Sorcerous Scrutinies: The Sacrificial Pyre of Thracia

                                                         The Sacrificial Pyre of Thracia

DCC #110: A Level 1 Adventure by Scott Moore

Goodman Games

Sweat pours from your brow as you ascend further into the ruby lava tube complex.  What began as a quest to retrieve a dozen missing villagers has become something far more arduous and challenging, but you persist; your word is your bond.  Having survived a forced entry into the guarded compound, you round every corner with your bloodied longsword in hand, your teeth clenched.

A passage winds to your right, illuminated by a dull glow.  You leave your party as they tend to their wounds and creep forward.  A door is slightly ajar ahead, and you cautiously open it with the tip of your blade.   

An old man sits upon a shoddy stool, odd tools in his hands.  His milky eyes drift around the room as he senses your arrival.  You perceive that he is more of a prisoner than a cultist.  

He outstretches his hand to the vacant stool next to him, and your heart flutters.  You sheathe your sword, and sit.  With surprising strength, he grips your right hand, and pierces your flesh with a fine needle.  You submit to the experience, intrigued by the forming image and undaunted by the sharp pain.  

Your companions fill the doorway, their mouths agape.  You hold up your bloodied hand, and a grinning skull looks back at you.  

“What in the hells have you done?”

You smile.  “Why fight a cult…when you could pretend to join it?”

What It Is

Sacrificial Pyre of Thracia is a new level 1 adventure that sets your players on a dangerous rescue mission across perilous lands and into the heart of a distant volcano.  The module was designed to establish your player characters on the island of Thracia, give them immediate purpose in assisting the village of Hamlet, and to leave enough breadcrumbs to the ruins of Old Thracia so the real adventure can begin.  Pyre was not written as a direct continuation of Grave Robbers of Thracia (curiously), but can easily serve as a direct sequel, as it did for my players.  

Structurally, the adventure flows from an introductory combat encounter into a town vignette where a quest is given, and then players will engage in some hexploration to reach a dungeon filled with interesting encounters, combats, and hooks that should lead them directly into Caverns of Thracia.  

If I’m not mistaken, this is Scott Moore’s first numbered entry into the DCC canon as writer, and I am excited to see more of his work!  The module has a classic feel, excellent flow, and enough character to set it apart.  

At The Table

Sacrificial Pyre is a great module to babystep players into hex exploration, and a fantastic tutorial for dungeon diving protocol (before they delve into the chaotic multi-levels of Caverns).  

The brief jaunt from Hamlet to the Volcano is rich territory for random encounters, tie-ins from Thracia that you find most interesting, everything the players should expect from hex travel, albeit in short form.  I found the Artifact of Another Age entry to be personally interesting, so I added a connection to the Resurrection Stone from Grave-Robbers and modified its powers for the players.  I turned the Tiger encounter into a ‘sneak past the sleeping monster’ encounter that worked out well, and then the Fast Zombies encounter was a blast (I’m guilty of adding a few more than 1d4+1, how could I resist?).  Fortuitously, my players rolled the Minotaur encounter on the way back to Hamlet and were able to exchange food for more information about the Caverns, their next goal.  

The Volcano itself is a sprawling complex with 24 Area entries, sure to keep your players busy with a variety of combats, treasures and curious encounters.  If run as a straight hack-n’-slash, players will see similar combats unfold repeatedly with guards and generic cultists, but my players were able to find ways to circumvent some of those more repetitious battles with deception or wit.  My players flowed from the tattoo artist to the western jail, discovered they needed the key from Adamacles, then retrieved it and finished the complex after freeing the majority of the Hamlet residents.

Sadly, my players missed the interesting planar content beyond the Elemental Entrance in Area 3-21, they were scared off by the hot air!  In hindsight, I could have added some kind of a stolen key to a door that sealed off the ritual chamber in 3-20 to force the players to retrieve it from Ash, the Kapnoteron.  Next time!

 

Play Highlights

I cannot emphasize enough how much my players loved the Dog Pack after I showed them the illustration.  I exchanged their given information for bits of food and trinkets the party offered them, which delighted my players.  The party was hell bent on aiding them, and so I created a bit of a quest to find their Alpha which culminated in the ritual encounter.  Now the reunited pack wanders the island, and perhaps we’ll meet them later on down the road.

