D23: Duke Scaradine's Mansion

This winter, my players wanted a new game that was (1) less gonzo than last time (UVG), (2) less dark than the time before that (custom Strahd thing), and (3) more directed than my mega dungeon game.

If I can't have gonzo or dark, I want to keep things weird. So I thought I'd go weird-via-fairy-tale rather than weird-via-scifi-gonzo. And I remembered this great series of posts ... now I am running a zelda game. That's good because it lets me give the players a main quest to fall back on if they're feeling too aimless. But it's still dungeon centric. BTW I haven't played zelda.

I'm running this thing as if Arnold's old posts are a published module. Except that whenever something doesn't actually get fleshed out, I make it...

So here is DUKE SCARADINE'S MANSION, 11 pages of garden-menagerie dungeon for my Moon City GLOG game but probably drag-and-droppable anywhere you've got an eccentric noble.

When I ran it, it went like this...

The players are

• Chosen, Nature Wizard from Lavender Village, 

• Burglar specialist named Bobbit

• Cannoli, Slime Wizard from Golden Claw

• Crongle, Ninja-Priest from ???

• Trained Ray named Rat-Hamlon

• Apocraphina, Witch from The Docks

The players were convicted of some absurd crimes and sentenced to death. Duke Scaradine broke them out so that he could have them run an errand for him--pick up his new pet, an astral peacock, and deliver it to his mansion.

(Someday they'll also want to collect seven magic swords and go get a wish from the King of Dreams. But for now they're playing uber for a purple chicken.)

The players entered Duke Scaradine’s garden and took the rougher path through the brush and dungeon grass. With the help of Chosen’s “speak with plants” they learned that Duke Scaradine wears a special perfume to keep his pets from attacking him. They also made a deal with the dungeon grass. The grass would let them cross if they stole Groundskeeper Higg’s iron galoshes. They crossed the grass, encountering the basilisk (((but not realizing it was blind))), and took refuge in the groundskeeper’s shed.

In the shed, they randomly encountered Scrimshaw, a yakuza-styled enforcer devil looking to deliver a message to Duke Scaradine. They decided to get on his good side by helping and learned that Duke Scaradine owes money to the Devil Earl Brax. They also stole Higg’s iron galoshes and a bottle of the Duke’s special perfume, which they used immediately.

The party continued towards the mansion, crossing over a bridge where they were attacked by a four armed white ape. They betrayed Scrimshaw and left him to fight the ape alone.

The party crossed the rest of the garden grounds uneventfully and delivered the Astral Peacock to Duke Scaradine. The duke gave them 1g and paperwork conferring “looting and squatting rights” to a house in Crossings District.

The bird revealed it's feathers which caused Crongle’s soul to be ejected from his body. Crongle then possessed the peacock, ejecting its soul from its body, and ran into the mansion. Scaradine’s butler Alfred gave chase. Still in the peacock body, Crongle met Chester, Duke Scaradine’s cat. Chester is actually a graymalkin who wants to escape the mansion. He convinced Crongle to use the peacock’s ability to eject him from his body. Then he went and possessed Crongle’s original body.

Meanwhile the Duke asked the remaining party to save his favorite white ape from the enforcer devil. The party returned to the bridge to discover that Scrimshaw had killed the ape. But its corpse was possessed by the astral peacock. They threw the peacock-possessed-ape off the bridge, apologized to Scrimshaw, and returned to the mansion. At the mansion, Scrimshaw broke Duke Scaradine’s leg to send a message from his boss.