, although maybe not the truth: It was a letter lampooning the Ferdsmire name and chastising Walton's father for always trying to set him on the path to nobility- signed by Walton himself. The party was quite sure Walton was the one who wrote the letter, and that he was the cloaked figure commanding the undead around the manor. With this information at hand, the party saw fit to burst out the second door in the room, which headed south.
They did so, the whole clown-car cohort piling out of the study and into the entrance hall, which primarily contained a large set of stone stairs heading up to the second floor (you know, for the grandeur of it all). But what draw their attention was the decorations to the east side of the room. There was a stone fountain on that edge, small and long since drained, with a large life-size carving of an angelic figure tipping a decanter over, perhaps that when working would have deposited water into the fountain basin. While the fountain itself was no longer operational, as the party looked up, they realized what was; a zombified head had been placed upon the broken head of the angelic figure, and a steel device placed in its mouth. As their lantern-light crested over the zombified eyes of the figure, it got a defiant look in its eyes and blew the steel device. The harmonica's cry pierced the party's ears, but they heard one word rattling in their brains: FEAR. It was at that moment that Hydil, Algernon, and Twink gazed to their right, and saw a horrible vision (though the other three were wholly unaffected). It was The Devil, The Pinelands Devil, the terrifying creature which haunts the nightmares of every Pinelands being, whether wild beast, monster, or humanoid. The three fear-stricken adventurers busted out the doors and ran away, while the three remaining were ambushed by another pair of ghouls. The ghouls put up a fight, and were able to paralyze Westside's spider momentarily, but were slashed, bludgeoned, and stabbed until they were nothing more than meat. When the Cause Fear spell from the zombie's harmonica had ended, the party rejoined in the foyer and went over their plan. First, they would head down to the cellar in the kitchen, then the stable, then conquer the second floor of the manor. They ended their time in the entrance hall by allowing William to smite the zombie head.
The adventurers crept down the dark spiral staircase down to the cellar, finding a seemingly normal cellar meagerly stocked with provisions, all fairly fresh. It was innocuous to everyone else, but Twink's dwarven connection to tunneling and underground structures allowed them to decipher the existence of a secret stone door in the back of the cellar by the marks it made on the wall and floor. Jamming their dungeoneering tools in and cracking it open, the door fell back and revealed another dark hallway filled with alcoves. This was clearly the Friendship family crypt, and as the party walked down, they noted many of the death veils of the corpses semi-preserved in each alcove had been tossed aside and many bodies had been removed. Beyond the crypt, a strange purple-red glow began to fill the hall, which turned a slow corner before ending in a large chamber. Set back in the chamber was a large stone statue, up against the wall opposite the opening. The flagstones here were particularly cold. In front of the statue was a pool of some sort of dark liquid, and a set of stairs leading down within. While some of the party were tense and cautious, they moved into the room to examine the statue. It was about twenty feet tall, and almost as wide-- depicting a squat, froglike creature sitting cris-crossed with each of its six fingers touching while spread apart, like an evil wizard pondering a plan. Twink Wink knew of this being and told as much to the rest of the party. In their experience dealing with the cultures of the Deeprock, the ever-expanding cave systems deep under the earth, deep under any of the sands of the Pinelands, Twink Wink had learned of the preferred deity of arcane magic of some cultures therein. This was Tsathoggua.
© Chaosium
By the time they'd finished hearing the tale of the craven magical deity of the Deeprock, Twink Wink noticed that Westside was gone. The rest of the party turned to see Westside wading into the pool of liquid, staring up at the statue. Westside commented on the fact that the eyes of the statue were large rubies, likely of great value. That got Jonathan moving, but not before Westside took a sip of the liquid. It was blood.
