Play Report & Micro Review: The Titan's Cliff

 

Play Report & Review: Titan Cliffs

Background

Titan Cliffs is written by Jim Hall of Brooklet Games (itch.io, patreon, and storefront). The module is available as a stand alone, system agnostic PDF on drivethrurpg or with OSE stats in KNOCK #3, which is where I found it.

It’s a small, self contained module about a group of cultists attempting to reanimate a buried Titan. The adventure takes place within the dungeon-like interior of the magical mecha.

I’m running this using my own system, Brighter Worlds, in part as a playtest. Brighter Worlds (PDF, SRD) is a hack of Cairn, Electric Bastionland, and Macchiato Monsters. Without going into too much detail if you imagine Cairn, but with modular classes and a more whimsical tone you’re most of the way there.

I’ll include the Brighter Worlds conversions I used for the stats at the bottom.

Characters

You may remember most of these characters from their previous adventures in The Fangwitch’s Falls.

Granny Hexwhistle

A Witch on a flying broom with a small frog that sweats hallucinogen as her familiar. Slowly accumulating more arcane power with which to terrorize innocent bystanders. All-around bad person.

Jierdan Havarian

A Grimblade with a giant, floating (and possibly sentient) obsidian zweihander named Lilicore. He’s able to cast spells by hitting people with said sword.

Tibbius Sacrum

A skeletal Bag of Bones who delights in comic relief, pranks, and occasionally flipping the “horror switch” and turning from spoopy to spooky. He is accompanied by an undead skeletal river bear, and an undead fish skeleton he stores in his ribcage.

Pele

A Cleric of Small Gods with a small, divine, volcano headed golem (the God of Magmatic Renewal) riding around on his shoulders. She can change the nature of the world by speaking with her god’s voice.

The Session

Drawn by rumors of local apocalyptic cult activity, the party approach an area where a massive stone figure is visible, partly buried in the ground. Its huge open mouth spews a thick fog, while a lighthouse perches on large stone hand nearby.

My signature post it note "fog of war" ready to go.

 The party decides to visit the lighthouse first, hoping to glean some information on the situation. Inside they find Sable, a pernickety wizard, who holds a deep grudge with the local cult. She worries they will awaken the Titan, which in turn will send her tower tumbling.

GM’s Note: The module does an interesting thing here, where a die is rolled to see how she feels about the cult. The result determines what degree of support, or sabotage, she will offer the party.

She offers them an invisibility spell to help them, with the understanding that they will prevent the Titan from awakening, or at least stop it from destroying her lighthouse.

GM’s Note: I quickly ad-libbed an invisibility spell, which previously had not existed for Brighter Worlds. Thinking it’d be fun to put a twist on what is otherwise, IMHO, a pretty boring spell I added a limitation to it. It made you, and anyone touching you, invisible as long as you held your breath.

Silly me, I’d forgotten that one of my players is playing a skeleton who explicitly doesn’t breathe. Whoops! We decided to roll with it for the duration of the session, but reworked the spell into a more restrictive ritual afterwards.

Tibbius gladly accepts the spell, which he promptly casts, and then spends nearly the rest of the session fully invisible. To extend the abuse clever use of the spell, they take further advantage of Tibbius’ skeletal state by detaching his arms to remain “in contact”, and therefore invisible, even while physically separated.

Thus prepared, and privately planning to reanimate the Titan for their own use, they enter the mouth of the Titan. Inside is an empty, dark room with a ladder descending into further darkness. Down the ladder and through a hallway, they enter a torch-lit circular room. The room is dominated by a magical circle filled with arcane runes, and pierced through with a large silver shaft bursting through the wall at an angle.

Granny Hexwhistle examines the circle for a few moments and is able to discern that it is designed to collect arcane energy, although the damage is diminishing its effectiveness. The party decides to leave through the door labeled with the image of a helmet, and manages to shrug off the poison trap that sprays across the group.

GM’s Note: I usually run very close to the ICI Doctrine where traps and secrets are heavily telegraphed. In this case, however, the players made it clear that they were deliberately taking no precautions and moving quickly, therefore: poison sprayed as they opened the door. Lucky bastards rolled well though, so no lessons were learned.

