Savage Tide: Additional Adventures
by David KeyserWhat if twelve adventures for the Savage Tide AP isn’t enough? I know, the question sounds crazy, but I have found a few additional adventures useful in fleshing out and expanding the campaign so that it expands the scope of the AP, investing more in the origin city of Sasserine and expanding a bit into Ochalea and some other areas of the Thanegioth Archipelago. I will share those adventures here and how I included them in the AP. Note that adding more adventures means you need to be careful about both XP and treasures, either pruning back both as PCs go through more encounters and recover more treasure than 3.5 D&D and the Savage Tide AP plans for, or upgrading later adventures to account for higher than expected PC levels.
I will keep this discussion to just other adventures found in Dungeon Magazine, assuming that if you collected the adventures for the Savage Tide AP, it isn’t hard for you to collect these other adventures from Dungeon Magazine. I won’t be citing obscure 3rd party adventures, even if I may have used one or two for my campaign.
Obligatory header...
In case you are interested in my conversion work and are otherwise unaware of it, you can find both CRichardDavies and my Mystara conversion notes in Threshold Magazine #4. All of my efforts for converting Savage Tide's first eight adventures, as well as Dungeon Magazine #114's Isle of Dread adventure, went into that article and issue.
Dungeon Magazine #149 War of the Wielded
This adventure can be run for 5th level PCs after the second adventure(Dungeon #140) and before the third adventure(Dungeon #141) in the Savage Tide AP. It is set in Sasserine, and is, in fact, the only other published adventure set in that city which is not part of the Savage Tide AP. It features the PCs getting involved in a war between two sets of magical weapons which dominate their wielders to maintain their feud with each other.
Rather than have the PCs stumble upon the weapons being used as the adventure sets up, you can introduce the players by having a patron or an affiliation like the Dawn Council approach the PCs and request their help in tracking down the cause of a series of violent duels and murders which have happened within Sasserine. A list of victims with no apparent connections to each other has flummoxed the various district city guards, and the PCs are already noted heroes from bringing down the Lotus Dragon thieves guild. The PCs can begin by visiting some of the public locales of the duels and questioning those who knew some of the victims. Early on they identify Larcos Dengrin as a person of interest, he has also visited some of the sites and questioned witnesses. The PCs will already know of him(see Threshold Magazine #4 p102-103).
They finally catch a break when they get to question a murderer caught soon after he committed his crime. The blade he was using is Princesssa Cathandra of the Unseen Edge(see p27 of Dungeon #149). They can question and even charm the suspect. He admits to the murder but insists that his beloved lady, the Princessa, required him to commit the murder. He will go on about how devoted he is to her and that she was able to get away because of her invisibility, but he won’t actually mention she is a weapon, and not a person, unless he is explicitly and specifically asked(he isn’t very bright and is, at the moment, more afraid of her than the authorities). Descriptions of her will focus on her lovely voice rather than physical attributes.
Alternatively you can just have a different weapon, Czarina Valora (p26 of Dungeon #149), recovered along with the murderer who used her. But the murderer is confused and can’t explain his or her actions, having picked up the weapon Czarina Valora and been hypnotized by her spell rather than being dominated by the weapon directly. The weapon goes into the district watch lockup but soon goes missing along with a member of the district watch.
Once the PCs begin to suspect it is the weapons rather than people which are the cause, you can introduce the initial encounter of the adventure and have Larcos contact them.
Affiliation rewards for PCs for completing this adventure:
+1 with the Dawn Council if they formally requested that the PCs investigate
+1 with the Witchwardens if they are able to study one of the weapons(although the first weapon brought in for study will undoubtedly escape along with a dominated apprentice)
+1 with Zelkarune’s Horns if the Kogoloxen is turned over to the arena, but reduce this reward to +1/2 if the PCs already gifted the arena with the rust monster Chunklus, which appears in the adventure The Bullywug Gambit