One of my players felt so clever for volunteering to get his cultist tattoo, and I was happy to reward him (after some Personality checks) with inside access to several encounters afterwards.  He got some great information from Adamacles himself before the cover was blown and the party laid their ambush.  

I must mention the wounded trash octopus. There is something in players that creates an irresistible instinct to collect friendly NPCs, and Moore nailed it on this one. My party was overjoyed to heal this wretched cephalopod, and then delighted when I inferred that it may feature into their future adventures.

Art Spotlight

I love pieces that succinctly set up encounters for players, or demonstrate quickly what a few paragraphs of description would take, and this module is full of them.  Standouts for me are the little Dog Park depiction on p.17 (gives the players a sense of ease about the encounter), the top down depiction of the volcano on p.14 (perhaps the wizard has a flying familiar, and this image can be their perspective of the complex from above), and the lush depiction of Hamlet on p.9 (immediate understanding from players of what type of village they’re looking at, and why they can’t suddenly buy platemail!).  

Shout-out to Kreader’s dungeon map as well, I spent six hours there with my players and loved every twist and turn.  

Judge Takeaways

Subtle Subterfuge

As referenced in my flavor hook above, there is a tattoo artist in Area 3-2 that can apply a cultist tattoo to your PCs.  This simple encounter becomes a gateway to a disguise portion of the module that can provide really satisfying role-playing opportunities for your players, a means to reduce combat bloat, and to provide crucial backstory through the mouths of the cultists, guards or Adamacles himself to tie the adventure to the Caverns of Thracia.  

To take the idea further, what if the tattoo were some means to receive the approval or disapproval from Thanatos, a potential deity for your characters?

Fortify the Finale

My party was composed of six level 1 characters, and they were clicking on all cylinders once we reached the dungeon.  Despite the battle of attrition in the many encounters of the dungeon, they were in pretty good shape heading into the final encounter in the titular Sacrificial Pyre.  So I did what any panicking judge would do, I flipped to the bestiary and added some meat to the encounter!

I added a Bandit Hero as a primary antagonist, a ‘Champion of Thanatos’, and then positioned two lava wells in the rear of the room that could be operated (only) by cultists to fling 1d6+1 damage per round at players with a DC 12 reflex save for half damage.  I also added some guards and split the chamber with a lava flow and bridge so that players would have to maneuver around the melee mob to reach the lava-flinging cultists.  To soften the bad guy bloat, I added a missing alpha of the Dog Pack in Area 3-12 who was reluctant to fight for the baddies, and could be swayed to fight with the PCs and rejoin his pack.  It was terrific fun, luck was burned, two players hit the deck, and it felt like a summative challenge befitting the dungeon crawl.

Hamlet Haggling

Especially if you plopped the party in Hamlet after Grave Robbers of Thracia, perhaps consider a trade montage where players can barter with locals for hide and leather armors, primitive weapons, ammunition and traveling supplies for their journey.  Language could be a stumbling block, have a translator character make Personality checks and translate their successes or failures into better or worse transactions.  There’s a waystation included in the Thracia newsletter that came in the box set; that location could also be placed on Map 2 (p.7) to give PCs more opportunities for commerce.

Conclusion

Sacrificial Pyre is the spring-board into Caverns that I was hoping for.  My players are totally engaged and excited about the mysterious depths to come, and they have so much more context than if I had just begun with the mega-dungeon.  Hamlet is now a hub where they can resupply in between delves, and I have some great NPCs now floating around the island, happy to encounter them once again and aid in their quest.  

I do see a missed opportunity in the lack of connection to Grave Robbers, and in a perfect world I think I would prefer to have the two be more part of the same general arc.  Were I to make a Thracia funnel, I might start with the players as neighboring villagers of Hamlet, undergoing some trouble related to the Caverns that ties into the introduction to Sacrificial Pyre.  

Now, with our funnel and 1st level adventure in the books, it’s time for the grand adventure.  The Caverns of Thracia have waited long enough.