Day 18: 13th Day, 8th Month, Year 507

The next morning the group returned to the mansion of the pirate queen Farah, while across the harbor smoke was still rising from the burned masts and charred piers. She wasn't too pleased with the disturbances of last night, but Kamar was dead with nothing to point towards any involvement by her or her henchmen. So she handed them a splint of bamboo wood with half of Jiub's name of it, telling them to take it to the Lockbox where he would be released to them. When asking Farah's servant who was escorting them back outside, they were told to simply ask any of the sailors down by the water for directions, as anyone in Tual would be able to tell them the way to the Lockbox.

After crossing half the town, they came to the end of the wooden walkways and bridges, where they were pointed to a nearby rocky island with steep cliffs on all side. Taking a rowboat across the water they arrived at a small deserted dock and climbed up shaky wooden stairs to a heavy door reinforced with bronze. On their knocking the door was opened and they presented their bamboo splint to the scruffy looking guards. After checking it with the other half they had in a small office nearby, the leader of the guard told them to take the elevator down to the prison, where another guard would take them to Jiub's cell.

At the bottom of the elevator they found the prison to be completely silent with only a single sputtering oil lamp providing any kind of light. Taking out their own lanterns they went to go looking for the guard but came upon two prisoners who told them they had been left alone in the darkness without food and only the water they had for probably days, after they had heard screams further down in the prison. Claiming that they had just been taken to the prison only days ago for snooping around where they were not supposed to, they got the group to let them out of their cells and join them in finding out what was going on.

Deeper into the dark dungeon they came upon several dead prisoners locked in their cells, which had apparently died only recently, but without visible causes. Alamar was peeking inside one cell and tried to reach to the person on the floor with his telepathic powers, which causes the prisoner to start screaming and jump to his feet, Other cells that had not been locked were thrown open and several escaped prisoners came charging at the group with clubs and knives. Three of them were quickly disabled with a sleep spell and the other two knocked out with little trouble. Once they woke up again safely secured in cells, the group began to question them and discerned from their ramblings that the prison was in complete chaos with people fighting for their lives.

As they continued to explore the dungeon, they came upon more dead prisoners both inside cells and in the hallways, but also some that were still breathing but otherwise showed no signs of life. Eventually they arrived at a cell were a man was lying on the claw surrounded by three small creatures looking like horribly starved and diseased monkeys, running their claws over his body. Alamar tried to shot them with magic, but they quickly hurried away into the shadows outside the light of the lanterns and disappeared. In a nearby cell they found a small hole that seemed to have been dug through the wall, but none of them was inclined to try crawling into it.

When the group discovered four dead men who had been killed by blades and stripped of most of their clothing, two more of the small creatures jumped from their hiding places and tried to reach for Alamar's and Fhareza's lanterns. Alamar managed to pull his lantern away, but Fhareza's was thrown to the ground, causing it to break and igniting the spilled oil. But quickly the two creatures were slain and the group discovered Jiub alive and reasonably well in a nearby cell. They told him that they wanted to sail to Inixon and that they heard he had taken ships there before, and he was more than willing to take them there in exchange for his freedom. As they continued to explore the dungeon, they heard a deep and rumbling voice calling them. Two huge hands appeared grabbing the iron bars of the small window in the door of a cell, and as Alamar raised his lantern, the large head of an ogre came into sight. The ogre claimed that his name was Hai and that he had been in a fight with some of Farah's henchmen. Since there was nowhere for him to hide on Tual he let himself be taken to the Lockbox, and made no attempt to break out of his cell since he couldn't leave the island port without a ship. He promised to serve the group if they could take him out of the prison and away from the island.

The group returned to the elevator but got no response when they shouted for the guards above to get them back up. Hai gave Haren a lift to reach the whole in the ceiling and he managed to scale the shaft to the top, getting the others back up after him with the elevator. They discovered that the men they had met when they first came to the Lockbox were gone, and so was the boat with which they had arrived. Even though the next island was nearby, the waters throughout Tual were infested with sharks of all sizes that were feeding on the many bodies being thrown into the harbor. But Sagari was able to use the bond his people had with the creatures of the sea to convince the shark to let him swim towards the next island without attacking him. Once he got another boat he returned to the Lockbox to ferry over the rest of the group and they quickly made their way back to their ship to plan their next move.

--

This one turned out to be rather rough.

When I ran Against the Cult of the Reptile God for a second time last month, it worked out fantastic, much better than the first time. Running Escape from Meenlock Prison a second time today did not. It wasn't all awful, but it was nowhere what the concept of the adventure was promising. A good deal of it does fall straight to me, no doubt about that. Given the complexity of the dungeon I had redrawn, I was using a full floorplan map for the whole thing again, and these things just never work for me in Roll20. Players keep running of in all possible corridors at the same time, and as always I failed to tell them to stop and do things orderly, and instead kept jumping around, trying to deal with all off them simultaneously. We had two completely new players today and I really should have paid much more attention to not letting some of the older players dominate the whole thing. The dungeon for next week will require a somewhat detailed map again, and I will try to get the hang of managing these things one more time.
It wasn't awful, but I think I performed very poorly this session.

Another mistake was that I had assumed this would be once again only four or five players, but instead all seven actually showed up. I was thinking that keeping with the sandbox approach, I should not adjust the dungeon to the party composition of the day and simply let them run free with the additional options and staying power this provides. But two meenlocks against four 3rd level characters, one 2nd level character, and two 1st level characters doesn't work. They barely survived for half a round. I was considering sending in more reinforcement, but then the fight was already over and I intended to just set up another larger ambush. But in the chaos of the whole situation it didn't seem a good time when the opportunity came up and then they also had two NPCs joining their party, so I never got to that.

But I think there also is a flaw inherent to the concept of this adventure. This whole adventure seems to be designed around a single setpiece encounter. But when you make the dungeon nonlinear and that first encounter doesn't turn out as expected, the whole thing breaks down very easily. The whole thing looks really cool on paper with great potential, but that super creepy fight is something that might happen or not, depending on how the dice fall and what seems like smart behavior for everyone involved in the specific situation that has build up during the adventure so far. And if that encounter does not result in a bang, then the rest of the adventure really has very little to offer.
I tried to prepare and script this thing in great detail over several weeks, and it just didn't work out. In contrast, the week before I made up a bar fight and a ship fight from nothing because the players spontaneously decided to have them and they were one of the big highlights of the whole campaign so far. I would even say the greatest session I've experienced in all my years as either a GM or player.
Setpieces seem seductive, but they are betting everything on one card, and if that doesn't work out the whole thing is pretty meh. In contrast, with open ended and unscripted adventures, you just set up pieces and see what happens. Much of it will turn out to be pretty pedestrian stuff that isn't really memorable, but occasionally something great will come from them unexpectedly. And an average encounter that doesn't leave much of an impression does not feel like a disappointment when there is no expectation that its going to be a big awesome thing.

This session did not turn out great, but I think I still learned quite a lot from it.