#low level

A Vault of Traps and Scales

A Kobold Dungeon Encounter for D&D 5E

We’ve just published Troy’s latest  encounter, a low-level dungeon delve filled to the brim with cunning  kobolds and their tactical traps. It comes complete with battle map, monster tokens, and stat blocks!

→Read it on 2-Minute Tabletop

Not an hour ago, the report of sounds within the sealed vault came in. Shortly after, those that went to investigate the possible breach clambered back out, bruised and reeling and spitefully naming the perpetrators: kobolds. A group of them has infiltrated the vault and is attempting to make off with whatever contents they can fit through their tunnels.

The kobolds have clearly been preparing for some time. Their tunnels weave between the walls of the vault’s interior into almost every chamber, and their traps now litter the rooms. The only section they have not breached is the innermost vault, owing to the enchantments of its construction. But they are working on the mechanisms and making swift progress. Someone needs to deal with them quickly, or the kobolds will leave nothing but an empty chamber behind…

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I invite you to pillage this article for all its traps, tokens, stat blocks, and other resources! Whether you play it out like Troy intends or simply break it down into its versatile ingredients, we hope that you and your group will enjoy. :)

The Green Hill Battle Map

Our new Green Hill map is just what you need for a low-level adventure in the countryside (or a nice picnic!)

→Find the downloads on 2-Minute Tabletop

A single oak tree stands upon on a 32×22 grassy hill. The locals call it by the simple name ‘Green Hill,’ and it is a favorite spot for picnics and weddings.

This is Rootyful‘s Green Hill, a simple but lovingly rendered grassy mound topped by a happy oak tree. This map and its variants are of simple everyday locations in the countryside, great for low-level adventures and suitable for any old setting … that isn’t post-apocalypse!

I especially like Rooty’s nighttime version, where the moonlight upon the grass is dappled by clouds in such a way that I can vividly imagine what the sky must look like.

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This oak could be a landmark at the edge of town, the centerpiece to a city’s gardens, or a sacred elven way-tree. What popped into your mind when you first laid eyes upon it?

Have fun,
– Ross

Plancescape: The Palace Moon

Hovering beyond the reach of mortals and beneath the notice of gods, this eerily tranquil wasteland awaits those who would explore its mysteries and discover the fate of a vanished pantheon.

Gods die, this is known, as their fossilized bodies are sometimes found floating in the astral sea or interred in great monuments hidden throughout the cosmos. Sometimes they are slain by other gods, or die as part of their own mythology, or shift and reoccur as new deities as the people who they are pledged to go through ideological changes.

This does not explain the absence of the gods that built the palace moon, a demiplane hanging just outside the material realm in much the same way that a regular moon might orbit a celestial body. In its time it was a hanging garden, a lush green paradise where one might lounge in mountain sized castles and observe the goings on of the material plane, basking in riches and radiance and all the splendor their divine might could conjure. Today the moon is a dust-riven wasteland, with its halls and city sized gardens smothered under colorless particulate with those remaining edifices exposed to the air slowly being worn away by time. It is a land ripe for exploration, as the relics of divinity lay scattered among the towering pagodas and basilicas covered with petrified ivory, amounting to not only the treasures of unknown gods but to the flotsam of various celestial courts and clergies born to serve the now absent divinities. It is for this reason that both scholarsandterrible warlords choose to make the Palace moon their home, sifting through the rubble of the dead world in the hopes of finding some fossilized trace of the ineffable.

Hooks:

• The a powerful druid who’s influence once kept the region stable has gone missing investigating strange omens from a set of ancient megaliths contained within the foundations of an overgrown temple. As tensions between the region’s factions escalate, those who would seek peace reach out to the party to find her and bring her back. After delving the dangerous ruins (and having to overcome some of the druid’s on defenses along with the local critters) they discover her journal. In attempting to stabilize the ruin, the druid activated some kind of portal and pulled something through, after which the party can deduce that whatever it is she summoned dragged her back with it before the portal closed. Their only hope of rescuing the peacekeeper is to retrace her steps, activate the portal and plunge through themselves, surviving the lunar wasteland and get her back, all before war breaks out at home. 
• In the light of the full moon, the silver inlaid skull of a particular aasimar possesses the power to teleport those holding it to a graveyard on the moon, the spirit of it’s departed owner desperate to return to the land from which it was banished. A fortune hunting thief has purchased this skull from an occultist, and has been using it to loot the graves of the celestial court and turn a tidy profit. The players might find a few of these objects in the local magic shops, with a chance to trace them back to their source.
  
