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It may be said that I fear too much. Surely, considering the state we stand in, I think it less danger to fear too much than too little.

—Sir Francis Walsingham

INTRODUCTION

The world is a dangerous place—especially when you’re up to no good.

But even a person of unblemished character and sterling repute may make enemies, especially among those of more blemished character and more tarnished repute. Perhaps your deeds have intruded on someone else’s interests, or soon will, and they’ve resolved to stop you. Perhaps the wealth you’ve amassed is becoming an irresistible temptation to larcenous minds. Perhaps you’re making discoveries that others would prefer to keep under wraps—or would appropriate for purposes of their own.

Whether you’re a rampaging monster, a renowned hero, a despised tyrant, an ambitious schemer, a paranoid recluse, or the current possessor of the Golden MacGuffin, someone’s going to come at you. Probably more than one someone. You need to be ready.

You need a lair.

When you’re writing your own adventure material for a tabletop roleplaying game from scratch, you have all kinds of freedom. You decide what environments the player characters will travel through. You decide what villains they’ll fight, what those villains’ plans are, and what kind of minions those villains will have. You decide what kind of help and hindrances the PCs will encounter along the way. And here’s a point of underrated importance: You draw the maps.

If you’re throwing your PCs and monsters at each other in a plain, rectangular room, or designing your dungeons as an essentially (or literally) random maze, you’re missing all kinds of opportunities to add flavor, challenge, complexity, and narrative. Designing a well-defended stronghold gives you opportunities to show off how your antagonists think and what they consider important.

In The Monsters Know What They’re Doing: Combat Tactics for Dungeon Masters and MOAR! Monsters Know What They’re Doing, I break down the stat blocks of fifth edition Dungeons & Dragons monsters to determine their unique tactics and styles of fighting so that every combat encounter with a different monster or villain is a distinct experience. In this book, I discuss how to create the environments in which those combat encounters take place so that they feel as real and alive as the monsters and villains do. Outfighting the enemy is no longer enough: PCs will have to outthink the enemy as well. Pushing your players to consider how to solve problems without running at them head-on, weapons swinging and fireballs blasting, is as much a gift to them as it is an obstacle, because some of the best gaming memories are born from the cunning plans that come together to produce success against the odds—and from the ones that go riotously sideways.

Having a lair is all about establishing surroundings that give you every available edge over those who want to kill you and take your stuff. For example, in The Monsters Know What They’re Doing, I make three observations that are essential to understanding how kobolds fight: First, by necessity, they fight in darkness or underground, not under broad daylight. Second, they’re small and weak yet instinctively coordinated, so they seek strength in numbers. Third, they make use of traps. The D&D sourcebook Volo’s Guide to Monsters, in a delightful section on kobold lairs, sensibly depicts a kobold lair as an anthill of twisty subterranean passages, full of traps and choke points, in which larger creatures will get lost, stuck, or both. It’s customized to maximize kobolds’ comparative advantage over their likely foes. The foes are big, and kobolds are small; therefore, the passages are small. The foes may not be able to see in the dark, and the kobolds can; therefore, the passages are unlit. The terrain is familiar to the kobolds, unfamiliar to their foes; therefore, the passages are full of traps to punish the unwary and ignorant.

Designing defensible space is both art and science, with more than two millennia of recorded experimentation to draw from. The ideas behind today’s best security practices date back to the building of the earliest ringworks. Introducing fantasy elements to your game setting doesn’t invalidate those ideas. Just the opposite: It presents new options and new challenges, to both the defender and the attacker. Overlook the fundamentals of security planning, and your villains will get rolled. Pile on an implausible, unsustainable number of defenses, however, and the game’s not fun anymore. It’s a delicate balance: A defended area has to be locked down tightly enough to repel any reasonable number of ordinary invaders, but extraordinary invaders, such as a group of PC adventurers, have to be able to make their way in somehow.

Building the perfect lair begins with the unglamorous step of a behind-the-scenes security assessment. As the Dungeon Master, ask yourself what your monsters and nonplayer characters need to protect, whom or what they need to protect it from, and what resources they have to protect it with. From there, move on to their unique methods of detecting, deterring, and responding to external threats. Decide how they might employ spies, concealment, and traps, if at all, and how many layers deep their defenses can be. Determine what climate and terrain features they can use to their advantage. Populate the lair’s environs with dangerous creatures, both loyal minions and opportunistic predators present for reasons of their own that have nothing to do with the defense of the lair but add interest to the experience of getting there. If your antagonists employ a guard force, decide how large it will be and how to deploy it. Figure out how much magical protection they’ll have access to, based on the prevalence of magic in your setting. Draw up a battle plan that the defenders will follow. Decide whether they’ll take prisoners and what they’ll do with them.

Then, finally, draw the map. You’ll find you’re thinking about it very differently than you did back when you were rolling dice to generate dungeon layouts randomly.

Like my previous books, this one discusses fifth edition D&D at length, although you’ll still need the core books to play the game. Unlike my previous books, this one contains an abundance of information that applies regardless of which tabletop roleplaying game system you’re using, so players of games other than D&D can find plenty to use in it. The sample lairs draw from D&D lore and are presented using D&D rules, but they’re intended as illustrations first, playable scenarios second. They’re there to inspire you and get you thinking, regardless of whether your level of familiarity with D&D is exhaustive or nonexistent. Take what you like from them and run wild.

Throughout this work, in the interest of brevity, I refer to the expansion books Volo’s Guide to Monsters, Mordenkainen’s Tome of Foes, Xanathar’s Guide to Everything, and Tasha’s Cauldron of Everything as Volo’s, Mordenkainen’s, Xanathar’s, and Tasha’s, respectively. (These short forms are more pleasing to my eye than the alphabet-soup abbreviations often used online.) To distinguish it from Mordenkainen’s Tome of Foes, I refer to Mordenkainen Presents Monsters of the Multiverse simply as Monsters of the Multiverse. All stat blocks from Volo’s and Mordenkainen’s cited here also appear in Monsters of the Multiverse.

When citing these books, as well as the Dungeon Master’s Guide and the Player’s Handbook, I refer to chapters and sections, rather than page numbers, because page numbers can change from printing to printing. Finally, in certain places, I use an (X) or a (T) to indicate that a spell or magic item not included in the D&D basic rules is found in Xanathar’s or Tasha’s.

CHAPTER 1

PRINCIPLES OF DEFENSE

So you’ve decided to build yourself a lair.

The good news is that defense is easier, cheaper, and less inherently risky than offense. If you play your cards right, you enjoy a number of advantages: freedom of movement within your own territory, detailed knowledge of the location, the ability to set up defenses however and wherever you wish, and at least as much time to prepare as your would-be attacker, if not significantly more.

The bad news is that nothing is unlimited, least of all cost, time, and your own intelligence. No matter how much circumstances favor you, you still have to work within constraints. One of these constraints is the impossibility of protecting yourself against every threat. You have to play the odds.

The typical Dungeon Master is accustomed to drawing a map, populating it with creatures, and lastly deciding what treasure to place in each location. Instead, I’m going to suggest that you start by thinking about the things you intend your lair to protect—treasure, yes, but other assets as well. Next, figure out how much help you’ll have protecting it. Then, and only then, draw your map. Because when it comes to planning effective security arrangements, you have to know what assets you’re trying to protect, and you have to know which of those assets are most important.

Designing a lair (or other defended location) is an exercise in risk management. You can’t eliminate all risk. What you can do is identify particular risks, determine the relative significance of those risks, and thereby decide where to focus your defensive efforts. The more critical, sensitive, or vulnerable an asset—that is, someone or something you’re trying to protect—the more it should figure into your security strategy. If you have more resources, you can prepare for more contingencies. If you have fewer resources, you have to focus on what’s most important and be willing to let other things go, or at least leave the responsibility of protecting them up to others.

As an illustration, in the movie Seven Samurai, a group of vagrant samurai takes on the job of defending a farming village against bandits who raid it after each year’s harvest. The local terrain works in their favor, with one exception: Three houses and a mill lie outside the village proper, on open land across a creek. The creek is a natural moat that can be improved further with a palisade fence. Beyond the creek, however, the samurai have no such advantage. The land is flat and open, with no cover for the defenders, a circumstance that favors the mounted, fast-moving bandits. To the samurai, the conclusion is obvious: The outlying houses and the mill must be evacuated and abandoned. They’re not worth the effort of defending them. While they’re highly vulnerable, they’re not critical—not compared with the village proper, the collected harvest, or the villagers’ lives.

ASSETS

Assets generally fall into three categories: physical assets, information, and people. You can think of these as “the Three Ls”: loot, lore, and lives.

You may not assign equal value to all the loot in your lair, or all the lore—or, bluntly, all the lives. Also, not everything you’re trying to protect necessarily possesses the same kind of value. How do you determine what’s most critical when it’s not intuitively obvious?

Here’s one method, which I use elsewhere in this book: To begin with, make a list of all your assets. Next, rate the value of each one according to six measures: intrinsic, monetary, economic, operational, regulatory, and intangible. Common practice is to use a scale from 1 (negligible) to 5 (vital), but in this book I use a scale that runs from 0 to 4 instead. These ratings are qualitative and relative; they don’t have to be perfectly quantified. Total these six ratings up to determine an asset’s overall value.

Intrinsic value needs no justification: A thing with intrinsic value is valuable simply because it exists. Loot is generally considered to have no intrinsic value (except by dragons, which have a wholly different perspective on the matter—see sidebar, page 11). Scholars, sages, spies, and members of esoteric societies view lore as having intrinsic value, but most other creatures don’t. Life, on the other hand, is the quintessential example of something that’s considered intrinsically valuable even though it may not possess any other kind of value.

That being said, your alignment may influence your estimation of this value. Good creatures, generally speaking, consider lives to have equal intrinsic value. Neutral creatures agree that lives are intrinsically valuable, but they tend to assess this value unequally, based on relative status and social proximity. Evil creatures may or may not agree that life has intrinsic value at all; some may consider only certain lives to have intrinsic value, and not others. Unaligned creatures assign intrinsic value to lives within their own social units, but not outside them.

Monetary value is a straightforward measure of how much money something can be sold for or how much it costs to replace. Creatures that don’t use currency for trade don’t assign monetary value to anything.

Economic value is a cousin of monetary value, with a couple of key differences: First, it doesn’t depend on currency. Even in a society that doesn’t use money, something might still be tradable for goods, services, or knowledge. Second, it can refer to how much wealth something has the potential to generate over the long term—a future monetary value greater than the present monetary value. A productive mine, for instance, is worth more than the land it occupies. Creatures that don’t engage in trade at all and don’t make investments for future benefit don’t assign economic value.

Operational value refers to how necessary something is to whatever activity you’re engaged in. Guards need weapons. Musicians need instruments. Artisans (and thieves) need tools. Scribes need paper and ink. Alchemists need reagents and laboratory equipment. These things have a special kind of value to those who use them; to others, it’s likely that their only value is monetary. However, lives can have operational value as well—the lives of workers, for instance, have operational value to their employer—without detracting from the intrinsic value they also possess. Creatures that engage in no activity beyond surviving don’t assign operational value.

Regulatory value depends on the existence of a legal system; it measures how necessary something is to compliance with the law. Feudal vassals, for instance, are required to keep records of their lands’ agricultural output to show to their lieges. Guilds keep charters that document their right to local monopolies on their crafts. Providers of certain services may need to hold licenses to practice. Creatures that don’t exist within systems of law don’t assign regulatory value.

Intangible value, in the case of loot, typically reflects sentimental attachment. Your collection of sad-eyed kitten figurines has no intrinsic, monetary, economic, operational, or regulatory value, but it may be so precious to you that you consider it worth defending nonetheless. Certain antique items may also have intangible value, because they hark back to a significant era in history or were once owned by an exceptionally distinguished personage.

In the case of lore, intangible value most often reflects the benefit of keeping information under wraps. You may possess specialized knowledge—a unique pottery firing technique, the forms of a powerful fighting style, a spell formula, a blend of herbs and spices—that elevates your reputation as a practitioner in your field. If it exists in written form, it becomes a sensitive asset that you wouldn’t want to fall into anyone else’s hands. You may also possess secret correspondence whose contents would tarnish your name or taint your relationships, or those of others, if someone else got their mitts on it—blackmail material, in other words. Alternatively, the intangible value of lore may lie in its significance to you, as in the case of a chronicle of your family’s history or a journal of meditations by someone you admire.

In the case of lives, intangible value reflects special, irreplaceable relationships. All lives may have equal intrinsic value, but your children’s lives have intangible value above and beyond that to you. Even creatures with minimal sentience may assign intangible value to things, as anyone who’s seen a dog carry around a favorite stick can attest.

Finally, in most instances, the value of any asset that can’t be neatly categorized under any of the Three Ls—such as privacy, authority, or psychological equilibrium—is primarily intangible.

Of course, what an asset is worth to you isn’t necessarily what it’s worth to someone else. Chances are, a group of adventurers isn’t going to come after your sad-eyed kitten figurine collection, but they may be very keen to divest you of some loot or lore on which they place high monetary or operational value. Therefore, when you’re assessing what kinds of threats you need to protect against, you have to be able to look at the situation through your enemy’s eyes. Even as you prioritize your security arrangements according to the values you place on your assets, how much time and money you subsequently decide to spend on protecting them should be, in large part, a function of how badly other people want them, lest you overspend on protecting something you’re not really at risk of losing—or underspend on protecting something whose value to others you’ve underestimated. A security arrangement that considers only the point of view of the owner of the lair is flawed and weak.

Once you’ve totaled up the overall value of all your assets, arrange them in descending order. Then, for each asset, starting with the one that’s most valuable and working your way down until you run out of resources, ask yourself these questions:

- Whom or what am I protecting it against? Rivals, looters, hired thieves, enemy kingdoms, opposing factions, parties of adventurer-heroes? (PCs aren’t the only threat; sometimes they aren’t even the threat you have the most reason to worry about.)

- How vulnerable is it? Can it be kept under lock and key, or does it need to stay out in the open for some reason?

- Will there be times or situations when it’s more vulnerable than it is now? Does it need to be taken out on a certain schedule? Will it ever need to be transported someplace else? Have my activities drawn extraordinary scrutiny lately?

- What happens if I lose it? Would that be an “oh, well” situation, or would it disrupt my activities significantly? Is it something too dangerous to allow out of my own hands? Would it cause a scandal? Do I still owe money on it? Would I grieve the loss?

- How thoroughly do I want to protect it? What arrangements are appropriate? What are my limits?

In most cases, you’ll want to place the strongest protections on the assets you value most highly, but not always. Sometimes the desirability of a particular item to thieves will warrant stronger protections; sometimes an item may be worth a great deal to you but not so much to anyone else, in which case you can devote fewer resources to its defense, leaving you more to apply elsewhere. For each adversary you identify, consider how that adversary is likely to come after your assets. Will visible security measures deter them—or encourage them? Are they most likely to come at you head-on, blockade you, try to break in or sneak in, or gain assistance from a disloyal insider? What can they learn about your defenses by spying on you? The more you can accurately predict, the better off you are.

Because of how we assess different kinds of value, we might place a total value on a material object or an item of lore higher than we place on our own lives. Does that mean we’ll die to protect it? Sometimes, but not always. Nor does it necessarily mean we care about that asset more than we care about our survival. What it does mean is that we’ll go to greater lengths, and incur greater expense, to protect that loot or lore than we will to protect ourselves alone. (Suppose, for example, that you own a $150,000 diamond necklace. You might decide that protecting it requires you to spend $1,250 to install a wall safe—even if you don’t spend any money at all on protecting yourself.) When push comes to shove, we’ll still try to save our own skins, but maybe we’ll take our most precious loot or lore with us when we flee, or maybe we’ll leave it locked away or defended by mundane or magical barriers or traps. The point is, we try to ensure that it’s still protected even if we can’t risk our own necks to protect it.

The Affinity is a criminal organization in the town of Granwick. Its members are mostly thieves, but some also engage in smuggling, extortion, or usury. Its assets include:

- Ready money, which it uses for operations. This cash has significant monetary (4), economic (2), and operational (4) value. Its value in other respects is negligible (0). Total value: 10.

- A stash of stolen goods ranging widely in bulk and value. Most of these goods have negligible value in every respect except monetary. Their monetary value varies, and they can be divided into two categories, ordinary stuff (1) and valuables (3—they would be 4, but the Affinity tries to fence them quickly, keeping as few of them as possible on the premises). An exception is a cache of gems (4), which also have some modest operational (2) and intangible value (2), since they’re pretty and also useful for bribing officials with. Total value: common loot, 1; valuables, 3; gems, 8.

- A few magic items: an eversmoking bottle, gloves of thievery, and a hat of disguise. These items relate directly to the Affinity’s activities and therefore have operational (2) and intangible (3) value in addition to their monetary value (3). Total value: 8.

- An equipment supply comprising various pieces of leather armor, hooded cloaks, weapons, and pouches of thieves’ tools, plus a ledger tracking members’ tabs, which they must repay out of their takings. The equipment supply has monetary value (2), but only in the sense that if it were lost, it would need to be replaced; the Affinity isn’t going to sell it. It also has operational value, especially the thieves’ tools. It’s not essential, but it’s handy. More important, the Affinity recognizes that some of its own members might abscond with that equipment if they could get away with it. Therefore, it gets assigned a slightly higher operational value (3), reflecting its value in the eyes of those members more than its value to the organization itself. The armory ledger’s value is economic (2) and operational (2). Total value: equipment supply, 5; armory ledger, 4.

- Enciphered records of businesses that are paying the thieves’ guild for protection, payments made to individuals within or associated with the guild, and payoffs to local officials and city guards. The value of these records is economic (4) and operational (4). The record of bribes has regulatory (4) and intangible (4) value as well, since these payoffs are what allow the Affinity to conduct its activities with impunity. Total value: protection and payment records, 7; payoff records, 16.

- The floor plan of a noble’s mansion, with the locations of valuables marked. Its value is operational (2), economic (2), and intangible (2): It’s the reason why the noble is now paying the Affinity for protection. Total value: 6.

- An intercepted letter of introduction, along with a crate containing five intricately tooled orbs made out of a highly polished, reddish-gold metal. Until recently, the letter and the crate were hard to assess, because the Affinity wasn’t certain of the orbs’ function or purpose. Now it knows: They’re essentially magical grenades. As such, both the letter and the crate have tremendous monetary (4) and intangible (4) value, with some potential economic (2) value as well. The orbs have some operational value to the Affinity, but other parties could do all sorts of things with them; therefore, they’re assigned an operational value of 4 rather than 2. Total value: orbs, 14; letter, 10.

- The members themselves. While the Affinity values its members’ lives, it values the life of its feared and respected chief, Kruno Skriven, most of all, and his lieutenants’ lives behind his. Thus, Kruno’s life is assigned intrinsic value (4), intangible value (4), and even regulatory value (4), because his reputation keeps the law at bay; the lives of his lieutenants, intrinsic value (3), intangible value (2), and operational value (3), since they’re experts who train others in their skills; and the lives of other Affinity members, intrinsic value (2) and operational value (1). Total value: Kruno, 12; lieutenants, 8; other members, 3.

Largely, the Affinity must protect these things against rival criminal organizations, which might stage a raid if they discovered a vulnerability. Such a raid probably wouldn’t occur unless the rival group managed to infiltrate the Affinity. However, other crooks aren’t the only ones who might take an interest in what the Affinity’s got. If the town guard happened to be taken over by a more straitlaced commander with a dim view of corruption in the ranks, he might employ someone to fetch those records of payoffs for him so that he could clean house. Also, in order to determine the function of the orbs, an Affinity loan shark gave one to a lackey to test out on the Blind Squirrel, a tavern whose proprietor was behind on his payments. The resulting explosion attracted much more attention than the Affinity generally prefers, and there’s a good chance that someone may come sniffing around. Thus, all the Affinity’s assets are more vulnerable now than they have been in the past or will be once things have settled down. Finally, the Affinity is an organization of thieves, and thieves are generally understood to be people who steal things. Measures must be taken to keep them from stealing from the organization itself.

If the Affinity lost the enciphered records of payoffs, its entire existence would be threatened. Therefore, they must be safeguarded as thoroughly as possible. Even if his own life is in danger, Kruno will make sure those records remain in the Affinity’s hands. If he has to flee the group’s base to survive, he’ll take them with him. Likewise, among those who know, Kruno’s name is almost synonymous with the Affinity; without him in control, its enemies (and victims) would be much bolder. Special care must therefore be taken to safeguard his life in the event of an attack, even at the cost of the organization’s other assets. Losing the orbs would be disappointing, but losing the orbs to a rival group would be deadly. The same is true of the intercepted letter; however, its lower value means it can be traded off (to the right people, of course) in order to protect Kruno, the orbs, or the payoff records, whereas the orbs themselves must be absolutely secure. Losing the ready cash or the gems would be a heavy blow to the Affinity, but probably not a fatal one—unless the protection records were lost at the same time. If it became known that the Affinity no longer had records of those payments, resistance might arise, severely disrupting the organization’s cash flow. Accordingly, reasonable and practical precautions are taken to protect these assets, but exceptional precautions are probably unnecessary. All the Affinity’s other assets, including its members, are replaceable. Protecting them can be left in the hands of the members themselves.

WHAT CREATURES VALUE

Creatures come in many different types, each with its own perspective on loot, lore, and life. Consequently, each type values these three asset categories differently.

A beast, ooze, or plant creature is generally concerned only with its own life, along with the lives of any offspring a beast is rearing. Beasts that live in social groups value the lives of other members of those groups; there may even exist social oozes that value the survival of their colonies, or awakened plants that value the preservation of their forests or fields. Still, even the most intelligent of these creature types generally don’t value material loot or lore as assets at all. A bird may instinctively gather shiny objects, but it’s not going to defend them. Only if they attach some meaning to a particular object will they treat it as an asset worth protecting.

Monstrosities may occasionally care about loot, and a small handful (notably sphinxes) may hoard lore, but generally, their lives are their foremost consideration.

Dragons are keenly interested in preserving their loot, on par with their lives. Craftier ones, such as green, bronze, and silver dragons, may hoard lore they want to keep to themselves as well.

Giants value their loot and their lives, but only cloud and storm giants tend to care about lore enough to place it under guard.

Most undead are too far gone to try to defend anything except, perhaps, the physical assets of a particular place. However, the exceptions—mummy lords, vampires, liches—are loath to part with anything they possess, and they’ll defend it all.

Celestials, fiends, and fey, by and large, are indifferent to mundane loot but highly sensitive to transgression on places that are important to them, and they take the guarding of secrets very, very seriously. They value others’ lives to the extent that their alignments imply.

Aberrations’ interest in loot is idiosyncratic, but they protect information jealously. They value their own lives consistently and the lives of others inconsistently, although if they’re part of a hive culture, they act to protect the existence of the colony first and foremost.

Constructs defend whomever and whatever they’re ordered to defend. Protecting themselves comes second.

The only elementals that are likely to establish lairs are genies, and they closefistedly guard everything they’ve got—loot, lore, and life. Good genies, however, defend the lives of others under their protection as fiercely as they do their own.

Which leaves humanoids. Most humanoids are about life first, loot second, and lore third, but their jobs and affiliations may rearrange their priorities. Ambitious young wizards may value their lives first, then their books and notes, without much regard for other material property. Loyal treasury guards may place their liege’s loot before their own lives. Members of a mystery cult may readily sacrifice their lives to protect the cult’s secrets; well-trained spies will do the same.

DETECTION, DETERRENCE, AND RESPONSE

Protecting yourself against loss of loot, lore, or life involves three main components: detection, deterrence, and response. That is, you have to become aware of threats as early as possible, stave them off long enough to do something about them, then actually do something about them.

All three components are necessary. There’s no point in knowing about a threat if you’re unable to mobilize against it. If you happen to deter a threat you never knew about, that’s just dumb luck, and you gain no knowledge with which to plan for the next attack. And having the capacity to respond is of little value if a sudden, swift attack catches you off guard.

DETECTION

The sooner you’re able to discover a threat to your assets—and the farther away from your lair that threat is when you discover it—the better. Maybe you possess supernatural senses that can detect the movement of intelligent beings for miles around, or access to divination magic that warns you of threats before they materialize. Wonderful! Super-handy! Then again, maybe you don’t. In which case, you’re going to have to detect threats the old-fashioned way: by employing guards, alarms, scouts, and spies.

If you employ a force of guards to defend your lair, you’ll need to assign some of them to security functions. However, you don’t want to assign more of them to these tasks than you absolutely need to. Most of your guards should instead be kept on standby, to provide the response if and when detection and deterrence fail to prevent an intrusion. They’re not going to be standing at the gate or keeping lookout atop the walls. They’re going to be waiting in the courtyard or the main hall in overwhelming numbers, bristling with spears and arrows, ready to shish-kebab trespassers who make it past the foyer. Exactly how many guards to divert to security functions and reconnaissance operations depends on a lot of variables, but an eighty–twenty ratio of main force to access control, surveillance, recon, and screening missions is a good place to start. If your lair defense plan includes forward observation posts, you need to assign a couple of squads of eight to twelve regular guards or scouts to each post to ensure round-the-clock coverage; hence, it usually isn’t feasible to keep observation posts continuously crewed if you employ fewer than a hundred guards.

Have guards take note of any unfamiliar visitors, report on them to you or to a commander, and escort any visitors who need to be brought into restricted areas. Have them check the carts, sacks, chests, and crates brought in and out by outside workers and be present whenever wagons are being loaded or unloaded. Have them take all messages and inspect all deliveries. (Suspicious items should be reported immediately, left alone, and kept under lock and key until you or a designated underling can check them out personally.) All important activities in your lair—other than your own, of course—need to happen where guards on surveillance duty can see them clearly, so arrange the spaces within accordingly.

If these guards notice something fishy, it’s their responsibility to take control of the situation by making contact with the suspected enemy, detaining them, and not allowing them to proceed or depart. At least one guard should be free to leave the scene immediately to report on what’s happening: The duty to report on an evolving situation is paramount. If a fight should happen to break out, your security guards’ new responsibility is to keep your enemies occupied until your response force arrives.

Normally, guards on surveillance duty don’t engage in combat except in self-defense. However, if you’ve already received warning of a threat and assigned guards to screen the area around your lair, and they detect scouts or spies conducting reconnaissance against you, it’s their job to intercept, apprehend, and, if necessary, destroy them. Zero tolerance for sneaks!

If you have scouts available, you should be sending them out to gather information all the time. Usually, they’ll have little to tell you about except the weather or the state of the roads. However, you may get wind of a threat brewing against you before your enemies try to breach your lair—or you may learn that they’ve already breached it successfully, then slipped through your fingers. When this happens, you need to send out a reconnaissance patrol with the specific objective of discovering and reporting back how numerous your foes are, what they’re up to, and what resources they possess. Once they’ve found your foes, they’ll switch from zone reconnaissance, which is wide-ranging and time-consuming, to reconnaissance of the specific area where your foes are, in order to collect more specific information about them—and, if the opportunity presents itself, clear them out. If you have the personnel, you should also assign guards to a screening mission, to keep those foes from ever reaching—or breaching—your perimeter. (I’ll discuss reconnaissance and security missions in more detail in chapter 6, “Battle Strategy.”)

SPIES

Early detection of threats is vital. If you’re shrewd, you can prevent an attack before it happens by spoiling your enemy’s plans—learning their intended objective and defending accordingly, seizing a necessary component of their attack, disabling them with a preemptive strike, or simply scaring them off. And a key component of early detection, reaching far beyond the physical boundaries of your lair, is espionage. In fact, without espionage, your chances of discovering and neutralizing a threat before it’s carried out are slim to none.

For the purposes of an individual lair owner (as opposed to a state entity), spies fall into two categories: those who are assigned merely to observe and report, and those who are assigned to acquire information more actively. These two categories have many qualities in common, but they differ in one important respect. Spies in the first category are “gray people”: ones who possess no quality that makes them stand out. They blend into the background and watch and listen unnoticed—often beneath notice. Spies in the second category, on the other hand, are charismatic and memorable. They approach targets under observation and ingratiate themselves with sincere smiles, strong eye contact, casual body language, and unflappable poise. They introduce themselves by commenting on something they have in common with their targets, then get those targets talking and listen with rapt interest. They copy their targets’ bearing, gestures, and speech habits. In no time, they become trusted confidants.

