Rory's Story Cubes and the Lost City of Akkarod

I got a fun present over the holidays, a set of Rory's Story Cubes ("Voyages" edition).

These are a set of nine regular (six-sided) dice each with a unique and evocative image on it. They are designed to be used as a storytelling game, with several variants.  I am mostly interested in using these as a game aid.  Pretty much every image would work great as D&D adventure fodder.  To give you an example, the die shown above with an octopus (Cthulhu!?!) face up has five other sides as follows:  a city with tall towers capped by minarets; a large jewel on a necklace; a crab; what looks to be a giant talking to a normal person, or perhaps a normal person talking to a miniature person; and a shield.  Another die, shown with a treasure map face up, also has a crown, a raygun, a whip, a snake, and what looks to be an explosion.

Just for fun I thought I would roll the dice and come up with a quick adventure from the results to post here - here are the results I got:

Looking at my results, I arranged them as shown above and decided the telescope was a magical item that revealed the location of the city.  Animated T-Rex skeletons guard the approach to the city.  The strange sun looking symbol I decided was the badge of office worn by the Sun Lich, the leader of the city.  He used magical potions to transform the inhabitants of the city to cannibal apes.  The sun lich is seeking a great treasure hidden below the city, an alien space ship and its high tech treasures.  Fleshing out those thoughts a bit further, we get...

The Lost City of Akkarod (story cube adventure) 

(this adventure assumes that a desert exists in the campaign world - it does not have to be close to the PCs present location)

The Telescope of Nichbod the Moon Lich:

The adventure starts with the PCs coming into possession of a collapsing brass telescope, exceedingly well made, covered with runes, with crystal lenses that glow softly at night with a green light. The telescope radiates strong magic.  If looked through during the day the telescope is completely black and reveals nothing, but at night the telescope will always allow the viewer to see a fabulous city of slender towers and golden minarets, which seems to be bathed in moonlight.  Only the city will be visible, and looking in any other direction will again result in blackness.  The city will be visible through mountain ranges or other physical obstacles, and will be visible at any distance.  The ornate runes are hard to identify but a knowledgeable sage could at least note that they appear to be a very early form of one of the desert languages.  If read through magical means, the runes identify the telescope as the creation of Nichbod the Moon Lich, the city as "Lost Akkarod" and the rest of the runes appear to be invocations of protection against Soleus the Sun Lich.  If identified, the telescope has several properties - first it will always reveal the direction to the lost city of Akkarod, second it prevents any form of magical scrying from being used against the telescope's wielder while the telescope is being looked through, and third it grants +1 to saves vs. Magic to anyone carrying it.

Desert Rumors (about the city of Akkarod or the liches Nichbod and Soleus):

Akkarod Rumors (d10, add +1 to +4 to the result if the source is knowledgeable on the subject of ancient cities)

1-2: Akkarod once was the richest city of the desert before being swallowed by the sands, and untold wealth was buried with it. (TRUE)

3-4: Akkarod is a fairy tale city supposedly inhabited by cannibal apes, used to scare children from wandering out into the desert  (TRUE)

5-6: Akkarod sank beneath the earth in a great earthquake and vanished without a trace as a punishment for the greed of its inhabitants.  (FALSE)

7-8: Akkarod is the mythical home of the fountain of youth and the Garden of Paradise - it is not of this world.  (FALSE)

9: Akkarod was consumed by a pillar of fire as punishment for withholding sacrifices to the old gods (FALSE)

10: Akkarod moves around the desert, tempting onlookers with its golden minarets, but it is a magical illusion that only lures people deeper into the desert (FALSE)

11: Akkarod was a walled city built around a famous oasis, the largest permanent water source in the deep desert. Many believe it to be a myth but it is mentioned in the old clay tablets that recorded the tributes of the first kings - it was located in the middle of a vast region of the desert with no other water sources.  Most knowledgeable sages agree that the  likely cause of the city's "disappearance" was simply that the oasis dried up.  (TRUE about the city, but FALSE about the cause of disappearance)

