GotWK Campaign Part 9: An Eye For An Eye

This is an account of part 9 of my ongoing campaign set in my homebrewed wild west setting, Guns of the Western Kings.  Get caught up with the previous parts here.

When last we left our heroes, they had chased a drow raiding party down into the Sunbeam Silver Mine.  The drow had attacked the mining camp at the surface, surprising both the miners and the elven rangers who had been waging a guerrilla campaign against the mining company.  As the party descends into the mountain in pursuit of the drow, they discover the wounded leader of the elven guerillas.  Bemoaning his failure, he says that if the drow have not seized control of the evil now, they surely would soon, and he implored the adventurers to destroy the evil before the drow can use it.  He is maddeningly unclear what he means by "the evil".  Nevertheless, the party fights its way through a hostage situation, kills a giant spider, and ends up hanging in its web above a seemingly bottomless hole deep into the depths of the mountain.

And now:

The Sniper in the Dark
One single passageway breaks into the side of the bottomless pit - a square entrance large enough that two men might march abreast through it - just above the level of the giant spiderweb.  Heather, Theodore, and Rusty pull themselves free of the sticky webbing and tightrope-walk to the passage.  Gudguníis, the blinded sharpshooter, has considerably more trouble extricating himself, and by the time he makes it to the entrance he is wearing the equivalent of a new suit of clothes in tangled spider silk.  The passageway is freshly carved and climbs steeply down, spiraling roughly around the outside of the bottomless pit.  They follow it for untold hours - possibly days - in the sunless dark before it opens up into a natural cavern.  It is a long cave full of stalagmites and stalactites, obviously carved by water at some time though now it is drier than a coal miner's cough.  Brandishing the lantern, Theodore takes the lead, only to be shot right through the breastplate.


The adventurers scramble for cover, ducking behind stalagmites as they try to pinpoint the sniper's location.  Rusty can see better in the dark with his miner's eyes, so he leaves the circle of lantern light and scouts ahead.  But even in the darkness, the sniper picks out Rusty's movements and hits him with deadly precision.  Jumping from stalagmite to stalagmite, the party inches forward.  Rusty and Theodore take turns drawing fire, letting the others run to cover behind them.  Heather keeps everyone from bleeding too much.  Stalagmites explode in chips of stone around them as the sniper fires at them from the darkness.  Finally, the dim edges of the lantern light reveal the sniper's nest, a raised section of floor surrounded by broken stalagmites.

Rusty lobs alchemical fire bombs while Theodore rushes in with his trusty trident and skewers the drow.  Upon examining the body of the sniper, they find that her rifle is mounted with a black-lensed scope, and in place of her right eye she has a black glass sphere.  After the party makes camp for a quick rest, Theodore and Gudguníis examine the drow's ocular enhancements.  They quickly decide that this might be just the thing to get our blind sharpshooter back in action.  The only problem: they'll have to remove one of Gudguníis' eyes.  Gudguníis takes a pull of whiskey and Theodore gets to work on improvised surgery.  They do this all while Heather - the actual party healer - sleeps, because they think she would object.  An incision is made, an eye is swapped for a black glass orb, and the wound is cauterized.  Gudguníis passes out from shock, but when he comes to, he can see in black and white through his new eye.  He doesn't have depth perception, but it's a damn sight better than being blind.  He attaches the scope to his rifle with some rattlesnake skin and hangs his old eye in a glass vial from the forestock of the gun.

The Mithral Spider
After resting up, Theodore and Gudguníis scout ahead.  They come upon a similar stalagmite-ridden cavern with pools of standing water scattered about.  Through his darkvision scope, Gudguníis spots a drow sentry resting against a stalagmite.  They sneak up on him and capture him, with the intent of wringing some answers out of him.  The drow speaks the common tongue, though heavily accented.  He laughs at the death the adventurers threaten him with.  "It is your deaths which should concern you, interlopers.  An army of my people awaits you under this mountain.  The Spider Queen protects us.  Even if you retreat now, her servants will soon spread across the surface and find you."  They kill the drow and position it to make it look like he committed suicide.  It is party tradition to pose dead bodies in odd ways on the off-chance that someone will stumble across them and be confused, it had just been a while since any of the party had gotten a chance to indulge in that habit.