Regardless of the type of spy you employ—and you’ll want to employ both types, but if you can afford only one, go with the first—your primary goal is to become aware of anyone and anything out of the ordinary. In particular, when newcomers arrive in town, you want to know who they are and what they’re up to. An inn or tavern near your lair is a place where you’ll want to have eyes and ears; a nondescript bartender, server, housekeeper, or regular patron is in a good position to report on new arrivals and can be hired to do so at bargain rates. Market-square beggars make outstanding informants, since most people are uncomfortable maintaining eye contact with them. So do scavengers, who perform a public service gathering scraps and in the course of their work gather rumors as well. You don’t need a shadowy snoop to tail a group of strangers through the streets when you have informants all over town.

When creating stat blocks for your spies, the spy stat block in the fifth edition D&D Monster Manual isn’t necessarily the ideal place to start. Intelligence and Wisdom are more important than Dexterity: Above all, a spy must have a detailed memory and the ability to immediately notice anything out of the ordinary. Consider striking the Sneak Attack trait and replacing it with traits that borrow from the Player’s Handbook feats Observant and Keen Mind (see, for example, the snoop and the plant in appendix B).

Deception is an essential part of a spy’s job, and Charisma is important for the second category of spy, but spies of the first category engage with the targets of their observation as little as possible; they simply report what they see and hear in the course of their ordinary activities, and the only pretense they need to engage in is that they’re not also watching and listening. In fact, since their deception relies on seeming perfectly ordinary, it might make more sense to base their Deception checks to avoid being noticed on Wisdom rather than Charisma (see Player’s Handbook, chapter 7, “Variant: Skills with Different Abilities”). Self-control, not force of personality, is the deciding factor in whether they succeed in their task. Skill in Stealth or Sleight of Hand can certainly be helpful, but being unseen and unheard isn’t the ultimate goal—being unnoticed is, and the best way to be unnoticed is to be unimportant.

DETERRENCE

Deterrence lies in showing that getting into your lair will be difficult, dangerous, or both—too risky to be worth the attempt. Elements of deterrence need not be subtle to be effective. High, solid walls send an unmistakable message. So do heavy doors, iron bars, loud bells, steep cliffs, deep moats, narrow entryways, mazelike approaches, wooded paths that mysteriously turn back on themselves. So do fire, ice, howling wind, crashing tides, foul stench, pitch-darkness.

Flaunting your detection and response measures sends the message that trespassers will be seen and will be dealt with. However, it’s important to make sure that would-be intruders don’t know all the things you can do to them—and know that they don’t know. The more concrete information they have, the more accurately they can judge the risk (or believe they can), and upon weighing all the pros and cons, they may decide it’s worth a go after all. Uncertainty, on the other hand, encourages them to fear the worst.

One surprisingly effective method of deterrence is the “no admittance” sign, along with any variation thereon that sends the same message, from a simple curtain hung in a door frame with a velvet rope across it to a row of heads on spikes. These visual statements tell observers that an area is off-limits and that the owner of the property cares enough whether someone unauthorized enters to deal with them if they do. By themselves, however, they don’t work as well on someone who’s determined to get in; if anything, they’ll make such an individual say, “Aha! This is where I’ll find what I’m looking for!” (For this reason, they also make good decoys.)

Implementing finicky procedures can have a deterrent effect—for example, insisting that all vehicles use a specific entrance or requiring visitors to sign a book. Couldn’t someone just sign a phony name? Of course. The point isn’t to have an infallible record of who’s come and gone. The point is to make deviation from the routine conspicuous. If a “farmer” doesn’t know which entrance to drive their wagon to, or a visitor makes a scene about having to sign in, their departure from the script casts suspicion on them immediately. Also, these procedures are often plain good sense by themselves: making visitors relinquish or bind their weapons, dismount from and stable their horses as soon as they’re inside the gate, or pass through a magic-detection field. Don’t make exceptions for local superstitions such as “On All Fools’ Day, neither rich man nor poor on the Fools’ Parade may close his door, or laughter and joy will be his nevermore!” You know your enemies are going to try that stunt.

CONCEALMENT

If you’re engaging in activities that you want to keep out of the public eye—or, more to the point, that may run counter to the interests of others who’d shut you down given the opportunity—an important aspect of deterrence is concealment. If the location of your base of operations is known, you have to present enough obvious obstacles to make it clear that trying to gain access is a fool’s game, and still, some foes will remain undaunted no matter how many obstacles you place in front of them. Thus, there’s a lot to be said for preventing others from locating your lair in the first place.

There are three primary ways to go about concealing your lair: hiding, blending, and disguising. Hiding your lair means placing it behind some kind of visual obstruction, such as a waterfall in front of a cave mouth. Blending, or camouflage, refers to making your lair indistinguishable from its surroundings, like an unremarkable rowhouse on a street of identical buildings. Disguising your lair means making it appear to be something other than what it is—for instance, establishing a chapterhouse of a secret society in the cellar of a brewery or a serpentfolk nest in a former monastery.

Alternatively, rather than conceal your entire lair, you may choose to conceal only your assets. You can hide loot in a safe behind a painting, lore in the room behind the trick bookshelf, lives in a safe room whose trapdoor is covered by a rug. You can dress yourself and your family as servants, label your most precious books with deceptive titles, employ illusion magic to camouflage or disguise treasures, or use codes or ciphers to keep those who find your notes from knowing their contents—and, perhaps, their worth.

Thieves are well aware of the importance of concealment, which is why they employ thieves’ cant—a form of conversational concealment, in which discussion of illicit activities is disguised as innocent conversation about card games and the well-being of family members or hidden behind a wall of impenetrable slang.

LOCKS AND SAFES

I can’t top these two sentences from the National Crime Prevention Institute’s The Use of Locks in Physical Crime Prevention (Boston: Butterworth, 1987), so I’m just going to give them to you verbatim: “The sole object of using any lock at all is to delay an intruder. A good lock makes entry riskier or more trouble than it’s worth, and that is the objective” (emphasis in the original). Every lock, given enough time, determination, and skill, can be defeated by manipulation, force, or simply stealing the key. The relevant questions are whether the amount of time and degree of determination and skill it will take, along with the threat of response, are enough to stop someone from trying; and whether the expense of the lock is justified by the value of the asset behind it.

An off-the-shelf lock from the Player’s Handbook’s list of adventuring gear costs 10 gp, weighs 1 pound, and is moderately difficult to pick. Positing that the baseline technological level of a typical fantasy RPG campaign is late medieval/early Renaissance, we can conclude that this is a warded lock made of iron. Warded locks don’t use tumblers and pins, as modern locks do. They’re simple machines in which the key either turns or doesn’t turn based on the arrangement of wards, or barriers, inside the lock housing; the key is shaped to bypass the wards, and keys of other shapes will either be blocked by the wards or fail to move the bolt.

“Your DM may decide that better locks are available for higher prices,” the Player’s Handbook adds. So how would those locks differ from the standard-issue lock?

Before the invention of the tumbler lock in 1772,[I] the science and technology of the time limited the ways in which a warded lock could be improved upon, but locksmiths employed all of them: A lock could contain several different wards. The wards could be more intricately shaped. A key could have parts that turned separately. A lock could require two, three, or even four keys to operate. One or more of the keyholes could be hidden behind sliding panels—or accessible only after using another key first. The bolts could be large and heavy and require commensurately large and heavy keys to move them.

Any of these methods might be employed by the “better locks… available for higher prices” described by the Player’s Handbook, and the more complicated and expensive the lock, the more of these methods it might employ. However, there are also at least three other obvious paths to superior lockmaking in a fantasy RPG campaign.

One path is simply looking to other cultures, such as Southwest Asia, where the engineer and polymath Ismā‘īl al-Jazarī described how to make a sophisticated combination lock in his Book of Knowledge of Ingenious Mechanical Devices in 1206 CE. This lock employs four dials, each controlling three concentric, notched discs. Opening the lock required turning all twelve discs to the positions where the notches lined up. Mechanically, the principle is the same as that of a warded lock, except that, rather than a key, it’s the wards that rotate, making it much harder to defeat. Any learned, technologically advanced society in your setting might come up with a similar lock concept. (A simpler, cheaper version of al-Jazarī’s lock might have two discs per dial, or even just one. Naturally, it would also be easier to defeat.)

Another path is the skill and inventiveness attributed to certain folk—rock gnomes especially, but also dwarves and elves—which might justify the existence of craft techniques advanced enough to create lever tumbler locks or even pin tumbler locks out of available metals. Those techniques would be closely guarded secrets, of course, and such locks would command premium prices, but even the most basic tumbler locks would be hard to pick compared with a generally available warded lock, at a fraction of the size and weight.

The last is magic. An enchantment placed on an otherwise ordinary warded lock might increase the difficulty of picking it by resisting the insertion of lockpicks, causing the lockpicks to turn red-hot or bitingly cold, providing false tactile and auditory feedback, or creating “smart wards” that anticipate the lockpicks’ movements and block them. Alternatively, a lock might be brought to life as an animate construct, clenching its keyhole shut against thieves’ tools, twisting away from them, or biting a lockpicker’s fingers. The rarest and most advanced magical locks might be opened not by any mechanical means at all but in response to passwords, arrangement of objects, application of elemental energy, the light of the moon(s), or some other esoteric catalyst. And let’s not forget the spell arcane lock, which takes an ordinary lock and adds enchantments to it. Rather than merely slap an extra 10 points onto the Difficulty Class, consider how this spell makes the picking of a lock more difficult. Just that one small detail can add memorable flavor.

These improvements to the ordinary lock increase the difficulty of the ability check made to pick them, but you don’t have to stop there. It stands to reason, for instance, that locks that require multiple steps to open should also require multiple actions to pick. An absurdly complicated puzzle lock, with sliding panels, latches disguised as rivets, and multiple keyholes, might require not only a successful Dexterity (thieves’ tools) check and an Intelligence (Investigation) check but also a full minute or more to bypass. For that matter, although it may be mathematically impossible for a rogue with Reliable Talent to fail to pick an ordinary padlock, if a door happens to be locked with four of them, it will still take that rogue four actions to spring them all—and that’s assuming that the rogue is on the right side of the door.

Typically, just like in our own houses, only important doors need locks on them. However, it’s not only doors that need to be locked. Chests containing valuable assets need locks, too. The problem with putting a lock on a chest, however, is that it doesn’t stop someone from carrying off the whole chest and taking their sweet time to defeat the lock someplace safer. That, in fact, was the preferred approach of burglars and robbers for centuries, when cash was often kept and transported in strongboxes, made first of iron-banded oak and later of sheet iron.

It wasn’t until the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries CE that what we’d think of as safes—that is, strongboxes that were either fixed in place or too large and heavy to carry off—were adopted on a large scale. Some of these early safes were cabinet-like, as we typically imagine safes today, but many others still took the form of a lidded chest. However, unlike the chest listed under “Adventuring Gear” in chapter 5 of the Player’s Handbook, which holds 12 cubic feet and weighs 25 pounds, one of these wrought-iron boxes, with a capacity of only 6 cubic feet, weighed in the neighborhood of 175 pounds. And while some of these strongboxes featured elaborate locking mechanisms, as often as not, their makers relied just as much on hiding the keyholes, occasionally including obvious but fake keyholes as decoys. Recall the ultimate purpose of a lock: to waste the thief’s time.

SAMPLE LOCKS

Lock

Cost

Weight

DC to Pick

Rounds to Unlock

Rounds to Pick

Warded lock, crude

5 gp

1 lb

10

1

1

Warded lock, common

10 gp

1 lb

15

1

1

Warded lock, elaborate

100 gp

1 lb

20

1

1

Warded lock, three-step

1,500 gp

3 lb

25

3

3

Gnomework lock, lever tumbler

200 gp

¼ lb

20

1

1

Gnomework lock, pin tumbler

2,000 gp

¼ lb

25

1

1

Combination lock, 3 × 1-disc

35 gp

¾ lb

15

1

3

Combination lock, 4 × 2-disc

300 gp

2 lb

20

4

8

Combination lock, 4 × 3-disc

3,500 gp

3 lb

25

6

12

Puzzle lock, masterwork, twelve-step

30,000 gp

30 lb

30

6

18+

Interestingly, while the development of safes plodded forward over many centuries, mechanical traps were in widespread use as early as the medieval and Renaissance eras. The needle trap isn’t just a fantasy invention: Not only does it have historical precedent, there’s an account of at least one trapmaker’s accidentally proving the efficacy of his invention by setting it off himself and getting stabbed in the hand. Other tricks can be played, too. One involved constructing a chest with a tray beneath the lid that a thief had to lift out in order to get at the contents—using helpfully provided finger holes with snapping-jaw traps inside them.

TRAPS

Speaking of which, an often overlooked yet essential issue in trap construction is the fact that you don’t want your traps to endanger your own minions—and you absolutely don’t want them to endanger you. Deadly, hidden traps that activate automatically when triggered, despite being a well-worn pulp adventure trope, are outrageously impractical in any kind of lair that’s a locus of ongoing activity. The only places you want to employ these, if at all, are (a) at vulnerable intrusion points that you and your minions never enter or exit by and (b) in the perimeter area around your lair, in both cases because you don’t have enough live guards to keep an eye on those locations.

If you’re considering placing traps inside your lair, two particular types are far more practical than Acme Spring-Loaded Corridor Blades:

- In a high-traffic area, a concealed trap operated manually by one or more guards on duty, generally (though not always) designed to capture rather than maim. The point of this kind of trap is to immobilize intruders and render them defenseless, at little or no risk to your own people.

- In a low-traffic area, an obvious trap that forces intruders to mull over whether to try to defeat it or to back off and take another route. The point of this kind of trap is to delay the intruders, giving you more time to respond to their presence. You don’t expect intruders to fall into the trap; the threat, rather than the execution, is the point.

Both of these types of trap rely on intruders’ having no choice but to pass through a choke point in order to get where they want to go, so the ideal places to put them are within the boundaries between defensive zones (see “Concentric Defense” below), including the outer physical boundary—the “envelope”—of your lair.

Traps should include a detection component—something that signals you to the presence of a threat if you’re not aware of it already. When intruders set off a trap in your lair (or are balked by one), you have only a brief window of opportunity to respond while they’re at your mercy. Wait too long, and they may find a way to slip out of your grasp.

RESPONSE

Enemies have invaded your lair. You failed to deter them, but you’ve detected the breach. Time to make them pay.

If you have a guard force, 80 percent of it, give or take, is tasked with response: taking up positions where they can contain, weaken, and ultimately subdue the invaders. Using the information provided by your detection elements—primarily reconnaissance and security forces—they engage where it’s most advantageous for them to do so, and at the right moment, when the invaders’ plans have fallen apart, launch a decisive counterattack.

This engagement is the “boss fight.” You don’t need to be anywhere near it, necessarily. You can be part of it, if you’re that much stronger than your minions. Or, if hiring guard troops isn’t an option for you—say, because you’re a weird monster that lives outside civilization and its economic systems—maybe you constitute the bulk of your own defensive forces, and response falls to you because there isn’t anyone else. Then, okay, this is your time to shine. If you can delegate the job to someone (or something) else, though, why put your own life on the line?

Your defensive response doesn’t need to be complicated. Simple overwhelming force gets the job done. However, at the very least, you do want to keep your enemies from knowing just how many of your minions they’re going to face once they get inside. The final number should come to them as a deeply unpleasant surprise.

Keep in mind, though, that the objective is not to kill intruders. The objective is to protect assets. Your defenders can kill two of those pesky adventurers who got in Crom only knows how and capture two others, but if the fifth one gets away with the Golden MacGuffin, that’s a failure. For this reason, constant gathering and transmission of accurate information is essential. Fights can’t take place in isolation. Even during a breach, whatever units you have assigned to surveillance, reconnaissance, and screening need to continue gathering intel, tracking the invaders’ progress through your lair, and handing that information off to your responders, all for the purpose of preventing any loss of valued loot, lore, or lives.

CONCENTRIC DEFENSE

In planning your defense, one of the limits you’ll face is the need for freedom of entry and exit. Not only do you yourself have to be able to come and go (or, at least, have minions come and go for you), so do the goods you supply yourself with, as well as any goods you may supply to others. For that matter, your business, whatever it is, may from time to time require allowing others inside to meet with you.

Think of your lair in terms of concentric zones: unrestricted zones, where people can come and go freely; controlled zones, which require people to present valid reasons for entering; and restricted zones, sensitive areas off-limits to anyone who’s not assigned to be there, such as private residences, armories, records rooms, and vaults. Then forget about the first zone entirely. A lair, by definition, should have no unrestricted zone. You’re building a redoubt, not a convention center. In fact, even the region around your lair may be a controlled zone, if others normally can’t enter it without going through a checkpoint. (That being said, a disguised lair, such as a thieves’ den with a legitimate business as a front, might allow the false front to seem unrestricted. Maintaining control while also maintaining this pretext, however, requires having ready excuses for bouncing anyone who doesn’t belong.)

Access control measures exist to keep the general public from wandering into controlled areas without a legitimate purpose—and to keep anyone from entering a restricted area without permission. If any business goes on in your lair that you aren’t personally and directly involved in, it takes place in a controlled zone. Generally, once people are admitted to the controlled zone, they can move around it freely with little or no interference—which is not to say little or no surveillance. The controlled zone is always closely watched. Access to restricted zones should require additional controls: more guards, more gates, more locks. No one unauthorized gets in, no one gets in unobserved, and no one goes wandering off on their own.

The outer extent of your construction, the hardened exterior, is called the “envelope.” It may be a wooden palisade or stone curtain wall, a glacier or mountainside, or the places where your building abuts the ones next door. An enemy who approaches your lair, after crossing the ground around your site, has to get through the envelope next.

Think of the envelope as a six-sided die: You need to prevent penetration not only through all four sides but also through the top and bottom. The field of military engineering has given considerable thought to how to prevent forced entry and sabotage from below (the literal meaning of “undermining”), but hardening against attack from above is difficult, costly, and feasible only over small areas; it thus requires more emphasis on detection and response. Doors and windows are inherently vulnerable, which is why medieval European castles tended to have very few of them; depending on your plumbing arrangements, sewers might also offer intruders a way in. Outer wall materials have to be able to withstand your enemies’ attempts to break, burrow, or burn through them.

Inside the envelope, you’ll want to add extra access control to your restricted zone(s). The two main ways of doing this are by architecturally limiting the number of ways in and through them and by posting guards. Depending on your resources, you might also employ technology, such as additional gates, or magic.

The ultimate goal of all these defenses is to stop intruders from reaching your assets, and one of the chief ways of accomplishing this goal is by slowing them down. The more deeply they penetrate your lair, the more difficult it should be for them to proceed—and to escape without getting caught.

WEAK POINTS

Once you have an idea of the basic components of your security, there are certain specific questions you need to ask yourself, lest you leave gaping holes in your defensive plan:

- How will my lair be defended when I’m asleep? Guards can’t stay on duty 24/7. They need breaks. They also need instructions on how to handle matters when you’re not there to direct them. If you’re the most powerful being in your lair, you need to make sure you have enough defenders, and strong enough defenders, to blunt an attack—or an alarm that will wake you up so that you can deal with it yourself.

- How will my guards deal with potential intruders? With legitimate visitors? Enforcement of the boundaries between uncontrolled and controlled areas, and between controlled and restricted areas, is essential, but how heavy-handed do you want to be? You can order your guards to attack anyone they can’t positively identify as friendly, to simply turn away anyone whose credentials they can’t verify, to wave them through if their credentials seem legitimate, or to allow them past the outer gate but then trap them or take them into custody and interrogate them. Whatever approach you choose, make sure you have enough guards to carry it out. If a visitor needs an escort, make sure the escort’s post isn’t left shorthanded. Also, if you expect to have visitors, determine a way for them to verify their identities and their right to be admitted.

- How can I ensure that my guards are loyal? A disgruntled guard is one of the worst security vulnerabilities you can have, because they can potentially compromise every other security measure you have in place. Actively recruit guards who’ll care about their job, and screen out ones that will be easy to turn. Give them reasons to like you, or at the very least, don’t give them reasons to hate you. At the same time, watch your watchmen—and make sure they know you’re watching. Don’t try to keep a constant eye on them; nobody likes that, nobody wants it, and it just isn’t practical. Instead, do random integrity tests, and reward those who pass. Also, if you have assignments that differ in their desirability, or in the opportunities they present for disloyalty or simple laziness, rotate your guards through them. Assigning everyone to the same job all the time creates incentives for subversion.

- How can I ensure that my guards have the best view of my lair’s surroundings? You’ll need someone keeping an eye on every approach. Intruders are more likely to use some approaches than others, and those are where you should place the most eyes, but you should have someone—preferably at least two someones—watching any direction they may come from. The farther your sentries can see, the more time they’ll have to respond. Visual obstructions too close to your lair invite blitzes that take out your guards before they can raise the alarm.

- How will my guards and I respond to a breach? Develop a response plan, as described in chapter 6, “Battle Strategy.” Choose where you want fights to take place—that is, where you have the most advantages possible, and intruders have the fewest—and prepare your battle positions in advance. But also consider interventions that don’t involve bloodshed. Some intrusions can be resolved by confronting the intruders and firmly escorting them out. Some intrusions may merely be simple misunderstandings. And some “intruders” may even be seeking you out to express their interest in aiding you in your activities or your cause. Don’t be a sucker, but exercise good judgment regarding when a situation calls for combat and when it doesn’t.

- How will I handle goods being moved in and out? Frequent, regular delivery of food and supplies creates a schedule that enemies casing your lair can memorize and exploit. They may slip in while your gates are open, either invisibly or hidden in wagons (or under them). However, if you don’t let anyone past your gate and instead require your guards to bring your supplies in from there, they can’t stay behind and watch that gate at the same time. If your guard force has a reserve, use it for these kinds of auxiliary responsibilities.

- How will I send and receive messages? This question applies both to messages between you and your underlings and to messages between you and the outside world. Your lair needs some kind of communication system, whether it consists of bells or wooden clappers, horn calls, signal lanterns, shouting from post to post, relay runners, sending stones, or magical paper airplanes. In the absence of a Westeros Postal Service, long-distance communication requires either magic or the participation of couriers. The latter entails summoning a courier, getting a message into their hands, trusting that they’ll make the entire journey safely and convey your message to its intended recipient, and being able to reverse that whole process in order to receive a reply. Every time the message changes hands along the way introduces an opportunity for error—or treachery. Come up with a system, or resign yourself to the life of a hermit.

- How will I protect my most valuable loot and my most sensitive lore? These assets will require defensive measures above and beyond those you employ to protect your lair as a whole. Extra locks, extra alarms, extra bars, extra concealment, extra guards, extra magic—any or all of these things, and more, may be called for. The question is how much your budget, and your powers, can support. If you possess unique traits or abilities that prospective intruders probably don’t, it’s wise to use this comparative advantage to protect your most critical assets. Can you fly? Then place these assets high up, in a location that can’t be reached by stairs or ladders. Don’t need to breathe? Put them in a room without air. Are you enormously strong? Put them behind a door or gate that humanoids of normal strength can’t budge. Are you a crafty trapsmith? Smith a crafty trap.

- How will I protect myself? This question is simple to answer if you’re the most powerful creature in your lair—Fight! Fight! Fight!—but what if you’ve always relied on the muscles of strangers? It behooves you to know what you’ll have to do if intruders make it past your strongest defenses. Have an escape route, a safe room, or a place to hide. Carry a clutch magic item. Create or purchase a device you can use to summon rescuers. Be in the good graces of your god—like, really, really good. Hire a bodyguard, or keep a watchbeast. The principles of detection, deterrence, and response all still apply, just on a smaller scale.

- If someone makes off with my loot, can I track it down again? In the vast majority of cases, the answer to this question is no. However, maybe you’re the type who employs skilled trackers and assassins. Maybe you have contacts in the merchant community, or you know someone down at the docks who sees every sailor and ship’s passenger who passes through. Maybe you were able to tear off a bit of an intruder’s clothing and can use it to scry on them, or you got a close enough look at them to cast locate creature. Or maybe you know a local fortune-teller who can give you a reading accurate enough to help you track down your stolen property. All in all, it’s better not to lose your assets in the first place, but these expedients may be able to offer you a smidgen of hope once you’ve already been burgled.

CASTLES

Castles weren’t solely private strongholds for their owners. They originated as places of refuge for the people of the entire area around them. It might have been infeasible to protect sprawling farms from raiders, just like the buildings across the stream in Seven Samurai, but at least the people could be protected by getting them inside the walls—as could livestock and stores of grain. (That’s how the nobility justified levying the taxes it took to build them.)

In later centuries, castles became hubs of social activity: Holidays and weddings were celebrated, and legal disputes heard, in their great halls. Village mills were often situated in their baileys, and villagers brought their grain inside to be ground into flour. A code of hospitality meant that traveling dignitaries could show up, even without prior notice, and be put up for the night as honored guests.

A castle isn’t a lair, and a lair isn’t a castle. Running a castle is a huge operation conducted (at least nominally) for the benefit of an entire domain and requiring its full support, so there’s no way to hide it and no good reason to. In fact, historically, building a castle was often an act of conspicuous consumption, a way of showing off one’s status. Your activities, however, are probably more self-interested—and more clandestine.

So why devote attention to castle design in a book about lair defense? Because castles represented the state of the art of defensive fortification during the eras that most fantasy role-playing campaigns are designed to evoke. They’re case studies in how to apply engineering and technology to the problem of defense.

A basic motte-and-bailey castle, typical of the early Middle Ages, provides a tidy illustration of each of the three components of defense. The role of detection is played by the tower; deterrence, by the palisade wall; and response, by the garrison. These are simple, low-technology methods of accomplishing these basic goals, and they stand up to simple, low-technology assault.

The more sophisticated the attacker, the more sophisticated the defenses required to defeat them. By the fifteenth century CE, castles had concentric curtain walls with corner towers, elaborate gatehouses with portcullises and zigzagging entrances, and an assortment of architectural devices that granted cover to defenders as they shot back at attackers from the walls—and gunpowder cannons were beginning to render even these cutting-edge measures obsolete. While austere castle keeps evolved into opulent palaces, the walls around them evolved into gun emplacements.

CONSTRUCTION

Castles were often built near borders, roads, or rivers, their sites chosen for defensibility, the value of the surrounding land they could control, or both. The jackpot location was a hilltop or mountain crag with bedrock beneath, in the bend of a river, with both farmland and woodland within easy reach. Elevated terrain allowed defenders to see farther and forced attackers to work harder, rock foundations prevented sappers from mining underneath them, and rivers provided multiple benefits: fresh water for drinking, boat traffic for delivery of heavy building materials (and, sometimes, the privilege of exacting tolls), the ability to fill a moat, and an obstruction for attackers to cross.

A castle had a defensive reach—and, by extension, an administrative reach—of about 10 miles, so castles built to control conquered territory were often situated about 20 miles apart from one another. An early motte was about 100 to 300 feet wide at the base, 50 feet wide on top, and generally between 20 and 30 feet high, although some were as low as 10 feet or as high as 100 feet. The earth to build the motte came from a dry moat dug 10 feet deep around what would become the bailey. The keep atop the motte was built out of wood, because the mounded earth wouldn’t support the weight of a stone structure. Because of this downside, motte-and-bailey construction went out of fashion fairly quickly: By the thirteenth century CE, “donjons”—stone-walled keeps built directly on the ground—had become the norm in Western and Central Europe. These keeps were between 70 and 120 feet tall, up to 70 to 100 feet long, and up to 50 to 80 feet wide, with walls generally 5 to 7 feet thick.

While donjon walls were made of stone, the floors generally weren’t, nor were any outbuildings in the bailey that weren’t required to withstand a direct assault. Timber was much more plentiful than workable stone, so floors, roofs, outbuildings, and scaffolding were all wooden. For stability, the stone walls were built with holes for the insertion of scaffold beams, called “putlog” holes.

European castles’ outer walls, also called curtain or enceinte (en-saint, or if you’re feeling especially Gallic, ahn-sant) walls, were between 5 and 15 feet thick and reinforced by buttresses. The less natural defense provided by the terrain, the thicker the wall. If high-quality stone was difficult to obtain locally, a castle’s outer wall might be a sandwich of two layers of carefully cut stone filled up in between with loose rubble suspended in mortar, a method developed by the Roman Empire. These core-and-veneer walls typically rose between 10 and 30 feet high and were one-fourth as thick as they were tall.