12:  The gardens of Akkarod are mentioned in some old ballads and epic poems, supposedly many unique magical plants grew there including the famed Moon Orchid that only bloomed under a full moon and whose fragrance was a powerful aphrodisiac.  The waters of the Akkarod Oasis cause even normal plants to take on magical properties, and the alchemists of Akkarod were known far and wide for the many potions they created with the magical water and plants.  (TRUE)

13: Akkarod was ruled by a council of liches who attained great power over the centuries, but eventually infighting amongst the liches doomed the city.  (TRUE)
14: Akkarod was ruled by a council of liches who attained great power over the centuries by controlling trade across the desert.  They demanded a fee from all caravans, and it was widely believed that they used their magical powers to bring doom upon those who attempted the dangerous desert crossing without stopping at the oasis of Akkarod.  A little known account of the great trader and explorer Sambalor details his last expedition to Akkarod - he reported that the famous gardens had been destroyed and all the workers of the city were engaged in digging a huge pit in the center of the city.  He was supposed to meet with the lich council as normal in the morning to pay his tariff before taking his wares to the market, but instead left the city hurriedly when a number of his caravan disappeared during the night, strange tracks revealing that they had been drug down into the pit by something monstrously huge.  (TRUE)

Moon Lich Nichbod rumors - only a wizard or sage specializing in arcane magic would know any of these (d4):

1. Nichbod was one of the lich kings of Akkarod, specializing in the gentle magics of love and nature. He bore the title of Moon Lich, meaning he was the second ranking member of the lich council that ruled Akkarod. Nothing has been heard of Nichbod for centuries (TRUE)
2. Nichbod  was a master of the undead and some believe that the rumors of huge skeletal monsters in the desert are proof that Nichbod still exists (FALSE)
3. Nichbod was an illusionist who enjoyed luring people to their doom with illusions of great splendor (FALSE)
4. Nichbod perished centuries ago at the hands of a rival (TRUE)

Sun Lich Soleus rumors -only a wizard or sage specializing in arcane magic would know any of these (d4):

1. Soleus was one of the lich kings of Akkarod, specializing in necromancy and illusions (TRUE)
2. Soleus is an aspect of the sun god (FALSE)
3. Soleus bore the title of Sun Lich, meaning he was the leader of the council of liches.  He was the Sun Lich when the city Akkarod disappeared (TRUE)
4. Soleus perished centuries ago at the hands of a rival (FALSE)

Approaching the City

If the telescope is used to locate the city, it indeed lies deep in an area of the desert with no water sources, sheltered within a ring of mountains. Any expedition must be properly outfitted with enough food and water to last the journey.  Desert encounters could include scorpions, giant sand spiders, caravan raiders, were-hyenas in human form pretending to be weary travelers, territorial lizard men, a brass dragon, chimera guarding a tomb, or more as needed.   A circular ring of mountains surrounds the low-lying basin where the city sits.  The mountains are not high but they are extremely steep on the descent down into the basin, and unless a roundabout route is carefully planned, several vertical cliff faces will have to be navigated.  The cliffs are riddled with caves, many of them connected into several large cave networks.  There are several passages that lead all the way to the caves under the city of Akkarod  (see The Great Pit below).  Once in the basin normal encounters become rarer and the most common encounters are either a group of cannibal apes (stats as a gorilla, a hunting party going to or coming from the mountains to bring back meat for the other apes in the city,  some of the apes wear clothing and armor and wield huge longbows that do 1d12 damage and two-handed swords that do 3d6+4, while most appear much more animalistic and attack with claw and fang) or an animated T-Rex skeleton (statted as the dinosaur, -2 HD and with the usual undead resistances and vulnerabilities - there are other kinds of animated dinosaurs as well but the T-Rex are the most commonly encountered in the basin). If tracked, both the apes and the skeletal dinosaurs appear to come from the city.

