Welcome to Friday night, also known as fight night, where we look at the encounters and meet the Denizens of the Crypt. There is a certain nostalgia that comes with fighting zombies and skeletons in a crypt. And what crypt isn’t complete without an unholy artefact that causes anything that dies in the crypt to come back as a zombie. Yep those bandits that died or are dying in those hallowed halls are about to join the fight once more.
Tonight’s stat-blocks were sourced from Tetra-cube and, as a bit of variety for content moving forward I have also include some Soulbound statblocks too as we may be seeing more souldbound content this year than originally planned.
Denizens of the Crypt
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D&D Stat blocks
The humble zombie and skeleton, no more iconic duo in crypts and tombs could there be found. Except for maybe gelatinous cubes and giant rats. The idea is to have between 2 and 3 per encounter block. The zombies will be where ever the bandits would fall in the halls or rooms of the crypt, skeletons behind locked doors or near chests, where they died defending or trying to fight over the cursed gold. For map reference we can look at yesterdays maps Dark Forest & Darker Crypts.
Soulbound
The idea behind soulbound is you have 2-3 minions per player, 1 or 2 warriors per player and a single champion per encounter. If we want to set this up to be a more challenging encounter we may add in a Chosen but that increases the difficulty substantially.
For our Minions we have the Deadwalker Zombie – the fallen bandits. For those cursed souls once trapped here we have the death rattle skeletons and our warriors for this weekend are the Graveguard.
Minions
Warriors
Champions
Chosen
Environment
We have a few thigs here. Unstable walls, treasure chests, a secret door and traps.
Some doorways are blocked, as can be seen by rubble around the bottom of the door, which might need a moderate test of strength and some time to remove. Or another way can be found into the rooms on the other side.
Throughout the halls there may be traps and other hazards with darts being shot from the wall or spikes dropping from the ceiling if a pressure plate is triggered.
There is a little notch on the wall to the right of the secret room, this is a button that looks like a wide mouthed grinning skull. If they reach into its mouth there is a button there that releases the door and it opens – a bit of a test of faith than something terrifying here.
The breakable wall here will have a little crack in the stone that if people deliberately (and successfully) examine the damaged wall they can see through to the other side. This should hint to another room here.
The cursed altar is an easy one. Light the flames and the undead will stop rising in the crypts. If you use holy magic or something creative enough that would look at purifying it (prayers, spells, holy water, incense etc.) then that will keep the fires lit indefinitely rather than just a period of time.
Thoughts
Both the D&D and soulbound adventure for this map will be a lot of fun. You may notice I didn’t include anything for the forest map as I want to keep this more as a random encounter zone or if the party bring the fight out of the crypts and into the forest itself.
The same wild creatures as what would be from last weeks adventure – The trouble with birds can work here but you can also add other larger creatures like bears and such. Goblins (Gitz for soulbound) also can work treat in this zone as its already got a lot of juicy mushrooms.
This week has been a bit of a weird one. With the D&D OGL1.0a changing this week there is a bit of a large departure from the D&D 3rd party content creator community. Personally I will continue with what I am doing, so far its not resulting in any extra paperwork that I have to continue but you may find that I will reduce the D&D specific content (stat blocks) and move to a more system agnostic approach.
And with the closure of the week that see’s tonight’s content finish. I am looking forward to bringing more soulbound into the content here on the blog and into the local community where I live. I think its a great system and if you want to feel like a bad-ass hero then it may be right for you. There is also my old favourite, Openlegends.rpg that is a great system for versatility and customisation where which may sneak its way back into here. We will see.
As always with the weekend here don’t forget to plan some tabletop time and as always, don’t forget to roll with advantage,
The Brazen Wolfe
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