Adventure #2 - Ghost in a Bottle (Eye of Abendego)

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Mission Outline
Legend has it that Ragadahn the Water Lord created spirit jars to bind the souls of his three-headed daughter to the Trident Vault. The Pathfinder Society wishes to obtain one of these jars for study. Arcane astronomers have determined the vault will appear in six weeks on the first day of summer near the Eye of Abendego (hurricane). Star dust will fall from the skies at dusk to reveal its location, and when the moon hangs overhead at midnight, the vault will be pulled into this world and remain until sunrise. A sailing ship has been hired to take a team of field agents into the open sea for this mission.

Mission Objectives
1. Sail to the Eye of Abendego.
2. Locate the Trident Vault.
3. Recover a spirit jar.

Mission Background
The oldest fantastical myths and dark fairy tales are thought by some scholars to reference the ancient First World. This vibrant, teeming with life, rough draft of existence came into being long before the laws of nature were defined. It is thought to be the birthplace of the mysterious fey, dreaded linnorms (primeval dragons), curious gnomes, and far stranger creatures. The most powerful entities in this realm are known by many names and collectively referred to as The Eldest.

Ragadahn the Water Lord is the Great Spiral, Serpent King, and Cruel Father. One of his many children was an invisible, three-headed linnorm named Tryphex. She was a master of thievery with an insatiable appetite, and eventually, set her eyes to treasures beyond the First World. She took to the stars to claim one for herself and devoured the first one she reached. This forever altered the night sky and led astray those who used the stars for navigation. The goddess Desna was furious and hunted down the thief. Tryphex retreated to the sea for safety, but Ragadahn saw her getting caught as failure and offered only partial protection. He prevented Desna from entering his realm but did not stop one of her starknives from cutting through the water. The deadly throw sunk deep into Tryphex's belly. Ragadahn was disappointed in his daughter but would not let one of his children go completely to waste or return what she had taken. He turned Tryphex into a vault and sealed her three souls inside to guard the stolen treasures. However, Desna does not forget slights and her thousands of eyes in the night sky search tirelessly for the invisible vault. Ragadahn moves it constantly, but Desna is vigilant and uses the stars to reveal its location whenever she finds it.

The Trident Vault is thought to be hidden between worlds, but when the stars align just right every few centuries, it is pulled onto Golarion for a single night. The vault is thought to be guarded by the souls of Tryphex as well as those of trespassers who are killed or fail to escape before the vault slips between the planes again. Most scholars believe that master thieves delve inside only to steal ancient treasures, but some say such thieves enter to hide their own plunder.

The Eye of Abendego is an unending hurricane the size of some nations. In fact, the nations of Lirgen and Yamasa were flooded almost in entirety when the storm formed shortly after the death of Aroden. What remains of these nations is a ruined marshy region to the east called The Sodden Lands. The hurricane also provides cover to the notorious network of pirate lords who rule an assortment of islands and stormy stretch of coast known as The Shackles in the south. The godless nation of Rahadoum is to the north, and Mediogalti Island -home of the Red Mantis assassin guild- hugs the northwest corner of the storm.

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Swim

Check: Make a Swim check once per round while you are in the water. Success means you may swim at up to half your speed (as a full-round action) or at a quarter of your speed (as a move action). If you fail by 4 or less, you make no progress. If you fail by 5 or more, you go underwater.

If you are underwater, either because you failed a Swim check or because you are swimming underwater intentionally, you must hold your breath. You can hold your breath for a number of rounds equal to twice your Constitution score, but only if you do nothing other than take move actions or free actions. If you take a standard action or a full-round action (such as making an attack), the remainder of the duration for which you can hold your breath is reduced by 1 round. (Effectively, a character in combat can hold his breath only half as long as normal.) After that period of time, you must make a DC 10 Constitution check every round to continue holding your breath. Each round, the DC for that check increases by 1. If you fail the Constitution check, you begin to drown. The DC for the Swim check depends on the water:
Calm water 10
Rough water 15
Stormy water 20*

* You can't take 10 on a Swim check in stormy water, even if you aren't otherwise being threatened or distracted.

Each hour that you swim, you must make a DC 20 Swim check or take 1d6 points of nonlethal damage from fatigue.