The Lost City of Akkarod

A massive ring of rubble surrounds the city, up to a hundred feet wide and nearly fifty feet tall in places.  The walled city itself is covered with a great and nearly impenetrable illusion that makes it appear as a rocky outcropping.  The illusion is so powerful that saves to disbelieve it are made at -4.  In addition, another enchantment makes it very difficult to approach the city during the day - within one mile of the city, a save vs. Magic at -4 is required every turn spent moving closer to the city, and failure results in disorientation and traveling the wrong way. Using the telescope at night to find the main gates is the easiest way to gain entrance, although there is a lot of cannibal ape activity around the rubble ring at night (see the Great Pit below).  The main gates into the city appear as shadowy caves in the rocky outcropping.

  The city is laid out in concentric circles, with the outermost and largest circle being the apartment style housing of the lower class laborers and servants, the next circle being the individual houses of artisans and skilled laborers, the next circle being the large villas of the merchants, and the innermost and smallest circle being the high towers of the nobility .  The houses and apartments of the first two circles are built wall to wall with no gaps, only pierced by the four main roads that radiate out from the center of the city to each of the cardinal directions.  Portcullis gates manned by cannibal apes block these roads at the first and second circles.   In the very center of the city (which used to be lush gardens and the famous oasis) lies a gaping and very deep pit.  The towers of the nobility are all sealed and contain many undead and rich treasures (slave quarters on the first levels of the tower, reception halls and dining halls next, then the personal apartments of the nobility above).  The rest of the houses are occupied by cannibal apes (really the polymorphed former inhabitants of the city, enslaved by Soleus, some of whom still cling to a vestige of their former humanity which most of their comrades have lost over the centuries).  The houses of the merchants contain much wealth, but the rest of the dwellings do not.

 The apes mostly sleep during the day, although there will still be some guards in the city and patrols going out into the desert.  Any prolonged combat will quickly draw the attention of more apes, and possibly other , more nefarious agents of Soleus (see the Great Pit below).  At night, the bulk of the apes descend into the pit to continue the excavations.  The apes that have lost their humanity are filled with anger at their servitude to Soleus, but they are completely incapable of resisting his commands.  The apes that still cling to humanity are capable of disobeying the spirit if not the letter of Soleus' commands; they seek the overthrow of Soleus and a return to human form, and could be allies if convinced that the party shares these aims.

The Great Pit

The upper levels of the pit have been lined with stone to prevent it from caving in, and two stone stairs spiral down the outside of the pit from the north and the south.  It is over 2000' feet deep and growing deeper - An intricate system of pulleys and buckets, powered by apes walking around a gear, hauls rubble up from the excavations.  Apes haul sledges to the ring of rubble around the city at night.  200' down, the pit is deeper than the surrounding sands and retaining walls are no longer needed to keep it from caving in.   Many tunnels extend out from the pit at different levels below this point, some leading to Soleus' lair (a series of immense caverns hewn out of the rock containing a metal clockwork construction built atop huge gears, with the rooms slowly and constantly shifting in relative position to each other as the gears rotate), some to the tombs of his undead followers (wraiths and vampires along with their ghoulish minions) and still others are natural caverns  in an area of ancient limestone that contain many dinosaur fossils (the source of the skeletons that Soleus animates as laborers and guard beasts).  Some of these caves are linked to cavern systems in the mountains but the way is long and twisting with many forks.  Trogledytes and stranger dwellers of the darkness live in the far flung cave networks.   The lowest third of the pit is chipped out of a dark blue, glassy obsidean-like rock with no passageways leading out.  The bottom of the pit is flooded with 50' of water, in which giant Anklyosaurus and Triceratops skeletons work to smash more of the glassy blue rock and extend the pit even farther down.  Drinking the water requires a save vs. Magic to avoid polymorphing permanently into a cannibal ape (Soleus corrupted and twisted the natural magic in the source of the old oasis, which is actually in the layer of limestone caverns above but trickles down to fill the bottom of the pit).  Greater ghouls armed with flamewhips oversee the apes as they haul rubble out, and one or more of the vampire lieutenants direct the skeletal dinosaurs.  The dinosaurs labor day and night but the apes only haul out the rubble at night.

