Inixon - Dwellers of the Isle of Dread (5th Ed.)

[Yora]

Day 4: 14th Day, 7th Month, Year 507

After having slain the priests, Alamar decided to put on the high priest’s robes and take his serpent staff and walk into the room behind the great doors at the end of a brightly lit corridor. The rest of the group stayed behind in side passages to observe what happens and come to aid him as soon as a battle started.

Opening the door and stepping through it, Alamar entered a chapple that also looked like a throne room, and on the raised platform on the opposite wall of the chamber were two cultists sleeping at the feet of a figure dressed in red robes and a large snake over its shoulders.

Alamar tried to impersonate the dead priest and tell his mistress that intruder are in the temple. With a gesture of her hand the two cultists rose from their cushions and the snake started to move forward, and in a moment of panic Alamar reached out with his newly developing telepathic powers. Surprised, the priestess signaled her servants to halt, and Alamar heard her speaking into his mind as well, asking who he is and why he has come to this place. Sensing that his deception had utterly failed, he ran back to the others, and seeing that the game was up, Haren the group in a charge into the main chamber.

The two cultists were easily knocked down and Alamar unleashed a telepathic attack against the priestess. Dazes from the attack, the priestess rose from her seat, revealing the tail of a great serpent instead of legs. She removed her mask, revealing a face covered in green scales, and as her robes fell away she transformed into a giant snake.

Fighting off an assault from Haren and Karim, Finan landed a deep strike with his blade and one of Ilmari’s arrows stuck deep into the neck of the great snake. Haren landed a mortal blow with his axe and continued to sever the serpent’s head.

Evil Overlord List, #34: “I will not turn into a snake. It never helps.”

When the two cultists awoke they told a story of having been taken from Orlane and brought to the hidden temple, where they had been brought before the priestess and became convinced to loyally serve her and the Great Serpent. Others managed to resist and were taken back to their cells, to await being taken away on a ship as slaves. Those who died during their imprisonment were being fed to crocodiles.

Picking up the golden mask, the group returned to loot the treasure room and the priest’s quarters. They freed all the cultists they had locked into their sleeping rooms and found them in an equal state to the first two they had questioned. A bit confused and appalled by what had happened to their fellow villagers who had resisted the power of the priestess. Though of the cultists that had been guarding the main entranace to the hidden temple there was no trace to be found.

After resting from their ordeal, the group loaded the treasures taken from the temple on the pack goats kept in the stables and led the freed cultists back to Orlane. Kamir inspected the golden mask for magic, which it clearly was holding, and Alamar and Haren got into a long fight over whether they could risk using it and falling under a curse. The possibilities that the masters of the golden priestess could send their minions and use powerful magic to recover the mask was also worrying. Alamar was insistent that the mask might come very useful in the future if they were to attempt infiltrating another serpent temple, and with the robe and staff taken from the priest he had a perfect disguise.

Despite Alamar’s protests to keep their possession of the mask a secret, Haren and Finan went to the witch Remi to learn more about it’s power. After studying it and performing various divinations, Remi told them that the mask had strong influence over the weak minded. Even someone without any mental powers could use it to bend the minds of others, but its powers would be much greater for someone who already possesses magical abilities of this kind. Alamar saw great potential in such an object, but Haren was not trusting him with such power.

As the sun was setting, the group visited the elderman of Orlane, who was crowded by freed cultists who were telling him of what had happened to them. The elderman inquired if there was anything they could do to find the people who were still missing, and one of the former cultists mentioned that the ship that was taking away the slaves always came during the darkness of the night of the new moon. The next one of which would be two days from now. A plan was made to ambush the crew of the ship when it arrived at the secret temple and then take their ship to reach the stronghold of the cult’s leaders on Inixon. Taking the helmsman of the ship prisoner and forcing him to take him there was not considered reliable enough, and so a freed cultists named Kevan volunteered to steer the ship for them, as he had been a sailor in his youth, and more than eager to help the people who had freed them from the cult’s control to save the still missing slaves.

Haren decided to check on the smith of Orlane who had reacted to their questions so violently when they first investigated the village. One of the smith’s sons answered the door and recommended that they don’t disturb his father, as he had always been an ill-tempered man and had finally started to calm down today. A quick visit to the temple revealed that the corpses from the battle had been cleared away during the two days they had been gone and the captured cultists set free. As they returned to the inn for the night they discovered that their prisoners there were gone as well, and somehow nobody had seen the innkeeper and his lackeys since then.

During the night, Alamar snuck from his bed to quietly take the mask from Haren’s pack. He put it on to study its magical energies for several hours, and found it to be just as the witch had told them, with no signs of dark or malicious powers. He managed to put the mask back into its place unnoticed and returned to his bed with nobody being the wiser.

--

Thus ends the adventure Against the Cult of the Reptile God.

