Saturday, December 3, 2022

White Plume Mountain

White Plume Mountain is a classic module from way back in 1979 by Lawrence Schick. There's a reason this thing is still being published and a reason why one Paul Kidd wrote a (abominably and embarrassingly terrible) fictional novel about it: because it's a really, really fun module if your group enjoys puzzles. It is definitely on the favorites list among both my gaming groups. My groups love puzzles, so I even added a few more to the adventure. It is considered a "dungeon crawl" but it's a dungeon crawl that features a lot of really different encounters and puzzles, so if you are looking for your basic "kick down the door, fight the monster, loot the treasure" adventure, this ain't it. If you want some high-stakes, crazy, use-your-brain-as-your-main sort of fun-run, step right up. 


I particularly like the accompanying illustrations in this one, as this is a pretty dimensional dungeon and the illustrations really help. I made them into handouts for my players. Plus, the rustic map of White Plume Mountain and its surrounding environs is cool. "The hut of Thingizzard, beware her potions." Love it.



I know Roll20 has a digital version of this one as part of a bundle that you can pick up, but I was halfway through building it from scratch when I realized that, so I just pressed on and used mine. So I can't say how it is. 







SPOILERS!



The given hook is that three legendary weapons named Wave, Whelm, and Blackrazor have been stolen from their wealthy owners and the culprit claims to be none other than the wizard Keraptis, thought dead for over a millennium. The players are hired to go retrieve them from the wizard's lair. 


When I ran this for the Rebels, I played that pretty straightforward. After all, they are Duke Orsino's special task force. So I didn't have to do much of a reach to send them on their way. 


The Class, though, have no such connections and are dealing with their own problems (namely, what to do about the evil relic in their possession and how to keep this awful cult in check). So they require a little more motivation. So in their case, Boz (a precognizant), who had been badly injured the night before by a cerebral stalker in the lair of an azurite-tripping mind-flayer, took a turn in the night. The rest of the party was awakened by his fevered ramblings, which clued them in that it was time to come clean about the Eye and also gave them some clues about what they needed to destroy it.  So off to White Plume they headed to retrieve these legendary weapons Boz had been rambling about. 


In both groups, getting to the mountain wasn't that simple. It took a long, several weeks-long trek dotted with many adventures along the way. I had placed a dramatic overlay of the mountain itself, with its plume of white steam right on the map and when the players saw it appear where they were heading, they started getting genuinely nervous. Genuinely nervous players are like a long rest and a hit of Bardic Inspiration to me. Pretty much my favorite thing. 


The entrance to the dungeon is a muddy cave from which steam blows in intervals, seeming to breathe. As written, there is a trap door which requires a search through the mud to find and a strength roll to open. I replaced these checks with a puzzle lock to solve and a lever to pull. 


Inside, the tunnel floors are flooded so that the characters are required to slog through warmish, scummy water and algae-slick tunnels. There is a small side room containing an underwater wheel, which will drain the tunnels of water if turned.  


The players will navigate a gynosphinx with a riddle, a pool with kelpies that will absolutely charm and drown anyone they can snare, a room full of numbered flesh golems that will either fight the players or aid them (depending on their skill at number riddles), a lock-behind-you chamber full of glass spheres containing an assortment of keys, treasure, and scary things that attack, a suspicious couple that evidently act as caretakers, a cavern full of boiling mud with a tricky series of swinging platforms they can use to traverse it (the solution to this I admit I don't really get. In play, it doesn't seem to work out so much, at least in my experience. Just figure out a way to make it fun and exciting and go with it.), a classic vampire in a coffin, a corridor that makes metal increasingly hot the farther along it the characters travel, a weird room with magically suspended streams of water the players must kayak through, a frictionless room that has what amounts to mulchers in the floor, and a room containing a hedonistic halfling that turns out to be a shape changing ogre that lost a bet. However, the two encounters that are the defining features of this entire module are the monster-filled "inverted ziggurat" and the boiling underground lake containing a giant crab inside a magically-maintained bubble. These are the two main things that people think of when they think of White Plume Mountain. 


The so-called inverted ziggurat is a sort of deadly zoo exhibit with stepped water tanks filled with ferocious water creatures and alternating with dry levels filled with equally deadly land creatures. Players have to figure out a way to get to the bottom of it. 

The Class did a lot of ranged shooting and distraction in this encounter using illusions to lure the creatures into position. They have a lot of ranged firepower, and though they were below level for this module, they did fine. They tend to drag around a lot of NPC with them, and I kind of regret I didn't actually level it up more than I did. This was the module that showed me I probably needed to start hitting them harder than I was. But no mind, they had fun. 


The Rebels don't pack the numbers or the damage output that the Class does, so their descent was a lot more calamitous. Stephanie, ever the strategist, remembered one of the caretakers from their earlier encounter saying she fed the animals in the labyrinth. So she created an illusion to appear as that character bearing food to draw the animals towards herself, safely on the top tier. Darren and Taijitsu made their ways carefully down the layers as Rolf covered them from above. At one point, they ended up having to fight some of the land creatures as they attempted to descend from one of the pool-levels, and in desperation, deliberately shattered the glass, hoping the torrent would create a chaotic situation in which the animals would fight each other and leave them alone. They made their way to the now-flooded bottom, aided by ranged attacks from Stephanie and Rolf. 


The giant crab in the underground lake, known in the lore as  "beast in the boiling bubble", is the other very creative encounter that give fame to this module. The players must battle this giant crab inside a bubble that feels as if it's made of think, transparent rubber. The water outside the bubble can be seen boiling like a hot kettle. A player would have to be very stupid indeed to not realize what would happen if that membrane were to be pierced or ripped. The crab is equipped with a rune-covered band on one of its claws...protection against psionics, which is a relic of an earlier version of D&D. The Class speculated wildly about what the band did, and went out of their way to remove it as soon as they could. In my game, it did nothing, but it could be tweaked to be anything the DM wanted.

The Class also ate the crab during their long rest. I mean, after all, their bard is a Halfling and no way is he going to waste that much fresh crab meat.

I mentioned that I added some puzzles to this module. The floating kayak encounter is basically this: characters float into a room where a bunch of thugs are waiting to beat them unconscious. If your players are chomping at the bit to get into a fight, there's nothing really wrong with this. But I frankly thought it was rather uninspired, so I replaced it with a puzzle to get out of the locked beatdown room. I used one of Paul Camp's puzzle packs from the Roll20 Marketplace, Laser Puzzles Fantasy Edition


The final encounter is I guess supposed to be a sort of boss encounter, where the players, having beaten all the encounters and are now leaving victorious, end up having a voice mockingly telling them they must now fight a pair of efreet. But come on, if that crab and that killer zoo, or even the vampire wasn't a "boss fight", a couple of tacked-on-at-the-end-as-an-afterthought  efreet aren't really one, either. I thought the efreet encounter was a little corny, and kind of anticlimactic, so I didn't use it in either case. Again, your mileage may vary. Never a rule saying you absolutely must run a module exactly as written. There is more than enough combat in this module to keep my players happy even leaving a few out, so adjust as your situation dictates. 





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