When last we left our heroes, they had just crashed their bedraggled steamboat in a desert canyon, far to the south of anywhere they wanted to be. Narrowly escaping a swarm of flesh-eating giant freshwater crabs, they found themselves facing the steep wall of the canyon they were trapped in. Following a crumbling staircase carved into the rock, they came upon a cave, littered with shards of pottery, but large enough to rest in. Before them looms a circular stone door ringed with strange glyphs. In its center, a carved skeletal figure hanging upside down over a river, its dark maw open wide, as if waiting to swallow something.
We now return you to the adventure already in progress...
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| Photo: Tigerhawkvok via Wikimedia |
(The carving on the door is of an ancient gnomish legendary figure who was punished for his greed in the afterlife by being suspended above the River of the Dead so that he would always be thirsty. Once every century he would be lowered into the river for a brief drink, but the water of the dead turns to sand in his mouth. In some gnomish cultures he became a sort of guardian of the souls of those who died in the desert. I intended for the door to open if someone poured water into it - hence the shards of old pottery in the room and the proximity to the river - but I figured a good amount of whisky would work just as well.)
Beyond the door was a short hallway leading into an octagonal room, each face of which features a doorway covered with a mat of woven reeds. Advancing into the room, they nearly fall victim to a trap - a large pit concealed by a similar reed mat, caked in dried mud to look like the stone around it. They edge around the narrow lip of the pit and Heather missteps and falls in. As she clambers out, two of the mats in the room beyond are torn down and two gnomish skeletons bearing bows and clubs rush to the attack. Soon two more, and then two more mats are torn down, and the restless dead swarm around the party. Between Heather's morningstar, Face's twin sawed-off shotguns, a generous helping of disrupt undead from Dawne, and even Ash's high-caliber rifle, they shatter the attacking skeletons.
One mat remains undisturbed. Behind it, they find a ladder leading up through the ceiling. They emerge in an oddly shaped room, like a bumpy cone, the wide end of which opens into a corridor. The corridor grows wider as it turns first to the right, then 180 degrees to the left, then a full turn to the right again. In this section of hall, the walls of which are covered with intricate carvings of men and skeletons and snakes, Ash steps on a pressure plate and a dart shoots out, narrowly missing him. Just to be safe, they crawl the rest of the way down the hall as darts shoot by just overhead. As they turn the corner to the next turn, however, a plate slides away in the ceiling and a swarm of animated snake skeletons engulfs our heroes. They bash and flail against the undead serpents, Heather and Face even stomping on them or crushing them against the walls. Finally, Ash clears the last of them away with a few sweeps of his longsword. They continue down the hall, the turns of which are coming more frequently now. It terminates at another doorway blocked with a reed mat. When they tear it down, they see a room carved to look like the inside of a rattlesnake's head - the snake whose body they had just come through. Both of its eyes are holes in the rock. In the center of the head, a gnome skeleton wearing intricate gold and turquoise jewelry and turtle-hide armor rises from the stone burial slab it was resting on and brandishes a spear. The adventurers leap to the attack, but a large snake skeleton slithers out of one of the snake eyeholes and bites at them. Ash and Heather take on the snake skeleton while Dawne and Face blast at the undead chieftain with spell and shotgun. Splinters of bone fly through the air as the undead abominations are returned to their natural rest. They loot the treasures of the gnomish chief and climb up the other snake eyehole, reaching a long well-like tunnel out to the desert above.
Theodore and the other half of the party are catching their breath from their mighty climb up the cliff-face when Heather pops out of a nearby pile of rocks, followed shortly by Face. As Ash and Dawne climb out, however, a burst of dusty air and a gnomish voice crying 'Cechua naha Azacatla!"follow them out of the tomb, and the two fall unconscious, their faces clouded by some magical curse. Bjorn slings one over each shoulder and the party sets out into the desert, a plain of orange sand and red rock only broken by the canyon to their rear and the occasional spur of oddly shaped sandstone thrusting into the sky. Thanks to Rusty's survival skills, they know to travel around dawn and dusk, sleeping through the heat of midday and the cold of the night. Even so, the harsh environment and their empty waterskins begin to take their toll. After a few parched days in the desert, they finally spot a thick mound of cacti! They rush for the succulent, water-bearing plants, only to draw back when a loud rattle sounds from their midst. Bjorn and Theodore leap toward danger, and danger comes out to meet them in the form of a massive rattlesnake. Its foot-long fangs bite down into Bjorn as Theodore stabs it with his trusty trident. Gudguniis comes around to the side, only for a lizardman with a stubby tail and bumpy orange and black skin rush out and bash him with a cactus club. Another gila-man charges at Face, who blasts it with her shotgun. Desperate for water, the adventurers fight boldly, cutting down their scaly opponents. Bjorn ends the fight by beheading the giant rattlesnake with a mighty blow from his greatsword. The exhausted party gorges themselves on juicy cacti as Rusty skins the snake and Heather prepares snake steaks and snake jerky for the road.