Stone walls were the norm across most of the castle-building world; Japan, however, was a salient exception. For pretty much the entire castle-building era in Japan, walls and keeps were built from wood—sometimes coated with plaster to make it more fire-resistant—with stone used only for foundations. (This choice was partly due to material availability and partly because wood structures were more flexible and therefore more earthquake-resistant.) However, especially in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries CE, those foundations became quite elaborate, as buildings and even entire baileys were raised up on elevated stone terraces—the motte principle again, but with much fancier and sturdier execution.

But back to Europe. As time went on, castle moats grew wider and deeper—by the thirteenth to fifteenth centuries CE, the heyday of the medieval castle, they were 40 to 60 feet wide and up to 30 feet deep. Whether a moat was filled with water depended a great deal on the presence of nearby natural water features, because that was the only dependable way to direct water into them. They were essentially open sewers, receiving all the waste from inside the castle, so crossing them was not only challenging but deeply unpleasant. Also, they often concealed a bottom dotted with sharpened stakes. If you fell into a moat while trying to climb a wall or stay on top of one, you could look forward to getting impaled on stakes, then—if that didn’t kill you outright—contracting infections through the wounds.

Meanwhile, keep walls doubled in thickness and began to follow a rounded pattern, since the corners of square towers created blind spots. Outer walls were built on plinths, which both gave them more solid foundations and caused objects dropped from atop them to roll forward into an enemy’s formation, and they gradually rose in height to match the keeps within them. Finally, towers were incorporated directly into the walls, eventually freeing the keep from its role in detection—and allowing it to evolve into a palatial residence.

Whether castle defenders used stairs or ladders to climb to the top of the walls depended in large part on what those walls were made of. The more stone was used in their construction, the more likely that stairs were built into them; the less stone used, the more likely that defenders had to scale them with ladders. Once towers were incorporated into the walls, the stairs were moved inside them, so that attackers who managed to reach the top of the wall would then have to break into a tower in order to get back down safely on the inside. Stairways in large towers were often made of wood and occupied a continuous vertical space that granted access to every floor.

Inside the keep, however, stairs performed an additional function beyond vertical access: They also communicated social access, or the denial of it. In particular, spiral staircases, which were usually made of stone and built into corners, signaled a transition from more public spaces to more private spaces—that is, from controlled zones to restricted zones. (Note how easy it is for a handful of guards, or even just one or two, to block access to an enclosed spiral stair!)

Spiral stairs quickly became the norm as soon as building engineering and material availability allowed stone stairs to supplant wood, but in later centuries, materials and forms both began to diversify to reflect further divisions in social status. For the private spaces of the castle’s owner, spiral stairs (and for the servants who needed to access those most private spaces, narrower and tighter spiral stairs); for high-status personnel and guests, straight stone stairs, with turns to signify crossing thresholds into spaces of distinction; for the common folk, wooden stairs; and for those of no social significance at all, ladders. In hyper-hierarchical medieval Europe, there was no confusion at all about what these different types of stairs were saying.

Contrary to popular belief, the lower levels of medieval castles didn’t serve as prisons or dungeons. Prisoners were usually held in the highest room of a tower, from which it would be most difficult to escape. Because the most secure place in an early medieval castle was in the donjon, the term “dungeon” became synonymous with “prison”—and later, in the Renaissance, when prison cells were moved underground, that part of the castle became known as the “dungeon.” In the Middle Ages, however, the lowest level of the keep was generally either a storage cellar or—if a rudimentary sanitary system had been installed—a cesspool, where waste from indoor toilets (“garderobes”) ended up. (Woe to the peasants who had to clean it out twice a year.)

Speaking of toilets, if a keep didn’t have a cesspool, they had to be located on the outer wall, where they projected outward and opened directly over the moat. This arrangement could be quite inconvenient for the residents of the keep if it happened to be located far inside the wall, which is why “sanitary towers” were occasionally built, inaccessible from the rest of the outer wall, and connected to the keep by a covered walkway. In many cases, however, such an arrangement simply wasn’t feasible, and the castle’s inhabitants used chamber pots, which had to be carried to the outer wall and dumped over the side. Castles were stanky places.

THE GATEHOUSE

As the aperture through which nearly all the daily traffic in and out of a castle is channeled, the castle gate is obviously of paramount defensive importance. How to limit access only to those authorized to enter and exit, make would-be intruders think twice about trying to trespass, and stop those who go ahead and try it?

The simplest and earliest solution was to close the entryway with a large, heavy, barred door, under the watchful eye of guards who could see and, if necessary, shoot approaching outsiders from a parapet—a low-walled balcony—above it. From there, it wasn’t a great leap to adding a battlement: an alternating pattern of high walls (“merlons”) that defenders could take cover behind and low walls (“crenels”) that they could see and shoot over.

Even really big doors, however, have a weakness: leverage. A massive enough strike against them—say, from a battering ram—at the edge farthest from their hinges can force them inward, flexing the bars holding them shut and snapping them like toothpicks.

Enter the portcullis, or vertical gate. Or rather, do not enter. Unlike the hinged gate door, which was designed to swing open and thus did so fairly readily under the not-so-gentle encouragement of the battering ram, the portcullis was built to be raised and lowered within grooves in the stone walls on either side of it. Its lattice design distributed force and contained damage, so that any impact was more likely to punch a small hole in it than to knock the whole thing out of place. And unlike doors, which had to be pushed shut by defenders inside against the resistance of attackers pushing them open from outside, portcullises could simply be dropped, letting gravity do the work. The vertical bars of portcullises were sharpened to points at the bottom, so you can imagine how fatal it was to be caught beneath one when it fell.

Sure, a whole bunch of strong warriors working together could lift a portcullis gate. But that’s a slow endeavor, and once you’ve lifted it up, you still have to make room for the ram to get through and deal with the door just past the portcullis. Yeah, they didn’t get rid of that. By late in the Middle Ages, castle gatehouses contained series of portcullises and doors that visitors, or attackers, had to pass through to get inside.

These locked-down vestibules also included arrow slits, narrow windows through which defenders could see targets and shoot arrows while enjoying nearly complete cover; and machicolations, stone structures that extended over the exterior walls and gate passages. Machicolations evolved out of hoardings, temporary wooden structures that cantilevered over the edges of castles’ outer walls in order to solve the problem of being unable to see, or counterattack, enemies directly below. Machicolations were more permanent and stronger than hoardings, and braced with buttresses. What hoardings and machicolations had in common is that they had openings in their floors through which defenders could observe attackers and drop rocks or boiling water on them. In gatehouses with multiple portcullises and doors, machicolations were built over the areas directly in front of each of those obstacles, so that defenders on the floor above could further harass intruders as they tried to penetrate the entrance. Interior machicolations were called meurtrières in French, roughly meaning exactly what we call them in English: “murder holes.”

Even before portcullises were widely adopted, there were already drawbridges, which we’re all familiar with. In a way, though, drawbridges are the opposite of portcullises, because they have to be lifted up to close the way and lowered to open it. Thus, they’re not suited to the portcullis trick of trapping an enemy force by dropping them. Their one and only application is to bridge a moat when you want to allow authorized individuals to enter, which means a castle generally has only one drawbridge, placed wherever the moat is. However, drawbridges do have the nice advantage of almost total immunity to battering rams: If you can’t cross the moat, you can’t get at the drawbridge to break it down, and anyway, it’s designed to open toward you.

How about we take this already difficult obstacle course and make it even tougher? Let’s build a barbican: a preliminary gatehouse standing some distance in front of the enceinte wall that one has to pass through first before proceeding through the gate in the wall itself. The path from the barbican to the castle proper, called the “neck,” is flanked by walls connecting the two, so it’s impossible to deviate from the path, and defenders stationed on top of those walls—and on top of the enceinte wall, and in the towers of the barbican—can take free shots at intruders as they make their way forward.

Or we can simply force our visitors to take a hard 90-degree turn in order to face the first gate they come to. So much for having the benefit of forward momentum while trying to strike it with a battering ram. While we’re at it, let’s put a tower on the other side of the approach as well, opposite the gate, so that when they turn to break it down, they’re turning their backs on the tower—and our guards can shoot them from the safety of their arrow slits.

At this point, you’re probably wondering why anyone would bother trying to breach a castle gate at all. Most of the time, they wouldn’t—not by force, anyway. It was a deterrent, and a successful one. It was so successful, in fact, that the usual approach to attacking a castle was to sit a safe distance away, block food and other supplies from being delivered, and hope that the inhabitants could be starved into surrendering before the troops called up to conduct the siege lost interest and went home. If that didn’t work, the approach next most likely to succeed was to try to scale the wall—or smash a hole in it. A variety of siege machines were built for both of these purposes. Sometimes these measures succeeded; sometimes they failed. Either way, they still made more sense than trying to bust through the gate. That would have been folly.

POSTERNS

“We’ll find the back entrance and sneak in that way!” is an RPG trope as well-loved—and worn-out—as a favorite shirt. Is it really plausible that anyone who took fortification seriously would include such a vulnerability?

Surprisingly, yes! They’re called posterns, and their main function was to allow the inhabitants of a walled city or castle to exit and enter unobtrusively, particularly mid-siege.

However, it wouldn’t be wholly accurate to characterize them as vulnerabilities, because they were defended as well as the front gate, if not as actively. They were built as small and narrow as possible, to prevent a large force from rushing through. They were often hidden, requiring close reconnaissance to find them. In early walled cities, they weren’t built directly through the walls; instead, two neighboring sections of wall were built to overlap, with the postern between them. They were generally barred, or had doors barred from the inside. Sometimes they weren’t even at ground level, requiring ladders to be lowered whenever anyone came or went.

In short, yeah, there were back entrances, but honestly? You’d have better luck trying to slip into a castle by using chicanery to enter via the front gate under false pretenses than by trying to get inside through a postern.

1. I. Or, rather, the reinvention, since the ancient Egyptians applied the tumbler principle to make locks out of wood, with keys nearly as long as a person’s arm.

CHAPTER 2

TERRAIN

Location, location, and location are said to be the three most important things about real estate. It’s certainly true of real estate that you have to defend. You want a site that offers good defensive sight lines; few places where your enemies can hide from you; natural features, such as slopes, bluffs, and rivers, that limit the directions from which enemies can approach; and consumable resources, such as food and building materials, close at hand. A climate that you’re adapted to but your enemies aren’t is an added benefit. The more Mother Earth does for you already, the less you have to do for yourself.

However, terrain can also constrain you. You have to consider what building materials are available to you, how many people (or creatures) the land can feed, how you and others will travel to and from your lair, and what your options are if you’re forced to flee. The environments listed below are organized by how many complications they present.

GRASSLAND/HILL

Constructed lairs in grassland and hill areas will look a lot like castles, because the defense of locations and populations in grasslands and hills—land coveted for its productive capacity—is exactly what castles were designed for. In these types of terrain, movement is easy, sight lines are long, and both food and building materials are abundant: the perfect conditions for building a solid fortification. Even if your lair isn’t a castle per se, it will most likely follow the form of a castle, with a ditch and bank, an outer wall atop the rampart, a gate in the wall with a parapet above it, and at least one observation tower.

The only drawback to these types of terrain is that they’re also the easiest to attack across, which means a fortified grassland or hill lair has to be extremely sturdy. For this reason, a hilltop location is preferable to one on flat ground: Higher vantage points allow sentries to see farther, improving detection, and would-be attackers have to work against gravity, improving deterrence. Also, attackers can come from any direction if you’re not using environmental obstacles to hinder their approach, so while a hill is good, a craggy hill is better.

One thing to be mindful of if you’ve chosen a hilltop location: Hills can be steep. If you need others to deliver supplies to you, you don’t want to make them go straight up the side—they’ll charge you extra, if they don’t simply refuse to deliver to you. Approach paths should be gently sloped, traveling mostly across the incline rather than right up it, with occasional hairpin turns. This design is both easier on those you want coming to your door and harder on those you don’t: The length of the approach gives you more time to see them. And shoot at them.

URBAN

Establishing an urban lair is a piece of cake: Just buy a building and retrofit it. The local vernacular architecture may not be as sturdy as a stone castle, but as long as you don’t hang out a shingle, you’ll blend right in with the neighbors. For an urban lair, camouflage and disguise are every bit as important as a hardened envelope, if not more so.

Of course, inside the walls, anything goes. Your building may be half-timbered wattle and daub on the outside, but you can line the interiors with stone—or lead, if protecting against X-ray vision is among your priorities. The appearance of the exterior can deceive intruders about the arrangement of the interior, making a building appear to have more or fewer floors, or to end where it continues or to continue where it ends; it also offers no clue as to how far below the ground the basement levels extend or what passages might exist in the walls between rooms. Maybe your building is TARDIS-like, bigger on the inside than it is on the outside (more likely if you’re a Great Old One warlock than if you’re a neighborhood crime boss).

You’ll have to contend with the fact that other buildings block line of sight, denying you early warning of enemies’ approach. That’s not such a problem if you’re occupying someplace like the Palazzo Vecchio in Florence, Italy, with a wide-open plaza on two sides and a big watchtower to look down from, but it’s a big problem… well, almost anywhere else in Florence. And while having a smaller footprint means it’s easier to protect against attacks from above, simply by putting up a roof, having lots of rooftops close together means you have to watch out for footpads scampering across them.

Population density is a mixed blessing. If your response to intrusion is of the loud or messy sort, that’s something you can’t let spill out into the street. Keep it behind closed doors; don’t invite further attention. Also, you can’t employ dull-witted guards. Your sentries must be cognizant of the everyday behavior patterns of townsfolk in the streets outside and able to spot anyone acting out of the ordinary. They’ll have to know and be able to recognize your neighbors so that they can identify people who aren’t your neighbors.

On the plus side, an abundance of eyes on the street has its own deterrent effect, and depending on your activities—and your connections—you may even be able to exploit the presence of law enforcement authorities, siccing the local militia on your foes. You can also hide guards among the townsfolk, allowing them to observe from the street, not just from the windows or parapets of your building. Or you can buy a building across the street, or rent space in one, and place guards there. Most important, lots of people means a large hiring pool for spies—and a greater likelihood that they won’t be identified as such. In a town or city large enough for everyone not to know everyone else, one can easily go about in comfortable anonymity, especially if one’s occupation is beneath others’ notice.

Another advantage to urban density is that when you need to escape, your pursuers will have a hard time chasing you through the streets. You, on the other hand, may not need to run through the streets at all to get far away from your pursuers. Connect your cellar to a network of underground service tunnels or catacombs, made necessary by the presence of a large, concentrated population, and if your lair is overrun, you can escape into a maze of twisty little passages, all alike.

COASTAL

Defending a coastal lair is two problems in one: defending against land incursions and defending against sea incursions. The land side of the problem isn’t difficult: Defend the same way you would in whatever terrain the coastal land belongs to. The sea side is more complex.

In the defender’s favor, sight lines over water are wide open; from a high vantage point, you can see for miles, giving you plenty of time to get into position. These circumstances favor the defender to such a degree that until the invention of cannons, and ships large and steady enough to carry them, naval siege was rare and impractical. To invade a position from water, you had to get your boats close enough that soldiers could wade the rest of the way to shore and fight hand to hand, which was generally a bad bet.

In addition, aside from remote military watchtowers built specifically for early warning, coastal fortifications weren’t usually built right up against open ocean. They were built in harbors: landforms that offered protection not only against storm winds and rough waves but also naval assault. In addition to building strongpoints from which enemy ships could be showered with projectiles on their way in, a fortification on a small harbor could take advantage of the geography to extend a defensive chain, or boom, across the mouth of the harbor. Raised and lowered on a winch, such a chain could be drawn taut, and any ship trying to sail into the harbor would run up against it and… just… stop.

Finally, one of the chief advantages of defense is knowing your terrain, and in coastal defense, that means knowing the locations of hazards—rocks that could stave in a ship’s hull, hidden shallows that could cause a ship to get stuck or capsize, and so forth. Without good intelligence on how to avoid such hazards, invaders would have to offset the risk by advancing slowly and carefully, blunting the momentum of their attack.

So far, so good. However, these factors mean only that it’s easy to defend against a conventional pre-gunpowder naval attack under normal conditions. You might have no trouble repelling a full-size caravel loaded with a couple dozen foot soldiers, but what about a band of saboteurs, slipping in quietly by rowboat? At night? Under fog? Having appropriate detection and response measures in place for small incursions under poor visibility conditions is essential.

And that’s in the real world. In a fantasy world, you have an additional threat to contend with: creatures native to the sea, such as sahuagin and merrows. They’ll laugh at a defensive chain the way you’d laugh at a length of string at ankle level, and what would be a hidden hazard to a ship’s crew is just a landmark to them. Surface combat is a two-dimensional affair, but the underwater world is three-dimensional. Dealing with swimming creatures is much like dealing with flying creatures: Any linear barrier you put in place, they can go over or under at will. The only answer to them is a combination of early detection and swift, aggressive response. If you’re a plodding, landbound humanoid, that almost certainly means depending at least in part on magic.

Concealment is always beneficial, but in a coastal lair, that has to be balanced against the probable reason why you built a coastal lair in the first place: the need to travel by sea. How do you hide, camouflage, or disguise your comings and goings? Now those wide-open sight lines are working against you—but fog works in your favor, as does the ability to dive. In other words, when you’re trying to keep anyone from knowing you’re there or learning what you’re up to, all the former pluses of coastal lair defense become minuses, and all the minuses become pluses—if you can take advantage of them.

FOREST

Historically, authority has claimed open land, while forests have been the home of resisters and the marginalized. There’s a reason why Robin Hood, upon being outlawed, sought refuge with his band of followers in Sherwood Forest. Trees and foliage impede visibility, as do the mists that gather in moist, shaded air. Uneven, overgrown terrain impedes mobility, channeling those passing through onto narrow beaten paths. Sounds are at once muffled, drowned out by birdsong, and reflected unpredictably off countless surfaces.

However, in fantasy settings, forests are home to well-established societies of their own—most notably elves and their fey cousins, but also lycanthropes, goblinoids, and smaller tribes of orcs and gnolls. Tropical and subtropical forests harbor grungs, lizardfolk, and serpentfolk. Among these peoples, the order is reversed: They claim dominion over the forests where they dwell, and their outcasts must seek refuge on the outside.

A conventional fighting force of any size is at a significant disadvantage in a forested area; the larger and older the forest, the greater the disadvantage. Forests are the domain of ambushers, guerrillas, hidden scouts, and small units of special forces. Because of this, the guardians of forest societies defend their homes using strategies and tactics more commonly associated with irregulars. Make no mistake, however: They’re still as highly trained and organized as any regular army.

A staple strategy in forest fighting is to block paths with abatis (felled trees laid facing the opponent, with their limbs sharpened to points) or fences of intertwined (“pleached” or “plashed”) branches, halting invaders’ progress. Hidden defenders then appear suddenly from behind surrounding trees and let loose a volley of arrows and thrown weapons. When the enemy collects its wits and begins to fight back, the defenders melt away into the woods, presenting another dilemma: whether or not to break formation in order to pursue. Frustratingly for the would-be attackers, this stunt can be pulled again farther down the road, and then again, and again, and there simply isn’t any good way to respond. Not only is it effective at reducing the enemy’s strength, it’s also murder on morale.

This kind of deep environmental defense is necessary, because forests tend not to be rich in accessible building materials other than wood. Potential invasions need to be detected, deterred, and responded to decisively long before they reach the location of the assets being protected. Otherwise, the last stand will be short and sad—especially if the invaders burn their way in. Far better to force them to give up and go home while they’re still far from their objective.

Even in an ordinary forest, for those who don’t know the terrain, it’s easy to lose one’s sense of direction. Elves and fey, however, have associations with magic, which can add extra levels of disorientation by distorting time and distance and producing terrifying noises to frighten invaders—as well as provide early warning of incursions, shape the landscape to present obstacles, lure invaders off task with enticing charms, and turn the beasts, birds, and even trees of the forest into sentries.

DESERT

The No. 1 challenge of establishing a desert lair is the No. 1 challenge of desert life in general: access to water. All desert settlements, regardless of size, are built next to or around a dependable water source, and the scarcity of arable land in arid terrain means that food is often grown inside, rather than outside, a fortification’s walls.

Another challenge is that desert landscapes generally offer few terrain obstacles other than shifting sands. Rivers are few and usually easy to cross; there are no forests to obstruct visibility or channel enemy movements. Unless you can find a nice plateau to build on in a desert that’s more rock than sand, or a major watercourse to set up alongside, you have to anticipate that an attack could come from any direction. Partly for this reason, citadels with hexagonal and octagonal outer walls appeared in Southwest Asia two centuries before they became common in Europe: More obtuse angles mean fewer blind spots.

Because desert spaces are so wide open, the more mobile side has a significant advantage—which means a key element of desert lair defense, which elsewhere might be more of a static affair, is being able to reposition your defenders smoothly and rapidly, both around your lair and inside it. (Historically, light cavalry—specifically, mounted archers on swift riding horses—proved to be a powerful asset in desert defense, defeated only by longer-range crossbows and heavier cavalry.) The converse of this fact is that if the defenders are routed, unless they can outrun their attackers, fleeing is pointless: There won’t be any safe place they can get to before they’re run down and annihilated. Consequently, they’re more likely to fight to the bitter end.

Wood is scarce in desert areas, but where there’s water, there’s clay soil that can be used to make adobe brick for walls and tiles for flooring and roofing. Depending on the type of desert, stone may also be abundant enough to build fortification walls out of, but other buildings will still generally be made out of brick. Walls are built extra thick, not just for durability but also as insulation from extreme desert temperatures, which can be as cold at night as they are hot during the day.

SWAMP

Building a lair in a swamp has both significant pros and significant cons. Swampland being among the most difficult of difficult terrains, the location itself is a substantial deterrent: Would-be invaders will be so slowed in their approach that even a small defensive force can inflict significant losses upon them, and retreating is every bit as difficult as advancing. Also, food is abundant, unlike in arctic and desert terrain. On the other hand, if you’re not native to the area, you’ll probably dislike the humidity (which among other things means you can’t store that abundant food for very long), not to mention the disease-carrying insect life. You may also find it hard to recruit a large guard force if you’re not enlisting swamp folk.

The “castle in a swamp” gag from Monty Python and the Holy Grail notwithstanding, not only is it feasible to build a fortification in a swamp, marsh castles were numerous throughout the Middle Ages, particularly in Central and Eastern Europe. The trick to constructing a swamp lair is to either build it on an already existing island or dredge together a sufficiently large motte to build on; to drive deep foundation piles for support; and not to build too heavy or too high.

Workable stone generally isn’t abundant in swampy areas, and transporting it from elsewhere would be a nightmare, but brick is easy to make from clay-rich swamp soil—if you have the means to dry it out, which is a big if. If not, you’ll most likely be building with wood, with a palisade wall making up the outer envelope of your construction. Humans who settle in marshlands (or are hiding out there) and who have access to a variety of materials will build stone foundations on wooden piles, with brick on top of that and wood the rest of the way up, but peoples native to swamps, such as lizardfolk and bullywugs, will generally use only wood.

MOUNTAIN

There are mountains, and there are mountains. Mount Marcy, the highest mountain in New York’s Adirondacks, rises to a height of 5,344 feet, which just barely qualifies it as a medium-size mountain. Meanwhile, Estes Park, Colorado, the nearest incorporated town to Rocky Mountain National Park, sits at 7,522 feet—more than two thousand feet higher than the peak of Mount Marcy—and every mountain trail in the park begins at an even higher elevation. The twenty-five highest mountains in the Colorado Rockies all reach above 14,000 feet. Yet these alps are dwarfed by Earth’s highest peak, Mount Everest, which rises to a staggering 29,032 feet—meaning the upper two-thirds of it are hostile to human existence.

When ascending a low mountain—one that rises less than 5,000 feet above sea level—all you need to concern yourself with is finding a safe path up. On medium-size mountains, however, you begin to confront the effects of high altitude, specifically lower atmospheric pressure and less oxygen in the air. The difference is significant enough that humans native to the upper end of this range, from 8,000 to 10,000 feet, have had to adapt physiologically to supply themselves with enough oxygen to survive, becoming more squat and heavyset, with enlarged chest cavities and shorter limbs. (Who’d have thought it—there’s actually a good reason for dwarves to look like that.)

High mountain elevations are in another league altogether. If you’re on the march, you’ll tire faster: A day’s travel below 10,000 feet is 8 hours, but between 10,000 and 13,000 feet, it’s 6 hours; between 13,000 and 16,000 feet, it’s 4 hours. (The Dungeon Master’s Guide makes a nod to this fact in chapter 5, “High Altitude,” treating all travel days at elevations between 10,000 and 20,000 feet as 4-hour days.) In addition to thin air, hazards include intense solar rays, extreme cold, deep snow, fast-changing weather, reduced visibility from storms and blizzards when the wind is strong and thick fog when it’s not, and avalanches and rockslides. Push yourself too hard, sweat too heavily, and you court not merely exhaustion but also hypothermia and frostbite. Spending too long at these very high altitudes can even induce personality disorders. And yet it is possible to adapt, by spending a few weeks around 10,000 feet and making regular treks to higher elevations and back.

Past 18,000 feet, forget it. There’s no way for a human being to acclimate to this altitude. At these heights, you’re courting death with every step.

For these reasons, a monster—most likely one that can fly—might choose to establish a lair above 10,000 feet, but except for aarakocra and goliaths, humanoids won’t. Even medium-size mountains are so inhospitable that only smugglers, bandits, and rebels seek refuge there. The environment is a more dangerous enemy than whoever’s after you. That being said, orcs won’t care about the dangers, and more war-weary ones might think highly of the idea of settling where other folk won’t come and hassle them.

Regardless of elevation, if you’re choosing to make your redoubt in the mountains—and you’re not a natural predator native to that milieu—you need to control the supply routes and trailheads that lead to it, as well as anyplace along the way where enemies might make camp. If you employ defenders, choose highly mobile, lightly armored scouts and skirmishers, armed with melee weapons, ranged weapons, and ranged spells or area-effect abilities; they’ll also need proficiency in Survival to recognize changing weather. Guards accustomed to harsh and capricious mountain conditions will take fighting in them for granted, giving them an edge over attackers who are unused to it. Run multiple reconnaissance and security patrols, and make them as large as you can manage. Stage raids to capture foes or their gear, lay traps, and wear them down. Pursuit through mountains is seldom feasible, so there’s no good reason to fight to the death, especially since you almost certainly know the terrain better than your attackers.

In a mountain lair, rather than concentrate your forces in your lair proper, it’s often wiser to establish observation posts and other defensive positions at different elevations along the way. Mind you, while this is the smart strategy, it’s also hard. Building and maintaining these posts demands a lot of resources, and they run out quickly, but you still need to keep them stocked with enough food, water, timber, and so forth to sustain themselves, because you never know whether the weather will cooperate when you need more. Your sentries will need hot, hearty meals, and they’d have their hands full and then some trying to both defend and forage at high altitude, so food and water will often have to be supplied from villages below. (By far, the best way to transport such supplies is by mule. They’re strong, sure-footed, and indefatigable, although they balk at deep snow, and mountain trails can get buried if they’re not cleared regularly. Mules’ altitude tolerance, like that of humans, tops out around 10,000 feet.)

Stone is an abundant resource in the mountains; so is wood, as long as you’re below the timberline. Alternatively, rather than build a lair on a mountain, you can build your lair into a mountain, starting from an already existing cave and digging corridors, multilevel galleries and halls, passageways to observation posts and concealed battlements, storerooms, and other useful chambers. You can seal the entrance off easily with as large a stone as you or your minions are capable of moving. However, this sort of construction requires a colossal amount of labor, not to mention deep knowledge of mining. At the technology level of most D&D settings, dwarves and kobolds are probably the only humanoids that wouldn’t consider this cost to outweigh the benefits. Other folks are better off using a natural cave as is.

All mountain terrain, except gentle ascents on well-maintained trails, is difficult terrain. Also, the distance between any two points in the mountains is about 10 percent greater than what your map suggests it ought to be—and that’s if you stick to the trails.

ARCTIC

Arctic terrain is a brutal place not just to try to assault a lair but to establish one in the first place. Since trees don’t grow in the tundra, let alone in polar ice, there’s no wood to build with; stone is often buried beneath permafrost, which is an iffy foundation for building anything large upon because of frost heave. The most widely available building materials are ice and peat.

If you can get wood shipped up from a warmer location, you can mitigate the frost heave problem somewhat by building on piles driven deep into the ground, as you might in a swamp—but you’ll be driving them down through ground that’s frozen solid most or all of the time. The amount of work involved, for a building of any scale, is mind-boggling. And if it gets too warm and the permafrost melts, those pilings may start to rot. When you’re building on frozen ground, you need that ground to stay frozen.