Action: A successful Swim check allows you to swim a quarter of your speed as a move action or half your speed as a full-round action.

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Water Dangers
Very deep water is not only generally pitch black, posing a navigational hazard, but worse, deals water pressure damage of 1d6 points per minute for every 100 feet the character is below the surface. A successful Fortitude save (DC 15, +1 for each previous check) means the diver takes no damage in that minute. Very cold water deals 1d6 points of nonlethal damage from hypothermia per minute of exposure.


Drowning
Any character can hold her breath for a number of rounds equal to twice her Constitution score. If a character takes a standard or full-round action, the remaining duration that the character can hold her breath is reduced by 1 round. After this period of time, the character must make a DC 10 Constitution check every round in order to continue holding her breath. Each round, the DC increases by 1.

When the character finally fails her Constitution check, she begins to drown. In the first round, she falls unconscious (0 hp). In the following round, she drops to –1 hit points and is dying. In the third round, she drowns.

Unconscious characters must begin making Constitution checks immediately upon being submerged (or upon becoming unconscious if the character was conscious when submerged). Once she fails one of these checks, she immediately drops to –1 (or loses 1 additional hit point, if her total is below –1). On the following round, she drowns.


Aquatic Terrain
Aquatic terrain is the least hospitable to most PCs, because they can't breathe there. Aquatic terrain doesn't offer the variety that land terrain does. The ocean floor holds many marvels, including undersea analogues of any of the terrain elements described earlier in this section, but if characters find themselves in the water because they were bull rushed off the deck of a pirate ship, the tall kelp beds hundreds of feet below them don't matter.

Non-Flowing Water: Lakes and oceans simply require a swim speed or successful Swim checks to move through (DC 10 in calm water, DC 15 in rough water, DC 20 in stormy water). Characters need a way to breathe if they're underwater; failing that, they risk drowning. When underwater, characters can move in any direction.

Stealth and Detection Underwater: How far you can see underwater depends on the water's clarity. As a guideline, creatures can see 4d8 × 10 feet if the water is clear, and 1d8 × 10 feet if it's murky. Moving water is always murky, unless it's in a particularly large, slow-moving river.

It's hard to find cover or concealment to hide underwater (except along the sea floor).

Invisibility: An invisible creature displaces water and leaves a visible, body-shaped “bubble” where the water was displaced. The creature still has concealment (20% miss chance), but not total concealment (50% miss chance).


Underwater Combat
Land-based creatures can have considerable difficulty when fighting in water. Water affects a creature's attack rolls, damage, and movement. In some cases a creature's opponents might get a bonus on attacks. The effects are summarized on Table: Combat Adjustments Underwater. They apply whenever a character is swimming, walking in chest-deep water, or walking along the bottom of a body of water.

Ranged Attacks Underwater: Thrown weapons are ineffective underwater, even when launched from land. Attacks with other ranged weapons take a –2 penalty on attack rolls for every 5 feet of water they pass through, in addition to the normal penalties for range.

Attacks from Land: Characters swimming, floating, or treading water on the surface, or wading in water at least chest deep, have improved cover (+8 bonus to AC, +4 bonus on Reflex saves) from opponents on land. Land-bound opponents who have freedom of movement effects ignore this cover when making melee attacks against targets in the water. A completely submerged creature has total cover against opponents on land unless those opponents have freedom of movement effects. Magical effects are unaffected except for those that require attack rolls (which are treated like any other effects) and fire effects.

Fire: Nonmagical fire (including alchemist's fire) does not burn underwater. Spells or spell-like effects with the fire descriptor are ineffective underwater unless the caster makes a caster level check (DC 20 + spell level). If the check succeeds, the spell creates a bubble of steam instead of its usual fiery effect, but otherwise the spell works as described. A supernatural fire effect is ineffective underwater unless its description states otherwise. The surface of a body of water blocks line of effect for any fire spell. If the caster has made the caster level check to make the fire spell usable underwater, the surface still blocks the spell's line of effect.

Spellcasting Underwater: Casting spells while submerged can be difficult for those who cannot breathe underwater. A creature that cannot breathe water must make a concentration check (DC 15 + spell level) to cast a spell underwater (this is in addition to the caster level check to successfully cast a fire spell underwater). Creatures that can breathe water are unaffected and can cast spells normally. Some spells might function differently underwater, subject to GM discretion.

