Clik here to view.
Ninarrens Cabin in the Woods
An elven serial killer’s secret hide-out in the woods.
This encounter area continues a series called Ancient Encounters, culled from ancient notebooks of campaigns past. The idea came after writing about re-using an old adventure, and I realized these great encounters deserve a little more attention. Hopefully others can be inspired by this series to make their own adventures, or to use elements of these admittedly “brief,” “vague,” and “improvisational encounters as building blocks for great games.
This would be about the point my last major campaign went “off the rails” due to my inability to follow my own self-imposed stricture to play a campaign by the book with store-bought adventures. Apparently my mind doesn’t work that way. The night of adventure inspired by this encounter has remained one of my favorite, and in some ways was instrumental in getting this blog started. For the encounter is described in the third ever post on this site, from Feb 12th, 2010:
…The game commenced with the party awakening in their garret apartment of Dame Gilroy’s Tenement, the morning after solving the Mystery of the Black Skull.
First order of business was breakfast, followed by shopping and information gathering. Valthrun the wise gave a history lesson that revealed three things: the downfall of the Keep was a rift in the Shadowfell caused by Orcus, that Orcus is imprisoned in the Abyss, and that Lord Padraig’s ancestor commanded that doomed garrison.
The dwarf Bronzebottom Brothers revealed that they received the crate with the black skull from men in the woods, and had some items to sell.
The party left town and went to the farmhouse where Jib Booter the woodsman agreed to help them navigate the wood. They followed the trail of Delphina along a secret path that ran parallel to the Kings Road, until it met two other sets of tracks in a clearing and turned north just before reaching Ninaren’s cabin.
The cabin was made of living branches pruned from the tops of four living trees, which were the four cornices of the cabin. It had a door, two shuttered windows, and thick thatched roof.
The cabin held a trap, a “Living Cloud of Daggers” that attacked when the door was touched. Inside was Delphina, tied up ad bleeding from a stab in her bosom. The room contained many hidden items, some of them magic: cat tabi boots, bloodstinger poison, an arrow of firesorm +1 and another of feezing +2.
Delphina was near unconcious, but before she slipped into a Snow White like slumber she told the following tale:
In the beginning, when the first elves awoke, even before the sun rose for the first time, they chose among them a king and queen. Thus the royal line of elves began, and a prophecy said that as the first royal elf brought the rest of the elves into the world with him, so the last royal elf to leave the world, would take the elves with her.
In the Undead war of 100 years ago, the elf lads were invaded and decimated, the royal house slaughtered when the capital fell to ruin. Only one young princess survived, and she was whisked away into hiding. Delphina is that princess,and if she dies, so must every elf alive.
However, the full prophecy was thwarted when Ninaren stoul her soul with a spirit knife and then cast an eternal slumber upon her before she perished forever. Why Ninaren, a fellow elf, would do this is unknown, but her tracks lead to the Keep on the Shadowfell.
Jib weeps as Delphina drifts into slumber, and vows to protect her. The party sets off for the Keep. ..
Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.
Image may be NSFW.Clik here to view.
