Lair of the Lamb - Summary

Recently, I ran two and a half players through the adventure Lair of the Lamb by Arnold K. We had a damn good time of it – or I did, at least.

This adventure is free-to-download, though Arnold asked that anyone who runs it provide a summary of their experience. This is that summary.

Beware spoilers for the Lair of the Lamb, obviously.

I also made several errors while running this adventure. You may notice them while reading. I don’t think they lessened our enjoyment of the adventure, but they do make our experience with it less true-to-text. I will likely reflect on these errors in a future post. For now, I will try to keep this post descriptive and non-evaluative.

Each player made four characters. Player one created Lyrathil, Arthuit, Legoland, and Lizbeth. Player two made Benny, Thomas, Oswald, and Martha.

Their characters awoke in a dark chamber. All of them were hogtied with ropes except one, who found a knife trapped beneath her. They began cutting their ropes and working their way free when a creature came down the hall, smelling of ammonia. They couldn’t see the creature, but the characters in one bowl felt Oswald’s entrails spill out and heard Oswald scream as he got eaten. The survivors ran towards the light at the end of the hall.

At the end of the hall, they found a lit torch. The characters then carefully travelled east around a pit and north to a fountain, where they found water. The fountain was a dead end, however.

As they exited the fountain, they saw a mud-covered shape moving and crying out in the bottom of the pit. Panicked, they ran east through the Crab Mural and busted down a locked door. Beyond they found a group of sleeping, prune-skinned priests bathing in pools of warm water.

Curious, one of the characters reached out and tried to rouse one of the priests. The priest shouted in alarm. As the priests’ raisin-like bodies jumped from the pools, the characters raced up a set of stairs to the east.

Atop the stairs, the characters came to a pair of heavy doors bound with chains. The priests caught up as the characters tried to pull the doors open. A battle ensued; some characters held the priests off while the others escaped. One of the priests’ spells reduced Lyrathil to dust.

Breathless, the surviving characters slammed the doors shut behind them. On the other side, they found two sallow-skinned humanoids dressed in fine clothes staring at them. They looked undead.

Frightened, Benny bolted down a hallway to the east, but quickly disappeared down a trapdoor with a splashing sound. Thinking quickly, the rest of the characters offered to let the undead eat Benny if the rest of them could go. The characters even offered to help the undead get Benny out of the pit. The undead agreed, as Benny would be even “juicier” after soaking in the pit’s water.

One of the undead left and returned with a rope. While one undead held the trapdoor open, the other undead worked with the characters to lower a rope into the pit where Benny swam. Just as Benny emerged from the hole, the characters pushed one of the undead into the pit. The other shrieked.

We ended the first session there.

///

We had a third player join us for the second session. Considering that the first two players each had three characters left, we let him roll up three characters. They were dwarf sisters named Dimira, Durthina, and Dundra.

Just as the characters shoved the undead humanoid down the trapdoor, these three dwarf sisters came through the heavy doors to the west.

In the ensuing chaos, the creature killed Dimira. As it ate her corpse, the rest of the party jumped across the pit Benny originally fell in. Safely on the other side of the trap, they continued down the hallway.

They encountered another pit, similar to the first. Thomas and Durthina fell inside, landing in water at the bottom, while the rest of the party jumped across successfully.

Jumping over another pit, the remaining party members found a coffer with a green mushroom atop it. They ignored it and proceeded north. There, they found a 20ft. wide pit with a rope strung across it, spiked into the wall.

One party member successfully climbed across using the rope, but not before a massive crab claw reached from the water and tried to grab them. Not wanting to risk getting grabbed, one party member took the green mushroom from the previous room and threw it into the water. The creature at the bottom swallowed it, then started glowing green and thrashing around violently in some sort of fit. In the ensuing confusion, the rest of the party made it safely across.

///

Meanwhile, Durthina and Thomas treaded water at the bottom of their pit in the dark. Durthina used her strength to break rusted bars that led to a larger room with a half-dozen statues inside. Durthina could see well enough with her infravision, though Thomas was effectively blind.

Wanting to get out of the water, Thomas climbed atop a statue. Feeling around, he deduced the statue held something like a box. He opened it to investigate, then choked on the poison gas it released.

Using her infravision, Durthina learned that all but one statue held a coffer; the last held a scroll, instead. Most statues held their coffers out or under their arms, but one statue held the coffer behind its back.

Unable to read the scroll in the dark, Durthina opened the coffer behind one statue’s back. Inside, she found a hand mirror, a potion that tasted of saltwater, and a pouch of gold.

Durthina then went west into a room with another statue, but was attacked by something beneath the water. She quickly swam east through the door, where she found a creature splashing in the water as if in a fit.

At this point, the rest of the party heard Durthina’s cries and used a rope to haul her up (the same one the undead creature used to hoist Benny out of the water). She narrowly escaped her subaquatic assailant.