Chances are, then, that if you’re establishing an arctic lair, you’re not building, you’re burrowing—most likely, into a glacier. Either that, or you’re operating on a very small scale. No fifty-warrior guard force for you, unless you’re all frost giants. The number of followers you can attract is limited as well by how much food is available for you and them. Arctic-dwelling peoples are traditionally nomadic: They go where the game goes.

However, if you’re already adapted to the cold and have some means of building shelter and feeding yourself and your hangers-on, you do have a lot of factors working in your favor defensively. As in desert, swamp, and mountain terrain, the environment is the enemy of travelers, and your enemy’s enemy is your friend. Noise carries farther in cold air, as temperature inversions keep sound waves from propagating off into the sky, where no one can hear them, and bounce them back toward the ground; this phenomenon allows you to hear someone coming from thousands of yards off. While creatures that have evolved to live in arctic conditions frequently enjoy natural camouflage in the form of white feathers or fur, darkly dressed interlopers stand out against the snow. Blizzards and blowing snow obscure friend and foe alike, but you’ll have the advantage of early detection if you possess a keen sense of hearing or smell.

Also, as featureless as it may look, arctic terrain is usually difficult terrain. Moving overland across deep snow or slick ice is punishingly hard work. Skis or snowshoes can help on snow, but only if you master the basic techniques, and which of the two to use is a function of the depth and density of the snow and the hilliness or flatness of the land. Plus, what makes movement easier on snow won’t help much on ice, and vice versa. As for bare tundra, it may be easier going in the winter, but during spring thaws and autumn rains, it turns to mud.

Whether you can survive if you flee your lair depends on your ability to preserve body heat and find nourishment. If you can do both of those things on your own, through either natural adaptation or learned skill, ditching your lair to save your hide makes sense. If instead you’re wholly dependent on your lair for warmth, food, or both, fleeing into the frigid waste is a death sentence; you may as well make a final stand and hope to prevail.

UNDERGROUND

Caves form by many different geological processes, but when we imagine a subterranean realm inhabited by entire civilizations as well as ecosystems of both ordinary critters and fantastic monsters, the images that come to mind are generally either solution caves, which form in sedimentary rock when it’s dissolved by eons of mildly acidic groundwater flow, or lava caves, tubes of igneous rock that form after volcanic eruptions when lava that’s exposed to the air cools and hardens faster than the still-flowing lava beneath it.[I]

Large cave systems are most often solution caves. But while solution caves, unmodified, may be okay as short-term hideouts, they’re not necessarily a good starting point for underground strongholds. Look at a map of a large cave system, and it more closely resembles the pattern of cracks on a piece of glazed pottery than it does an organized underground habitation. Rooms, or clusters of rooms, large enough to establish a settlement in are scarce, and there’s constant dampness and threat of flooding, because the hydrology that created the cave system in the first place never shuts off. Unintelligent creatures, less discerning ones such as kobolds or troglodytes, or weird folk such as myconids might not consider these issues to be deal-breakers, but more sophisticated humanoids won’t tolerate them. Also, some caves, because of surrounding geology or microbial life, harbor pockets of toxic or flammable gas or chemical processes that consume the available oxygen, replacing it with carbon dioxide—or carbon monoxide.

Therefore, if you’re going to try to turn a cave network into a dwarven citadel or a drow compound or whatever, you need three things: extensive mining, drainage, and ventilation. Those big, irregular cave rooms are going to be heavily modified, with lots of interior construction, probably rectilinear, and leveling of ground into stepped terraces. Smaller cave rooms will be dug out into more regular shapes, narrow passageways will be widened, and new rooms will be dug off those passageways, with many pillars to keep the ceiling from falling in.

In room-and-pillar mining, cascade collapses can occur if the width-to-height ratio of the supporting pillars is too low. That ratio is a function of the type of rock being dug out and the “extraction ratio,” or the amount that ain’t there anymore divided by the sum of what ain’t and what still is. In metal mining, for instance, if you want to create a room with a 10-foot ceiling, your pillars need to be at least 10 feet wide. In a gem or crystal mine, they need to be at least 20 feet wide. In a coal mine, they need to be 30 feet wide. And because collapses most often occur when the extraction ratio exceeds 60 percent—and geometry is a harsh mistress—those pillars must in fact be wider than the passages between them. A 60 percent extraction ratio means 40 percent unextracted volume, and a square pillar that occupies 40 percent of a larger square area is 63 percent of the larger square’s length and width.

That being said, limestone is fairly strong, and even in the real world, you can sometimes get away with pillars as narrow as 55 percent of the ceiling height and extraction ratios of up to 90 percent, meaning pillars just 30 percent of the length and width of the square that contains them. However, this can only occur when all the stars align: You’re not digging too deep, so the overburden of the rock above isn’t too great; the surrounding rock is solid and stable; and there’s no risk of an earthquake.

It’s best, therefore, to keep any new underground rooms you dig fairly small and unimpressive if you don’t want them to cave in. Where your ceiling is 10 feet high, for instance, don’t dig wider than 7 feet—or, if you prefer, dig 17 feet wide, but leave a row of 3-foot pillars down the middle, spaced 7 feet apart.

Limestone is hard, but dwarves and drow are canonically very long-lived, so they have the luxury of being able to take their time and dig fairly extensive room networks, with pillars either left in place or added in after the fact as needed, through skillful stonemasonry. Those grand, high-ceilinged halls, like the Halls of Moria in The Fellowship of the Ring? Chances are, the dwarves who built those started at the top and dug down—either to mine out valuable ore, to get at valuable ore they thought might be farther below, or to quarry stone to use as building material someplace else. The “higher” the ceiling, the longer they’ve been digging downward. Such rooms will certainly have entryways near the ceiling that either are no longer in use or are now reached by stairs carved into the walls beneath them. (In addition to proficiency in mining, advanced underground-dwelling folks probably have some fairly advanced understanding of alchemy, which would allow them to use acid solution mining to widen cracks.)

What about shorter-lived folks, though? They’ll need something softer to dig through. An incredible real-world example exists in the underground cities of the Cappadocia region in modern Turkey, which were dug through volcanic tuff during the early Middle Ages. Many levels deep, these delvings not only included ventilation (shafts passing through multiple levels reach all the way up to the surface above) and drinking water (other shafts, also passing through multiple levels, reach down to the water table below) but storage for wine and grain and, near the surface, stabling for animals! The largest of these cities, at Derinkuyu and Kaymaklı, were large enough to house up to twenty thousand inhabitants, who used these subterranean shelters to hide from invaders during the Arab-Byzantine wars.

Of course, the medieval Cappadocians didn’t grow grain or wine underground; they brought these down from the surface. Any underground-dwelling folk needs surface access to produce the kind of diet we’re accustomed to. If your dwarves have a taste for ale and mutton, they need to either grow the barley and hops and raise the sheep themselves, on the sunny slopes of their mountainsides, or trade for them. Otherwise, they need a drastically different cuisine, consisting mainly of fungi, crustaceans, and edible insects—and room to farm these foodstuffs underground.

Lava caves are drier than solution caves, but they’re generally long and narrow, with few or no branches. Most underground cities developed in and around a lava cave will resemble lengthy hotel hallways, with lava tubes as central thoroughfares connecting many small, hand-dug rooms arranged alongside them. There are a few exceptions, though, such as Kazumura Cave in Hawai’i, a crisscrossing of several lava tubes intentionally connected by cavers.

The chief advantage of an underground lair is that it’s nigh impossible to find an alternative way in that its inhabitants don’t already know about. Every side of the envelope is blocked by billions of tons of solid rock. Tunnels are easy to monitor and even easier to block off. (The Cappadocians used half-ton rolling doors of solid stone.) Would-be invaders are in enfilade every step of the way.

But maybe you’re not looking to go all the way underground. Maybe you’re content with a cave that’s relatively close to the surface. In that case, your needs might be met by a sea cave, created by waves smashing relentlessly against rock, or an eolian cave, eroded not by water but by abrasive particles carried on the wind. A red dragon looking for a nice mountain cave dwelling will probably have to settle for a lava cave, since most other processes of cave formation don’t operate at mountain altitudes. (There are talus caves—the leftover spaces in piles of tumbling boulders—but to a dragon, those would probably be the equivalent of a tin-roofed shanty.)

UNDERWATER

The rules for underwater combat dictate the choice of weaponry of marine humanoids: Crossbows and thrown tridents, spears, javelins, and darts are suitable for ranged combat, but they’re only good out to their normal range. Nets suffer the same ridiculous drawbacks underwater as they do on land (they’re largely ineffective without the help of an ally, it’s impossible to gain advantage on a net attack, and they’re much too easy to get out of) with one more besides: They miss automatically at a range of greater than 5 feet. However, creatures with a swimming speed can use any melee weapon they please, and they suffer no speed penalty underwater, as creatures without a swimming speed do. They can therefore pull off some unfairly clever maneuvers using long weapons without ever entering their opponents’ reach.

What can you build an underwater lair out of? Would you believe… concrete? Stone may be as plentiful underwater as on land, but good luck trying to move it. There are no trees to harvest for wood, and baking bricks is out of the question. But all the ingredients you need in order to make concrete are there; in fact, living corals use the same substances to form entire reefs. That being said, without the aid of magic, it may take more time than you have available—a lot more. With the aid of magic, though, it’s a piece of cake. The spells fabricate, stone shape, transmute rock, and move earth suggest that some customized transmutation magic in the 4th- through 6th-level range should do the trick.

Where do you intend to build your underwater lair? This question is surprisingly troublesome. The Monster Manual’s descriptions of legendary undersea monsters such as the aboleth and the kraken refer to their living in the depths of the ocean, but the oceans of our world are insanely deep—about 13,000 feet deep on average, and 24,000 to 36,000 feet deep at their lowest points. There’s no light and almost no oxygen down there, and the water above exerts more than four hundred atmospheres’ worth of pressure. PCs who want an experience that alien are better off casting plane shift than trying to penetrate the lower pelagic layers. The beds of deep seas, such as the Arctic, Mediterranean, South China, and Caribbean seas, the Sea of Japan, and the Gulf of Mexico, are likewise prohibitively difficult for land dwellers to reach, ranging from about 4,500 feet to 7,000 feet or more on average. These depths are far, far beyond those that even determined swimmers can reach without causing themselves serious harm. We’re going to have to interpret “depths of the ocean” somewhat loosely if we want our lairs to be accessible by adventurers.

Plus, most fantasy settings offer nothing in the way of diving gear. Diving without equipment is no small undertaking, and even if you presuppose that a magic item such as the cloak of the manta ray or a spell such as water breathing provides not just the power of underwater respiration but also protection from the effects of hydrostatic pressure, bad things can still happen if that magic is dispelled.

If you’ve ever swum to the bottom of the deep end of the pool, you may have been struck by the amount of pressure you feel at just 12 feet of depth. Most swimmers never dive below 20 feet without equipment, and even experienced freedivers rarely venture deeper than 30 or 40 feet, where the ambient pressure is double what it is on the surface. At this depth, the additional pressure can rupture an eardrum or cause blood vessels in the lungs to burst; at 60 feet, where the pressure is triple what it is on the surface, the risk of such injury increases significantly. Trained freedivers use special breathing and “clearing” techniques to prevent these injuries from occurring.

Sixty feet is considered the limit for safe diving without SCUBA gear. Beyond that, water pressure starts to affect not only the ears and lungs but also brain function.

Nitrogen narcosis, while much less unpleasant than coughing up blood, presents with an even more dangerous symptom: a feeling of serenity and false confidence, which arises at depths below 100 feet. It’s dangerous because a typical swimmer already experiences minor impairments in judgment and motor function between 60 and 100 feet, and these only get worse the farther down they go. Nitrogen narcosis is a particular risk for SCUBA divers breathing pressurized air, but it affects freedivers as well, especially at lower depths.

Beyond 100 feet of depth, as if under the influence of alcohol, divers experience slower reaction times, worse risk assessment and decision making, and a tendency to burst out laughing. At a depth of 150 feet, anxiety starts to kick in, especially in water that’s cold and dark. Around 175 to 200 feet, divers start to experience sleepiness, dizziness, confusion, even hallucinations; reaction delays become severe, and the sense of anxiety may intensify to terror. Between 250 and 300 feet, it becomes hard to concentrate, to remember things, and to react to stimuli at all. Past 300 feet, divers may hallucinate, experience mood swings, lose their sense of time, or simply black out.

Fortunately, the effects of nitrogen narcosis clear up as divers rise back toward the surface. Unfortunately, returning to the surface too fast can result in another unhappy condition: decompression sickness, also known as “the bends.” The most common symptom is intense joint pain, but other symptoms may include dizziness, shortness of breath, deep fatigue, nausea, paralysis of the legs, visual phenomena, and even seizures. These symptoms may occur at the time of ascent, but it can also take them an hour or more to occur; they mostly subside within one to three hours after onset and rarely linger more than a day, but they’re misery in the meantime.

There are two key takeaways here: First, the effects of water pressure are a powerful counter against land-dwelling enemies, almost as powerful as the threat of drowning. Second, an underwater lair at a depth of more than 300 feet is effectively unreachable by land dwellers without the aid of magic, and if that magic is lost for any reason at all, they’re done for. You could site a lair at a greater depth, but your PCs would most likely never venture there and certainly shouldn’t try. Any attempt to do so would risk a very stupid and narratively unsatisfying demise.

Therefore, if you want to build an adventure around an underwater lair constructed on the seafloor, it more or less has to be situated on a continental shelf: an area of relatively shallow water, usually less than a few hundred feet deep, surrounding land. Along some coastlines, the shelf is narrow or nearly nonexistent; along others, it extends for hundreds of miles beyond land. The North Sea, Baltic Sea, Persian Gulf, Yellow Sea, Gulf of Thailand, Java Sea, Arafura Sea, Argentine Sea, and Gulf of St. Lawrence, along with Hudson Bay and the northern half of the Bering Sea, are all above continental shelves, so it’s entirely plausible for you to create places in your fantasy world where vast areas of water lie over seafloors just 300 feet deep, give or take.

Now, if you loosen your definition of a “lair” to refer simply to an underwater region, as opposed to an underwater structure or formation, you don’t have to worry about how much water there is below it. You can also create a submarine palace, floating freely through Poseidon’s realm at whatever depth you please—it doesn’t even have to remain at a single depth, and can bob above and below 300 feet below sea level as your whims dictate. If you want your underwater lair to rest on solid ground, however, stick to the continental shelves.

OPTIONAL RULE: DIVE TRAUMA

The ability to breathe water, whether innate or granted by magic, confers immunity to dive trauma at depths of less than 600 feet. However, if this ability is lost while a creature is underwater, it must immediately make a series of Constitution saving throws as if it were descending from the surface to its current depth.

Creatures sealed inside a pressurized conveyance, such as an apparatus of the crab, are also immune to dive trauma.

Dive trauma doesn’t occur on the elemental plane of water: Because the plane consists of nothing but water extending infinitely in every direction, there’s no significant variation in pressure, because everyone and everything is effectively weightless. (Not massless, though; encumbrance still applies.)

BAROTRAUMA

When a creature that’s susceptible to dive trauma descends below 30 feet, it must make a DC 10 Constitution (Athletics)II check. On a failure, the creature takes one level of exhaustion. If the saving throw fails by 5 or more, the creature also suffers a perforated eardrum and has disadvantage on Wisdom (Perception) checks that rely on hearing.

The creature must repeat this saving throw when it descends below 60 feet. If it suffers a second perforated eardrum, the creature is deafened.

A lesser restoration, prayer of healing, greater restoration, heal, or regeneration spell repairs the eardrum(s) and removes the deafened condition.

NITROGEN NARCOSIS

Nitrogen narcosis works similarly to exhaustion: It occurs in levels, with escalating severity. However, levels of nitrogen narcosis don’t require a rest, short or long, to reduce; they can be reduced simply by swimming back up to higher depths.

A creature that’s susceptible to dive trauma must make a DC 10 Constitution saving throw when it descends below 100 feet and again every additional 50 feet beyond that. At 300 feet, the save DC increases to 15, and an additional saving throw must be made every 10 minutes. At 600 feet, the save DC increases to 20, and an additional save must be made every 1 minute. At 750 feet, the save DC increases to 25, and an additional save must be made at the beginning of every turn. Each failed saving throw adds one level of nitrogen narcosis. A creature suffers the effect of its current level of nitrogen narcosis as well as all lower levels.

Level

Effect

1

The creature takes one level of exhaustion.

2

The creature is frightened by the depths. If the saving throw fails by 5 or more, the creature has a panic attack, is incapacitated until its nitrogen narcosis level is reduced to 1 or eliminated, and cannot willingly descend any farther.

3

The creature behaves as if affected by a  confusion spell, acting and moving normally on a roll of 7 or 8.

4

The creature must make a DC 10 Constitution saving throw, as if to maintain concentration on a spell, at the start of its turn. On a failed saving throw, it doesn’t move, take actions, or perceive that any time has passed. On a successful save, it still behaves as above.

5

The creature falls unconscious.

Whenever a creature suffering from nitrogen narcosis ascends above 300 feet, and again at each lesser depth at which it must make a saving throw, it can repeat the saving throw for that depth. On a success, one level of nitrogen narcosis goes away. When a creature’s last level of nitrogen narcosis is eliminated, one level of exhaustion also goes away without having to take a long rest. Levels of nitrogen narcosis go away automatically at a rate of one per minute of inactivity above 100 feet of depth.

DECOMPRESSION SICKNESS

Each turn, a creature underwater can safely ascend up to its swimming speed or half its walking speed, whichever is greater. If it ascends any faster, it must make a DC 10 Constitution saving throw at the end of the turn. On its first failed saving throw, the creature is poisoned by decompression sickness for 1d4 hours. A second failed saving throw has no additional effect. However, after three failed saves, the creature is stunned while poisoned in this way. A short rest reduces recovery time by 1 hour.

1. I. It’s probably more correct to say that the images that come to mind are of soundstage sets constructed for movies and TV shows, meant to resemble those two types of caves.

2. II. See Player’s Handbook, chapter 7, “Variant: Skills with Different Abilities.”

CHAPTER 3

DEFENSIVE MAGIC

By making the impossible possible, magic introduces all sorts of complications to the planning of a lair—adding many new options for defense, but wildly multiplying the number of ways one can be attacked. This phenomenon is one of many reasons why I personally prefer low-magic anchored fantasy settings to high-magic wild fantasy settings. When everyone gets their hands on magic, the whole schema of attack and defense is radically transformed, just as it was in the real world when people got their hands on gunpowder—only worse, because the range of applications of magic is wider than that of gunpowder.

To me, the sweet spot is reached via the following premises:

- Magic exists, but…

- Magic is scarce. Magical practitioners are few—no more numerous than, say, people in contemporary society with PhDs. That works out to about two people out of a hundred, and it includes all spellcasters, both arcane and divine, of every level of accomplishment.

- Magic is expensive. Magic items are luxury goods; spells are premium services.

- Most magic items of any power are custom jobs. You won’t find a “magic shop” except in a city, or in a town with a community of wizards nearby—the fantasy equivalent of a college town—and its stock will consist only of material components and basic healing potions. In the biggest, richest cities, you can find shops selling other common magic items. To acquire anything of uncommon or greater rarity, you’ve got to dig it up yourself, commission its creation, or know a guy who knows a guy. To have a spell cast for you, you have to hire someone to do it, and there’s no Yelp for spellcasters, only word of mouth. Even clerics, who are typically more generous than wizards about performing minor miracles, generally do so only for their own congregations unless you make them an offering they can’t refuse. On the flip side, if you happen into possession of a magic item you don’t want, you can command a high price for it.

- Magical practitioners are kept under close observation, both by governments and by their own organizations. You don’t want someone who can lob fireballs going rogue.

Within these constraints, magic remains magical: something you don’t see every day, that isn’t oozing out of every crack in the woodwork. It’s not ubiquitous. It frequently comes as a surprise, even when you’re anticipating it.

If you’re designing for a wild high fantasy setting instead, you’ll need to adjust accordingly, because threats are going to proliferate. For starters, governments and high-status individuals will spare no expense on protection against enchantment and surveillance magic. Every titled aristocrat and prosperous merchant in a high-magic D&D campaign will wear a ring of mind shielding and an amulet of proof against detection and location. A noble with a title equivalent to earl or count, or higher, and a fear of being kidnapped may also wear a ring of free action. A duke or royal will wear both a ring of mind shielding and an amulet of proof against detection and location, plus either a ring of spell turning or a scarab of protection.

Even though these last two items are of legendary rarity, merely granting advantage on saving throws might rightly strike someone of such high status as providing insufficient protection. So let’s posit the existence of a talisman of inviolability, existing in various degrees of potency and rarity, that makes the wearer immune to all enchantment magic, mind-reading, and scrying up to a certain spell level: The uncommon talisman of inviolability is proof against 1st-level spells, the rare talisman of greater inviolability against spells up to 3rd level, the very rare talisman of superior inviolability against spells up to 6th level, and the legendary talisman of supreme inviolability against spells up to 8th level.

Looking at the tiers of fifth edition D&D play, minor nobles and privileged gentry are unlikely to be threatened by anything worse than a 2nd-level spell, so a greater inviolability talisman should suffice for them; royalty and major nobility, who might be targeted by spells as powerful as 5th level, can make do with a superior inviolability talisman; and supreme inviolability talismans are made for the kind of people who aspire to take over the world, by the kind of people who merely aspire to work for them. These can take the place of the items mentioned in the previous paragraph. (See appendix A for complete item description.)

Owners of castles will have to contend not only with battering rams and trebuchets but spells custom-made for siege. The ranges of fifth edition D&D spell attacks max out at 120 feet, but the Spell Sniper feat and Eldritch Spear warlock invocation increase this distance to an extent that makes them competitive with siege engines. What would it take to boost the range of a simple damaging evocation spell to, say, 300 feet? Comparing spells such as freezing sphere, ice storm, whirlwind, and insect plague to the suggested spell damage by level in the Dungeon Master’s Guide (chapter 9, “Creating a Spell”), it seems to be a simple matter of reducing damage by one die for instantaneous spells and two dice for spells that require concentration, or perhaps one die for elemental damage and two dice for mystical damage such as magical bludgeoning or piercing.

Thus, we can easily imagine some wizardly Leonardo da Vinci devising a 6th-level spell called hurlstone that deals 10d10 bludgeoning damage to a single target at a range of up to 300 feet, making it more powerful than a conventional trebuchet—or that deals only 8d10 damage on a hit but also deals half damage on a miss, making it equally powerful and more reliable. Either way, the spell could easily take a sizable chunk out of a stone curtain wall or crumple an iron portcullis like the front end of a Fiat. And that’s to say nothing of spells that allow attackers to charm or befuddle guards, deceive them with illusions, transmute a section of wall into mud, teleport shock troops past it, or simply fly over it.

Dialing the magic level back, we see that there remains a decent selection of effective but expensive warding magic in the pages of the Player’s Handbook and Xanathar’s Guide to Everything—if you can hack the spells’ duration, since very few of these spells last indefinitely. The Dungeon Master’s Guide has a solution for us here, too, although it’s a fiddlier one: We can follow the rules for crafting a magic item (chapter 6, “More Downtime Activities: Crafting a Magic Item”), using the Magic Item Power by Rarity table (chapter 9, “Creating a New Item”) to determine the base rarity of a spell we want to make permanent, then figure out how many times a day it needs to be cast for the benefits to be constant. The magic items in appendix A, which represent what I think are the most cost-effective ways to gain the benefits of certain spells for your lair, are designed using these rules.

Alternatively, depending on your budget and the cost of the spell, you may wish to employ a spellcaster as a full-time skilled hireling to cast the spell for you as often as needed. This kind of arrangement is a must for any spell that must be cast every day for a year to make it permanent—unless you know how to cast the spell yourself, which is always the cheapest way to go. (One implication of this last point is that such spells are employed much more often by spellcasters, and especially communities of spellcasters, than by individuals who have to hire others to cast spells for them.)

All that being said, few creatures other than humanoids lean on spells or magic items for defense. Nonhumanoids typically rely instead on their own special features and traits, including heightened senses, camouflage, psionic abilities, natural weaponry, and—in the case of legendary creatures—legendary actions, lair actions, and lair and regional effects.

Also, I would restrict only individuals to published spells. Long-established institutions, settlements, cities, or even realms with strong arcane or divine traditions may employ special permanent magical protections such as the ones placed on the scholars’ stronghold of Candlekeep, described in the D&D adventure anthology Candlekeep Mysteries. These can have a variety of effects, unbound by the limits of the spell descriptions in the Player’s Handbook and other supplements; presumably, these are the products of extremely carefully worded wish spells or other comparable magic. As a general rule, though, such permanent wards should either be temporary (say, lasting up to 8 hours) and require intentional activation, or have loopholes that clever players can exploit.

Spellcasting costs are based on D&D Adventurers’ League rules. Spells marked (X) appear in Xanathar’s Guide to Everything.

DETECTION SPELLS

Alarm. A simple 1st-level spell, but one that needs to be cast three times a day to achieve constant coverage. Spend 500 gp on some trespasser’s bane (appendix A) if you want continuous protection.

See invisibility. A 2nd-level spell that does what it says but lasts only one hour. Mounting a lens of overwatch (appendix A) on your wall will grant you the benefits of this spell, but it will cost you 5,000 gp to have one made. For more limited personal protection, you can get a pair of lenses of revelation (appendix A) for 500 gp.

Arcane eye. A 4th-level spell that creates a wee magical surveillance drone. Practical only on an as-needed basis, because it requires concentration and supersedes the caster’s own sight.

Faithful hound. A 4th-level spell that, like alarm, lasts only 8 hours; it also ends when the caster moves more than 100 feet away from it, which makes it more suitable for overnight protection than for round-the-clock coverage. On the plus side, it doubles as a response spell. The going rate per casting is 160 gp; if you’ll need more than thirty nights’ worth of protection—or if you never leave your lair—you can drop 5,000 gp on Norton’s phantom sentry (appendix A).

True seeing. A 6th-level spell that lasts only one hour. A gem of seeing (Dungeon Master’s Guide, chapter 7, “Magic Items A–Z”) is the easiest way to gain the benefit of this spell; you can have one made for 5,000 gp.

DETERRENCE SPELLS

Arcane lock. A 2nd-level spell that magically locks any door, window, gate, or chest, opening it only if someone speaks the password. Unfortunately vulnerable to another 2nd-level spell, knock, or the 3rd-level spell dispel magic. On the upside, a single casting will cost you only 90 gp, and it lasts until it’s dispelled.

Magic mouth. Sometimes all it takes to make a trespasser go away is to warn them that they’re someplace they don’t belong, and this 2nd-level spell does just that for you. For 60 gp, you get an enchantment that plays a recorded message on whatever condition you choose, unless and until someone shuts it up with dispel magic. One nice side effect is that it makes interlopers fret that they’re going to face worse magic the farther in they go.

Arcanist’s magic aura. This 2nd-level spell has two main defensive functions: to disguise a magic item from one school of magic as being from a different school of magic (or not magical at all), and to disguise one type of creature as another type of creature. The first function can prevent a magic item from lighting up under a detect magic spell or deter trespassers from handling a magic item by making it appear to bear evocation or necromancy magic, which seem to make D&D players the most nervous. The second function, concealment of one’s nature, is especially useful for such monsters as vampires, liches, succubi and incubi, and rakshasas. It lasts only twenty-four hours, so for continuous coverage, you’ll need to spend 500 gp on a bottle of lacquer of dissimulation or a ring of imposture (appendix A).

Arcanist’s magic aura can also make a nonmagical item appear to be magical, although that’s generally less useful for defense and more useful for perpetrating fraud. Still, if you can’t afford higher-level magic, fraud can serve a defensive purpose: Slap this spell on an ordinary door or other random surface to make it emanate an aura of abjuration as a temporary deterrent. Dispel magic wipes it away, but you’ll make a trespasser squander precious time as they mull over whether to cast it or not, and then they’ll either balk or waste a valuable spell slot annulling a harmless bit of hocus-pocus.

Major image. A 3rd-level spell that normally requires conscious control. It can be stored in a glyph of warding (see “Response Spells” below), but the illusion is centered on whoever triggers the glyph, and any physical interaction with it reveals it to be an illusion, so any illusion you create with it in this way must be one that immediately scares the target away from wherever they’re standing. That’s tricky to pull off, especially when you’re not there to customize it with convincing details; plus, the glyph spell adds another 490 gp to the cost. Don’t bother. Instead, if you can afford it, get yourself a programmed illusion (see below). Alternatively, if you’re going to be expending a 6th-level slot—or paying for a 6th-level spell—anyway, a permanent major image is useful simply for hiding things in what would otherwise be plain sight, as long as no one’s going to be bumping into them.