• Seeking visions of the divine, a group of mystics cast their mind out to the aether and were cursed with visions of the lunar tomb palace. Extracting from this foreboding omen that the true gods of their world were dead, and all others were merely invading presences, they set about forming a heretical order and stirring up no end of trouble, even after their deaths. These followers of the Lunatic’s Canto can be responsible for all manner of blasphemous crimes across the realm, eventually drawing the party into one of their moon mad rituals the way that cultist are wont to do.
  

Further Adventures:

• It’s up to you whether the palace moon is one of the ACTUAL moons of your campaign world,  or whether it exists in a parallel space to one of those satellites, the way olympus as unreachable home of the gods existed parallel to the quite scalable mountain in the Grecian countryside. If it’s the latter, then the Palace Moon may only be accessible by specialized rituals and at particular times of the year, then the palace is accessible to anyone with a strong enough teleport spell, making it a great “ staring you in the face since level 1″ twist to where the villian has their lair.
  
• Not to play into the old “ That Wizard came from the Moon” meme, but the moon really is an underexploited place for weird monsters to come from, ranging from old classics like mooncalf , or stranger aberrations that have taken up residence on the moon’s marble halls (thanks @thirdtofifthand@dm-tuz). Let your party enjoy a bit of flash-gordon weirdness, you know you want to! Plus it’s also a good home for angels and other godly beings to hang out that’s not so distant as the afterlife.
  
• The vanished pantheon of the Palace moon is a great way to explain “ Silent gods” in your campaign world, regions that are cut off from the divine while others are in communion with their gods and have a LOT to say about that fact. Likewise, a partymember with Aasimar heritage may be descended from one of the celestial courts that dwelt on the palace moon, escaping to the world below after their masters left.
  

Dungeon: The Veiled Palace

Sorrow pervades this valley, the painful ache that remains after tears and screams have exhausted themselves and the body can only linger on in faltering surrender. You can feel it in the rain, in the rocks, in the chill of the wind as it pulls the mirth from your bones.

Setup: Forlorn and forgotten thought it may be, the Veiled palace was said to have been constructed by a besotted celestial and played home to a succession of demigod warlords before it and the surrounding lands were reclaimed by nature at the end of the last civil war, transforming into a vast hinterland ripe for exploration.

Hooks:

• Though the warlords have been gone for generations, their most cunning servants, a coterie of assassins live on, location concealed by ancient enchantments that cloak their fortress and their movements in near impenetrable mist.  They now sell their services to the innumerable nobles and merchants of the lowlands as the “Serpent-Unseen”, a group the party will only hear of after taking an innocuous job that sees their prospective employer killed half way through and the party hastily pinned for the crime.
  
• In addition to the isolated human villages in mountains, there are also encalves of aarakocra and jaguar-tabaxi in the region, both of whom retain scraps of lore about the palace and its formation, but have become increasingly unfriendly towards outsiders of late. Someone has been wandering their territory and ensnaring their people through the use of a bewitching flute, and all those who try to rescue the ensorceled are never heard from again.
• Tales in local roadhouses tell of Tamha, a long vanished village in the mountains that once traded in heavenly treasures, some beautiful or powerful beyond beleif. While these rumors may incite the party to start combing the rainforest for trinkets, they’ve also inspired the Serpent-Unseen’s latest leader, Janbek the collector,  aspirations for his organization far above being petty cutthroats. Having found a few of these trinkets ( such as the flute), the collector realizes that the Veiled palace is a storehouse of powerful enchantments that could lead him and his people to true power far beyond the swords and poisons they currently wield.
  