The Glassy Core

Long ago... (pick one in keeping with the tone of your campaign - for me it would be A or B)...    

A:  Soleus discovered evidence of a large meteorite impact that formed the ring of mountains and the basin in which Akkarod sits.  He seeks to dig down through the fused rock covering the meteorite itself and uncover an intact alien spacecraft.  Soleus discovered some high tech artifacts that were scattered during the wreck, including a small escape pod and a trove of laser blasters that he outfits his lieutenants with.

B: Soleus discovered evidence of a large meteorite impact that formed the ring of mountains and the basin in which Akkarod sits.  He seeks to dig down through the fused rock covering the meteorite itself and uncover a demon of unthinkable power that is imprisoned in the meteorite.  The demon made mental contact with Soleus ages ago and made a bargain to grant Soleus dominion over the entire world in return for freedom. 

C:  Soleus found two artifacts from the fabled city of Karod, which was buried in a lava flow from the ring of volcanic mountains.  The artifacts are a staff and a robe of great power which elevated Soleus above the other liches, but they are linked to a crown which is still buried below and which has possessed Soleus with a maniacal drive to uncover it.

Pai-Gon's Hexagonal Experiments

Poking around in the arch-lich Pai-Gon's work room whilst trying not to draw the ire of the incredibly powerful crystal intelligence bound into the tree of human arms flesh golem thing, some members of my 4e group decided to open up some random sealed ceramic containers.

Pai-Gon's Work Room

These containers were roughly cubic, with each face of the cube being a hexagon and some odd faceted angular faces making up the difference.  Each container was stacked six high with the sealed opening facing out into the room, in three rows six containers long.

Each container held one of Pai-Gon's experiments, left to bathe in the mutating and energizing radiation emitted by the Huwawa Complex after Pai-Gon mysteriously disappeared.

I made some random tables to determine the contents of each jar.  They proved to be very stimulating in play, causing quite a few "what the fuck" moments amongst the players as they had no clue what they were getting themselves in to.

Roll on each chart.  4e Plant, Animal or Insect refers to an organism native to the "prime material plane" or whatever you want to call the normal plane of existence that D&D is played in.  Planet X refers to an inhabited planet in another dimension/plane of existence that has a considerably different periodic table and physics.

Chart 1: Physical Environment inside the container (d20)
1-3: Fresh Water
4-5: Salt Water
6: Acidic Liquid
7: Basic Liquid
8-9: Acidic Soil
10: Ph Neutral Soil
11: Basic Soil
12: Silt/Inorganic Mud
13-14: Organic Mud
15-16: Clay
17: Solid Rock
18: Crystal
19: Metal
20: Metallic Gas (some heavy metals in Dimension X have a gaseous state)

Chart 2: Subject of the Experiment (d20 - containers with plants have a magical light source and magically regulated growing conditions, containers with animal and insect experiments also contain appropriate food species - many containers are much larger inside than their external dimensions would suggest)
1-4: 4e Plant (roll d10: 1-2: Fungus, 3-4: Flowering Plant, 5-6: Succulent Plant, 7-8: Bush, 9-10: Tree)
5-7: 4e Plant / Planet X "plant" hybrid
8-10: Planet X "plant" (roll 2d6: first d6: 1-3: Carniverous, 4-6: Chemosynthetic, second d6: 1-2: Mobile, 3-             4: Anchored but moving parts, 5-6: Stationary)
11-12: 4e Amphibian (roll d6: 1-2: Frog, 3-4: Toad, 5-6: Salamander)
13-15: 4e Insect (roll d6: 1-2: Crawling, 3: Jumping, 4: Digging, 5-6: Flying)
16-18: 4e Insect / Planet X "insect" hybrid
19-20: Planet X "insect" (roll d6: 1: Crawling, 2: Jumping, 3: Digging, 4-5: Flying, 6: Teleporting)

