Adventure Site Contest 3: Temple of the Blood Bat

​Written by Jason Blasso
For OSE, levels 1-2
Bat cult caves
VILLAGE of DAX
25 farm village. Distraught farmers cry over their cups in the tavern about the Night Scourge, a black mass that descends nightly from the sky to drain their animals dry of blood, turning them into zombies. Farmer Jebbet saw it one moonlit night coming from the west. Farmer Kidde attacked it when it landed on his prized milkcow but he was killed, turned into a zombie, and killed again. 4 fed up farmers, suspecting the evil comes from Mount Mondax, left and never returned. A party of 5 adventures followed the same fate soon after. Farmers now keep their animals indoors with them at night and it’s getting crowded.    
   Thank goodness, it’s a temple. I was getting a little out of my depth seeing multiple adventures without some kind of shrine/temple/church/place of worship to invade. Unusual to go this long before hitting an OSE adventure, but we knew Mr. Blasso here, and he seems to enjoy the system. As usual with his modules, everything is well-formatted, well-considered, with a clean and pleasing look. Good to have a level 1-2 adventure too…we need high-level adventure sites, but that doesn’t mean that low levels should be completely ignored.
   Our plot, well-conveyed in the preamble above, is your bog-standard evil-cleric-of-a-dark-bat-god-summons-swarm-of-giant-bats-to-eat-all-the-local-livestock-and-turn-them-into-zombies. A local yokel brute squad and an NPC adventurer party already done got themselves et, so now it’s time for the heroes to avenge farmers and milk cows with the added inducement of a $1,000 bounty. And hey, added cash for each farmer corpse. Go have fun storming the caves.
   Map here made some interesting choices. Unlike the “hyper-realistic caving” choice made elsewhere, this is a bunch of bubbles or rectangles, descending deep into the earth in almost a mind-map manner. I don’t love the look aesthetically/realistically, but I will compliment the cartographer for making a natural cave map that I’d be comfortable describing. Having three points of ingress/egress is good, although the third, that chimney in the BBEG cave, isn’t very likely to be the first choice. Good secret passageway with the kobold’s little tunnel, almost working like an in-dungeon teleporters. Loops are just 000 next to each other and I could wish for more over-under rooms, but the elevation changes combined with challenging slippery wall climbs are fun. Fine map.
   Starting adventures require a real delicate touch. We want to challenge fresh players and their low-level characters, but with hit points typically in the same range as a single monster attack and few resources outside of rope and rusty daggers, those challenges can’t be too intense or you’ll annihilate everyone. Most of the non-monster hazards here consist of walls and pits, reasonable things to try and overcome. The main cave is so coated in guano that PCs get sick, lovely. It’s when you have mixtures that things get a little intense, like yellow mold in one cave or a green slime variant floating in a pool that conceals platinum coins. Classic, and a good risk/reward choice, but edging more to level 2 difficulty than strict level 1.
   Monsters are even more gnarly judging by that metric. Giant rats, fire beetles, giant centipedes, that’s all standard, but they appear in large numbers. Skeletons and skeletons mixed with zombies, especially the undead adventurers, will be pretty nasty to fight if your cleric doesn’t manage to get off his turn. I do like that there’s a night state/day state where the players would honestly be better served to plunge into the deeps after nightfall, which is a bit unusual. The cleric isn’t that rough to fight (and flees if he gets hurt), but the swarm of vampire bats is a brutal fight for newbies and deep in the rear there are even worse things, including a gargoyle guarding the treasure trove. Better hope you figured out the way past without combat. I do love that the kobolds are presented as a group to interact with by default, it’s always best in a dungeon if someone can chat with the players in a silly voice.
   Assuming the evil bat-cleric doesn’t scupper away the bat idol he worships in the guano cave, there are a couple nice ruby eyes to loot in it, and destroying the thing unleashes a tide of blood which washes away enough bat poop to find what must be a disgusting +1 sword. Other magic loot is the cleric’s own cloak of flying, the dead elf’s +1 arrow, the dead magician’s scroll of invisibility, and a single healing potion. Don’t worry, as difficult as some of these fights are, your players won’t complain about lack of reward. Even outside of the farmers’ bounty, these caves are pretty rich, with three thousand gold pieces just in the treasure cave and in the cleric’s sleeping chamber. Pretty solid for a day’s work. Downright overgenerous, with a full clear.
   As for placement in your campaign…it’s an evil bat-shrine in some caves, c’mon, how could you not find a place to stick this? I would use it not so much as my starting villages’ initial dungeon but rather as a catch-up dungeon for players joining later in the campaign. For that admittedly rather bespoke purpose, this thing is perfect.