Kaldera of the Sickle-Dancer, Finale & Thoughts

You can read Part 1 here; there's a middle part I didn't write up. Don't worry about that part. There was a TPK.

The party stood a hundred feet underground in a volcano that was actively trying to kill them. The 4-armed sickle dancer they'd wounded last session was waiting at the bottom of the elevator. She didn't wait long.

Morgan (having been turned into a giant cobra) wrapped himself around her and squeezed. Blood vessels popped. She turned purple. Asu the Pit Fighter drove his longsword into the gap Morgan's coils left open, spilling her guts across the elevator floor. She whispered something about her queen's revenge. Morgan ate her.

Deeper in, the party found a boulder covered in screaming human faces rolling through a smoke-filled cavern. An ankh dangled from one wailing mouth. Narzop the Goblin (wearing a belly-dancer bedlah outfit that added 4 to his AC) tried his 10-foot pole., but failed. Asu tried a crowbar. Failed. The boulder kept grinding forward into the tunnel they took refuge in. Then Asu hooked it with his toe. The faces shifted from agony to ecstasy, petrified back into stone, and the whole thing crumbled.

A lever opened a stone bridge spanning the magma lake to a colossal six-armed marilith statue. The catch: a ballista and a live obsidian kraken. Narzop went first, took a ballista bolt that bounced off his, ah, outfit, then dodged kraken fire breath using the bedlah's cancel ability. All three sprinted across while tentacles crashed around them.

Morgan regurgitated the sickle dancer's half-digested corpse to find a scroll pouch with Lightning Bolt, Fly, Misty Step, and Fabricate.

In the Ashen Cloister, four obsidian marilith statues turned their heads when Morgan vomited up baby teeth he'd been hoarding. Asu fed the teeth to the statues and got a vision of the sickle dancer's cannibal cult pushing sacrifices into volcanoes. He also got a luck token.

The Sickle Dancer Queen emerged from a balor skull, wielding the Kopesh of Extinction, a blade that kills not just the target, but their entire ancestry. Narzop blasted her with his finger cymbals for 14 damage, cracking her spine against the kaldera wall. Asu critted twice with a longsword (his crit range had expanded to 1–14 thanks to geothermal energy pulsing through his finger charm). Morgan, freshly reverted from cobra form after the Queen's own cymbal spell destroyed his snake body, picked up his warhammer and caved in her back.

The volcano erupted. Magma rose fast. Narzop looted the Queen's fire-immunity corset, dove through a demon-head portal, and signed a contract with an ooze humanoid to rejoin Mugdulblub's service. Asu and Morgan grabbed an inflating statue kraken as the real one lunged. Asu kicked both tentacles away with a nat 20. The balloon kraken carried them out.

Morgan pledged his life to Asu. Asu took him home, raised a family, and never stopped looking for things to fight. Narzop, in his bedlah and corset, went to work for a god.

This 3-session Shadowdark adventure came courtesy of Sersa Victory, via the PDF I purchased here. I'd like to offer my thoughts on the design of the module for anyone considering running it.

First: I absolutely love the visual and graphic design of this PDF. I think the vibes are immaculate. The writing is terse but extremely helpful for a GM, like the core Shadowdark book. The aesthetics match the intended vibe, and you can get real feel for the author's fiction touchstones and inspirational media from just the preview images on their site.

One thing I really loved about the module is that it does away with the traditional Shadowdark torch timer, and replaces it with an eruption timer. Instead of rolling on an encounter table every few dungeon turns and worrying about torch timers, you're rolling on an eruption table every 60 minutes (or 30 minutes as the adventure progresses). Different things are happening to the environment to increase the intensity and urgency as the adventure goes on, like players being caked in soot and therefore having DIS on initiative rolls, or a gout of steam bursting through rock to blind a player.

Another really cool aspect is that the module rewards exploration and experimentation. There's a lot of amazing loot, like the aforementioned Belly Dancer bedlah that offered +4 to AC and the ability to cancel three attacks. It's pretty spectacular loot and really appropriate for a highly deadly dungeon like this one, but it only sort of works in this contained environment. On the upside, it led to a really great role-playing scene where my players had to decide who was going to take their armor off and don this bedlah. Not your typical loot distribution process, but a fun one nonetheless!

On the flip side, there are a ton of deadly aspects to this adventure; as with any Shadowdark module, your players should be expecting, and ideally trying to avoid, death at every turn, in every corner, in every room. We had a TPK when one player followed the legend I had given them before the adventure started. I told them it could have been false or true...they assumed it was true, and it ended with, well, we'll just say everybody died. instantly.

If you're looking for a deadly dungeon with a different twist than traditional medieval fantasy that takes place in a fantastic location, you could do a lot worse (and probably not a lot better) than buying "The Kaldera of the Sickle Dancer" by Sersa Victory.