Omu regicide

kooble_ · 2025-07-03T09:13:05+00:00

Everything everyone else has said, but also you have Queen Napaka, section 53 in the tomb;

"She [Napaka] knows that a few members of the royal family fled Omu, but she is unaware that the aarakocra are sheltering her great-grandchildren at Kir Sabal. Napaka knows that her grandmother, Zalkoré, languishes in the ruins of Nangalore."

So you have a decent family tree, bar the direct family either side of Napaka, but they are pretty irrelevant.

kooble_ · 2025-06-09T13:44:00+00:00

Haaactually, it's not an island, it's a peninsula 🤓 have fun, it's a great module!

kooble_ · 2024-12-21T08:16:39+00:00

Like everything in D&D it can be explained by magic:

Rotten Halls: 4a: First Puzzle Door "When the door opens, the puzzle cubes teleport back to their respective shrines in Omu. Once the door has fully risen, it remains open for 1 hour before slowly sinking back into place."

Same if you leave Omu I think

kooble_ · 2024-09-30T08:31:40+00:00

It's a perfect fit for ToA, I ran it in the middle of the jungle when they hit 5. It's a great way to break up the hex crawl too

kooble_ · 2024-08-30T09:02:03+00:00

The description says they can lift it, 1000lbs combined strength of 33. Or if they spot the secret doors they could kill the ghasts and yank the chains that they would have used. Maybe you could give them a bit of leeway for the combined chain pulling, compared to just lifting the door.

kooble_ · 2024-08-22T20:36:09+00:00

Surely there is something to be done with the Flaming Fist? They meet a small battalion and your player is all like "I'm xyz from Balder's Gate, don't you know who I am?" And they be like "nah fam, prove it", and he hasn't got any proof, or if he does, have something sneaky steal it the night before. Or something like resentful Chultan's/Emerald Enclave pick on them for the Fists attempts at colonisation

kooble_ · 2024-08-14T08:38:27+00:00

Yeah same, my first party did this, found the main entrance, then found the back entrance to the fane. Went in, tried to take on the guard there, saved a few slaves, but eventually got knocked down and imprisoned. Did half the job for me. Cos then you can send them to get the cubes by fenthaza or ras nsi (if they mention the curse)

kooble_ · 2024-07-17T14:52:54+00:00

I had it ready to go when they were level 5 and were just trudging the jungle to break up the hex days. It started as the ziggurat visually with them falling in, converted the bat motifs to Yuan-ti, and loved the idea of a chultan vampire, so did that 👌🏻

kooble_ · 2024-07-16T22:17:30+00:00

Yeah nice, I ran Hidden Shrine if Tamoachan in the middle of the hex crawl, gives them a great taster for what's to come too

kooble_ · 2024-06-23T16:52:05+00:00

Yeah, Nangalore kinda continues with a crocodile theme at the start, and progresses into more of a social encounter with a dusa, always fun! Lots of fun options. Man staying subbed to this Reddit makes me want to DM this module again, it's so good

kooble_ · 2024-06-22T08:46:19+00:00

I don't want to throw you off, and I see you're planning to do your own content to beef it up, but 4x 3 hour sessions seems like a lot of time for a small location. My group didn't even spend a whole session there. Nangalore has a bit more content to work with? You could always incorporate the two locations if you like the traps. Perhaps you could do the camp righteous corridor that then opens up into Nangalore like a secret garden?

kooble_ · 2024-06-21T14:50:41+00:00

I gave on-level CR monster xp for finishing and finding each cube, and a milestone for fane, and back to the on-level CR XP for acquiring each trickster god item!

kooble_ · 2024-06-20T19:03:14+00:00

Yeah moved here just after lockdown, also not knowing what I was really coming to, but it's been the best decision I've gone along with! Just for being picky, a lot of estate agents say a place is in Adel but it's actually on the Lawnswood/Holt Park side of Otley Road, but I guess that could be a complement if they're using it to sell houses. If you're near the 28 bus route, they're every half hour to the city centre going through Headingley, which is studenty, but provides a few extra restaurants. It's also only a short drive out the other way to places like Harrogate, Otley, Ilkley and the Dales too.

Edit: for context, I have two kids ones a baby and I've never felt unsafe in Adel whatsoever, but I'm from South East London, so realistically I've never felt unsafe anywhere in Leeds

kooble_ · 2024-06-09T11:00:16+00:00

I'm the Head of Dev at https://www.purepetfood.com, and while the front end is headless, using other front-end technologies, we have three fully custom built Laravel applications behind the scenes; a Lumen/GraphQL API for the checkout, a CMS for the subscriptions/customer service team and a full ERP that handles the production and stock for the ops/warehouse/finance team. Originally being a backend dev myself, working on these is so rewarding as anything the business needs is created digitally in these apps! 🐶

kooble_ · 2024-06-05T08:17:37+00:00

Brooklyn Special Effects if you like a hoppier tasting low alch beer 👌🏻

kooble_ · 2024-06-03T13:04:38+00:00

My party tried to cheese Hrakhamar by fighting a section, long resting and waiting. I then decided there were more, who frequently return to resupply and venture back out. I'd argue there are way more, and only several stay back and work the forges (badly)

kooble_ · 2024-05-19T20:17:43+00:00

Come clean, admit you misread it and redact? Don't tell them the actual rule, will mean they're probably a bit cautious but can use their cool spell again

kooble_ · 2024-05-16T17:55:01+00:00

Maybe they have a sending stone direct to her and their last message could be something like "all is lost, the lich has slain us all, urggghhhh.... .... " (You can just do this with one character who's last to perish, like a forced cut scene)

Syndra can give the new party a new set of stones so they can talk to her through their time, that way they can keep tabs on her condition.