Reunited, the party progressed through the northern door and met some strange, bipedal isopods. By sticking the handle of their almost-exhausted torch into the wall, they also opened a secret door to the west, which revealed a room of glowing blue mushrooms.

Using the glowing blue mushrooms as a light source, the party progressed down the hallway to the east (carefully jumping over the pit they detected in the floor). They came to a room with a table and a plate with a green mushroom growing out of it, like the one they encountered before.

Opening the door to the south, the party found a room with slightly-sinking bricks in the middle. A decapitated head lay in the center of the room. Dundra went forward to investigate, but fell to her death as the floor collapsed beneath her.

With that direction thoroughly eliminated as an option, the party progressed north to a room filled with chewed bones. From here they could see a line of decapitated heads to the north. A string of human hands dangled from a rope above them, barely touching the tops of the heads. The characters’ teeth began to chatter as they got within eyesight of it. A set of stairs led down on the other side of the room.

Using her knife, Martha bravely went forward cut the rope. She swiftly died. The rest of the party then passed safely, however.

There were now three party members left: Arthuit, Legoland, and Durthina.

After making it past the heads and reaching the bottom of the stairs, the party was stymied by a brick wall. They could smell fresh air coming from the other side of a loose brick, however – so they were desperate to get through.

Without a way to destroy the brick wall, the party returned to the bone pile and tried another, boarded-up door. Beyond it, they found a large guillotine. With enough time (and a lot of noise), the party disassembled the guillotine and formed a makeshift battering ram. With it, they tore down the brick wall at the bottom of the steps and found a large room flooded with water.

About 60ft away, they could see a faint light coming around the corner. The party used the potion Durthina found to summon a large boat for themselves (they had poured some of it out on the ground earlier and learned that it summed a magical boat).

However, the boat they summoned was too large to row. They used their makeshift battering ram to inefficiently move themselves through the water, pushing off the various columns in the room.

They smelled ammonia. They saw a large, dark shape beneath the water. Suddenly, some large, horrid creature emerged and took the battering ram from Durthina’s hands. The party now had no paddle. They would soon get eaten.

Desperate, Durthina used her potion to summon a smaller rowboat for the party. The three of them quickly jumped inside and paddled to the light they saw. The creature followed close behind.

They came to a room with daylight breaking through the top. A set of crumbling stairs led to a door overhead, but the stairs were broken 20ft. above the water. The characters began climbing the rough walls, trying to reach the stairs.

Arthuit was successful.

Durthina and Legoland were not.

As Arthuit reached safety at the top of the stairs, he watched as the creature consumed his last two companions. Such is the story of how Arthuit escaped the Lair of the Lamb.

Notes on the Weird that Befell Drigbolton

While scanning through the posts in the Necrotic GnomeDiscord server earlier this week, someone asked for advice on running the Dolmenwood adventure The Weird that Befell Drigbolton.

How fortunate! I happen to be running a pair of players through that adventure, currently. And nothing gets me in the writing mood more than the belief that I might help someone. So I offered to share my notes.

Rather than clog Gavin Norman's lovely Discord server with lengthy back-to-back posts, I will consolidate my thoughts in this post. In the future, I will likely 1. write a summary of my players' escapades and 2. offer a review of the adventure. But for now, I will focus on the preparations I made to run this wonderfully weird adventure.

Disclaimer: This post contains spoilers for The Weird that Befell Drigbolton (hereafter abbreviated as TWtBD). Unless you intend to run this adventure as a referee, you should stop reading here.

The beautiful cover of this adventure, drawn by Andrew Walter.

PART 1: THE MAP

The first thing I would like to share is a map I made of Drigbolton's surroundings. A large part of this adventure involves the players exploring Bolton Moor. Although the adventure's map fits neatly into a single six-mile hex in the north of Dolmenwood (specifically Hex 0702), it does not have a scale.

This lack of a scale makes it difficult to track time as the player characters travel between locations. By making it difficult to track time, this adventure also makes it difficult to know when to use the zany random encounter tables included at the back of the book. As Gygax himself said in the Dungeon Master's Guide, "YOU CAN NOT HAVE A MEANINGFUL CAMPAIGN IF STRICT TIME RECORDS ARE NOT KEPT.” And keeping track of time in this adventure is especially important, given how things progress and develop over the course of several days.

To solve this problem, I subdivided the six-mile hex into 1-mile hexes. I shifted a few locations slightly to ensure only one major location sat within each hex.

While running this for my players, I allowed them to move three hexes per hour while on a road, two hexes per hour on open land, and one hex per hour in rough terrain (forests, swamps, and hills). Expressed in terms of time, a road hex takes 20 minutes to travel through, an open hex takes 30 minutes to travel through, and a hex of rough terrain takes an hour to travel through.