Through the door is a dark staircase, and halfway down the invisible Tibbius nearly trips over a figure lying injured on the stairs. After some invisible skeleton hijinks, the party becomes acquainted with Taba, an adventurer who had previously been investigating the cult but broke her leg on the stairs and has been stuck. The party helps her splint her leg, although she declines the extremely suspicious blood rituals Granny offered to fully heal it, and shares that she’d learned the cult leader, Gazuk, is deathly afraid of rats. Now mobile, and somewhat put off by the party’s (typical, by this point) unhinged behavior, she exits the Titan and leaves the party to finish their task.

At the bottom of the stairs is a criss-crossing intersection of pipes and conduits, among which two spider automata are drinking a strange fluid leaking from one of the pipes. After the most cursory of attempts at diplomacy, the party smashes the spiders to bits, and Granny Hexwhistle decides to sample the liquid. Of course. She grows a foot taller and declares this a victory.

GM’s Note: Props to the module for including the effect which occurs when someone drinks the fluid. In my experience players will always drink the fluid, no matter what or where it comes from.

Climbing up a ladder, they find a room in which a single cultist stands motionless while wearing a strange, steampunk-esque helmet and goggles which connect to the walls via a number of tubes. Tibbius opens “negotiations” by drop kicking the paralyzed cultist across the room.

The cultist finds himself on the ground, being attacked by a party of apparent lunatics all speaking to an invisible friend. Despite this, he keeps his loyalty to his leader and refuses to divulge any information, at which point the party promptly kills him.

Pele dons the helmet the cultist was wearing and finds herself looking at the sky, and fully immobile until Jierdan frees her.

This is where the obligatory Granny Hexwhistle war crimes begin, although it’s really more Tibbius’ fault this time around. Tibbius has the brilliant plan to reanimate the murdered cultist to act as an infiltrator, but is stymied by the fact that his ability only reanimates the skeleton, the flesh will simply slough off.

Granny comes up with the solution: they will take some spikes (harvested from the witchspawn in Fangwitch’s Falls) and use them to pin the flesh to the skeleton beneath.

Horrifying abomination in tow, they continue their exploration of the Titan’s inner workings. Returning down the ladder, they leave the pipe intersection by following the newest looking pipe until it runs directly into a wall. On close examination the wall looks like it’s been built much more recently than its surroundings. The party collectively decides that this couldn’t possibly be meaningful, promptly ignores it, and continues on their way.

GM’s Note: Guess that secret room will stay secret.

Around the corner the party enters what appears to be the living quarters of the cult. Bunk beds, chests, and the remains of a meal on a large table. Granny, who’s been on the lookout for rats since talking to Taba, manages to snag a rodent who had been picking on the leftovers with use of her Staring Contest spell.

Continuing through the quarters, the party finds the reason the rooms have been mostly deserted thus far, every cultist in the place is gathered together with Gazuk, their leader, in a large chamber containing a huge metallic heart!

GM’s Note: Here’s a place where random chance worked out in a serendipitous way. I’d rolled way more “no encounter” results than I expected, leading to tons of empty rooms. And then in this final room, I rolled the maximum number of cultists that could be there. Everything makes sense!

The party watches as the cult attempts to restart the Titan’s heart through a combination of compressions (by way of a battering ram) and shocks (by way of a lighting bolt spell). Rather than rushing in, the party makes a careful plan which involves Granny spending 10 minutes performing the Summon Swarm ritual to use her captured rat to create a horrible swarm of the things.

Just as the heart is resuscitated and the cult begins to celebrate, the party sends in their reanimated cultist flanked by a swarm of rats to interrupt the festivities. A horrible mess of a fight ensues, with spells, blades, and rats being thrown about, all against a backdrop of the floor moving wildly as the Titan begins to pick itself up.

GM’s Note: This timing was genuinely coincidental, despite how cinematic it turned out.

Outnumbered by the cult, the situation begins to turn against the party until Pele makes a dramatic move. Speaking with the power of her god, she attempts to flash boil the Titan’s blood within the largest artery leading into the heart to destroy it, and hopefully interrupt the revival. This succeeds, but in a way that creates a huge explosion impacting her, along with a number of nearby cultists. Pele is taken down by a face-full of boiling Titan blood, but her sacrifice allows Jierdan to defeat the (mildly panicking) Gazuk with a combo of blade and spell. The loss of their leader breaks the spirit of the remaining cultists, who flee for the exit as the half stood Titan begins to collapse.