Once Heather and Rusty catch up with them, the group presses on.  They come upon a fork in the tunnel.  Gudguníis decides to scout ahead, but no sooner does he start up one tunnel than a clattering sound grows from the other one.  He drinks an invisibility potion and squeezes against the cavern wall.  A gleaming silver spider with guns for eyes crawls up the tunnel, heading for the cavern that the rest of the party is in.  Rusty steps out from behind a stalagmite and lobs a bomb at it.  It responds by pumping him full of lead, nearly killing him with a precision volley from its face-guns.  Heather shoots at the spider from the side, then runs over to heal Rusty.  Gudguníis lines up a sneak attack from behind but misses horribly, still adjusting to his new eye.  Theodore rushes into melee with the mithril spiderstabbing it relentlessly with his trident as it stabs him with its sharp legs and poisoned fangs.  The bold cavalier succumbs to the drow poison, falling into a deep sleep at the feet of the metal spider.  With Theodore unconscious, Heather's rifle unable to make much headway against the spider's thick armor, and Gudguníis shooting like he was still blind, Rusty steps up to finish things.  He chucks a bomb right at the spider's neck, bursting open some rents that Theodore had created.  The arachnoid construct explodes in sundering flame.

With the sentry spider defeated, the party continues to scout ahead.  They take the left fork in the tunnel first.  It winds gradually uphill until it comes to a subterranean river.  An old stone tower stands on the banks, next to a broken dock.  This is the drow outpost the party encountered long ago while investigating the source of a mysterious glowing dye (see GotWK Campaign Part 4: The Underground Steamboat of Death).

Entering the Drow Encampment
The right fork seems to twist back around on itself.  Finally it opens up on a huge cavern lined with buildings and bustling with drow military activity.  Off to one end of the cavern there is a huge metal building of some sort.  Hugging the wall on the other end is an outcrop of rock with a minecart track leading out of it.  The entrance is guarded by two armed and armored drow.  The party retreats back up the tunnel to consider their options.  They decide they need a distraction, and just as they are trying to figure out what that distraction will be, they head dozens of soft footsteps approaching.  Rounding the corner is a platoon of elven rangers led by the elf that had warned them about "the evil".  The rangers offer to attack the drow military outpost while the adventurers sneak in to find and destroy the evil.  The party slides down a steep scree leading from the path into the drow cavern and takes shelter among the rocks as the rangers move into position.  Soon, elven arrows rain down on the drow settlement, and the drow respond in mind with guns and explosions.  The two guards at the entrance to the mine break off to join the fight, leaving the party free to infiltrate.

They bust into the mine and follow the mine cart tracks deeper inside until they come upon a large metal double door barred on their side.  They kick open the doors to reveal a large dome-shaped cavern excavated from the bare rock.  In its center: a huge fossilized demon skeleton, the rock around it is black and twisted.  A team of horribly mutated dwarves mine the ugly rock growing out of the demon skeleton.  Presiding over it all, is a drider - half-drow, half-spider - in thick protective gear and holding a whip.  She is positioned before another set of doors with another set of minecart tracks leading to them.  As the party enters, she points her whip at them and screeches, "Slaves, kill the intruders!"

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Let's talk about telescopic rifle sights.  Giving a gun telescopic sights is more complicated than just strapping a telescope to your rifle.  The first practical telescopic sights weren't produced until the mid 19th century, several hundred years after practical telescopes were invented.  Chances are, your campaign setting doesn't have telescopic sights, even if gunpowder weapons are allowed.  If you are restricting yourself to purely medieval gunpowder weapons, you definitely won't have telescopic sights.  But if you are running a campaign with a 19th century technology level or want to introduce telescopic sights for fun and coolness, you might find this handy.

In the current rules-build of Guns of the Western Kings, rogues can make sneak attacks with firearms against flat-footed opponents within the first range increment of their gun, rather than just within 30 feet.  Aside from reducing the penalties for range increments, scopes in GotWK allow rogues to make sneak attacks at greater distances.

The preliminary rules for telescopic sights are as follows:
The following text in gold is available as Open Game Content under the OGL. Open Game Content is ©2016 Jonah Bomgaars.

Telescopic sights reduce the penalty for ranged attacks by one for each range increment.  Before use, the sights must be properly adjusted; this is a full-round action that provokes attacks of opportunity.  The sights must be readjusted any time the target moves more than 30 ft. from its original position, or any time the wielder switches to a target more than 30 ft. from the original target.  
   A wielder with the sneak attack class ability can make sneak attacks through telescopic sights at any range, so long as the target is flat-footed to the wielder.  Making a sneak attack through telescopic sights requires a full-round action (this is in addition to the full-round action required to adjust the sights to the target).
   Low-light vision functions through the scope, but the range of darkvision and other sight-based perceptive powers or divination effects are not modified by the scope.  Although only one eye is used with telescopic sights, the user suffers no penalty to ranged attacks for only using one eye while sighting through a scope.  However, when the target is within 30 ft. of the wielder, the wielder suffers a -4 penalty for firing while using a scope.  

Again, these rules are preliminary and subject to change.  I haven't settled on a price for telescopic sights, but I am leaning toward somewhere around 1,500 to 2,000 gp, taking into account that this is a rare technology that requires specialty equipment and expertise in its construction and confers significant in-game advantages.

Of course, Gudguníis' magic black scope is something a bit different from the telescopic sights presented above.

-your range-finding d20 despot