Background: Three players and an NPC Locathah cleric have been hired by a man named Erik representing the village of Torlynn to brave a ruined keep and break a curse of ice and snow.

Underway: This is a nice little vermin filled dungeon crawl from the Summer of 2001. Initially, the party had to deal with dug-in orc raiders and then a bone golen (which I added in on my own), but after braving those encounters with gusto, they expended too many spells slots and hit points to safely explore the ruins. They went through them regardless and it cost them more hit points as they cleared the upper level and ending the session (the webbirds were a pain for them, but they made level 4). Unfortunately, real life struck next session and no one had prepped for the next level and of course, and the one player that did prep before the game wanted to short rest. Sadly, they picked poor and cramped areas to camp and encountered wandering creatures. Since they had ended all of the tougher creatures in the temple, against my better judgement and sent all the lower level creatures to the bedroom of the high priestess and to get it over with because they were noisy as all hell. At the end of the actual level, I added in some bad guys from the 1st module who did manage to kill the party minotaur barbarian.

Postmortem: When I first read this, I was drawn the chance that a caster would get a Pseudodragon as a familiar, but after seeing the large variety of creatures including some the more seasoned players have never encountered before sold me.

Cartilage: After succeeding in clearing the keep, the party recieved a treasure map from the freed elves which they decided to follow.

Keywords: Aberrations, plants, monstrosities, humanoids, undead npc.