Suddenly, Westside was alone. She looked up from the pool and around and noticed the room had become shrouded in darkness. Her companions were nowhere to be seen. She turned her head to look for them but saw no trace. All she could see was the statue, now bathed in that same reddish-purple light, but intensifying. It crescendoed, briefly blinding Westside, but as her vision came back to her she noticed that the statue was no longer the same grey stone it once had been. It was not stone at all, but dark, green-grey skin, oily and wet like a toad. The creature, Tsathoggua, shifted in their seated position, and cracked an odd amphibian grin, like a salamander perched to pounce on a lowly bug. It chuckled just a bit, a belly laugh full of elation, before Westside noticed the voice of the thing in her mind. It was quite amused that Westside had been so quick to drink the blood which had been sitting in this pool since the family of Friendship had sacrificed countless animals, and then humanoids, to their deity all those years ago. It had a gift her. Tsathoggua would grant Westside the power to see through its darkness, for periods of time, to be able to better navigate in the tunnels and cave systems it bid Westside to traverse. Come down to my realm, it said. There is much for you to learn.
In the sacrificial chamber, Westside awoke vomiting. She scrambled out of the pit while William and the rest of the party began to look after her. She wouldn't be the only one needing guidance and healing, though. No sooner had she left the pool than was there a small explosion as Jonathan was thrown back onto the stone in a nigh-bloody pulp. He'd failed to extract the ruby correctly from the statue's eye and almost paid for it with his life. Hydil was quite done with this chamber, and once the second ruby had been correctly extracted without any following character death, he led them back out of the crypt and out to the stables.
It seemed things were no better there. Approaching the stables, the party were struck by the gross visage of a creature pleading for death. Its rump and back legs were that of a black bear, which was misshapenly welded by skin and flesh to the front half of a horse. The head was that of a human, which looked at the party with mournful eyes. It couldn't speak full words. but was clearly not in good spirits. Around its neck hung a large amulet of copper construction. When a member of the party removed the amulet, they watched in horror and forgiveness as the flesh-welded creature began to slough apart and fall to the ground, fully rotting away in seconds. It seemed to have been some sort of horrible Chimera, and the party worried about where the rest of the parts had gone. It was time to find out.
The party trudged up the stone steps to the second floor of the house, their weapons all dripping with caustic ghoul paralysis fluid and ready for action. Passing a single precipice, they came to what must have once been a series of rooms about the size of the dining room, parlor, and study downstairs. All the walls seemed to have been knocked aside, except for a few load-bearing supports. Sitting in the middle of the room was the cloaked figure, fervently clutching one book in his hand while reading unintelligible words aloud from another. He threw his hood back as the characters entered, looking at the assembled party from spider to elf to dwarf. Walton Ferdsmire cracked a wry smile, and began to chuckle as he watched the feeble party that had been causing him problems all damn day assemble before him, ready for a fight. He chuckled again, now with rage in his eyes. He went into full monologue, lampooning each of the characters for being poor useless saps for a useless civilization who were beneath his notice. Walton had learned the mysteries of the universe, raising his book of Tsathogguan necromancy above his head and laughing, jeering on and on about how he was master of all he surveyed and would grind the party into a bloody pulp. It was quite time for the battle to commence, and as Walton stood, he called to the back of the room, where the lanternlight and candlelight could not reach. Out from the shadows, dragging a great wrought iron broadsword, came a horse-faced beast with the strength of a bear's body, the hooves and head of a horse, and the hands and brain of a human The chimera, in the visage of the Pinelands Devil, raised its broadsword and whinnied, a terrible croaking neigh which shook the room and sounded the start of the great battle. Hydil was the first to notice the copper amulet around the beast's neck, calling out to his party to the obvious weak point on the strong creature. The party fanned out, hoping to outwit Walton and his creation with their greater numbers. The creature whinnied and bled black from a handful of attacks, but it seemed to have less effect then desired as it swung its broadsword down and nearly took off William's head, slicing into his chest and leaving him nearly incapacitated. Walton retreated behind his creation and cast a simple spell, coating his body in a spiky bone armor which would shrapnel out if hit by a melee weapon. Hydil learned this when one of the shrapnel fragments nearly impaled him on a glancing hit, while Westside and Jonathan unleashed a volley of bolt and arrow fire finished off with the slam of Twink's paralyzing axe blow in the creature's hind leg. It stumbled, clearly incapacitated, while Hydil's paralysis took effect on Walton. With both of the enemies outwitted, the adventuring party stripped the chimera-devil of its amulet and let it rot into the floor, while hogtying Walton and throwing him over Grumtilda to take back to town.
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