The party makes it out alive before things truly fall apart (dragging Pele’s unconscious form with them before she bleeds out), in time to see their “good friend” Sable’s tower smashed to pieces across the ground. They console themselves that this couldn’t possibly be their fault, and make the decision to not go check on her before heading on to more adventures.

Thoughts on the Module

This module was a lot of fun to run, and I was able to do so with very little prep (just jotting down the stat conversions below). There’s lots of opportunity for shenanigans, and I think most groups will jump at the chance to try and take control of a giant fantasy mecha (even if my group entirely forgot their plans to do so in favor of ruining the cult’s day).

I would have had a complaint about the room encounters all turning up empty, leading to a somewhat austere interior, but it ended up working out and honestly that’s not something entirely within the control of a module like this to begin with.

Places where I think things could be improved is that I wish the interior did a bit more to emphasize the feeling of being inside a Titan. Aside from the occasional “lub dub” noise of the heart beating, this mostly felt like a (quite fun) normal dungeon crawl.

Second, this is by no means unique to this module, but I dislike when enemies are tagged as being “fanatically loyal” or “always hostile” because it cuts out so much potential interaction and politics. Obviously this is something I can adjust myself as a GM, but I’d prefer modules were written with more flexibility in mind (see my play report of Lair of the Gobbler for a module that does this really well).

Overall though, neither of those issues actually got in the way of what was a very fun session. I will highly recommend giving this a shot if you need a small crawl on short notice, especially if you’ve already got Knock #3 on your shelf.

Brighter Worlds Conversion

Room Specific Changes

Room 2: Poison Spray deals 1d10 damage and deprives on Critical Damage for 1 day or until treated.

Room 5: Grimoire contains incoherent scrawling about the titan, along with the following spells and rituals:

• Finger Flare - Make finger guns and fire a bright, but harmless, magical flare.
• Augury - Toss bones, draw cards, or otherwise cast lots to immediately divine the outcome of a specific action. There is a 3 in 6 chance of a meaningful answer of weal, woe, or uncertain. If the roll fails it is always uncertain. Increase the chance of a meaningful answer by 1 in 6 for each of: burning an offering, taking 10 minutes, involving a living creature.
• Summon Swarm – [vermin] Kill an insect, rat, or other vermin with your bare hands. Summon a swarm of the sacrificed creature with total mass equal to a cow. You can control the direction the swarm moves in for ten minutes, but afterwards the swarm will act on its own.

Room 6: Lightning deals 1d12 damage.

Room 12: Scroll of Lighting Bolt: Launch a 1d10 damage electrical bolt that impairs the next Save or Attack the target makes on Critical Damage.

Bestiary

Spider Automaton

3 Grit, 1 Armor, d6/d6/d6, Bite (d6)

• Automata: Unharmed by gas, fire, and mind altering spells.
• Abilities
  1. Nothing
  2. Nothing
  3. Flaming Blood: Deal 1d8 damage to attacker upon recieving Critical Damage (DEX Save to avoid).
  4. Rush: Move at four times speed. +1 Armor while doing so.
  5. Acid Spray: 1d6, damages equipment on Direct Damage, take 1d6 damage next round on Critical Damage.
  6. Web: Spit nylon web (1d6 blast, damage to DEX, trapped on Critical Damage)

Cultist

3 Grit, d6/d6/d6, Quarterstaff or Crossbow (d6)

• Fanatical: Cannot be persuaded, intimidated, or charmed.
• Rarely make Morale Saves, enhanced when they do.

Gazuk

5 Grit, 1 Armor, d8/d6/d8, Mace (d8)

• Grimoire Contains:
  • Freezing Missile – Fire a d8 magical dart, Critical Damage freezes the target in place for a turn. Concentrate to hold them longer, they can break out by beating you in a STR vs WIL Save.
  • Cause Fear – Force Morale Saves for NPCs. PCs make a WIL Save or are impaired on any aggressive actions until the next round.
  • Silence – Anyone attempting to cast a spell in your presence must beat you in a WIL Save.
  • Lightning Bolt – Launch a 1d10 damage electrical bolt that impairs the next Save or Attack the target makes on Critical Damage.

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