DM Guide

Answer "Yes". Be silly, make mistakes. Give them opportunities to reveal themselves. Pay attention. Follow the good stuff. Don't leave them lost. Nobody is trying to win.

The City of the Dead 1

Sahra. It is night. In your mind you draw a swirling black pattern on the bar. You hear odd footsteps outside the bar, limping perhaps, and cursing. You slowly open your eyes. Your fingers and toes are stiff with cold. The green grass looks grey in the moonlight. You look around and see shadows of branches leaping about in the wind. You hear a woman cursing as she limps past you through the cemetery. As you rouse yourself to look at her, she sees you, looks oddly at you, turns and hurries into a squat stone building.

• Insight check to see if Sahra notices that Zindi recognises Sahra.
• Zindi limps into a crypt, into a maze of crypts, on her way back to HQ. Adar follows her.
• If Sahra gathers her friends first
  • Go to Dreams now. Sahra will wake them from each dream.
• If Sahra follows Zindi
  • Several turns inside the crypts there is a concealed room behind an illusory wall with a portal frame
  • Zindi casts a spell and opens a gate, Shadow monsters emerge (1 per PC present)
  • Shadows:
    • 16 HP, AC 12, speed 40 ft unless slowed
    • +4 to hit, 1d4 Strength damage.
    • Vulnerable to Radiant damage
    • Resistant to Acid, Cold, Fire, Lightning, Thunder
    • Immune to Necrotic, Poison
    • Afraid of magical light, DC 10 (Wisdom) to turn them
    • Sahra's spells slow them, allowing her to flee
  • Zindi and Sahra have to flee
• Zindi (maybe with Sahra in tow) emerges in a different crypt with a barred gate. Adar flies through the bars and goes for help.
• Click and Tikva are nearby in the Dock Ward, awake. Nova slept at Jo's. Giles slept nearby in the graveyard. Sahra may have woken Nova and Giles and brought them already.
• The creatures approach from below. Multiple creatures. Zindi screams.
• If players are still asleep, go to Dreams now. The scream wakes them from each dream.

Dream: The Moon Garden

Giles. You are sitting in your tiny groundskeeper's lodge, although tonight it has no roof and no walls. There is a bookshelf of books about gardening, written in a spidery script, most by Erin Valeblossom. She did a lot of sketches too. How to turn Mandrake spirits into servants, herbs for medicinal use, the shaping of earth and water for different plants. There is a book you don't recognise on the shelf. A leather bound tome with a moth motif on its cover. As you inspect it, you find its pages blank unless you tilt them in the moonlight, where you see a half-elf in a huge forest. It's Nova.

Let them do whatever but Tilion will try to use cryptic moonlight to give clues:

• The moon moves rapidly across the sky (he was in the Feywild for years where time runs slower than outside)
• He has a tiny moonlit thread around each wrist (he owes a debt to a Fey)
• In the book, Nova encounters a burrowing owl and if she follows it, she finds the lantern under an ancient tree that has died of old age and fallen over. This is how Nova found the lantern, Tilion edition.
• If it gets dark, a currawong call.

Sahra or Adar or Zindi's scream wakes up Giles and Nova.

The City of the Dead 2

• The creatures approach from below the crypt. Multiple creatures. Zindi screams.
• Something brushes against Giles's leg. A small dog is standing beside him. It looks completely ordinary. It looks up at Giles as though waiting for a command. Giles recognises it as one of Lord Percy's hunting dogs, Petrichor. It secretly works for Tilion.
• The dog can blink inside and blink Zindi (and Sahra) out again. Then it blinks and disappears.
• The Shadow melds through the crypt bars. Everybody who has been summoned fight Shadows.
• The graveyard is quiet again. The dog is gone.
• Zindi, if questioned by the players, is distrustful mostly because of Sahra. "If you want to know what's happening, look into Rosalind Thorne." She will then use every magical trick in the book to escape.
• Above, Adar watches from a tall gravestone and then flies away to report to Edyn.

Goblins South

Wagon tracks run off the road and disappear on the hard ground in the direction of the nearby forest. Amongst the darkest part of the forest, goblins laze on tree branches, enjoying their stolen wagon's spoils. The largest of them is carrying water to a camp fire with a large iron pot, one is tinkering with the wagon, one is juggling knives, one is reading a book out loud.

Mozza: Look, this guy Hee'gul says... licks his surprisingly clean fingers and turns a page... Everybody is fighting everybody else because they think they know what they are.

Pimble: What's that Mozza? They fight just because they... D'uh... What?

Mozza: You got one guy saying, “I am this.” And another saying, “No, you're not, because I am that.” And then they fight.

Nim: What weapons do they use? flips a knife

Mozza: The sharpest weapon of all, Nim. And then, after fighting, they realise neither of 'em had the way of it. So now they have to become something new.

Pimble: Become something new? Dead? Injured?

Mozza: Their idea of themselves is dead, Pimble. And born anew. That's the important bit. They don't just go back to being what they were. After being wrong about themselves, they become a new thing. That's the only way to become a new thing.

Pimble: Oh. Huh. I hadn't thought of it that way.

Mozza: Hee'gul calls this the Unfolding of Spirit.

Pimble: Being wrong? I call that "Tuesday".

They all laugh.

Pimble: Have you finished with that thing yet? I'm hungry.

They throw the book on the camp fire and light it up. Fire bursts forth and licks the base of the pot.

• Nim and Pimble will recognise Sahra as a dangerous witch, they tried to rob her earlier
• They stole a wagon full of scrolls, paper products, ink, some philosophical books
• They have been evading a Ranger who has been tracking them by Nim's smarts - covering or confusing their tracks, crossing streams to remove their scent, piping their camp fire smoke through a tunnel to reduce smoke, moving around, living in tunnels
• Pimble is dumb, good natured, a cook
• Mozza is a literary type and liable to fall in love with Tikva
• Junky is a genius mechanic and just invented better wagon suspension
• Nim is cynical, watchful, protective, xenophobic
• Have zero interest in dying - Nim yells at them to Nimble Escape if hurt even once
• TOTALLY CONFUSED BY TIKVA

Goblins:

• 7 HP, AC 13 (no shield) 15 (shield)
• Stealth +6, Darkvision 60 ft, Passive Perception 9
• Knife/pot/wrench: Melee Weapon Attack: +4 to hit, reach 5 ft., one target. Hit: 5 (1d4 + 2) slashing/bludgeoning damage.
• Shortbow: Ranged Weapon Attack: +4 to hit, range 80/320 ft., one target. Hit: 5 (1d6 + 2) piercing damage.
• Nimble Escape: The goblin can take the Disengage or Hide action as a bonus action on each of its turns.

Goblins North

• The town of Phandalin, a tiny mining town, Tikva's family lives here.
• There are no goblins here at all.
• The only man who matches Nova's description is a man who died in a climbing accident a few days ago. He is being kept at the local church, yet to be buried.
• Click would recognise him as a man he stole climbing pitons from, a week ago, as he was passing through Waterdeep. Mother is in possession of the stolen goods.
• The Magister base is in the Sword Mountains, some have seen robed figures coming and going.

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