Souls for Smuggler’s Shiv
The first adventure is now in the bag.
This is what proper wilderness exploration is. Our party was less than perfectly geared for the effort, with two characters with move speed 20 trying to fight through constant difficult terrain and no one having really invested in Stealth, but that’s part of the charm. The fighting balance of our party is fairly good, the only thing missing is a dedicated trap-springer. No one in the party has an even moderately good Perception, so I expect we’ll be walking into those things for a while yet. Other than our wisdomless party structure, we’re in pretty good shape.
Compared to our previous starting adventure Burnt Offerings, this one was more brutal in that the jungle is just stocked with all kinds of threats, and the safest spot on the island is nowhere near as safe as your average Varisian border town. You are essentially camping out in a dungeon, and the safety guarantee of your home base is “we just cleared this room, let’s hope the monsters all sit still in theirs.” That is to say: the work day is longer than five minutes, boys and girls, and you do not ever truly leave the dungeon to rest in between. No one leaves the island. ಠ_ಠ
Continuity-wise, SfSS is the close blood sibling of Burnt Offerings in that they drop hints about the things to come in almost identical ways. Neither one ends in an explicit ‘This way for your next adventure!’-sign, but both drop ancient symbols that are signs of a bygone age, old empire, forgotten civilization, ancient ruins, etc. Picking up those serpent-skull holy symbols it actually occurred to me to think, “Is this a devious sendup of some sort? A bit of deceptive foreshadowing to get you to think this is going down exactly the same plot path as Rise of the Runelords?” I don’t think anyone who stopped to pick up both those Sihedron holy symbols and these newer serpent skull ones could escape the déjà vu. I just hope the plot won’t turn out to be a new skin of novel color sewn on the skeleton of a forefather.