With the fall of night, some of the party is able to sleep in a hollow that the lizardmen had created beneath the cactus mound. Theodore sleeps outside under the stars, and is awoken by a horse licking his face. It is a white horse, unmarked except for a bear-claw scar on its flank. Theodore (a cavalier who had thus far gone horseless), mounts the steed. The rest of the party wakes to find him striking a daring pose against the rising sun. His horse, who he names Bucephalus, has a desire to ride east, so they go east. They soon come to a small town on the edge of the prairie, very close to a cattle ranch called Thunderhoof.
At Thunderhoof Ranch, they see a cowboy rounding up his cattle. As he rides out of the herd, they see his lower half is a horse! (Bjorn remains unconvinced: "I think he’s just an amputee riding a headless horse.") The centaur cowboy introduces himself as Clem Thunderhoof. They ask him if they can buy some of his horses so they can ride north. Clem says he can't afford to part with the horses, but they can ride with him if they like; he's driving his herd north tomorrow to meet up with the railroad at Templeton, and all his ranch hands have been hired off by "Bones" Conway, the famous paleomancer who has a dig nearby. He offers them 700 gold each, minus 5 gold for each head of cattle lost along the way. The party agrees, and they set out the next day.
Riding through the rolling prairie with a herd of meat is a dangerous proposition in this world. All sorts of predators lurk behind every bush. But sometimes the bush itself is the predator! As they cook up breakfast the next morning, a tangle of tumbleweeds rolls toward them with deadly purpose. These are no ordinary tumbleweeds - they are tumblers, a sentient plant that entangles its victims in its own body and then sucks their blood. Two of the vampiric shrubs slam into Bjorn and Gudguniis, attaching their blood-sucking tendrils to them. Heather destroys one with her sickle, a plant-fighting weapon if ever there was one. Rusty goes to town on them with his fiery alchemist bombs, burning them to cinders. One attacks the centaur Clem, but Rusty burns it away. Bjorn and Gudguniis hack their respective assailants off of their bodies and finish off the last of the offending plants. "We'd better get moving," says Clem. "More are sure to come, and bigger ones at that. I've seen tumblers big enough to swallow a horse and carry it off." They ride on in silence.
As they pass through another patch of desert, Theodore spots a bone-shaped rock sticking out of the side of a rocky outcropping. He decides to use it as target practice, but just then a lone figure comes riding up frantically. He barely pauses to yell out, "Scales McDermot's minions raised our finds - they're tearing us apart! Get out while you can!" before riding off. "Scales" McDermot is another famous paleomancer, and archrival of "Bones" Conway. The two wizards are well known for sabotaging each others' fossil digs with dynamite and necromancy. The party takes up defensive positions while Clem tends to the herd. A minute later, four small turkey-like skeletons with long, toothy maws, grasping forarms, and sickle-like toe-claws crest the top of the rocky outcrop. Face immediately blasts one with a shotgun, damaging it. Rusty scorches the other three with a bomb and then turns and flees. One of the velociraptors chases down the fleeing alchemist, two move in to flank Gudguniis, and the fourth leaps down onto Face, ripping into her with its many claws. Theodore rides over to assist Gudguniis, flanking one of the flankers. Rusty drinks a mutagen and turns to face his undead pursuer while Face keeps backing up and shooting at the tenacious raptor. Gudguniis goes down under the velociraptors' deadly claws, but Heather heals him. He shoots at one of the raptors from the ground with his derringer, then rolls over and shoots at another. One of the velociraptors, still burning from Rusty's bomb, claws its way up Bucephalus to attack Theodore, nearly killing the horse in the process. The party chips away at the primeval assailants, taking them out one at a time. Heather kept the fighters going by healing them, and it was only at the end that the was able to bring her super effective morningstar to bear, smashing the last animated fossil to pieces.
Clem insists they keep moving, lest more creatures find them here. Three cattle have wandered off, but Theodore rides off to round them up and successfully drives all three back to the main herd. That night, they lose their first steer. It is found in the morning, partially eaten, the apparent victim of a giant tarantula attack.