Chart 3: Broad area of Pai-Gon's interest that the experiment falls into (d20) (combine with subject matter and environment to determine purpose and exact contents of each experimental container)
1-2: Protection from Damage
3-4:  Controlling Agression
5-6:  Controlling Emotion
7-8: Protection from Fire
9-11: Love
12-13: Dispelling Magic
14-17: Plant Propagation
18-20: Insect Breeding
21-30: Shadow Plant Analogs (I put this entry in the chart because we use the d30 houserule - once a session replace any roll with a d30 roll.  What exactly a shadow plant analog is might be a subject for an entire post on its own I think)

Chart 4: Current State of the Experiment (d6)
1-3: Experiment existing in stasis and performing as designed by Pai-Gon
4: Stasis failed due to Huwawa field, contents destroyed
5:  The experiment succeeded but the intended results have run wild for thousands of years
6:  The experiment failed but a secondary organism in the controlled environment has mutated and thrived (flies included as food for a spider experiment might still be thriving, or a plant included as food for an insect experiment has mutated and taken over the container, etc.)

Obviously these charts are going to give suggestions of categories, not specific results:  It is up to the DM to interpret what an acidic liquid environment, Teleporting Planet X Insect experiment about Love that has succeeded but run wild means, exactly.

My party ended up with worms that burrowed through solid rock and consumed magic, a green gas spore cloud that left sickly mutant flowering plants springing up wherever the spores encountered moisture, a burbling pot full of mud with a fire-resistant salamander in it and a crystal matrix that served as an artificial growing medium for a Planet X insect grub.  Hammer the warforged barbarian opened the container of magic consuming worms, much to his disgust as he realized that they were consuming the very magical lifeblood that flowed through his constructed body.

Lichhanger

Our last 4e session ended on quite a cliffhanger.  The short story - the party split up.  One member of the party woke up a lich precisely as the other two party members were breaking into the temple treasure room and triggering its magical guardians to spring to life.  And that is when we called it a night :)

Earlier in the evening Beautiful Bob bathed in the pool of light at the base of the radiant energy waterfall manifest between two colossal stone statues guarding the entrances to two temples.  One temple contained a peaceful new cult of the river god, worshiping the party's old friend Akili as a new incarnation of the river's spirit.  The party's stay there was more or less uneventful, although Beautiful Bob did plant a few seeds in Akili's head about learning to control and harness her new-found godlike powers.

Exploring the other temple proved much more exciting.  Right after a tense encounter that used some of the party's daily powers the party split up.  I should not forget to mention that a giant stone disc was slowly closing the entrance to the temple (the party triggered a trap in the entrance hallway), coinciding with the slow opening of a portal to a nightmare dimension populated by the Bati-Bati (orb creatures from another reality that warp the minds of all who behold them until they pluck out their own eyes).  I told the party they estimated about 10 minutes until the temple was sealed in completely.  There was some discussion of whether the party was still going to be able to teleport out of the temple if it was sealed and the general consensus was that no one knew.  They forged on ahead.  Bob had made a couple of tiny clones of himself earlier that were keeping an eye out on the long tunnel to Bati-Bati world and exploring the labyrinthine crypts below the temple.

 Tilia went down to the magically sealed iron door at the end of the long hand carved tunnel to the south-east of the crystal ritual chamber where they fought the animated giant-boar heart and entrail-mouthed abomination just a few moments earlier and opened it on her own.  Hammer and Bob were checking out the rooms to the north-west when Bob figured out that the large wooden double doors at the end of the hallway were magically trapped and wanted to explode.  Bob then scried beyond the door and saw the temple treasury, gems and gold and residuum.  This was all that Hammer needed to hear and he charged headfirst at the door.  Which happily exploded in his face.  Right about then Tilia had walked into a room lined with seven niches carved into the walls, six of which contained mummified bodies quickly identified as slumbering arch-liches (although from a divine tradition).  Two large ceramic statues of horned spear wielding temple guardians sprung to life like drunken bottom-heavy tops in the treasure chamber above exactly as Tilia managed to wake up one of the sleeping arch-liches in the lower chamber.

This should be fun!