Nondetection. A 3rd-level spell that provides one target creature 8 hours’ worth of immunity to all divination magic, including clairvoyance and scrying. At least it doesn’t require concentration, but for continuous coverage, it has to be cast three times per day, sucking up three spell slots at a level that has lots of utility and self-defense spells competing for those slots. It also consumes 25 gp of diamond dust every time it’s cast. If you can’t cast it yourself and have to pay someone else to, it’s going to run you 420 gp per day. At that rate, if flying under the radar is important to you, you’d be a fool not to get yourself an amulet of proof against detection and location (Dungeon Master’s Guide, chapter 7, “Magic Items A–Z”) for a one-time outlay of 500 gp and an attunement slot.

Private sanctum. A 4th-level spell (which can be cast using a higher-level slot for greater coverage) that prevents unwanted scrying and, more significantly, teleportation and planar travel. The area of effect is enough to cover a typical manor house, tower, or keep, though not enough to cover a large palace or an entire castle bailey. It’s a crucial defense in a high-magic campaign. One drawback is that it’s cube-shaped by default, which can result in coverage gaps if you’re using it to protect a non-cube-shaped area—although certain NPCs may plausibly have access to customized versions of the spell with differently shaped areas of effect. It also has to be cast every day for a year to become permanent, so it’s a costly proposition if you can’t cast it yourself or get a wizard to cast it for you at well below the market rate of 160 gp per casting.

Hallow. Depending on the nature of the threats you face, it may be worth it to have part of your lair consecrated (or desecrated). This 5th-level invocation, the effects of which are permanent unless dispelled, will run you 2,250 gp.

Forbiddance. Powerful, if limited in its application, this 6th-level spell requires—and rewards—close reading. It’s not for keeping out any old intruder, but specifically for keeping out supernatural intruders. A single casting lasts only a day, but casting it for thirty consecutive days makes it permanent. Its material component is costly, but it’s not considered consumed until that thirtieth casting. Thus, the total cost to outsource the creation of a permanent forbiddance zone in your lair is 12,800 gp. That’s expensive, but if you have genuine reason to fear a large-scale supernatural incursion—or more than one—you’ll be thankful for the whopping damage it deals to designated foes who transgress.

Guards and wards. This 6th-level spell is one of the best ways to place an assortment of permanent protective enchantments on your lair. It’s also one of the most expensive: Like private sanctum, it has to be cast every day for a year to stick, at a cost of 361 gp per casting. You need to be a bard or a wizard, or have one on your payroll, if you want to enjoy the benefits of this spell.

Programmed illusion. A 6th-level spell that works like magic mouth but produces a convincing visual and auditory illusion across a large area of effect—large enough to contain the illusion of a Gargantuan monster. Sometimes, though, simpler illusions—such as having a door appear to open and a squad of guards pour through it, spears at the ready, or an area appear to fill up with yellow-green gas—are more effective at delaying or repelling intruders. The spell persists until it’s dispelled and will run you 362 gp per casting. Add another 760 gp, and you can put it in a 6th-level glyph of warding (see “Response Spells” below) so that it runs only when you need it.

Mirage arcane. At first glance, this 7th-level spell looks like a good way to confuse and discourage enemies by making the landscape around your lair appear impassable—or by surrounding your lair with a bewildering number of identical copies, costing your enemies time by forcing them to figure out which one is the real one by process of elimination. Unfortunately, it lasts only ten days, which isn’t long enough to fool anyone who puts requisite effort into reconnaissance: A savvy foe will easily find out that those lava pits didn’t exist two weeks ago. You’d need to have sprung for a permanent illusion (using the custom magic item workaround) when you first established your lair, and while a few nabobs might have the money to do that (500,000 gp), nobody’s got the time (fifty-five years). Except elves. Elves would totally do it.

Simulacrum. A 7th-level spell that creates a double of you or another individual you want to protect—an excellent security solution if protecting one specific life is a top priority. Hiring a wizard to cast it for you will cost you 3,490 gp.

Sequester. Because of the powdered gemstones required to cast it, this 7th-level spell is a costly way to protect a single item of loot or lore, but it’s an effective one, placing it behind a veil of invisibility penetrable only by truesight; divination spells such as locate object skate right off it. The third-party casting cost is high: 10,490 gp. However, it lasts indefinitely, unless you set a timer on it.

Temple of the gods. (X) For the rich and pious, this 7th-level spell offers several concrete benefits over a limited but respectable area (120 feet wide, deep, and high): It hinders celestials, elementals, fey, fiends, and undead from entering, and if they do somehow get inside, it impedes everything they might try to do. It shields everyone within it from divination magic, and it boosts healing magic. It bars entry via the Ethereal Plane, its windows are unbreakable, and its doors are unopenable if you’re not on the List. However, it has two downsides: Making it permanent entails casting it in the same place every day for a year, at a daily casting cost of 490 gp if you aren’t casting it yourself; and the 6th-level spell disintegrate vaporizes it, flushing all the time, money, and effort you’ve expended on its creation down the drain.

Antimagic field. There are two catches to this 8th-level spell. First, it nullifies all magic within its area of effect, including the enchantment of any magic items you may possess. (Magical thrown weapons or missiles are still good against targets outside the field.) Second, it can only be cast on oneself; you can’t cast it on an area, nor can you hire someone else to cast it on you. A spell that can only be cast by a spellcaster, who in so doing has to abstain from casting any other spell? It’s a conundrum, figuring out how to make that one work. One solution: Shell out 50,000 gp for a circlet of magic suppression (appendix A) and call on its power only in time of need.

Antipathy/sympathy. The antipathy portion of this 8th-level spell is the obvious choice for deterrence, but the sympathy portion also has its uses—primarily luring its targets into traps or contained areas, away from the assets you want to protect. The trouble with the spell, aside from its level, is its impermanence: It lasts only 10 days. If you’ve got good connections in the magic world, though, maybe you can get someone to craft you a beacon of attraction or a talisman of repulsion (appendix A)—but it will run you a steep 500,000 gp.

Mighty fortress. This 8th-level spell doesn’t live up to its name. For adventurers, it’s a dandy combination of temporary strongpoint and hotel with all-you-can-eat buffet. For anyone looking for long-term protection, its seven-day duration, unalterable shape, and wall height of only 20 feet are less than optimal. To begin with, it’s easily defeated by the 3rd-level spell fly, which is a lot more widely available—and availed—than the 8th-level mighty fortress. For that matter, anyone with a warhorse can effortlessly clear a 20-foot-high, 1-foot-deep wall simply by casting jump on the horse, and that’s just 1st-level. The duration problem can be remedied by casting the spell fifty-two consecutive times, which is fine if you have fifty-two 500 gp diamonds in your possession and not fine at all if you don’t. If you have the 26,000 gp to cast it yourself, spend 15,000 gp and have a mundane fort or tower built to your specifications instead. If you can’t cast it yourself, but you have the 85,280 gp to pay someone else to do it for you, spend 50,000 gp and get yourself a nice little castle.

RESPONSE SPELLS

Glyph of warding. Technically, any spell can be a response spell if it punishes a trespasser for trespassing. Most such spells, however, require a spellcaster to be around to cast them. Glyph of warding, a boostable 3rd-level spell, allows another spell—such as many of those below—to be triggered by an intruder without the spellcaster’s having to be present, circumventing the duration problem. The only catch is that to set it up, you have to expend two spell slots at the level of the spell or higher: one to cast glyph of warding, the other to cast the spell into the glyph. Therefore, you probably won’t be storing your highest-level spells this way.

You don’t have to store a spell in a glyph of warding, though. You can, instead, simply allow the glyph to explode, dealing your choice of elemental damage over the same area as a fireball spell, at about 80 percent of the efficacy. You can also specify the precise conditions under which the glyph will be triggered, reducing the risk that you or one of your minions will set it off by accident.

If you have to pay someone else to cast glyph of warding for you, it’s a minimum of 490 gp, plus the cost of any spell you elect to store in it; the expense means you’ll probably need to use it selectively. If you can afford only one glyph, set it between your enemies and whatever asset you most urgently need to protect—and make sure it’s not going to destroy the asset when it goes off. If you place a spell glyph that deals fire damage in your library of rare scrolls, the consequences are no one’s fault but your own.

Incidentally, if you’re using explosive runes, strongly consider having them deal thunder damage. That way, your response spell also has a detection component: The sound of the explosion will be audible throughout your lair. (Next door and across the street, too, so you may prefer a different damage type in an urban lair.)

Suggestion. This 2nd-level spell is a lovely little bijou to stick in a glyph of warding. A suggestion such as “Your attempted invasion is doomed to fail, so surrender if you want to be treated with mercy,” if it works, can throw a real wrench in your enemies’ plans, as they have to divert their attention from carrying out their mission to stopping the affected target from giving them away. You can also add a sleeper trigger—“Your attempted invasion is doomed to fail, so when you reach your objective, surrender immediately if you want to be treated with mercy”—so that your enemies proceed with their plan, but then your target screws everything up at the critical moment. Even better, your enemies will freak out when the glyph is triggered yet appears to have no immediate effect! Could anything you do to them be as much fun as watching them speculate on what you might have done to them? If you can’t cast the spells yourself, hiring an outside spellcaster to install this combo in your lair will run you just 530 gp. Treat yourself.

Bestow curse. It’s a 3rd-level spell, but if you have the power (or the money), store it at 5th level, so that the effect lasts 8 hours rather than 1 minute. Forget the second and fourth curse options, since they depend on the caster’s being present. Wrecking their Dex checks is a nice way to undermine a foe’s ability to sneak around without being detected, but the Group Checks rule (Player’s Handbook, chapter 7) reduces the impact of any single character’s blundering. The best choice is therefore requiring the target of the spell to make a Wisdom saving throw to do anything at all, making them a cinch to apprehend. It’s a total of 580 gp to pay a spellcaster to store bestow curse in a glyph of warding at 3rd level, 900 gp to store it at 5th level.

Faithful hound. See “Detection Spells” above.

Awaken. This 5th-level spell can turn beasts and plants into defenders of your lair and its environs. Sounds great, doesn’t it? The downside is the cost: Each casting consumes a 1,000 gp agate. If you don’t have either a staff of the woodlands or your own agate mine, that’s going to get old fast. It’s even worse if you need someone else to cast the spell for you: 2,250 gp per casting, plus additional fees for pampering the beast or plant so that it stays friendly to you for more than 30 days.

Geas. A 5th-level spell that produces an extraordinarily powerful magical compulsion—and built-in punishment if the target tries to resist. Because of its 1-minute casting time, it’s virtually impossible to pull off geas against an enemy in combat, but put it in a glyph of warding, and it takes effect instantaneously! You can compel a trespasser who fails their Wisdom saving throw to transfer their loyalty to you, to surrender to your guards, to confess their entire plan, to walk out of your lair without looking back, or even to perform the final act that completes your diabolical master plan. Store it at 7th level, and you can make the effect last for up to a year rather than 30 days; store it at 9th level, and you can make it last indefinitely. To pay someone to set it up for you, the price is 900 gp for a 5th-level geas—some of the most bang for the buck you can get. Higher-level geasa, which generally require the scribing of spell scrolls to store them in glyphs of warding, are 51,380 gp for 7th level and 502,020 gp for 9th level, an awful lot of bucks for the bang.

Flesh to stone. Placing this 6th-level spell in a glyph of warding is delightfully underhanded (if you have the spell slots or can afford an extra 2,500 gp for a 6th-level spell scroll to cast glyph from—5,000 gp if you’re having it made and cast for you), but success is far from guaranteed. Suppose the caster has a spell save DC of 16, and the target has a Constitution saving throw modifier of +1. The target has only a 36 percent chance of avoiding being petrified, and they’ll be at least restrained 68 percent of the time after three rounds. However, suppose the target has a Con save modifier of +8. This target has an 85 percent chance of shaking off the spell, including a 65 percent chance of being entirely unaffected; they’ll be free after three rounds 75 percent of the time. Therefore, you’ll have to be able to muster some other response within two rounds of the spell’s triggering for it to have any significant value. It’s a lot of effort and money to spend on something that requires a backup as often as not, despite its high scare factor.

Forbiddance. See “Deterrence Spells” above. If the 12,800 gp cost to have it made permanent is too rich for your blood, get it stored in a glyph of warding for 1,350 gp (the cost assumes a 7th-level glyph of warding to hold the 6th-level spell) and have it activate when one of your designated enemy types comes within a certain distance of it. Because the spell will be centered on the creature who sets it off, not on the glyph itself, the area of effect may not line up exactly with the boundaries of your lair, but unless your foes are attacking from multiple directions, they’ll all be smack in the middle of it. Watch them get fried.

Mental prison. (X) Already nasty for a 6th-level spell—it deals respectable damage and restrains the target for 1 minute and targets Intelligence rather than one of the big three saving throw abilities—this spell is even nastier when stored in a glyph of warding, with the caveat that targets immune to being charmed get off scot-free. But if 1,250 gp (which includes a 7th-level glyph of warding) is well within your price range, maybe that’s a gamble you’re willing to take.

Modify memory. Putting this 6th-level spell in a glyph of warding is a nice idea in theory, but for it to work, you’d have to be present to tell the target what they remembered, which would defeat the whole purpose of putting it in a glyph of warding. Pass.

Forcecage. A glyph of warding containing this 7th-level spell has several significant benefits: It lasts an hour. It can trap several intruders at once, not just the one who triggers the glyph. There’s no saving throw against being trapped. It’s immune to dispel magic, and even getting out via misty step or dimension door is a gamble. For simply and effectively putting a stop to an invasion attempt, it’s hard to beat this combination of spells. However, if you don’t have a second 7th-level spell slot or an 8th-level slot to cast glyph of warding with, hiring someone else to set the glyph up for you will run you 1,680 gp.

Reverse gravity. This 7th-level spell has such a large area of effect—a cylinder 100 feet high and 100 feet across—that it needs a special area built around it, without any gap that would allow the effect to spill into adjoining space, to ensure that it affects intruders and only intruders. Also, paying someone to cast it into a glyph of warding for you will cost you 1,530 gp (positing an 8th-level glyph for the 7th-level spell). These requirements may make this combination impractical for your needs.

That said, if you do decide to put reverse gravity in a glyph of warding, the ceiling over the area of effect should be as close to 100 feet high as possible without going over, so that foes who set it off take maximum damage, first when they fall up and again when they fall down. For extra-special Rube Goldberg shenanigans, put another glyph of warding on the ceiling and store web or black tentacles in it, so that targets who fail Dexterity saves get caught up there. Better yet, if you’re already spending a king’s ransom on magical defenses anyway, forcecage.

Symbol. Storing this 7th-level spell in a glyph of warding would be redundant, since it functions substantially like glyph already. Instead of storing a spell or simply exploding, it has a variety of insensitive options, from putting its targets to sleep to inflicting a wave of necrotic damage. And yes, I said “targets”: Unlike glyph of warding, symbol affects not just the triggering creature but every other creature within 60 feet that isn’t blocked by a wall or some other form of total cover. Consequently, you need to be sure to place it where it won’t hurt you or any of your followers—you can specify that neither you nor your followers trigger it, but if someone else triggers it, it will still hurt you if you’re within range. For best results, choose one of the options that significantly disrupts your opponents’ ability to carry out their plans even if some of them succeed on their saving throws: Death, Discord, Fear, Hopelessness, Insanity,[I] Pain, or Stunning. Hiring someone to cast this spell will run you 2,490 gp, a bargain compared with some of the other 6th- and 7th-level options described above.

Feeblemind. This 8th-level spell is brutal against Charisma casters: bards, paladins, sorcerers, and warlocks. It’s bad for wizards, too, but wizards have the best chance of resisting it, because it requires an Intelligence saving throw to avoid its worst effects. Therefore, if you’re putting it in a glyph of warding—which will require casting glyph from a spell scroll, since you can’t have more than one 8th-level spell slot, period—try to set the glyph where it will attract the kinds of targets it hurts the most. The cost of hiring a caster to do it for you is 1,850 gp, two-thirds of which is for a 9th-level glyph to hold the 8th-level spell.

Imprisonment. This 9th-level spell is the most nefarious possible response to an intrusion… so it’s probably a good thing for your enemies that imprisonment can’t be combined effectively with glyph of warding, period. Why on earth not? Because one of the components of the spell is a drawing or carving of the target, and another component varies in cost according to how many Hit Dice the target has. In other words, you can’t cast imprisonment on just anyone; you have to have a specific target in mind when you cast the spell. On top of which, storing a 9th-level spell in a glyph of warding requires either a second 9th-level slot (impossible without an epic boon of High Magic) or casting glyph from a spell scroll, which requires a titanic outlay of cost and time… but that’s all academic. We’re not incarcerating any unknown intruders in a Hedged Prison without doing the job ourselves, and that’s that.

1. I. Treating insanity as an RPG mechanic is increasingly viewed as offensive. You may wish to recharacterize this option as “Delirium.”

CHAPTER 4

HUMANOID (AND NONHUMANOID) RESOURCES

Whether you take note of it or not, the area around your lair is full of life. If you’re based in a settled area, this life probably looks a lot like you. But even if your lair is situated far from humanoid habitation, there’s still an abundance of animal and plant life—and, possibly, monster life. Through awesome presence or the promise of a paycheck, you may be able to move some of these creatures to serve you. Even those whose loyalty you can’t command can still play a role in the defense of your lair, simply by being a danger to outsiders.

Take a look at the terrain around your lair, as well as any regional effects your lair may have on it. Elements such as climate, altitude, visibility, verticality, and ruggedness will appeal to some creatures more than others. The traits in their stat blocks will give you an indication of whether they’re helped by a feature that hinders others.

As an example, let’s look at the area around the lair of an adult or ancient white dragon. A couple of things leap out: First, white dragons dwell at high latitudes and/or altitudes, so adaptation to cold is helpful. Second, the presence of a white dragon’s lair causes fog to form in the area around it—but that’s not a problem for creatures that depend on hearing or smell rather than sight. Just these two pillars give us a solid foundation to build on:

- White guard drakes have resistance to cold damage and proficiency in Perception, negating the fog penalty. Since guard drakes aren’t evolved creatures, but rather created deliberately through magical ritual, they won’t be found naturally in the wild, but the dragon might keep a few around in its lair as watchbeasts.

- Ice mephits would be drawn to the area around a white dragon’s lair and might even colonize the lair itself, like elemental cockroaches. They have proficiency in Perception and Stealth, and they’re immune to cold damage.

- Polar bears have Keen Smell and Perception proficiency. Need I say more?

- Winter wolves have both Perception and Stealth proficiency and Keen Hearing and Smell, plus Snow Camouflage, which gives them advantage on Stealth checks in snowy terrain and a decided edge over PCs. They’re also immune to cold damage. The region around a white dragon’s lair is a perfect winter wolf hunting ground; they’d naturally migrate to such an area.

- Yetis, like winter wolves, have Perception proficiency, Stealth proficiency, Keen Smell, and Snow Camouflage, and they’re immune to cold damage. Abominable yetis have all of that plus Cold Breath of their own. However, they may be a bit much to throw at your PCs when they’re off to fight a dragon, and a white dragon might well consider an abominable yeti an unwelcome rival that needs to be eliminated. Ordinary yetis, though, would probably be beneath the dragon’s notice.

- Barghests have resistance to cold damage, Stealth proficiency, and 60 feet of blindsight.

- Bheur hags are naturally drawn to the same climes as white dragons, they have Perception and Stealth proficiency, they’re immune to cold damage, and they share the Ice Walk feature.

You don’t need to throw all these creatures into the mix. For one thing, predatory animals are territorial and don’t want competition. If winter wolves migrate into polar bears’ hunting grounds, or vice versa, the polar bears won’t stay around for long, because the stronger, social winter wolves will drive out the solitary polar bears. A few bears may remain, but they’ll back down from the wolves. (You can create some interesting multilateral combat encounters this way—for instance, having an encounter with a single polar bear turn into an encounter with a pack of winter wolves, which initially are more interested in driving off the bear than in snacking on the PCs.)

A secluded village of wary wood elves won’t have supernatural regional effects, but the elves’ presence will influence what creatures a trespasser in their woods might encounter. For starters, there’ll be few other humanoids: The territorial elves will have driven them off. They’ll also have banded together to hunt and kill any monster that might once have threatened their village. That doesn’t mean there’ll be no monsters or predatory beasts in their woods at all, only that such creatures won’t be so bold and ferocious as to pose a direct threat. Owlbears, for instance, will have been hunted to extinction in the area: They’re simply too deadly and destructive to put up with.

Wood elves have an uncanny ability to blend in with natural surroundings that lightly obscure visibility, much like the fog around a white dragon’s lair. They’ll be drawn to areas with dense foliage, persistent mist, or frequent rain or snow—and so will other creatures with acute hearing and smell, or with blindsight. Beasts with keen nonvisual senses include badgers, bats, and owls, both ordinary and giant; wolves, both ordinary and dire; black and brown bears; and giant spiders. Possible monstrous denizens include catoblepes, leucrottas, shadow mastiffs, and werebears. Werewolves and wererats also fit the profile, but they and the wood elves would be implacable enemies, attacking one another on sight.

Also, the sylvan elves share the woods with various fey creatures, both good-natured ones (such as blink dogs) and aggressive ones (such as yeth hounds). The elves are friendly with the former; they hunt down the latter whenever they can but may not be able to rid the woods of them entirely.

While the forest terrain offers them a wide variety of advantages, the elves aren’t especially numerous, and they have a vast perimeter they need to patrol—one where conditions interfere with their ability to spot trespassers as much as with trespassers’ ability to spot them. However, they figured out the solution to this problem long ago: a tradition of echuided, or “rousing,” in which elf druids go forth into the woods and cast awaken on trees and beasts, then tend to them for thirty days, protecting them from harm and treating them with the utmost kindness, so that they remain friendly once the charm wears off. Thus, the woods are full of awakened trees and intelligent animals conducting constant reconnaissance and security operations on the elves’ behalf. The trees, especially, provide invaluable assistance when it comes to keeping the werewolves at bay.

Therefore, let’s say the region around the white dragon’s lair includes at least one roving pack of winter wolves, a band of yetis, and maybe a single bheur hag. Meanwhile, you can have malicious, opportunistic ice mephits show up on the fringe of any encounter—combat or otherwise—to add insult to injury.

RECRUITING FOLLOWERS

When we think of “followers,” we usually think of humanoids, or as they were referred to in the first edition Advanced Dungeons & Dragons Dungeon Master’s Guide, “henchmen and hirelings.” These are people who are either hired to defend your lair as armed guards or who volunteer to do so out of loyalty, inspired by the honor of serving you, the chance to learn from you, the prospect of raising their own status, or some similar reason.

To make a deal like this requires a certain level of intelligence: A nonsentient creature can’t apply for such a job, although it can be trained to perform aspects of it. On the other hand, there are many intelligent creatures that make poor followers because they lack any interest in serving someone like you. Good luck hiring a squad of giants, for example, unless you yourself are a giant with higher status in the Ordning. Giants don’t care two whits about impressing anyone other than giants. Fiends can be bound to your service, but they’re always looking for an opening to turn the tables on you, and aberrations’ motivations are inscrutable. Ergo, for the most part, humanoids.

When you hire followers, you’re taking on a lot of burdens. First, you have to pay them. Second, you have to equip them, unless you’re all right with having a guard force equipped with a hodgepodge of armor and weapons.[I] Third, if you don’t want to deal with the complication of their coming and going at the beginning and end of each duty shift—an extra layer of vulnerability to consider—you have to house them as well, and if you’re housing them, you have to feed them. Fourth, you have to keep them loyal: You don’t want turncoats in your operation. If you’ve ever thought twice about the level of responsibility involved in getting a puppy, you’d better think real hard about hiring your own private army.

Still, maybe having a private army is central to your plans. Or maybe your activities, were they to become known, would engender such a backlash that having a private army is a sensible, proportional precaution. If that’s so, then bite the bullet, build the barracks, hand out the hauberks and crossbows and pikes, and start heating up the stew.

Discipline is essential to the effectiveness of a fighting force. I’m not talking about being a tyrannical martinet, although if that’s your style, you do you (looking at you, lawful evil!). I’m talking specifically about ensuring that your troops hear and understand the orders you give them and are willing and able to obey. In this sense, discipline is partly a function of loyalty and morale, but it’s just as much—if not more—a function of organization.

A single leader, no matter how charismatic, can’t issue orders to more than about two hundred fifty followers at once and expect those orders to be followed faithfully. Larger numbers than that simply can’t hear you without some kind of vocal amplification (magical, probably, as with the thaumaturgy spell or the War Leader property of a special magic item). For this reason, historically, bands of mercenaries and other soldiers united by the charisma of a veteran leader topped out at this size. Larger armies have to be divided into companies, with orders handed down from generals to captains, who then pass them on to their own troops.

For practical, division-of-labor reasons, even companies will be divided into smaller units, generally tens or twenties, led by sergeants (also called “vinetars,” although this name connotes a leader of exactly twenty warriors). In larger companies, intermediate units of thirty to fifty, led by lieutenants, are anachronistic but practical; we refer to such units today as platoons. When units of more than two hundred fifty but fewer than the whole force are required, companies may be joined together within battalions of up to one thousand soldiers, led by commandants (also called captains-major—majors, for short—or “millenaries,” if they command exactly one thousand).

Armies bigger than a company, however, are possessed almost exclusively by kingdoms (which raise them only in times of war) or empires. For you to have this many soldiers in your employ would mean several things: First, you’d be poaching most or all of the available able-bodied fighters from the local authorities, which they might resent. Second, you’d be demanding your troops’ ongoing service without giving them the opportunity to pillage—a strong motivating factor among soldiers in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, many of whom were pulled from their everyday work to fight for their lieges and had only so much tolerance for it, feudalism or no. Third, luring that many people away from other jobs would have a noticeable effect on the local economy. “Sorry, no arrows for sale in Galdrith’s Run. Milo Fletcher said he had a new job and hasn’t been seen in town since. Try over in Wythorp.” “Oh, sorry, mate. No arrows in Wythorp…” Assume, therefore, that you’re hiring mercenaries, one company at a time, unless there’s some compelling reason why people should flock to your side for reasons other than material gain—or unless you are the local authority.

However many people you command, remember that they have to eat and sleep. If you’re trying to establish round-the-clock protection, you’ll need some awake while the rest sleep, and vice versa; they’ll never all be alert and ready to fight at the same time. Only one-third to one-half of your total guard complement will be on duty at any given moment. Thus, if you hire Roderick’s Red Wolves, a company of two hundred mercenaries, to guard your lair, what you’ll most likely end up with is two groups of forty standing guard from dawn to noon, two standing guard from noon to dusk, and one standing guard overnight. (If you hire a second or third company to increase those numbers, what you’ll most likely end up with is a counterproductive rivalry.)

Guards are useful by virtue of their sheer numbers, but you’ll also want followers with more particular skills. Those skills include the ones we associate with PC classes, but they aren’t limited to those. For instance, if you’re brewing poisons, you’re not going to hang out a shingle and sell them over the counter; you’ll need expert smugglers to get them into your customers’ hands. If your lair is overrun, they can use their skills to help get you out safely. If you like to live in comfort, a chamberlain can keep your household in order while you do whatever it is you do—as well as sound the alarm, activate traps, misdirect intruders, lock down restricted areas, burn incriminating papers, and help cover your escape. I’ve already mentioned spies.

Savvy leadership includes compensating for your own weaknesses by recruiting followers that are strong where you’re weak. If you’re a glass-cannon spellcaster, for example, surround yourself with formidable brutes who can stand between you and danger, plus marksmen and skirmishers who can harass the enemy’s own ranged attackers and spellslingers. If you’re a brute, on the other hand, you want a couple of wingmen, a whole lot of ranged backup, and at least one sharp-eyed controller (a cleric or bard, perhaps, or a monster with similar abilities) to notice and neutralize attempts to outflank you.

But that’s if you’re a savvy boss. If you’re a stupid boss—one with both mediocre Intelligence and mediocre Wisdom—it will never occur to you that you have weaknesses, let alone that you need to compensate for them. Stupid bosses know only their own strengths, and consequently they surround themselves with minions who possess the same strengths—only to a lesser degree, because any minion who had those same strengths in the same degree would be a rival!