It rains the next day, and menacing black clouds form at their backs, crackling with lightning. As they drive the herd through an arroyo, the storm hits. A flash flood could occur at any moment. The party debates whether to drive the cattle through the arroyo to the other side, or take them back, toward any potential flooding. Heather spots a hillock up ahead, and they decide to head for that. They reach it just as the water starts to flow down the arroyo. A nearby lightning strike spooks the cattle, and one of them is injured in the resulting panic. As Clem and Theodore calm the herd, Heather goes back to heal the injured one, leading it onto the hillock just as the flood hits.
Surrounded on the hillock, the party holes up for a long wait. Clem pulls out a long oiled duster that fits over his horse body. They ride around the outside of the herd, keeping them out of the rising waters. As darkness gathers with the storm, Gudguniis spots something moving in the muddy waters - hideous fat worms the size of a grown man, their mottled skin splitting at the front into four tentacles around a toothy beak. The gricks (actually reskinned giant leeches, because I realized at the last second that gricks have DR10/magic and would straight-up kill the party) roil unnaturally toward the party and the cattle they guard. Rusty and Gudguniis both critically fumble their attacks on the monsters, with Rusty shooting himself in the foot. Theodore, on the other hand, blasts one of the lurching worms with his .557 revolver, and Face finishes it off with a shotgun blast. Rusty burns his leech with a well-placed bomb, but the third attaches to Heather and begins to suck her blood until Gndguniis shoots it off her. Then something larger bursts from the water - a mound of muddy flesh with three rubbery tentacles, two of which terminate in spike-covered paddles and the third in a grotesque collection of sensory organs. The otyugh heaves itself onto shore and lays into them with its long tentacles. The party concentrates fire on it. Bullets piece its thick hide, causing spurts of oozing blood. Its skin boils and sloughs off where it is hit by Rusty's bombs. But still it comes forward, biting Heather with its misshapen mouth. Finally, Rusty chucks a bomb into its gullet, and it explodes in a shower of general unpleasantness.
Shaken by their encounter and soaked through by the storm, the party spends the night on the hillock with the cows. The floodwaters have receded by dawn. They ride on for another day, shadowed by dog-headed humanoids who always stay well out of rifle range. At noon the following day, they ride up to Templeton. Theodore uses his Profession (businessman) skill to negotiate a bonus of 25 gold each - after all, they did only lose a single steer in that entire cattle drive.
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Sorry for the late post - my real, not-tabletop-related job is keeping me pretty busy. To make up for it, here is the stat block for a Small-sized Tumbler:
The following text in gold is available as Open Game Content under the OGL. Open Game Content is ©2015 Jonah Bomgaars.
Tumbler CR
1/3
XP 135
N Small plant
Init +3; Senses
low-light vision; Perception -1
DEFENSE
AC 14, touch 14,
flat-footed 11 (+3 Dex, +1 size)
hp 5 (2d8-4)
Fort +1, Ref +3, Will -1
DR 5/slashing; Immune plant traits
Vulnerability
fire
OFFENSE
Speed 40 ft.
Melee touch +5
(attach)
Special Attacks blood
drain
STATISTICS
Str 2, Dex 16, Con 7, Int 1, Wis 8, Cha 4
Base Atk +1; CMB -4 (+6 grapple when attached); CMD 9
Feats Weapon
Finesse
Skills Stealth +12
SPECIAL ABILITIES
Attach (Ex)
With a successful melee touch attack, a tumbler can envelop
an enemy in its tangle of branches, causing it to become Entangled. The target must be no more than one size
category larger than the tumbler. The
Entangled penalties from multiple tumblers stack.
When a tumbler is
attached to its target in this way, it is effectively grappling it. The tumbler loses its Dexterity bonus to AC
and has an AC of 11. A Tumbler has a +10
racial bonus to maintain its grapple to a foe once it is attached. An attached tumbler can be struck with a
weapon or grappled itself. A tumbler can
be removed if its target wins a grapple or Escape Artist check against it.
Blood Drain (Ex)
Tumblers subsist by sucking the blood of their victims. It drains blood at the end of its turn if it
attached to its foe, inflicting 1 point of Constitution damage. Typically, tumblers stay attached to their
foes until they are completely drained of blood, but they will willingly break
off if severely damaged. A tumbler
cannot drain blood on a turn in which it takes fire damage.
ECOLOGY
Environment any
plains
Organization solitary,
pair, swarm (3-18)
Treasure none-your tumbling d20 despot
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