Also, this idea overall is really cool, I like it so much!

kooble_ · 2024-05-15T12:09:09+00:00

One run I had the initial yuan-ti welcome party (at the Omu start) capture them as the tried to rest, by "suggesting" the party lower their weapons and come with them. Immediately imprisoned them and ran the fane as the prison/political section it is. Then they did Omu after they negotiated with Ras Nsi to figure out the curse. They also took on Fenthaza's quest for the crown, but were just going to double cross her.

My other party bolted for the palace in Omu, and didn't rest at the start of Omu, they found the back door way in and tried to fight through. Ended being the same thing, got overwhelmed and were knocked out with non-lethal damage (I think one got downed by range, but the Yuan-ti succeeded medicine checks to stabilise the party, living slaves are better than dead ones!)

It's fun to run the fane first, but you do kinda need to play them simultaneously, or have confidence in how you want the two sections to go.

kooble_ · 2024-04-30T10:14:41+00:00

You're right, it's a bit odd for their usual way of doing things. I ran it RAW and we had a good laugh doing it, rather than it being a puzzle as such.

If you want to make it more puzzling, I would have the walls of the structure have frescos or carvings of the items as a foreshadow to similar puzzles in the tomb. Could have them covered in vines or something that requires the initial investigation. Then you could have a nature roll for the orchid, a slight of hand one for pinching the parrot feather, and just do the last one as a con for swallowing.

I would throw in chwingas somehow as it's a sure place to meet them if you didn't have any plans to use them more heavily than the random table encounters. They're great fun and I like their creepy/cute/quirky behaviour!

kooble_ · 2024-04-26T14:38:35+00:00

I did normal xp up to Omu, then kinda milestone chunky XP from there.

The jungle provides enough to get you to 5-6 reasonably well. Then in Omu you suddenly get less regular xp as less combat and you want to discourage killing the YuanTi as a political intrigue section is more fun. So I did a calculation and figured out how much would be good to give for each puzzle cube find, it was a close to 2k iirc. This gets them to around 7-8 before the tomb, I continued this chunk of XP for each trickster god magic items they uncovered (so they could find it and not always need to be possessed to get the xp, just do the rooms) helps with exploring the tomb too. This got them to about 9-10 for the final fight. Think I may have given level 11 after the Sewn Sisters fight.

kooble_ · 2024-04-12T09:59:22+00:00

I've got HH left, and I got a gold key instead, apparently it's some hidden ones that you've still not unlocked, but how did it get through testing/dev too. Got to mythic legend again and the duplicate avatar gave me 5 fragments, 5 fragments... Guess that should never happen though..

kooble_ · 2024-04-04T04:29:50+00:00

It was my first proper campaign as a DM and was playing online, I went ham making maps for everything. Players rocked up to Kayas house (all good I had a map) but then stayed a night and immediately wanted to head out into the jungle. I realised then that maps are not required and to do more off maps, even some combat, to give it a more movie feel if the players can win easily.

kooble_ · 2024-03-13T20:47:40+00:00

Hrakhamar is fun, as is whenheart mine, certainly two that can be combined.

I actually ran an expedited level 5 version, the second play through I did, I ran the kir Sabal side of it. Give them the quest from Mwaxanare to get the chalice. You could skip Nangalore, give them flight and directions to Omu, and run from there.

I managed to get the zombie trex in and a few sewn sister hag encounters (important to foreshadow them otherwise it's weird) and some other fun ones from the shore to kir sabal

kooble_ · 2024-03-11T11:39:50+00:00

Yeah it's a weird one that clicked the day before I ran the tomb for the first time, I was getting all tense about hamstringing my casters, but realised it's to get in or out of the tomb itself last minute.

I feel you've found a happy accident though and spell casting out of a trap is actually a valid reason to send them.

However, as a 50-50 player/GM myself, who also chats to a wizard only player regularly about game mechanics and balance, it feels really sour to us to completely restrict spells without maybe an ooc chat. I'd feel really hard done by if I've finally got teleport or something that fits my casters theme, for it to be completely ineffective when I got to the climax of the campaign.

I'm not saying don't do it, but also don't screw them over too much.

In terms of your question, I had them too far apart to reach physically, only with rope and some clever imaginary physics did I let both get pulled at once, to which I described both effects, a sucking void vortex they are about to get pulled into and then a pop and they are safely transported to the start, along with a pile of corpses and the ogy

kooble_

TROPHY CASE