• Those traveling high into the mountains should be wary, as to hear the locals tell it a soaking wet ghost that appears wandering the roads in the area dazed and confused, bloodless save for the silvery ichor which drips down from a bone-bearing gash in his head. As the ghost story goes, should the specter clasp you in his deathly grip, you’ll start to drown on land, all while he pleads with you to help him find his way home, dissolving into tears should his victim fight their way free.
  

Background:As the story goes, the celestial noble Rindal’jar was traveling the mortal world  admiring the beauty of the mountains when he fell in love with a mortal girl from a tiny little village by name of Sya. This was a problem, as Rindal’jar was already married to the local goddess of rain, and so cloaked the surrounding valley in a never ending mist so as to hide the affair from his betrothed. Rindal’jar likewise concealed his true nature from his beau, claiming to be a wandering noble in search of poetic inspiration as he lavished gifts upon her and her people. Sya for her part figured out Rindal’jar’s ruse when such gifts icnluded bundles of gold or a bridge over a valley she was forced to cross every time she went to gather fruit, but she and her people were poor, and she feared offending this fanciful stranger and all the power he seemed to wield.
The affair continued for years, and eventually saw Sya living like royalty in a palace conjured by Rindal’jar, waited upon by a staff of animals transmuted into servants: brilliant birds for her ladies and courtiers and a pack of leopards for her honor guard. Her people were forced to stay in the village below, but she smuggled them whatever riches she could to trade for food and proper tools.
Having long suspected her husband’s unfaithfulness, the goddess of rain eventually used her trusted agents to track him to the valley, giving them a bronze vessel empowered by years of bitter hurt and resentment to unleash upon him when he was alone in the valley.  Unstoppered the vessel unleashed monsoon storms and flooded the valley in an instant, washing away the unfaithful Rindal’jar as well as Sya’s village in an instant of divine spite. Watching from above and hidden by the palace’s enchantments, Sya watched her people destroyed, and afterwords retreated to the depths of the palace, living out the rest of her life like a ghost. Her and Rindal’jar’s children, raised by magical convenience and their sorrow-broken mother came up spoiled and wrong, eventually declaring themselves as warlords and raising successive bands of jaguar folk and mountain bandits as they use their father’s gifts to carve out territory for themselves. This pattern persisted over generations, until Rindal’jar’s line got tangled up in a brutal civil war and ended up extinguished for their troubles, their territory falling back to the wild.

Further Adventures:

• Once and orphan and petty thief, the aasimar Janbek (perhaps correctly) sees himself as the heir to the warlords’ legacy, feeling pulled to collect the trinkets and treasures a celestial noble carelessly bestowed upon a hapless village girl so long ago.   While many of these trinkets are merely valuable, others possess powerful abilities that have gone long unobserved, but seem to blossom in the collector’s grasp allowing him to ascend the ranks of the Serpent Unseen faster than anyone in the organization’s history.   His ultimate goal is to uncover the origin of these wonders, and bring the valley under his control as a new reigning warlord to which surrounding territories must offer their allegiance.  To this end the party may end up doing battle with Janbek over treasures they do not know the true origin of, or even inadvertently passing a few into his hands in the early game. 
• Of all the magical items scattered throughout the hinterlands and the surrounding region, perhaps the most dangerous is the stormbearing vessel, which was washed downstream and into the plunge of a violent waterfall and stuck in the rubble beneath the crashing water ever since. The party may only come to know of the vessel thanks to the locals telling them the sad story of Rindal’Jar’s transgressions, and connecting it with their earlier ghost sightings. 
  
•  If one held the wrathful vessel, one could bring rains in times of drought, or summon hurricanes to ravage armies and scour fleets at sea. One could even use it to summon the wrathful goddess, which Janbek may attempt to do if the party closes in on him. What this scornful rain-god will do with the descendant of her philandering husband is anyone’s guess, perhaps smite him on the spot or take him as a consort, elevating him to terrible power. The gods are inscrutable after all, and it would be impious to try to predict how they would act next.