1. I. If you do go hodgepodge, don’t assign every guard a separate Armor Class and damage die. Use averages for the sake of efficiency, then embellish your descriptions for the sake of flavor.

CHAPTER 5

BUDGETING

Now that you have a sense of the various things you need to do, it’s time to confront the problem of figuring out how many of those things you can afford to do.

If you’re a creature or monster with no involvement in any kind of economic system, you’ll have to make do with what you’ve got, what you can find, what you can take, and what you can attract to you. You may be able to scrounge building materials, but you can’t buy them. You may be able to acquire labor by force, but you can’t hire it. You may even have minions that fight on your behalf, but your ability to choose those minions is limited. In other words, you’re limited primarily by your nature and your environment.

If you do live within an economic system, you’re limited by your resources within that system: money, status, power, and trust. The more of each of these things you have, the more you can spend on defensive measures. The less of them you have, the more you have to cut corners, the more risks you have to take—and the more creative you have to be.

A significant challenge in building a lair is that you frequently have to go it alone. One doesn’t typically build a lair on behalf of Church, Crown, or the Worshipful Company of Mercers. One builds a lair because one is doing things that those established authorities might well want to put a stop to. You’re probably not going to receive infusions of outside funding for this project.

But how to put a number on exactly how much you can spend?

Let’s think about treasure hoards, as described by the random treasure tables in chapter 7 of the fifth edition Dungeon Master’s Guide, and posit that your hoard represents your entire accumulated wealth. Naturally, you don’t want to spend all that wealth on your lair. You want to have that wealth. Not only that, you’d like it to generate income for you, so that you can have more of it.

If you do the math (and I did), at no tier is it possible to run a stronghold larger than a fortified tower on one-twentieth of the average treasure hoard per year, a reasonable rate of return on investment, and you have to have a challenge rating of 17 or greater to manage even that much. According to the Building a Stronghold and Maintenance Costs tables in chapter 6 of the DMG, to build and operate a stronghold, with paid guards and hirelings, you have to engage in income-producing activity.

Fortunately, there’s a rule in the DMG for generating cash flow (chapter 6, “Running a Business”). Unfortunately, it’s broken. According to this rule, losses are proportional to maintenance cost, but profits are fixed sums—and paid out over any number of days the business-owning character chooses, which has a maximum of thirty but no minimum, so it could conceivably be daily. Calculated by the day, a business would earn an average of 14 gp minus 45 percent of daily maintenance cost, but calculated by the month, a business would earn an average of 14 gp minus 13.5 times daily maintenance cost. If you’re running, say, a shop, with a maintenance cost of 2 gp per day, that’s the difference between earning a little over 13 gp per day and losing 13 gp over the course of a month. Calculating monthly, there’s no way to turn a profit on any business with a total cost per day of more than 1 gp; calculating daily, the limit is 31 gp, which still isn’t enough to run an outpost or fort, let alone a castle of any size.

Forget all that, then, and let’s roll with what feels right.

TIER 1

The foes that D&D player characters confront at levels 1 through 4 engage in activities that are local in scale. At this tier of play, the largest lair you can establish is equivalent in size to an outpost or fort, which costs 15,000 gp to build. If you haven’t inherited a fortune from a late relative or struck it rich in some other way, you’re going to have to scale your ambitions way back and make do with an armed camp, scrappy hideout, commandeered building, or occupied ruin, built with sweat equity. Anything you and your minions can’t do yourselves probably doesn’t get done. You can’t afford to hire trained warriors; any guards you have are loyal followers whom you’ll command personally.

TIER 2

The foes that PCs confront at levels 5 through 10 engage in activities that impact whole regions. At this tier, you might be able to establish a lair equivalent in size to a small castle, with a guard complement numbering up to two hundred, divided into multiple units, and led by a sergeant or a captain (see appendix B). It’s plausible that you might be able to raise the 100 gp per day necessary to run it, but to do so will require a long reach. In essence, you have to make yourself a tax-collecting authority, extorting your operating cash from surrounding lands. Alternatively, you can establish a smaller-scale fortification and defend it using subtler methods than raw numbers.

TIER 3

The foes that PCs confront at levels 11 through 16 engage in activities that can alter the courses of nations, or even the entire known world. At this tier, you can establish a large castle or complex lair with as many as two hundred to five hundred guards—a whole battalion, led by a commandant (see appendix B)—or a monstrous equivalent. Such a base will cost 400 gp per day to run. To keep it going, you’ll have to be an all-out robber baron—or be able to compel obedience by means other than a salary. And, again, sometimes a smaller footprint is better.

TIER 4

The foes that PCs confront at levels 17 through 20 possess cosmic powers, command legions of minions, and bend whole planes of existence to their wills. At this tier, you can establish a vast lair requiring days to infiltrate, with a guard complement numbering between five hundred and a thousand, and raise an army of anywhere from twenty-five hundred troops to five thousand or more. At the head of these forces are a commandant in command of your guard battalion and a general (see appendix B) in command of your army, if you don’t lead it yourself. At this level, money ceases to be an issue, not because you have so much of it—you may not—but because you’re past caring about economic systems at all. Your status and power are so great that they alone procure you what you need.

From this, I think we can establish a few rules of thumb.

- Let’s say the upper limit of what you can build, cost-wise, is set at 10 times the monetary value of your treasure hoard—if you exist within an economic system that allows you to leverage credit. Otherwise, it’s equal to your hoard’s value, on the premise that you wouldn’t have spent more than you could keep. Remember to account for any permanent enchantments or magic items and any traps, as well as any out-of-the-ordinary gear you supply your minions with. That stuff costs extra. All this being said, in many cases, it may be smarter not to build a base of operations but rather to take an already existing one by force (and, hopefully, defend it better than the previous owner did). This approach will grant you access to a lot more than you could afford to build on your own.

- The maximum number of guards you can employ is equal to your experience point value divided by 2.5. However, those guards aren’t all on duty at the same time; instead, they’re divided into multiple watches. Aboveground, in the diurnal world, these will generally be two day shifts and one all-night shift, with the assumption that anyone not on night shift but also not on active day watch had better be ready to step up at a moment’s notice in the event of an attack (flip day and night for nocturnal creatures with darkvision). Underground, among folks who don’t observe the day/night cycle, two or three equal shifts will be more typical. Thus, while you might command one hundred fifty guards in total, trespassers in your lair will never encounter more than one hundred twenty of them, and they might encounter as few as thirty, depending on when they show up.

- The limit on how many minions you can attract to your service, including the region around your lair, is your XP value times 10. For instance, while a bugbear chief (700 XP) could theoretically have up to 280 followers behind it, it could command only thirty-five if all of them were bugbears (200 XP). Or, alternatively, it could command a mixed company made up of fifteen bugbears, forty goblins (50 XP), and twenty worgs (100 XP). Or twenty-three bugbears and forty-seven goblins. But again, remember that this is the total number of minions, not the number that are awake and alert at any given time. PCs should never have to encounter more than 80 percent of this number and will typically encounter far fewer even than that; the rest are sleeping or out hunting or conducting reconnaissance elsewhere.

- Built lairs have to be made from materials that one could reasonably obtain from surrounding lands, unless they’re significantly smaller than they need to be. Imported materials are expensive—about four times what they’d cost locally—if they can even be brought to you at all.

- If a PC wouldn’t be able to find more than one major magic item of a particular rarity in your hoard, you can’t have one as part of your lair. Thus, at tier 1, you’re limited to common and uncommon magic items; at tier 2, rare or less; at tier 3, very rare or less; and at tier 4, anything goes. This rule doesn’t mean you can’t carry an item of higher rarity, or that you can’t have it in your hoard. It just can’t be part of your lair, meaning something used specifically and exclusively in its defense.

CHAPTER 6

BATTLE STRATEGY

You have measures in place to detect and deter intruders. You’ve chosen a site for your lair and laid it out so as to provide the best possible protection for your assets. Your lair and the area around it are full of creatures—some loyal to you or in your employ, some there for reasons of their own—that anyone who poses a threat to your assets has to get past first.

Now it’s time to come up with a plan. Having all the measures in place is good, but it’s not a plan. You need to make choices on behalf of yourself and the defenders you command—to decide how they’re going to respond once the anticipated threat comes to pass. This plan is the heart of the response component of your defense. Guards, in and of themselves, are not a response. Guards engaging with the enemy to stop an intrusion are a response.

To recap: While attackers may get to choose the moment when hostilities begin, you, as the defender, have the advantages of knowing your territory intimately and being able to spend as much time as you like preparing for attack. Attackers generally get one chance to succeed in their objective, but every day your defenders hold their position, as long as they’re not shirking their duties, is a success—which furthermore lays groundwork for future success.

The goal of defense is simple: to ensure that no attack succeeds. This goal can certainly be accomplished by slaughtering your foes, but that option is by no means the only one. In fact, if at all possible, you want to prevent attacks, not wait until they occur.

Be proactive. Have scouts and spies out reconnoitering for threats. Order them to kill enemy scouts and spies, capture them, or divert them away from your lair so that they never get near enough to your assets to threaten them, then report back on their presence so that the threat they represent is known. Don’t let those sneaks find out where or how strong your forces are. Launch raids to weaken your enemies before the first assault. Steal or destroy items that give them an edge. Thwart their preparations however you can.

If and when an attack comes, fight back—but also do everything you can to disrupt your enemy’s scheme. Cut off lines of communication, divide and scatter foes so that they’re easy pickings for capture, or simply frustrate them enough that they give up and leave. Any of these will suffice to accomplish your goal, which is to keep your assets intact.

Be mobile and adaptable, prepared to shift your forces at a moment’s notice—which you can do, because you own the area they’re defending. Establish fallback positions. Don’t ready just one line of defense: Make intruders slog through a gantlet of danger zones. Keep a small force in reserve to replenish losses, reinforce a position that’s under attack from an unexpected direction, or strike hard at a faltering enemy.

Remember, you can’t eliminate all risk; you can only play the odds. Therefore, use the knowledge you’re able to gather about your enemies’ numbers, strength, and plans to mass your defenses where you expect an attack to come. Reduce the number of possible approaches to your lair as much as you can. Use both preexisting terrain and constructed obstacles to funnel attackers into areas where you want to engage them, and use archers and other ranged attackers to cover those approaches thoroughly. If, by necessity, your forces are spread out when they come under attack, have them fall back and group up. Large concentrations of defenders are vulnerable to attack from above, so keep an eye on the sky and take down aerial attackers as fast as you can.

Meanwhile, cover less probable avenues of approach with as few guards as you can get away with—but do still cover them. You can increase those guards’ effectiveness, and thereby reduce the risk of an attack on them, by placing obstacles along those avenues of approach and ensuring that your guards have good sight lines for attacking with ranged weapons.

Ideally, if and when intruders reach your designated engagement area, they should be confronted by an unanticipated and frankly shocking number of guards, ready to loose a storm of missiles from one or more concealed positions of cover. Once the intruders’ momentum is arrested and they’re in disarray, send your reserve in to engage them in melee, or have your main body of guards switch from arrows to swords and spears and close in. This double blow should crush the intruders’ spirits and force them to surrender—but if not, there’s always the option of massacre.

That’s the ideal scenario. Sometimes, however, your foes will prove unexpectedly resilient. If your guards are taking more damage than they’re dishing out, you need to be ready to carry out what the U.S. Army drolly calls a “transition to the retrograde”: While you and/or guards who aren’t in contact with the enemy secure your most valuable assets (possibly including yourself) and prepare to evacuate them, some guards that are still in contact may engage the intruders in battle in order to buy time and inflict more damage upon them, while other guards disengage from battle and withdraw in order to conserve their strength. Keep in mind, though, that even when retreating, your forces are still keeping their eyes open for chances to turn the tide of battle back in your favor. Retreat is not necessarily defeat.

THE LAY OF THE LAND

When defending your lair, you and your guards are engaged primarily in area defense: preventing invasion by outsiders. The main way to achieve this is to position them where they can control paths of access with ranged weapon attacks from different directions. When invaders are weakened, other forces (often reserves) may then bear down on them, engage them in melee, and kill or capture them.

Build your defense around battle positions: places where you’ll post guards in anticipation that a fight may occur. These positions should be placed along likely avenues of approach and chosen according to features of the terrain and the number and strength of the guards you’ll station on them.

The most important battle position is your primary position, which should overlook the main battle area—the place where you intend to repel, capture, or kill a determined group of intruders once and for all, which you’ll defend with the bulk of your response force. Your lair is your domain, and you know it thoroughly, so you have the knowledge and the freedom to determine the best place to fight this battle. It should be along the path into your lair that intruders are most likely to follow, and it should be the place along that path where you can most effectively prevent them from getting in. If it’s inside your lair, it should be in a controlled area, if possible: You want to stop intruders before they can get into a restricted area.

You chose the terrain your lair is in; the terrain is your friend. When you’re fighting off intruders, you want to force them to fight where they don’t want to fight. You want them out in the open while your defenders enjoy cover and concealment. You want freedom of movement while they’re halted, unable to advance. You want high ground, with good lines of sight and plenty of room to shoot. Terrain features such as rivers and lakes, swamps, thick woods, cliffs, parallel ridges that intruders have to advance across, and built-up urban areas all work in your favor. Even better is terrain that’s so difficult to traverse, your lair can be reached by only one or two possible routes, so that you can predict which direction an attack will most likely come from. Throw additional obstacles in trespassers’ paths to bring them to a sudden, unexpected stop or to steer them where you want them to go.

It may come to pass that your primary position becomes unsuitable or untenable. Not only is it okay if this happens, it’s something you should expect and plan for. Give your main force an alternate position to relocate to, one that overlooks the same area that the primary position overlooks but gives your defenders more cover, so that they can stay in the fight longer.

In addition, establish fallback positions (also known as “subsequent” positions) that your defenders can move to if they have to cede control of the main battle area. Battle positions generally aren’t defended to the death: They’re abandoned as soon as they’re no longer useful. For each battle position, know in advance under what circumstances it’s time for the unit of guards stationed there to clear out and go someplace new. Remember, the objective is always to keep the intruders away from your assets!

Intruders being intruders, there’s always the chance that they’ll choose an avenue of approach that isn’t the one you predicted they’d take. For this reason, you should also establish supplementary positions: defensive positions along approaches other than the most likely avenue of approach, chosen to provide the best line of sight over the best defensive terrain features. No more guards should be stationed on supplementary positions than you absolutely need, and when they spot incoming hostiles, they shouldn’t mess around: If the first couple of volleys of arrows don’t do the trick, they should immediately fall back to subsequent positions of their own and raise the alarm.

As a matter of deterrence, some battle positions will be obvious, but in general, you don’t want your enemies to know where you’ll have guards posted—in particular, where you intend to fight the decisive battle. Do everything you can, both passively and actively, to prevent anyone from reconnoitering your defensive positions. Guards that intruders will encounter before reaching your main battle area should observe possible threats; collect as much information as possible about them and furnish this info to you; and deceive, disrupt, and delay any identified enemies so that if and when they reach the main battle area, you’re ready to squash them.

PERIMETER DEFENSE

The above recommendations apply to defense of a fortified lair that’s likely to be attacked from only one direction. But what if you’re in the middle of the desert or the ocean? What if you and your followers are nomadic, and your “lair” is nothing more than a camp? What if you simply don’t have the means to build strong walls? You may need to set up a perimeter defense instead.

Perimeter defense takes it as a given that an attack could come from any direction, at any time. Unlike conventional lair defense, in which the main battle area is generally somewhere inside the envelope, perimeter defense treats the entire perimeter as a main battle area; the bulk of your guard forces will be distributed around it and assigned to security operations. If you have a reserve, station it inside, from which location it can respond rapidly to an incursion anywhere on the perimeter, or cover a gap if a perimeter unit has to leave its portion temporarily unguarded.

The perimeter isn’t necessarily circular, nor should you necessarily space your guards around it evenly. If there’s terrain you can take advantage of that offers your defenders higher ground or a better view, or that obstructs attackers’ advance, allow the shape of your perimeter to conform to those features. For instance, if you’re setting up camp along a difficult-to-ford river, you can use fewer guards to defend the bank—but if there’s a bridge across it, you’ll definitely want to post more guards on the side of your camp that faces it.

Perimeter defense requires aggressive patrolling and security operations to be effective (see “Reconnaissance and Security” below). Beyond your perimeter, if you can spare the personnel, you’ll want to establish observation posts from which your guards can observe likely avenues of approach. If you don’t have guards to spare, or if there’s too much area to cover, you’ll need scouts to patrol the areas outside the perimeter that can’t be observed from a stationary post—at least to a range of 600 feet, the maximum distance over which you can be attacked by archers, siege engines, or magic. Have them set alarms and traps in this zone to detect and deter intruders who might try to slip past your scouts.

Battle positions don’t really exist in perimeter defense. When your sentries spot possible intruders, they need to approach, confront them, and as soon as they can clarify that their targets are hostile, attack. If the intruders turn and run, those sentries should pursue. These attacks can be overt displays of force, but if you want to be more subtle about it, you can also have your scouts conduct raids and ambushes against suspected hostiles, or—if you have flying creatures on your side—harass them from the air.

RECONNAISSANCE AND SECURITY

The purpose of reconnaissance and security operations is detection: providing early and accurate warning of threats to your assets, so that you have time to organize a response. They’re active, not passive, operations. You’re not waiting for enemies to come to you and be caught in the mischievous act. You’ve got people out looking for threats.

Defenders assigned to security missions are posted where they can monitor avenues of approach to your lair, as far from your lair as is feasible. Often, this means establishing observation posts—but then again, depending on the degree of danger, sometimes “as far from your lair as is feasible” is just outside the envelope, or even right on the forward edge of it. It depends on what kind of threats you expect to confront, as well as the landscape.

Screening missions, the most basic kind of security mission (and probably the only one you’ll have enough guards to conduct), are often assigned because you’ve received warning of a threat, perhaps as the result of a reconnaissance mission. They’re not conducted all the time. They’re also not large operations: Generally, they comprise as few guards as necessary to get the job done, because assigning more guards to security missions means having fewer available to defend in the main battle area.

When you have guards assigned to screening missions, their priorities are to keep their eyes and ears open for any kind of intrusion attempt or preparation for such an attempt, irrespective of visibility conditions; to place themselves between the intruders and your lair; to report back on what the intruders are doing and, if possible, who they are; and not to let those intruders out of their sight. No intruder should get past a security patrol without its presence being detected and reported, and no enemy scout or spy should survive being spotted by one. To the extent of their capabilities, guards on screening missions should also harass enemies and interfere with their preparations, but it’s unlikely that you’ll be able to devote enough guards to security operations for them to commit to a decisive combat engagement.

The term “observation post” suggests a stationary, permanent or semipermanent watchtower, but in reality it’s any position that guards can keep watch from. It can be stationary or mobile, on foot or mounted. Mounted observers are more obvious; observers on foot are stealthier but can’t cover as much area. As I mentioned in chapter 1, “Principles of Defense,” it takes two squads of eight to twelve guards or scouts per observation post to ensure continuous coverage; since it’s unlikely that you can spare this number, send out at least two observers together for no more than 12 hours at a time as needed, based on prudent cost-benefit analysis. If you can spare more, send more.

In contrast to security operations, you should be engaging in reconnaissance operations all the time, whether you’re aware of a threat or not, because recon ops are how you become aware of threats. Reconnaissance operations, like security operations, involve reporting on observed enemy activity and maintaining contact with an enemy once it’s made. That’s where the similarity ends, though. Units assigned to security often keep a few members in reserve; units assigned to recon are always fully committed. Security units are focused on preventing breaches of your lair and protecting the main guard force, whereas recon units are focused on gaining as much information as possible on whoever or whatever they’ve been sent out to observe. Security units sometimes confront possible intruders and, if necessary, attack. Recon units avoid combat whenever they can; stealthy surveillance is their preferred modus operandi.

Recon is dangerous work. Remember how I said it’s the responsibility of guards assigned to security operations to kill enemy scouts and spies? It’s highly likely that your enemies will take the same attitude toward your scouts and spies. Also, reconnaissance is useless if your scouts can’t get their information back to base. Therefore, recon units can’t let themselves get pinned down or drawn into a fight. When they need to get a closer look, they send just a couple of scouts forward, so that if those scouts are caught, the rest can escape and report on what happened.

That said, in order to discover what your enemies’ capabilities are, it’s sometimes necessary to provoke them into using those capabilities. “Aggressive reconnaissance” is a hit-and-run operation meant to elicit a reaction from the targets under observation; it requires ranged weaponry and superior mobility. It’s also extremely risky, appropriate only when you know you don’t have time to glean the same info by stealthy observation.

Scouts and spies are responsible for turning unknowns into knowns: discovering enemy numbers, capabilities, movements, activities, and intentions. In particular, they need to gather enough information to predict which direction intruders will come from and what route they’ll follow. If they have enough time and can get close enough, they look for patterns of behavior, possible vulnerabilities, and—very important!—what magical capabilities foes possess, especially whether they might be capable of flying or otherwise getting behind your lines. When there’s no known threat, or when you’re aware of a threat but lack details on its nature, they can take the time to comb a large area, usually as several small groups moving forward simultaneously. Once they’ve identified a certain location where a threat exists—a town, a stand of woods, a bridge—they relocate to that area and narrow their attention to it.

In most cases, scouts try to avoid being detected, taking maximum advantage of cover and concealment to gain as much detailed information as possible from as close to their targets as possible. Sometimes, though, getting basic, general information fast is more important than waiting around for details. In these instances, if the terrain is open enough and the weather good enough to allow it, you might choose instead to send your scouts out on horseback. As with security operations, mounted reconnaissance is much more obvious than reconnaissance on foot; it’s an appropriate option if and only if the situation calls for it. (Flying mounts have essentially the same pros and cons as horses.)

VISIBILITY

Low-visibility conditions favor the stealthy, so it’s reasonable to expect that intruders will try to take advantage of darkness, fog, or heavy rain or snow to conduct reconnaissance against you, scale your walls, and slip past your guards. You should expect this to happen and plan accordingly. Any defensive plan you develop has to work just as well in unfavorable visibility conditions as in clear daylight. Of course, fantasy worlds are full of beings that can see in the dark—you may be one of those beings yourself—but the range of this ability is limited, so while you may still spot intruders when they try to breach your lair, you may also find yourself with less time to respond. Plus, fog, rain, and snow remain problems.

Don’t expect your ears to save you. According to the Encounter Distance table on the Dungeon Master’s Screen Reincarnated—which, as of this writing, is still not available in any published fifth edition D&D book—the distance at which a creature trying to be quiet can be heard is at most 60 feet, and may be as little as 10 feet! By comparison, darkvision has a 60-foot range for most creatures with that trait. So while listening carefully for stealthy intruders may still give you some warning—especially when you can’t see at all, such as in heavy fog—it’s never going to give you as much as a clear line of sight under good illumination will. Even the Keen Hearing trait only makes it more likely that you’ll hear intruders once they come within range; it doesn’t increase the range.

The real jackpot trait to have is Keen Smell. D&D includes no mechanic for smell and never quantifies its range, but the fact that real-world bears and elephants can detect scents at a range of 10 miles or more suggests that it should be extremely difficult for an intruder to get close to a lair guarded by a creature with the Keen Smell trait without being detected, barring some form of magical concealment such as pass without trace.

When visibility is poor, move more guards to supplementary positions, send out scouts to keep an eye on secondary avenues of approach, and increase the number of security patrols between stationary observation positions. Also send some guards out in the direction of any terrain features that trespassers might use to orient themselves in darkness or fog, such as ridges, waterways, or forest edges. If you’re conducting a perimeter defense, bring your forces in so that they’re closer together: twice their visual range apart rather than twice their weapon range. Have a system of audible alarms and signals in place; they’re useful anytime, but they’re essential when you can’t see.

Keep in mind that reconnaissance and security operations take more time in low-visibility conditions. Nighttime and low-visibility recon patrols are generally conducted on foot. Mounted reconnaissance in limited-visibility conditions is generally limited to roads and trails, and it forfeits much of the speed advantage of mounted recon in daylight and clear weather. Also, horses aren’t naturally stealthy.

Pay heed to the defensive value of darkness, smoke, and fog. Especially if intruders make it inside, these forms of obscuration are disorienting and can slow or stop their advance through your lair. In fact, if you’ve been thinking about the need for traps, forget about the Acme Spring-Loaded Corridor Blades; just have smoke pour out of the walls and fill the entire area. It’s harmless to your people, but it can cause real problems for intruders—and buy you time to respond. In fifth edition D&D, an area of heavily obscured visibility effectively renders everyone in it both blinded and invisible, simultaneously conferring advantage and imposing disadvantage on every attack roll and thereby quashing all sources of attack roll advantage or disadvantage. The result is that the side with the less gimmick-dependent approach to combat is heavily favored.

“PLAN B”

What if, gods forfend, your guards are overwhelmed by an attack? Then you need to be able to switch from area defense to retreat. But retreats aren’t always forced: Sometimes they’re deliberate, in order to buy time with little risk, to conserve strength, to move into a better position, or to lure opponents into areas that favor the defense.

When a retreat is under way, any given group of guards may be assigned to do one of three things: withdraw, delay, or retire. Withdrawing is what we usually associate with “retreat”: when a force in contact with the enemy disengages and moves away, usually to preserve its strength. Withdrawing is dangerous, because the enemy is likely to pursue, and the withdrawing force’s ability to fight back is limited. For this reason, another force may be assigned to delay the enemy’s advance—to run interference for the withdrawing force. A retiring force is one that’s not in contact with the enemy to begin with, and is moving away to a safer location. When your lair is under attack, retiring guards will be the ones helping secure your most critical assets and get them someplace else, away from your attackers.

Delaying is hard. It only works when the delaying force can present a serious enough threat that the enemy doesn’t annihilate it—or simply barge past it. It has to be able to seize and hold the enemy’s attention. For this reason, after it deals enough damage to provoke the enemy, a delaying force doesn’t stick around, but rather moves to an alternate or fallback position before the enemy can strike back, goading it into pursuing. In this way, it wastes the enemy’s time by making it confront one new defensive arrangement after another and adjust to each.

In more wide-open areas, the delaying force moves to a fallback position and stays together as a single unit. In tighter quarters, the delaying force moves to an alternate position, and if there’s more than one such position and enough guards to divide between them, it splits up, so that the enemy gets hit from multiple directions.

Because withdrawing from an enemy is so dangerous, it’s a good idea to use obscuration—especially smoke, fog, or obstructed lines of sight—to keep the enemy from observing. (In D&D terms, you can’t make an opportunity attack against an opponent you can’t see, so there’s no need for a withdrawing force to take the Disengage action when it’s heavily obscured.) When withdrawing, keep a small security force in contact with the enemy to fool them into thinking the whole guard unit is still present. Any guards you have that possess better mobility or longer-range weapons should be part of this force.

Guards farthest from the enemy withdraw first; those in closest contact withdraw only when the security force engages with the enemy and seizes its attention. The security force delays the enemy as described above while the rest of the withdrawing force retreats as quickly as possible. Only when it’s a safe distance away does the security force begin its own withdrawal.

Retiring guards also leave a small security force behind while they gather up what assets they can and get them to safety. This security force doesn’t seek out contact with the enemy but rather stays in place until it receives word that the retirement is successful, at which point it moves out. If the enemy shows up before then, the security force tries to delay it.

AVOIDING THE WOOD CHIPPER

One side effect of massing combat power is that it can result in fights that, because of encounter difficulty modifiers, are way more deadly than PCs can handle. While that’s the whole point of massing combat power, it’s not going to be fun for players if they carelessly run afoul of it.

Even though there’s supposed to be parity between monster challenge rating and PC level, a lair boss isn’t necessarily a solo boss. A CR 4 or CR 5 boss creature, by itself, might be a good match for a party of level 3 or level 4 PCs, but that creature plus a lair full of minions, in an environment designed to favor defenders, is too much—especially since intruders won’t get the opportunity to rest once the lair is on alert.

To avoid inadvertent total party kills by large guard forces, start with a boss villain whose challenge rating is below what would be a match for the party as a solo enemy. How far below? In experience point terms, a lair boss with a full complement of guards in-house should be worth about 20 percent of the XP value of a solo boss at tier 1, 30 percent at tier 2, or 33 percent at tier 3 or 4. This ratio is roughly equivalent to a challenge rating difference of two or three at tier 1, five at tier 2, and seven or eight at tier 3 or 4.