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Items that may be useful for an ocean adventure:

Darkwood armor & shields have an armor check penalty that is 2 less than normal and is relatively affordable. Mithral armor & shields have an armor check penalty that is 3 less than normal, though, all you can afford at this point is a shield or light armor, so darkwood is the better option for shields (if you don't mind a wooden one) because it gets you the same result for much cheaper.

Everburning torch (110 gp) - magic flame that functions when wet.

Sunrod (2 gp) - alchemical light that functions when wet (6 hours).

Elixir of swimming (250 gp) provides +10 competence bonus on Swim checks for 1 hour.

Potion of water breathing (750 gp, CL 5) provides 10 hours of water breathing to the drinker.

Scroll of water breathing (375 gp, CL 5 - cleric or sor/wiz) provides 10 hours of water breathing that can be divided evenly among multiple creatures (2.5 hours each among a party of 4)

Scroll of freedom of movement (700 gp, CL 7 - cleric) provides 70 minutes of normal movement and attack underwater to one creature touched.

Wooden Armor (20 gp) provides +3 AC, +3 Max Dex Bonus, -1 armor check penalty (but 0 for Swim), 15% arcane spell failure,25 lb

[reefwood]

[OOC: This adventure may have some things that aren't obvious or may be tricky to figure out, which is the intent, so sometimes you may ask for clarification about something you don't understand, and the answer will be "You don't know," but you may be able to figure it out by trial and error. Emphasis on the error

Also, Knowledges can be good for characters figuring out things that players can't.

Another option for this adventure will be hero points. You will be able to spend 1 hero point to gain a clue, or 2 hero points to gain an answer. This won't ever defeat a challenge for you, but it will provide you a clue or answer on how to do it.

Finally, this session will have an estimated stop time of 9pm. Not sure yet if this will be a hard stop, or just when we need to start winding down the final combat or roleplay scene. There will be an option for a second session during the week of March 17-22, and we can check in at the end of the first session to if that's even feasible.]

[reefwood]

[OOC: I realized that there isn't really much of a post-game report to present since you completed the main part of the adventure. Although, if people have questions, I'd be happy to anything that doesn't give too much away. Here are some misc thoughts...

As I mentioned at the end of the session, part of the puzzle / challenge was realizing that completing the entire dungeon was beyond your capability.  Doing that was too much for 6th-level characters, but it was never the mission.  You just needed 1 spirit jar.

The handout about Tryphex was initially presented in its original language (even though there was a translation too) as a clue that being able to read this language could be useful. It worked out nicely that half the party could read it, but if no one could, I was hoping someone would realize it might be helpful to have a way to read this language and perhaps do something like purchase a scroll of comprehend languages. Or alternatively, if someone had Linguistics, having the original copy and a translated copy for comparison would provide a +2 circumstance bonus to translate other texts in this language.

As for the story in the handout, it was designed to be obviously about Tryphex and also provide clues that electricity, fire, and cold might be involved, so that someone realize that having these kind of energies, or resistance to them, could be useful.

A couple things that never came up at the main gate were that: 1) Each of the locks resets after 3 rounds unless they are all open, so all three locks had to be opened within 3 rounds of each other, but you did that, so the reset never happened, and 2) The water pressure would have started to damage everyone after one minute, so it's good you started working on it right away.

One thing that was interesting and a bit funny to see was the reaction to the crew members encountered in the vault. I thought players would assume that something bad happened to the ship (i.e. destroyed by the typhoon and drowned crew turned into undead), but instead, most people seemed to think they had intentionally lured you into a trap.

The first set of 3 colored spirals that opened the one black door would have been best to work on all that the same time, but the second set would have been bad - you would not have wanted all 3 spiral/energy doors to open at once. I hadn't even thought of that possibility - in part because I figured you wouldn't even have the capability to open more than 1 - so I'm glad one energy source (fire elementals) worked a lot faster than the other (ray of frost)!]

[reefwood]

Just a little timeline note for myself:

Depart from the Eye of Abendego on Starday, Sarenith 21 (June).
Arrive in Absalom on Moonday, Arodus 4 (August).

Adventure begins 3 months later at the start of Neth (November).