Adventure Site Contest 2: The Caverns of Despair

Written by Kurt.
AD&D, For 6+ characters of levels 4-7
Huge mound in a forest.
  Deep in the swamps, a deadly evil festers within the ancient caves of Feng Hua. A small army of chaotic bandits, led by a gargantuan man, wielder of a legendary black longsword with a fi st-sized nacre embedded within its hilt. The sleepy frontier town of Pai Lo, perched on the edge of civilization, lies a mere ten miles from these accursed caves.
  A time portal opened, and Kurt here actually submitted this one before the contest started. On October 1st, he contacted me again and informed me this was indeed his finished product, so he wins the “posted it first” award. And…it’s an OA site, incredible. I’ve never run OA, but I thought about a game set in the Straits of Malacca once, this basically makes me a Qualified Expert. Premise certainly doesn’t rely on any orientation, though, so I think we should be good to proceed.
  Nothing will shock us about said premise, but it’s perfectly functional. There’s bandits. They have a cave. They have monster allies. They raid the village Pai Lo. The poor villagers scrape together 12k gold to hire adventures to clear said bandits. Go crawl in the caverns. Drive your group’s mapper mad. It’s an ogre mage, bandits, weird dogs, trolls, bugbears, and goblins all stuck in a cave system.

  These are some very natural caves. Lots of blobs-with-tunnels, as we’d expect, which is fine enough. The initial impression of nonlinearity is a little false; everything funnels through the giant cavern 6 and the splay of tunnels west of 5 and east of 4 don’t actually connect. Three entrances/exits are good, but unfortunately, I have no idea where any of them spit out in an above-ground environment. The lack of greater context also applies to the secret doors, I’m a little unclear as to how any of them are hidden/revealed. I also have a few questions about how the bandits are fitting this many dudes into these 5” squares. Line work is nice, good pencil technique.
  Keen-eyed readers may notice a discordant note, I just described a classic Standard Bandit Lair, but the top description says “levels 4-7”, what gives? Well, the solution is buttloads of monsters. TWO DOZEN goblins, FORTY-FIVE HIT DICE of trolls and weird dog-hybrids, EIGHTY bandits, plus elite hit squads of fighters (led by a cleric 4 with access to level 3 spells somehow), a wight trio, little guard bumps that can raise and alarm, and the boss is a decently gnarly ogre mage with bugbear guards and a both an escape plan plus a bribery scheme. One set of the monster zoo is willing to be bribed to fight against the rest of the crew, which helps with the couple who survive the fireballs. There’s lip service given to responding to an incursion and subsequent retreat, but there’s no overarching order of battle and there’s no random encounter table/frequency. Other hazards are pretty light although points for the spiked pit trap having poison on the spikes. NPC prisoners are available to free for Good Boy Points as well as valuable intel, nice to have.
  The real treasure, in addition to the friends we’ve made along the way, is sprinkled liberally throughout the caves but the biggest chunk of change (over 6.8k) is found in the secret stash cave with the wight guardians. The 12k bounty for “fix this bandit problem” is a significant plurality of the reward for the adventure but not, thankfully, the majority. Most treasure is hidden, which is good. The only treasure that’s awkward to retrieve is a staff of striking hidden in a hollow statue that breaks if the statue gets broken with a touch too much enthusiasm. Good, but I’d love a bit more cursed gear and hard-to-move bulk. Magic isn’t too heavily sprinkled, but I don’t think a level 7 party will complain too much about the stuff available, particularly the boss’ magic sword with a fire-resistance pearl in its hilt.
  Initial comments aside, the OA theming isn’t overwhelming and this is a high-level bandit lair that could be easily adapted to most games. I have a bit more homework with the multiple exits than I’d prefer, but you could finagle this thing into any karst zone handy and draw three dots on the hill map to call tunnel locations. Just keep it in your back pocket for whenever your mapper is getting too cocky. ​