Next, cap the adjusted XP total of the fight around the main battle area at half the adventuring day budget for your PCs (see Dungeon Master’s Guide, chapter 3, Adventuring Day XP table). That’s still a lot—it’s going to be a Deadly encounter by DMG standards, and it shouldn’t be a cakewalk by any measure, but your PCs may yet prevail. At a minimum, they should have a chance to realize they’re in over their heads and get out of there before any of them bites the dust. (Remember that you can give your boss villain fewer than the maximum number of guards it can command, especially if having so many guards is hard to justify for any reason.)

Since your PCs will have little or no opportunity to rest once they’ve penetrated a lair, you can’t throw an entire adventuring day’s worth of combat encounters at them. Aside from the main battle, which should account for half the day’s adjusted XP budget at most, all other encounters within the lair should account for no more than one-sixth of the daily budget. In other words, invading a lair—especially one with a hard envelope—will essentially consist of one super-Deadly fight, the equivalent of either one Medium or two Easy fights… and that’s it. Any combat encounters beyond that must take place outside the envelope, where PCs can have a chance to recover resources with a short rest before finishing the job.

That being said, you don’t want to nerf your boss’s defenses too far. Magic items, especially ones that confer hit points or deal damage, allow PCs to overcome tougher challenges than their levels would suggest. When you calculate adjusted XP per day, you can account for the effect of magic items by increasing PCs’ levels in your calculations according to these suggestions from fellow DM Jonathan Tsu:[I]

- A level 5 or greater PC with a +1 weapon should be considered one level higher; a level 11 or greater PC with a +2 or +3 weapon should be considered two levels higher.

- For each additional 1d6 damage a weapon deals per turn, add a level.

- Add a level for each bonus point of Armor Class conferred by magic armor or other items, as well as every 15 hp added.

- Finally, add a level for each magic item that can cast one or more spells. (Tsu’s actual suggestion is more involved, taking into account the level of spell cast and how many times per day you can cast it, but this is the kernel of it.)

1. I. https://www.reddit.com/r/dndnext/comments/llvgin/how_to_deal_with_two_common_cr_blind_spots/.

CHAPTER 7

TAKING PRISONERS

On the one hand, you’ve consumed enough media to know that when your enemies invade your lair, the smart thing to do is not to waste time talking with them but simply to kill them. On the other hand, you have a legitimate interest in knowing whether they might be just the tip of the spear—harbingers of an even greater threat still to come. Also, from a metagaming standpoint, keeping them alive is more fun. And more interesting. Especially if you know how to interrogate them.

Before I go any deeper into this topic, however, I’m going to draw a hard line: You can take PCs and NPCs prisoner, you can question them, you can mess with their heads, you can even threaten them with death, but torture has no place in a roleplaying game, period. Both DMs and players alike have a positive obligation to treat sensitive topics with sensitivity. The only unarguably responsible way to deal with so abhorrent a violation of rights and dignity as torture in an RPG is to disallow any hint of it.

That being said, even ethical interrogation is still inherently manipulative. Consider this a content warning for the remainder of this chapter.

When you’re interrogating prisoners, there are several things to keep in mind:

- Know what you’re after. The course of your interrogation should always be guided by your objective. If you start to drift off course, you’re in trouble: Your subject will sense that you’ve lost the thread and will grab control of the situation.

- Seize and hold the initiative. Your goal is to get useful, accurate information as efficiently as possible, which you can’t do if you let yourself get placed on the defensive. An interrogator who loses control can no longer get good information out of a subject. They need to be taken off the job and replaced by a new interrogator using a different strategy from the get-go.

- Only accurate information has value. Monitor your interrogation subject constantly for signs that they’re lying. Randomly and casually drop questions that you’ve already asked into your line of questioning: This is a good way to trap them in a contradiction or to catch their hesitation as they try to remember what they’ve already told you. If they’ve told you something you’re certain is a lie, confront them about it firmly and self-assuredly.

- Coercion is overrated. The application of force, whether physical or mental, is rarely necessary or useful. Mostly, it gets subjects to tell you what they think you want to hear. Obtaining compliance is not the same as obtaining reliable information, which is what you’re after. And if you make a threat you can’t or won’t back up and your subject calls your bluff, they’ve won, and you’ve lost.

- Maintain a closed system. The only person who should be gaining information from this process is you. Don’t let anyone else observe unless for some reason you need them to. If you’re interviewing members of a group separately—as you generally should—don’t let it slip to Prisoner A that Prisoner B is cooperating with you (unless it’s part of a strategy to flip Prisoner A). As soon as they’re together again, Prisoner A will pressure Prisoner B to clam up.

So what makes a good interrogator?

More than anything else, patience, poise, good judgment, and self-control. You have to be mindful and in control of the situation at all times, and losing your cool is the No. 1 one way to lose both your focus and your grasp. You also have to be credible: Your subjects must believe that you have the upper hand, but they also have to believe that you’ll fulfill any promises you make, express or implied, in exchange for their cooperation. Establish your credibility from the first moment your subjects meet you, then maintain it throughout the interrogation. You have to be perceptive, which in D&D terms means strong Insight and Perception scores. And you have to be adaptable, able to tell when one approach is losing efficacy and pivot immediately to another. If you don’t possess these traits, your attempts at questioning will be a joke, and you shouldn’t even bother.[I]

Knowledge is power. You need to know how your subjects were captured, what condition they were already in, what their mental state was then and what it is now, and any other information about them that your forces can provide you, because these data inform how you should approach your subjects to gain their cooperation. Not only must you be equipped with all this information, you also have to be able to demonstrate your knowledge—and to do it without giving too much away. Never show all your cards.

APPROACHING AN INTERROGATION SUBJECT

You can summon some prisoners to you, or walk into their cells, and begin asking them questions immediately, with no prelude. In many cases, the direct approach is as effective as it is simple. It doesn’t work on every interrogation subject, though, and it works especially poorly on those who’ve been trained to resist questioning, who possess valuable information and are aware of its value, or who are simply recalcitrant by nature. Often, therefore, you have to take some time to get your prisoners in the mood to open up, and only then start questioning them in earnest. Which isn’t to say you can’t ask questions right away, but the questions you ask first should be unimportant ones, ones that have nothing to do with what you need to find out from your prisoners, in order to get them accustomed to answering your questions.

Certain factors make people more inclined to respond positively to questioning. When they’ve just experienced a high-stress situation, for example, they open up easily to someone who offers a sympathetic ear—and you want to make sure the first ear they open up to is yours. The more hierarchical the society they come from, the more automatically they defer to someone they recognize as an authority figure. The more values they hold in common with their questioner, the less they suspect that their answers will be wielded against them. The more unexpected or disorienting the situation, the less able they are to follow familiar scripts, and thus the more they respond to guidance. Flattery is an evergreen tactic, as is exculpation, if they harbor feelings of guilt. Treating a topic as if it’s no big deal gets people to drop their guard while discussing it.

Other factors intensify people’s defiance. Challenging their core values elicits extremely negative reactions, as does belittling anyone or anything they hold in high esteem—especially if they already have a reason to dislike you. Also, trying to pull rank on someone who doesn’t recognize you as a superior is a surefire way to undermine your position of power. Quid pro quos, as appealing a shortcut to cooperation as they may seem, may get you information, but they don’t necessarily get you accurate information—and as often as not, they get you a subject who withholds cooperation in order to elicit more rewards.

A belligerent, confrontational attitude will get you nowhere with most interrogation subjects. Instead, be calm, businesslike, even courteous and affable (though not too much at first). Show concern for their well-being, even if it’s just an act—and even if they know it’s just an act. They’ll at least take note of the fact that you had enough sense to pretend, which ironically helps burnish your credibility. Maybe you’re a liar, but you’re no idiot.

The approach phase begins when you first meet a prisoner and ends when they’re starting to answer important questions. Once you’ve moved on to the questioning phase, if at any time they start to balk, stop questioning and return to the approach phase to get them back into a question-answering frame of mind. You may take the same approach again, or you may decide, based on what you’ve learned and observed, to switch to a different method the second time around. Good interrogators reassess their interrogation subjects constantly, and when they realize a new approach is called for, they make the transition promptly and smoothly.

One of the first things you want to pay attention to is how frightened a prisoner seems to be—drawing a distinction between frightened, the emotional state, and frightened, the fifth edition D&D condition. The emotional state, if roleplayed faithfully, opens the door to certain approaches that may prove effective. The condition imposes disadvantage on ability checks while the source of one’s fear is within line of sight, which allows you to exploit social interaction mechanics by making it harder for characters to deceive you—or for them to use Insight checks to penetrate Deception and Intimidation.II If you have a trait that allows you to impose the frightened condition on a foe, an interrogation is a good time to make use of it.

If a prisoner exhibits no fear at all, only patient defiance, you can try the echo approach: Ask an innocuous question. When they answer, repeat your question, repeat their answer, then ask for verification again, slowly and deliberately. Do it again and again and again. They’ll start expanding on their answers out of sheer boredom, in order to get you to quit repeating them. However, this approach doesn’t work as well on a prisoner who’s very introverted or self-disciplined. It’s also slow.

Alternatively, if the information you’ve collected tells you that the fearless, defiant prisoner is also an egotist, talk to all your other prisoners first and save them for last. When you finally get to them, treat them with weary disdain. Bemoan that it’s a waste of time to question them because they can’t possibly be of any importance or know anything you might find useful. When they start bragging about their illustriousness, you have your way in. If this approach fails, though, it will be hard for you to reestablish your credibility.

Do they give off an iconoclastic rebel vibe? Accuse them of lying about their identity to conceal the fact that they’re a known criminal wanted for various despicable crimes. If they can’t prove they’re who they say they are, you’ll turn them in for punishment. “They’re eager to get their hands on you!” This approach forces subjects to give explicit details about themselves, which you can tell them you’ll have to verify, of course.

Do they lack emotional self-control? Pepper them with rapid-fire questions, and don’t let them finish answering one question before asking another. Gradually increase the tempo until they snap and say something they shouldn’t. This approach works all right with one interrogator, but it’s better with two, if you can make use of two interrogators at once—either two trusted underlings or one plus yourself. This way, while they’re answering a question from one of you, the other can interject that they’re a liar, which will tilt them even further. It takes skilled, experienced interrogators to make this approach work.

A prisoner who seems thoughtful and slightly nervous, especially one who suspects that you already know what they know, may be susceptible to the silent treatment: Sit, stare, and wait. Maybe smile a little. Just a little. Let the pressure build up until the dam breaks and the floodwaters rush through. This approach requires considerable patience and the ability to maintain eye contact for a long time, but it’s often more effective over time than it seems initially.

If they seem wracked with uncertainty or doubt, and you know things they don’t, convince them that all is lost already. Have they just come from a village overrun by invaders? Tell them the invaders have already overrun the entire province, and they’ll soon overrun the whole kingdom. There’s no point in resisting any longer. If they won’t answer questions, they’ll stay here till they do. If you’re keeping your prisoners separated, tell them their allies have been cooperating, because they just want to get on with their lives. This approach requires you to be well informed, persuasive, and aware of your prisoner’s weaknesses, and without some other, more positive technique to complement it—for instance, offering a reward or incentive that can provide a small ray of hope—it may simply make the prisoner shut down rather than win their cooperation.

Sometimes a prisoner is so burdened by some other concern that the fact that they’re imprisoned and about to be interrogated is secondary. Are they pining for loved ones? Say you can send them a message. When you captured them, were they in desperate need of something they’d been deprived of, like food—or something to which they’re addicted? Say you can provide it. (Don’t say you will. Don’t guarantee anything. Provide it when you think the time is right. Conversely, however, never dangle anything you can’t provide.)

Have you learned that they were working for someone who routinely put them down, expressing doubt about their competence? Build them up: Display respect and admiration for the all the personal qualities that have heretofore gone unrecognized, and meanwhile turn their ire against those who care so little for them as to put them in this situation. In essence, imply that they’d much rather be working for you.

If they seem like they’re just on the edge of opening up but not quite ready to do so all the way, take them away from where you’re questioning them to someplace else, nicer or more casual, that makes them feel like they’re not being interrogated anymore. In that new environment, ask casual icebreaker questions that put them at ease; from there, you can gradually lead the conversation into areas of greater importance and ease information out of them.

A frightened prisoner who also seems confused or in the dark is susceptible to the “We already know everything about you” approach, but to pull this one off, you have to be very well prepared, with a list of specific questions you can ask that you already know the answers to. When the prisoner lies, hesitates, or balks at a question, answer it yourself, correctly. This approach can be embellished by carrying a fat stack of notes containing all the information you have on the prisoner, including things that aren’t tactically important but enhance the act. (Your information may take up only the first page or two, but you don’t show them the rest!) This embellishment is more effective when the prisoner is already expressing a sense of hopelessness.

When a prisoner is extremely frightened, it’s crucial to know the source of their fear. If it’s you, then roll with it: Instead of playing nice, take an overtly intimidating approach—not violent but blustering. Verbosely inform them that cooperation is their only hope of salvation and resistance means doom. However, it’s possible that what’s terrifying them is something altogether different—maybe some other peril that frightens them more than imprisonment does, or maybe the possibility that they did something unforgivably wrong. In these instances, show kindness. Let them know they have nothing to fear from you; they’re safe where they are. Don’t spook them by asking troubling questions right away. Instead, establish an easy rapport with safe questions and a comforting tone of voice. It will take a while for them to open up, so work on your other prisoners in the meantime.

You may notice that I haven’t yet mentioned the classic dual-interrogator “good cop, bad cop” trope. That’s because it has several major drawbacks. First, it’s only effective on subjects who are frightened already. Second, it needs a second interrogator, and you may not trust anyone else to handle an interrogation alongside you. Third, it takes excellent acting skills. If a subject sees through it, your credibility is shot. Fourth, it relies on physical and/or mental coercion on the part of the “bad cop,” the idea being that this generates gratitude toward the “good cop” who holds them back (but who then tells the subject, when the “bad cop” is out of the room, “I may not be able to protect you next time; you should cooperate now to protect yourself”). In short, not only is it gross, it’s also a risky bet more often than not, likely to do more harm than good. On top of which, practically speaking, it’s hard for a DM to roleplay two different interrogators at the same time! We all love our tropes, but this one’s three days from retirement. Let it retire.

ASKING QUESTIONS

Prepare a list of questions in advance. These questions should be almost journalistic in nature—that is, directed toward obtaining the who, what, when, where, why, and how of your intruders’ agenda. They shouldn’t be the kind of questions that can be answered with a simple “yes” or “no”: Such questions provoke both terse, uncooperative responses and dishonest ones, and they may inadvertently reveal what answers you want to hear, which your subjects will pick up on. You also need to take care that you’re asking only one question at a time. Compound questions often cause confusion, and they invite evasion.

Your questions should follow a planned, logical sequence. Nothing should interrupt that sequence except relevant follow-up questions to incomplete answers or unexpected new leads, off-topic questions that obfuscate the goal of your interrogation, or asides that reinforce your rapport with the subject. You can sprinkle in random questions from time to time as a way to reassess your subject or disrupt an attempt to construct a complex lie, but otherwise, they’re distractions that defocus the interview. When you start digging deeper, mix follow-up questions with ones designed to tell truth from falsehood, and test clever and stubborn subjects by asking questions you already know the answers to.

Be thorough and attentive to detail. Don’t let a prisoner waste your time with rambling answers that lead you away from your area of focus. Ask precise questions that are difficult to dodge or answer vaguely, and don’t move on to the next topic until you’re done with the current one. To help you remember the answers you receive, repeat them out loud; you can make this repetition seem more natural by feigning a bit of surprise.

Keep your cool: Don’t ask rude or smart-aleck questions on a whim. You can destroy whatever rapport you’ve built up with a prisoner in an instant by insulting or offending them. (You can ask a rude or smart-aleck question as part of a calculated plan—but be very, very careful with that.) If you start to feel distracted or wrong-footed during a questioning session, end the session immediately—smoothly and matter-of-factly, not in a panic!—and the next time you meet with that prisoner, go back to the approach phase.

Once you’ve gotten all the info you can out of your subject, end your interrogation promptly. “Another interview will be forthcoming. In the meantime, we’ll check this information out thoroughly. Is there anything else you want to add? Anything possibly misleading you want to clarify?”

1. I. However, as a DM, you may decide to do it anyway, just to make your players feel superior to their captor.

2. II. Wait—how do you use Deception and Intimidation against PCs when players have free will and full dominion over what their PCs think and how they feel? Great question! You do it by presenting fiction as fact. In other words, if a character or creature wins a Deception or Intimidation vs. Insight contest against a PC, then you, as the DM, tell the player that whatever the character or creature wants the PC to believe is true. Not that the PC believes it’s true, but that it is true. The player believes it, because you, the DM, said so, and they can then have the PC respond or react to that knowledge however they see fit. (In contrast, if the PC wins the contest, you let the player in on the charade.)
Yes, lie! Lie to your players! But only when their PCs would believe the lie, and only because their PCs would believe the lie.

When the opposing character or creature uses Persuasion, it’s trickier. In that case, a lost contest would mean the PC’s judgment is overwhelmed by the argument; you can convey that by making the argument your argument, reiterating the logos, ethos, and pathos of the appeal (“Her argument is sound, she knows what she’s talking about, and you would do what she’s suggesting if it were your mother”). If the PC’s Insight prevails, present the actual facts of the situation instead. In the case of a strong argument, that might mean reiterating just how strong it is, but in the case of a weak one, it reveals the weaknesses (“There are holes in her argument, she doesn’t have the experience to be so sure of herself, and that emotional appeal was over-the-top”).

All that being said, don’t roll dice in the middle of an interrogation scene unless a player asks, “Do I believe her?” or words to that effect. Use passive skill scores instead. It streamlines gameplay and maintains immersion. If you really want to let die rolls influence the outcome, do it once for your villain before the scene begins and once for the PC at the end.

CHAPTER 8

SIXTEEN LAIRS

A NOTE ON DIFFICULTY

Every one of these lairs contains an encounter that would be considered Deadly for the minimum recommended party, according to the encounter building guidelines in chapter 3 of the Dungeon Master’s Guide. Whether that encounter occurs depends on the choices of the characters invading the lair—but it’s always along the route of approach that the owner of the lair believes intruders are most likely to take.

To keep descriptions from becoming too tedious and hard to follow, and also for the benefit of gamemasters using systems other than fifth edition D&D, rather than repeatedly inserting parentheticals such as “(DC 20 to detect)” or “(DC 10 to disarm),” I use natural language: “hard to detect,” “easy to disarm.” The descriptors correspond to those in the Typical Difficulty Classes table in the Player’s Handbook, chapter 7, “Ability Checks”: “Very Easy” equals DC 5, “easy” equals DC 10, “moderately difficult” equals DC 15, “hard” or “difficult” equals DC 20, “very hard” or “very difficult” equals DC 25, and “nearly impossible” equals DC 30. Whenever difficulty isn’t specified, assume DC 15.

GRUNG VILLAGE

Minimum recommended party: four or five level 3 PCs

A band of grungs dwelling in the Emaranhá rainforest have recently started kidnapping interlopers and holding them for ransom. This activity was the brainchild of a grung wildling named Chittittittittittitt. Originally, the grungs simply ate whatever captives they took, and they didn’t kidnap anyone when they weren’t hungry. However, one captive, a merchant, tried to buy his freedom by flashing some impressive-looking semiprecious stones at them, and Chittittittittittitt’s avarice was kindled by the beautiful objects. Now the grungs have amassed a hoard of precious coins, gems, and a previously unimagined treasure: a driftglobe. Out of a desire for ever more captivating treasure, the band has gotten bolder in its depredations and kidnapped a minor noble, Dom Calixto do Margem. The grungs forced him to write his own ransom note, then conveyed it to the nearest village.

ASSETS

- Hatching pool. The pool where the grungs lay their eggs and foster their tadpoles is of the utmost intrinsic (4) and intangible (4) value to them. Its value in other respects is negligible (0). Total value: 8.

- Cash. The money that the grungs are hoarding—80 gp, 1,000 sp, and 1,800 cp—isn’t an enormous sum even by the standards of the impoverished local economy, and since they don’t use money themselves, they don’t recognize its monetary value, although they are intelligent enough to recognize that others place a unique sort of value on it. The value of the shiny coins, to them, lies in their beauty (intangible value: 2), so they estimate its monetary value to others accordingly (also 2). Total value: 4.

- Scrolls. These weren’t part of a ransom payment but rather were taken off the body of an earlier victim of the grungs. They comprise three spell scrolls: produce flame, fog cloud, and detect magic. Chittittittittittitt, who has some druidic spellcasting ability, recognized their potential usefulness and squirreled the scrolls away. They’re worth more money than all the cash combined, but the grungs don’t know that, so they underrate the scrolls’ monetary value. The wildling, however, can make good use of them in a pinch—as could a PC who managed to filch them (operational value: 4). Total value: 4.

- Gems. Ten strikingly faceted pieces of transparent blue quartz, roughly heart-shaped and worth 10 gp each. Prettier than the cash (intangible value: 3), and presumably also more valuable (monetary value: 3). Total value: 6.

- Driftglobe. This magic item captivates the grungs, who have never seen anything like it. It levitates! And glows! Amazing! Its mesmerizing quality gives it an intangible value of 4, and the grungs reason that it must have a commensurate monetary value to the dryskins. Even an uncommon magic item is worth a decent amount of money, but the value they imagine it to have (monetary value: 4) is greater than it could actually fetch if sold. On the flip side, while the driftglobe could be quite useful to a party of adventurers, the grungs don’t recognize its operational value, since they don’t use it for anything practical themselves. Total value: 8.

- Territory. Grungs are extremely territorial. The intrinsic (3) and intangible (3) value of their territory is second only to that of their hatching pool. Total value: 6.

- Prisoners. Taking prisoners has operational value (2) to the grungs, since they’re getting something they like out of the deal. This fact also confers a certain economic value (2) upon their prisoners: While their economic system is bare-bones, based on barter, they get that they can trade prisoners for the shiny objects they covet. They’re also aware of the intrinsic value (4) that other folk place on the captives’ lives. Total value: 8.

- Grungs. The village isn’t just an armed camp. It supports a population of six artisans and nine juvenile grungs as well. Their lives have intrinsic value (4) to the grungs. The artisans have operational (2) value as well, since they make the goods that the grungs barter with, and intangible value (2), since this is a close-knit band and everyone in it is related by kinship. The warriors have a different sort of operational value, equal to that of the artisans, and the juveniles have an intangible value equal to that of the hatchlings (4). Total value of each group: 8.

The grungs’ most valuable assets, aside from their own lives, are the hatching pool, the prisoners, and the driftglobe. All of these are protected by a 10-foot palisade of sharpened stakes, lashed together with tough vines. Historically, the grungs have mostly needed to protect their village only from hostile bands of other grungs; only since they began taking captives for ransom have they considered the need to protect themselves from other folk, and they built the palisade as a result. There’s no gate in this palisade, because the grungs don’t need one: They get around via the tree branches above and can easily jump or climb down and back up. Chittittittittittitt’s hut is built below the canopy and has an excellent view of the area outside the palisade as well as within it, so that if there’s a scuffle outside the village, the wildling can assist by casting spells from afar. The village is a restricted area: No one enters but the grungs.

The gems, the cash, and the driftglobe are kept in a shrine hut in the village, adjacent to Chittittittittittitt’s hut. The cash is in baskets, out in the open; for the gems and the driftglobe, the grungs have built a special wooden altar. The gems rest in indentations in the top, while the driftglobe is kept inside in a hidden compartment with a cleverly constructed wooden lock, to which Chittittittittittitt holds the key. It’s a rudimentary lock and very easy to pick, but it prevents simply picking the globe up and walking off with it, and the woodwork is skillful enough that it’s moderately difficult to spot the compartment.

Four prisoners, including Dom Calixto, are kept in a vine net hanging from a tree limb near the middle of the village. If any were to cut their way out somehow, they’d face a 10-foot fall—and they’d still be inside the palisade. The top of the net has an opening about 1 ½ feet wide, enough for the grungs to toss in scraps of food a couple of times a day.

The grungs are loath to part with the driftglobe—they keep it hidden, don’t mention its existence, and fight to defend it—but in general, their lives matter more to them than their loot and even their territory, and if a fight is going badly, Chittittittittittitt will try to buy off the attackers, first by offering the cash to get them to leave, then the scrolls if the cash isn’t enough, and finally the gems. If pushed to the wall, they’ll even grant free passage through their territory. The grungs’ prisoners, however, are their golden goose, and they won’t bargain for their release. Unless any would-be rescuers can sneak in and free the prisoners without the grungs’ knowing, it’s going to be an all-out fight.

DEFENSE

The terrain around the village is uniformly overgrown and marshy—difficult terrain throughout. The lowest branches of the trees are 10 to 20 feet above the ground. Where grungs can’t jump directly into the branches, they can easily climb the trees’ trunks. One hundred twenty feet from the wall, the grungs have dug a 15-foot-wide moat to a depth of 6 to 8 feet around the village, leaving 10-foot-wide gaps to the east and west to channel trespassers through. This moat, which winds around trees in its path, has naturally filled in with muddy water, concealing its depth—and the sharpened stakes that line the bottom of it.

A reserve of six grungs guards the village within the palisade wall. This reserve responds immediately to any breach of the wall, always maintaining a position between intruders and the hatching pool. Outside the wall, two patrols of five grungs each screen the perimeter outside the palisade, moving and observing stealthily from the treetops at a distance of roughly 60 feet from the wall. Farther out, about 200 feet from the wall, two pairs of grung scouts make a continuous reconnaissance circuit around the village. If a pair spots any potentially hostile creatures, one of the pair returns to the nearest security patrol to report on what they’ve seen, while the other hides and watches. After reporting, the first scout rejoins the second, and they continue to gather whatever information they can.

If it seems like an attack is imminent, the scouts call out to warn their security patrols, which in turn call out to warn Chittittittittittitt and the reserves. If the PCs speak Grung, they hear and comprehend the warning; if not, recognizing that these calls aren’t just normal rainforest critter noise requires a successful DC 15 Intelligence (Nature) check. When one security patrol is warned of an impending attack, it relays the warning to the other security patrol, which sends one of its own grungs to add to the defense of the first one, so that more force is concentrated in the direction the attack will come from. At the sound of a warning, all non-warrior grungs take cover in their huts.

Chittittittittittitt, the grung wildling, casts spells from within the wall: first plant growth on the forest floor around the invaders to slow their progress, then spike growth centered upon them to make further passage perilous. While concentrating on the latter spell, the wildling then moves toward the battle and takes shots at the invaders with a shortbow.

If the grungs on security patrol outnumber the intruders at least three to one—which they won’t, unless there are only one or two intruders—they fling daggers from up in the treetops until each has only one left. They continue in this manner until they can transition to offense, in which case they leap down and try to grapple their targets and drag them over to a net that they use to hoist their captives over the wall, or must retreat, in which case they try to lead the intruders toward the reserve. Routed grungs withdraw toward the hatching pool, where they make their last stand. Even if one patrol comes under attack, those grungs remaining in the other one stay on their side of the village, just in case there’s an attack from another direction.

At night, instead of two patrols of five in the controlled zone outside the palisade, the grungs send out four patrols: three grungs to the east and west, two to the north and south. They don’t conduct reconnaissance at night unless they’re keeping an eye on possible enemies they came across during the day. If a security patrol sounds the alarm at night, any grung in a neighboring patrol hurries over to join it, and Chittittittittittitt comes out to assist as well.

WERERAT NEST

Minimum recommended party: four or five level 5 PCs

Commanding a breathtaking view of the Amidland Ocean, the city of Aearfen is ancient, beautiful, and decadent. A center of learning, culture, trade, and ruthless scheming, Aearfen has been ruled since its founding by a single high elf dynasty and the council of nobles that supports it. Detached from the day-to-day realities of citizens’ lives, high elf aristocrats jockey constantly for social position and political power and consume an unseemly disproportion of the city’s wealth, to the particular detriment of the lower classes, who live and work in a downslope borough derisively called i Ast—“the Dust.” The city’s many put-upon residents—including elves of less fortunate birth, human and halfling migrants from other continents, and large minorities of orcs and gnomes, the latter overrepresented in Aearfen’s intelligentsia and bourgeoisie—are becoming more vocal about their dissatisfaction. A few have already grown tired of talking and begun planning direct action. Into this last group fall Snar, Poe, Gnaw, Sniff, and Mither: anarchists, saboteurs… and wererats.