The map I created is below.

A map of Drigbolton's surroundings, divided into 1-mile hexes.

Knowing that you might be playing on a virtual table-top (or just don't like my colored-pencil drawing), here is another version I made using Hextml.

A digital, 1-mile hex map of Bolton Moor.

PART 2: THE HAMLET

Another area I remapped was the hamlet of Drigbolton itself.

The adventure itemizes each building in Drigbolton, noting the inhabitants of each. This is par for the course. This method of keying villages goes all the way back to T1: The Village of Hommlet.

However, I've always found such keys only marginally useful. One reason is that it doesn't help make a village feel alive; villagers hardly spend all day in their homes. So although the house-by-house key may help me, as a referee, know where each villager lives, that information is really only is relevant at the outset if the villagers all line up at their own doorsteps like the von Trapp family when the PCs pass through.

Secondly, it also does not help me provide a narrative description of the village. A house-by-house key is too granular. Just using this map, if the PCs approach from the north, I would say to them, "You approach the village from the north. You see two houses to the right (J and C), and another house by the well (K). Other paths lead to the left (F and I), right (D), and ahead (the rest of town)."

YAWN. How boring.

When I think of running a town, I tend to think of it like a room in a dungeon: I want to give 1. a general overview in one sentence, 2. one or two relevant details, and 3. two or more interesting things for the players to explore. This map does not help me do that.

So I created the map below.

The reason I like this map is because it "chunks" the information into discrete "zones" that I can provide to the players. It gives them specific places to go - almost like a point-and-click adventure game gives you specific things to click on.

Now, were the players to approach from the north, I could say:

"You arrive at a hamlet of about a dozen wooden cottages gathered along a river. It looks like a sleepy village suddenly come alive; gaudy, colorful flags decorate every building. To your right you see a large, wooden structure - like a hall or barn or something (if after dark, they would hear music there). Straight ahead the path continues past a well, around which you see a cluster of houses."

Now the players have a general idea of the village, as well as two potential directions to head in. They can either check out the barn or proceed to the well. If the village were more "normal," I might describe all its "zones" at once when the players arrive. But Drigbolton in this adventure is far from normal, so I run it more like a dungeon.

I should add that 1. a roster of villagers (independent of where they live) and a brief description of their appearance / personalities is helpful to have. I have not posted that here. And a random encounter table for the village would be cool. I haven't had time to write one myself, but I think it would be a great way to make the village seem alive.

PART 3: KNOW YOUR STAR-METAL

Another piece of advice I would give is to know 1. where the goal(s) of the players is/are and 2. how they might get to that goal. That may seem obvious, but I failed to do that.

Because we are running this adventure as a "one-shot," I asked my players at the beginning of our first session what "prompt" they wanted to start the adventure with (out of those provided at the beginning): salvaging star-metal, finding the Black Book, or uncovering the Arch Mage. They chose to search for star-metal.

That was fine. But after they made their choice, I quickly realized that I did not have a comprehensive list of where all the star metal was. I knew they could find it as part of a random encounter. I remembered reading that there was star metal in several places around Drigbolton, but I couldn't remember specifically where - and the book refused to tell me. The references to star-metal are buried within the dense prose of the adventure and not highlighted or "called out" in any way.

I therefore began our first session rather "in the dark," hoping my players lucked into some star-metal. I was going to discover it just as much as they were 😂

Needless to say: after our first session, I then went through the book and highlighted every reference to star metal I could find.

The other two prompts - finding the Black Book or uncovering the Arch Mage - are more straightforward. They just require the PCs to go to the Laird's house. Any villager in the hamlet can point them in that direction. However, I don't want someone else to repeat the same mistake that I made.

So, for your ease of reference, the player characters can find star metal:

• In the vegetable patch behind the Oath House (pg. 28)
• At Nob's Spinney, tangled among the brambles (pg. 36)
• Around the barn at Bolton Bog (pg. 38)
• With a result of 12-15 on a d20 in a random encounter check (pg. 46)
• POSSIBLY in the mouths of "moon-eyed" creatures, brought as offerings to the star (pg. 18). The text vaguely references this, but doesn't specifically call it out as a "find."

Also, just as a minor detail: the text says star metal fragments are valued "at five times their weight in gold" (pg. 2). The adventure also says that star-metal fragments are worth "50gp per pound of weight" (pg. 57). This conversion would imply that ten gold coins weigh one pound.

However, I use a conversion rate of 50 coins per pound. I consider it to be more believable, based on this post at the Dungeon Master's Workshop. So I said that star-metal was worth 250gp per pound, not 50.

That is an INCREDIBLY nitpicky thing that only I care about (probably). But I just thought I'd mention it.

///

And that's it: all my notes and advice on running this fantastic adventure. I hope it is helpful for you 🙂