I've been running D&D campaigns on and off since the release of 3rd edition in 2020 with five different groups, and I feel that this has been by far the best adventure I've run yet. Two of the players were already familiar with the adventure and one had been running it himself in the past. I had redrawn the dungeon maps and repopulated it with 5th edition NPCs and creatures that fit my homebrew setting, but I ran the town part essentially straight from the book. I had moved some inhabitants to different buildings, and to make it unclear which of the two inns was safe and which one is controlled by the cult, I turned one of them into a trade post and changed both their names.
We spend three sessions investigating the town with the inn and temple and it was a blast to run. Though I think having some people in the group who knew that they were supposed to talk with random villagers to start gathering some clues probably helped a lot. As fun as this adventure is, it begins in a way that really is not suited to introducing completely new players to the game. But I think having a mixed group of veterans and beginners would also help, even if everyone goes into it completely blind.
I always thought the descriptions of all the villagers was a total overkill and pretty much none of it was used when I ran the adventure the first time some six years ago. But this time I was much better prepared and the players were looking to talk to random NPCs, and having all that information really made it a breeze to play them. You get a few bits of personality, what their concerns are, and what they know about the situation. And that really makes it super easy to play out their interactions with the players. This has very much been a learning experience and I'm looking forward to see how this will affect my future preparation of NPCs for adventures.
What I wasn't quite prepared for, and which the adventure has no advice on, is how to play charmed cultists that get captured and interrogated by the players. Sure they are charmed, but what does that really mean? They are magically compelled to regard the enchanter as a trusted ally, but simple villagers would not withstand persistent questioning by seasoned warriors. Do they just spill their beans and reveal everything they know? I kind of feel that it makes things to easy, but I really saw no reason why it shouldn't be that way.

Something the adventure is regularly criticized for is that the original boss fight against a spirit naga is much too dangerous and that the adventure recommends the players getting help from the local wizard who knows a lot about what's going on but doesn't want to tell them, or two elf fighters who can serve as backup. The two elves never came up in this campaign because the party never got to their house or talked with the most gossipy NPCs. The wizard (reskinned as a witch) came in quite handy a couple of times, sharing a little bit of information and giving a second opinion about the magical enchantments on the cultists, but never offered and never was asked any help with fighting the cult.
Not having run a 5th edition game before, I was a bit concerned about having two 2nd level and three 1st level PCs fight a Yuan-ti Malison at CR 3 with a few backup minions. But it turned out to be a walk in the park for them, which did not particularly surprise me, They still had huge numerical superiority. I really wanted the priestess to turn into a giant snake during the fight, which admittedly really didn't help her in the fight. It took her a full round to transform and mostly just resulted in her losing her ability to attack twice per round. Otherwise she might have been able to make six attempts at PCs instead of just two, but I doubt it would have changed anything meaningfully.

The most meaningful change I made to the adventure is that I had the prisoners who resisted being charmed not be killed and thrown into a pool, but instead be taken away as slaves, which serves as one hook for further adventures. The second hook is that the cult seems to be responsible for raiding ships with goods destined for Finan's smuggling outfit, and there's a third hook of the warlock Alamar having visions that the serpents have mystical knowledge that he's interested in. So far the players have been quite happy with "doing the heroic thing", but since I intend to expand the campaign into a sandbox after this initial starting adventure I feel it's important to not just give them a single goal that I tell them to pursue.

What really surprised me was that damn mask. Charm effects in 5th edition have a much shorter duration than they had in 1st edition so some homebrewing was required allow the leader of the cult to charm dozens of people for months. I could simply have given her a unique ability that allows her to do just that, but I already had the image for how she looks, and I just really love having enchanted masks as part of my setting's worldbuilding. So I created the golden mask, which is simply a reskin of regular eyes of charming, with the additional power that boosts the natural suggestion ability of yuan-ti to become a long-lasting charm effect. And that's really all there is to that thing.
So five sessions into the campaign, the party gets their first magic item (actually second but they never checked the staff for magic) and they immediately get into heated debates that they should leave it alone. That never happened to me before. I think this actually resulted from Haren having already been established to be weary of dark magic and cursed objects. This goes all the way back since they found the bronze serpent idol under the inn. I think the player just thought it would be fitting that Haren would suspect the mask to be cursed, because it was worn by a mysterious telepathic priestess who turned into a giant snake. I don't think the player had real concerns that I would make their first magic item cursed. But with Alamar being greedy for magic and his player being quite bold with taking the lead, things just escalated from there quickly.
With other players I might have intervened, but with these two I felt quite confident that they would both take each other's stubbornness in good sport with no hard feelings. I also really like the approach that when one PC turns against another, the other player has the sole call if that attempt can go forward and play out or not. Stealing a magic item from another character certainly would count as that. But in this case the item was not part of Haren's equipment and merely stored in his possession until they decided what to do with it, so it wasn't really stealing from another player. And I was told that Alamar's intention was to study the mask, not to keep it. So I judged this situation to not count as fighting within the party and let Alamar go ahead with it. However, even though the player notified me about the plan secretly, I spontaneously decided to play it out in the open. Even though the other characters never learned about it, I feel that it's better to have the cards out in the open with this. My impression of this group is that they enjoy collaboratively creating a story about conflict between the characters, but it does not have to be players secretly working against each other. I will see how this turns out in the long run, but I am feeling pretty good with how this went at this point.