ASSETS

- Tools. These wererats are skilled artisans who’ve assembled a miscellany of tinkering, coopering, alchemy, and trap-making tools, which they’re using to build bombs and booby traps. These tools are essential to their plans (operational value: 4). Total value: 4.

- Raw materials. They’re also collecting black powder, as well as the wood, metal fittings, and wire out of which they’re making their improvised explosive devices. These are also important to the wererats’ plans, but they’re more fungible and easily replaced than the tools (operational value: 3). Total value: 3.

- Food. The wererats’ workshop and hideout is also their squat. They maintain a stockpile of food in case they have to lie low for a while (operational value: 4). Total value: 4.

- Clothing. One of the perpetual risks of lycanthropy is losing one’s clothing upon changing into bestial form—and one of the risks of criminality is being identified by a distinctive item of clothing. The wererats take care of both of these problems at once by keeping a supply of plain, common clothes on hand (operational value: 4). Total value: 4.

- Weapons. Unlike werewolves and other lycanthropes, wererats lack formidable natural weapons. Sure, they can bite, but that often ends up creating more wererats, and manufactured weapons are more effective. Thus, for self-defense, the wererats keep five shortswords, five light crossbows (hand crossbows are easier to wield, it’s true, but light crossbows are more widely available, have better range, and are one-third the price), and forty crossbow bolts on hand. These weapons are a wise precaution, but they’re not essential to the wererats’ purposes (operational value: 2). Total value: 2.

- Wererats. The members of this little family of choice care about one another’s lives a great deal, not just as kindred beings (intrinsic value: 4) but also out of shared commitment to their cause (intangible value: 2). Total value: 6.

The wererats share an “all for one and one for all” ethos. No matter what else happens, they look out for one another first. Everything else can be replaced if necessary, but not their lives, nor the bond they share. Although they live in an area with a significant amount of violent crime, the two most salient threats to their lives are the ruling authorities and lycanthrope-hating mobs. Since their activities—which include stealing food and clothing as well as procuring donations of raw materials from fellow travelers—necessitate going out in public, their existence is precarious, and they must keep a very low profile.

Their cache of clothing is unlikely to be of any interest to a looter, but a lot of the wererats’ neighbors could use the food and would sell the tools for whatever they could get, so the wererats have to be on guard against simple burglary. The food and clothing can generally stay hidden away, but the tools have to be taken out and used from time to time. Fortunately, the wererats aren’t likely to have to deal with a break-in while they’re at work.

The bomb- and trap-making materials are of little use to a poor resident of the Dust, but to a guard searching the premises, they’re highly incriminating—enough to get the wererats charged with treason and put to death. Also, it’s easier to put away tools than to put away a half-made bomb. These materials are therefore more critical and more vulnerable than some of the wererats’ other assets, even if they’re slightly less valuable. The weapons aren’t especially suspicious in and of themselves, but if found together with the bomb materials, they’d be taken as further evidence of criminal intent; they’re also one of the first things an opportunistic burglar would choose to steal, along with the tools.

DEFENSE

The streets of i Ast are narrow and meandering, crowded by a dense agglomeration of firetrap buildings piled one on top of another as the land rises steeply from the coast. The innavigable lanes and indistinguishable buildings of the neighborhood make it an ideal place to hide out.

Five wererats (with Intelligence 15) live together in the nest. At any given hour of the night, 1d4 + 1 of them are home. During the day, they’re all home 50 percent of the time; the other 50 percent of the time, one of them is out. The only window is covered by a curtain, and there’s no light inside except for a single hooded lantern in the workshop, used as a task lamp when the wererats are tinkering and extinguished when they aren’t.

The entrance (A) is invisible from the street, facing onto a narrow, dead-end alley overarched by the buildings on either side of it. The nest is up one flight of stairs—barely more than a ladder—from that entrance and extends to the front of the building, where its single window (B) overlooks the nameless street at the entrance to the alley. At least one wererat is always on watch at this window; sometimes they’re joined by a second.

To find the nest, an intruder has to wend through a labyrinth of slum streets, locate the entrance alley, summon the courage to enter it, choose the right door, and ascend the steep stairs behind it. If they manage to do all that, they’re faced with a door in the ceiling that’s barred on the inside. This trapdoor has Armor Class 15 and 22 hp, and it’s immune to poison and psychic damage. (However, if the door is dealt at least 10 bludgeoning or force damage, the bracket holding the bar gives way, the frame splinters, and the door bursts open. The same result can be accomplished with a successful DC 20 Strength check.) The wererats always have an ally on watch at the window who can unbar the door for them—and who, thanks to their Keen Smell, can identify them through the door without a single word being spoken—so they have no trouble getting in.

All the rooms in the hideout—a living/sleeping room, a workroom, a kitchen, and a hidden storeroom—are at the same level. Behind these rooms is an escape passage that in turn leads to a landing, with stairs leading down to the maze of streets below—but also a ladder leading to the rooftops above. The wererats favor the former escape route during the day and the latter route at night.

There are several secret hiding places in the wererats’ nest. The stockpiled food is stored not in the kitchen, where hungry looters would expect it to be, but in the storeroom, the doorway to which is hidden behind an armoire in the workshop. The only way to find it is to move the armoire, although a successful DC 20 Wisdom (Perception) check will spot telltale scuff marks on the floor. The armoire doubles as a place to stash unfinished projects if the wererats need to clean up in a hurry. It’s lockable (although the lock is only moderately difficult to pick), and it contains several very thick blankets that can be used to muffle the sound of objects shifting around inside.

The tools are kept in a locked chest in the workshop. The lock is hard to pick, and it’s protected by an acid trap (+5 to hit, 2d10 acid damage) that’s triggered by a failed attempt to pick the lock. This trap, which is only moderately hard to find but hard to disarm, is intended as a strongly worded “go away” message, not meant to kill. The chest weighs 25 pounds, and the tools weigh another 25.

The clothes are in a plain rectangular chest in the living/sleeping room; a thin blanket is thrown over it to make it look like a table. The weapons are kept in a compartment in the living/sleeping room floor that’s hidden beneath one of the wererats’ mattresses. Raw materials are kept in the secret storeroom along with the food. Amid the other bomb- and trap-making material is a single crate, about 2 feet on a side, made of wood of a distinctive color. This crate is a booby trap. If it’s pried open, picked up, or tilted in any direction, it explodes. Every creature in the room must make a DC 20 Dexterity saving throw, taking 2d10 fire damage and 8d10 thunder damage on a failure, or half damage on a success. It’s only moderately hard to disarm, which can be done through a small hole in the side, but without tilting the crate—and thereby setting off the trap—it’s not possible to reach in and see in at the same time, imposing disadvantage on the ability check unless one has the ability to see through solid objects or reach inside telekinetically. All the wererats know exactly which crate is the booby trap and not to mess with it. This trap is meant to kill—and to destroy evidence.

The wererats have three escape routes: a second trapdoor in the living/sleeping room, hidden under a different mattress, with a crawl space beneath it; a Small door cut into the workshop wall, accessible by crawling underneath a workbench; and a similar door in the kitchen pantry, accessible by crawling underneath a shelf. All three of these doors are hidden from view but obvious when looked at directly.

As soon as the wererats hear noises at the door—especially if the one on watch has seen unknown characters lurking suspiciously around the street below—they get ready for action, but what sort of action depends on whom they see coming.

If it’s more than a couple of city guards gathering outside, the wererats will have to assume that their secrecy is compromised, because the guards normally assigned to patrol the Dust are notoriously corrupt, lazy, and uninterested in whatever might be going on out of view. The wererats will grab whatever project they’re working on, throw as many tools as they can carry into a sack, and book it out the back way. One will go up to the roof and shift into giant rat form to keep an eye on the street and try to draw whatever conclusions they can from the guards’ behavior after they leave; they’ll rendezvous with the rest later. The others will take the stairs down and head through the snarl of streets toward the waterfront, where they can acquire a rowboat from a confederate and skip town for a while. They won’t return to this location; they’ll establish a new one elsewhere in the Dust.

If it’s one or more local lowlifes, they probably won’t even get in the door (and if they try to get in the window, whichever wererat is on watch will give them a push, which should settle things). But just in case, while the wererat on watch stays on watch, any others who are around hide their project in the armoire, lock up their tools, and retrieve and distribute weapons. Two take cover on either side of the door in the living/sleeping room, two in the kitchen, and one around the corner in the workshop, in that order, and they all load their crossbows and aim them at the door. When they catch the scent of intruders, the nearest wererat shouts a warning to whoever’s outside that they’re armed, ready, and waiting. It never goes any further than that.

Where things get interesting is if people are lurking suspiciously around the street outside and the wererats have no idea who they are. In this case, they’ll be on alert, but not necessarily ready to give up their hideout. The wererat on watch will stay on watch, gleaning as many clues as possible from the lurkers’ behavior, and the others will follow the same plan as above, with one addition: They lower the rolled-up, weighted fishing nets that are hung behind the interior doorways. The wererats can easily see and shoot through these nets, but anyone who tries to barge through one gets tangled up in it (i.e., restrained) upon reaching the other side of the doorway, as the weights fall behind them. (See Player’s Handbook, chapter 5, “Special Weapons,” for how to escape a net.)

If the wererats’ warning shout elicits a reply that piques their interest, they may be open to a parley. If the door is broken in, they’ll fight, fleeing out the back if it starts to go badly for them and not worrying about hiding their means of egress. If the door is sprung by magic—with a knock spell, for instance—they’ll get spooked and drop their weapons in surrender, figuring that they’re probably outmatched and that their chances of survival are better if they talk rather than try to fight.

If they’re ever caught completely by surprise, they fight if they can but flee if they must. Nothing in their lair is worth dying for.

WIZARD’S TOWER

Minimum recommended party: four or five level 5 PCs

Gúlwelch is a transmuter (see Volo’s; if you’re using the stat block from Monsters of the Multiverse, add blink and expeditious retreat to the list of spells he can cast twice per day) who resides in a tower he bought from its former owner decades ago in the valley of Hûn e Hîr. The tower was once the keep of a small castle, and the outer walls still stand, but peace came to the valley long ago, and with it enough settlers—and wealth—that the aran of the shire opted for a more luxurious manor, closer to town, over a stark old castle. Unaffiliated with any order of magic-users (and having established a reputation for being difficult to get along with), Gúlwelch works alone and conducts research independently, casting spells for hire from time to time.

Recently, he drew attention to himself when he hired thieves to steal the Tome of Lucid Reason from a collector of rare books who refused to sell it to him. Gúlwelch is a genius; he covered his tracks twenty-five different ways. However, he failed to consider the other twenty-five ways the trail led back to him.

ASSETS

- Research. The study of transmutation is Gúlwelch’s vocation (intrinsic value: 4), and he’s developed some distinctive spells of his own (intangible value: 4). These spells are pure research, without a lot of direct application yet, but they could lead to greater payoffs in the future (economic value: 2). Using his research notes, other wizards could learn to duplicate their effects (operational value: 2). Total value: 12.

- Spellbook. Without his spellbook, his most prized personal possession, Gúlwelch is undone as a wizard (intrinsic value: 4, operational value: 4, intangible value: 4). As a collection of spells that another wizard could copy, it could fetch a very good price (monetary value: 3). In addition to the spells Gúlwelch has prepared, it contains the following spells: message; catapult, comprehend languages, detect magic, feather fall, find familiar, identify; arcane lock, arcanist’s magic aura, enlarge/reduce, magic mouth, pyrotechnics, skywrite; bestow curse, fly, gaseous form, glyph of warding, haste, tiny servant; control water, fabricate, private sanctum, secret chest; animate objects. Total value: 15.

- Material components (common). Like any working wizard, Gúlwelch keeps a supply of magical reagents for his spellcasting (operational value: 4). He has a lot of it, but most of it is stuff you could easily procure from any magic shop (monetary value: 1). Total value: 5.

- Material components (rare). However, some of the material components required for his spellcasting are rare and expensive (monetary value: 3), and it would be inconvenient to replace them (intangible value: 1). These components include a diamond worth 50 gp; a pearl worth 100 gp; 200 gp worth of gold dust and 500 gp worth of diamond dust; an exquisitely crafted wooden coffer for the secret chest spell, worth 5,000 gp; and a small replica of that coffer, worth 50 gp, also used in the spell. Gúlwelch keeps the 50 gp diamond and 100 gp worth of diamond dust on his person, in case he needs to cast chromatic orb or stoneskin, and the pearl in his workshop, where he uses it to cast identify; the other components are for spells he casts infrequently (operational value: 2). Total value: 6.

- Potion of healing. Every wizard keeps one of these over-the-counter potions in their medicine cabinet (monetary value: 1, operational value: 2). Total value: 3.

- Alchemy jug. Thanks to this uncommon wondrous item, Gúlwelch has no need to go outside and use the well. Every evening, he anticipates the next day’s needs and refills his casks with fresh water, wine, beer, vinegar, or oil; tops off his honey jar; or produces some acid for the lab (monetary value: 2, operational value: 4). Total value: 6.

- Dust of disappearance. Gúlwelch keeps this uncommon consumable item on his person as a self-defense measure (monetary value: 2, operational value: 2). Total value: 4.

- Spell scroll of passwall. Gúlwelch recently bought this scroll to study it, but he hasn’t copied it into his spellbook yet (intrinsic value: 4, operational value: 4). It cost him a pretty penny (monetary value: 3). Total value: 11.

- Ring of mind shielding. Like many wizards, Gúlwelch is anxious about being subjected to enchantment or mind-reading. He wears this uncommon magic ring as a precaution (monetary value: 2, intangible value: 4). Total value: 6.

- Peace of mind. Also like many wizards, Gúlwelch likes his privacy. The fewer disturbances he must endure, the better. His isolated tower outside a country village gives him the peace and quiet that he enjoys—and that helps him focus on his studies (intrinsic value: 2, operational value: 2, intangible value: 4). Total value: 8.

- Interesting lore. Gúlwelch has accumulated his own collection of valuable books, some of which contain information thought lost, which would otherwise be accessible only by means of a legend lore spell. He considers this lore to be intrinsically valuable, although not quite on par with his own life (3); institutional libraries would pay generously to acquire it if he had any interest in parting with it (monetary value: 4), but he doesn’t (intangible value: 3). Total value: 10.

- Tome of Lucid Reason. Gúlwelch had this very rare magical volume (monetary value: 4) stolen and delivered to him so that he could use the exercises in it to enhance his already considerable brainpower further. Aside from the effect he anticipates it will have on his research (operational value: 4), he’s simply thrilled to have such a treasure in his possession (intangible value: 4). Given that he already considers lore to be valuable in and of itself (intrinsic value: 3), this tome is a prize on par with his spellbook. Total value: 15.

- Cash. Over the last century and a half of his adult life, Gúlwelch has done well for himself as a wizard for hire, despite his abrasive personality. His current cash on hand amounts to 2,770 gp (monetary value: 3), mostly in gold but with a fair amount of silver and copper that he couldn’t be bothered to exchange. Aside from a small quantity of pocket money, he keeps it in a single chest. Total value: 3.

- Tower. Gúlwelch needs someplace to work (operational value: 2), and he forked over a lot of money for the privilege of working independently and in privacy. His tower isn’t exactly appreciating—in other words, it lacks economic value—but if he ever chose to move on, he could certainly recoup a good portion of the purchase price. Conversely, if he ever had to flee, that investment would be lost, and replacing it would be costly. These factors make it one of his most significant monetary assets (4), rivaled only by his rare books and the stolen tome. The physical protection it affords adds some intangible value (2). Total value: 8.

- Gúlwelch. As both a naturally long-lived high elf and a practitioner of a discipline that requires years and years of dedicated effort to master, the wizard considers his life to have more value than most (intrinsic value: 4)—and he can’t pursue his work if he’s dead (operational value: 4). Total value: 8.

Since Gúlwelch values his peace of mind so highly, and thus is sensitive to any intrusion on his personal space, he doesn’t make any special effort to secure the less valuable assets in his tower (his material components, his common and uncommon magic items, or his cash), the entirety of which is a restricted area to begin with. As far as he’s concerned, securing the tower itself is enough to secure these assets, and their relative values serve only as a guide to whether he keeps them in less private or more private areas of the tower. In contrast, his lore library, scroll of passwall, research notes, and spellbook, along with the Tome of Lucid Reason, require increasingly stringent security measures in addition to those of the tower itself.

These measures are especially stringent right now, since he’s in possession of stolen property. Gúlwelch thinks the theft can’t be traced back to him, but he’s smart enough to be aware of the possibility that he overlooked something and to take some extra precautions. The collector probably won’t come after Gúlwelch personally, and he doesn’t fear the mundane law, but it’s possible that the collector might send hired agents—thieves of his own, perhaps, or worse, an assassin. The worst-case scenario is that other mages might be sent against him, since they’re the ones most likely to be able to bypass his security.

Gúlwelch also has to take into consideration the fact that both his spellbook and the Tome of Lucid Reason are, in essence, tools. A significant fraction of the value of both is operational. He has to take both of them out at least once a day to benefit from having them. Thus, while they have to be kept under lock and key, they also have to be accessible to him when he wants them. He also can’t simply stop doing research while he waits to see whether or not he’s busted. In contrast, he can forgo the pleasures of his lore library for a while. It’s very valuable, but it’s not critical.

It’s curious that even an elf wizard could value a single scroll, for instance, more than his own life—but that’s his value system at work. Without his magic, without his accomplishments and discoveries, his life would be empty of purpose, so he’ll go to extraordinary lengths to protect his research and his spellbook. If the Tome of Lucid Reason were stolen back, it would be a crushing loss, especially after all the effort expended to get it in the first place, not to mention a deep humiliation. In the end, however, he’d still be a wizard, and he could recover from the blow. If he lost his research notes, on the other hand, they’d take decades to reconstruct, if it could even be done, and if he lost his spellbook, relearning and rescribing all the spells he doesn’t have prepared would cost him more money than he’s got. Protecting these things is where Gúlwelch devotes the lion’s share of his money and attention.

DEFENSE

The crenellated walls of the former castle, which are 6 feet thick and 20 feet high, are enough to deter casual busybodies and accidental trespassers, but they won’t thwart a magic-user, who could bypass them easily with such spells as jump, levitate, and fly, so Gúlwelch stations guards atop the walls as well as at the gate. However, their primary responsibility is detection, not response. The guards know better than to engage intruders who use magic to bypass the outer wall. Instead, they take cover in the gatehouse and sound the alarm: four rings of a bell, repeated as long as the danger persists.

The 10-foot-wide, 10-foot-high gate has a double portcullis, with each grille raised and lowered by a separate winch in the guardroom above. The guardroom has two murder holes in the floor, overlooking the space between the portcullises.

Gúlwelch employs only a handful of day guards: two in the guardroom to greet (or turn away) visitors and raise and lower the portcullises, two more to go downstairs and deal with visitors face-to-face, and two to patrol the remainder of the wall. They’re armed with shortswords and light crossbows, but these weapons are a somewhat empty threat: For the most part, Gúlwelch’s guards don’t risk their lives fighting enemies of extraordinary ability. Along with paying them well, reassuring them that he doesn’t expect them to expose themselves to undue risk is how he secures their loyalty.

As an elf, Gúlwelch doesn’t sleep; he merely goes into a meditative trance for four hours, usually from late at night until around dawn. During this time, he allows no one in through the gate and has four night guards keep watch from atop the wall. Not all his guards are elves, but he does hire elves specifically for night watch duty because of their ability to see in the dark.

Gúlwelch doesn’t allow anyone inside the walls around his tower without an invitation. Everyone who arrives must state their name and business and check their weapons at the gate. The double portcullis is operated like an airlock: Both portcullises may be lowered, or either the outer one or the inner one may be raised, but the two are never raised at the same time. When Gúlwelch has supplies delivered, which happens every few days, the outer portcullis is raised, the goods are brought in, and the outer portcullis is lowered again. The goods are then unloaded, the outer portcullis raised again, and the carter sent away. Finally, the outer portcullis is lowered again, the inner portcullis is raised, and the goods are brought to the tower. The guards ring a code on the alarm bell—one ring, then three, just once—to inform Gúlwelch of the goods’ arrival.

All messages also go through the guards. The guard sergeant (see appendix B), who is on duty during the day only, takes messages from the gate to the tower, speaking a special password that bypasses the arcane lock on the tower door for 1 minute. She leaves the message in Gúlwelch’s parlor, tugs on a bell pull to let him know it’s there, then returns to her post. As she does, the gate and wall guards train their attention on the tower door, ready to sound the alarm if they see any intruder slip in while their sergeant is inside. When Gúlwelch wants to send a message, he notifies the guard sergeant using the message cantrip, and the process is reversed. The guards ring a special code on the alarm bell—one ring, then two, repeated after a long pause—which the couriers in the village market recognize as their cue to fetch a message from the gate.

Whenever an alarm bell sounds, Gúlwelch sends out his owl familiar to make a sweep of the area, seeing through its eyes and hearing through its ears, in order to get a bead on the situation. When he’s satisfied that he knows what’s happening, he recalls his familiar. If anyone draws a weapon against the owl, he dismisses it immediately to avoid the inconvenience of having to recast find familiar.

The bailey contains a number of wooden outbuildings left over from the castle’s earlier days. Gúlwelch doesn’t use them, and they’re somewhat dilapidated. The guards don’t use them, either: They have a barracks in one of the gatehouse towers and a farmhouse kitchen in the other. To prevent intruders from hiding in the outbuildings, Gúlwelch had the idea of placing glyphs of warding with thunder-dealing explosive runes in them, but he decided against it: It was too expensive a measure to take to protect an area that didn’t matter to him all that much. Instead, he had the floors of all the buildings covered with straw and buried a few ordinary hunting traps (A) in it (DC 14 to notice them).

The tower door is made of sturdy wood, reinforced at night with a sliding bar, and inscribed with an arcane lock. Only Gúlwelch can open the door freely; only the guard sergeant knows the password that opens it temporarily. When anyone other than Gúlwelch or the sergeant comes within 5 feet of the door unaccompanied by one of the two, a magic mouth spell activates and says in Common, “You trespass upon the property of Gúlwelch i Rúwiston. Leave now and do not return. I will not warn you again.” The entire tower is enclosed within a permanent private sanctum spell, customized to cover a cylindrical area of effect, which precludes divination magic, teleportation, and planar travel.

The tower’s floors are hardwood. The first floor, which is one story above ground level, is Gúlwelch’s parlor, where he meets with visitors. The second floor is his residence. The third floor, once an armory, is now his library; the fourth floor, once a prison, is his laboratory. The first, second, and third levels of the tower are accessed by a single spiral staircase of stone. The ground-floor kitchen and basement cellar are accessed from the first floor by a separate wooden staircase; the ladder by which the fourth floor was originally reached from the third has been replaced by a wooden spiral stair. The trapdoor between the floors remains, as does its lock, which is moderately difficult to pick. However, Gúlwelch has enhanced the trapdoor with another arcane lock, which opens only to him, for only 1 minute at a time, and only when he speaks the password. He also carries the only key.

The opening between the first and second floors of the tower (B) is ringed with trespasser’s bane (see appendix A), so Gúlwelch is alerted if anyone manages to enter the tower and climb the stairs. He keeps the books in his library not in open shelves but in an enormous armoire with windowed doors (C). The armoire is locked—Gúlwelch has the key to this lock, too, but it’s easy to pick—and the backplate is inscribed with a 4th-level glyph of warding containing a polymorph spell (DC 14 Wisdom saving throw to resist) that turns the target into a pig (AC 10, 5 hp, speed 30 ft., Strength 13, no attack—see the D&D adventure Storm King’s Thunder for other stats). The glyph is triggered if anyone other than Gúlwelch touches any part of the cabinet latch hardware: the knob, the lock, or the backplate.

Inside his laboratory, Gúlwelch keeps his spell reagents in jars on open shelves and in drawers in an apothecary chest, with no additional protection. His notes are another matter: These are recorded in a book that he keeps in a drawer of his desk along with his spell scroll of passwall and the tiny replica chest that’s a component of his secret chest spell. The drawer is inscribed with a 5th-level glyph of warding containing a bestow curse spell (same saving throw as above) that lasts for 8 hours, during which a target who fails their saving throw must make a Wisdom save at the start of every turn in order to take any action at all. It’s triggered by anyone other than Gúlwelch who touches the drawer. The stolen Tome of Lucid Reason is stashed in the chest, as is his spellbook whenever he’s not using it.

Gúlwelch doesn’t want a fight inside the tower. If there’s going to be a fight, he’d prefer that it happen in the bailey. The windows of the tower are tall, narrow, and barred—only a Tiny creature can squeeze through them—and they’re not glazed. When his guards sound the alarm, Gúlwelch will make an owl-powered reconnaissance sweep and try to locate and size up the threat. If it seems fairly minor, he’ll lob a few chromatic orbs, dealing thunder damage, from a narrow upper-floor window (the windows grant him three-quarters cover) in order to test his opponents’ response. If it’s more serious, he’ll cast slow, followed by fireball, then chromatic orb (he keeps his last 3rd-level spell slot in reserve). His hope is to drive the intruders off before they breach the tower. The front window on the third floor has a machicolation that allows him to see—and target—the area in front of the door. It grants him three-quarters cover when he stands over it, total cover when he steps away. (It also allows his owl to exit and enter without squeezing, which it prefers.)

Once Gúlwelch begins casting evocation spells, the wall guards will run for the nearest tower that has line of sight on the intruders, while the gate guards rendezvous in the guardroom. They’ll then shoot at the intruders with their crossbows from embrasures in the towers and the guardroom, which give them three-quarters cover. They won’t engage in melee, or venture down into the bailey at all, unless the intruders are either vanquished or in obvious, complete disarray.

If his foes breach the tower, Gúlwelch will scramble. First, he’ll cast mage armor. Second, he’ll retreat to the fourth floor—his lab is also his panic room—and close the arcane locked trapdoor behind him. Third, he’ll call his secret chest back from the Ethereal Plane and stash his spellbook, spell scroll of passwall, and research notes inside it, along with the Tome of Lucid Reason. Fourth, he’ll send it back to the Ethereal Plane and pocket the replica chest. Fifth, he’ll take out his dust of disappearance and keep it at the ready. Finally, he’ll wait, as silently as he can, using his owl familiar to scope out what’s happening downstairs.

If it looks like the intruders are going to get into the lab, he’ll toss the dust of disappearance over himself, along with his entire desk, rendering them both invisible. His hope is that his foes, failing to find what they’re looking for, will give up and leave.

What he does next will depend on how formidable they seem and how determined they still are to find him, his notes, or his stolen property. If he knows he’s outmatched—especially if his enemies include an assassin—he’ll run for the trapdoor and close it behind him, leaving his foes once again on the wrong side of the arcane lock (unless they bypassed it with knock or dispel magic). He’ll also physically lock it with the key for good measure. Then he’ll cast polymorph to take the form of a common local bird, changing the effect of his Transmuter’s Stone to give him an extra 10 feet of speed as he does so, and fly out the window, over the wall, and into a nearby tree. His owl familiar, meanwhile, will fly up to the roof and wait for him there.

Gúlwelch stays in the tree, in bird form, until the spell runs out, then uses his familiar’s eyes and ears to survey the situation and determine whether it’s safe to return. If it’s not—and doesn’t look as though it will be anytime soon—he’ll leave and seek a new home elsewhere. Abandoning the tower will be a painful loss, abandoning his library even more so, but he’ll have his life and the rest of his most valuable assets.

If he thinks he can win a fight against the intruders, then he’ll fight—but he won’t fight to the death. As above, he’ll run downstairs while he’s still invisible and slam the trapdoor behind him. In this instance, however, he won’t lock the door, because ultimately he wants them out of his house and in the bailey, where he can set them on fire without damaging his furniture. Instead, he’ll cross the room, take cover in the spiral stair, and wait to see what his opponents do, watching and eavesdropping on them through the upstairs window via owlvision. (He’s particularly keen to see whether anyone finds his desk and triggers the glyph of warding on the drawer.) If they seem to be rendered helpless, he’ll go back upstairs and deal with them; if they come through the door one at a time, he’ll try to pick them off; and if they barge through as a group, he’ll lead them out of the tower and into the bailey, where he can add not only fireball but also blink to his bag of tricks (unfortunately, it doesn’t work inside the private sanctum). If at any point he takes more than 12 damage, he’ll cast polymorph, changing the effect of his Transmuter’s Stone to give him an extra 10 feet of speed; turn himself into a giant owl; and either fly up to the tower to continue fighting from there or, if the situation looks grim enough, abscond.

He has one other trick up his sleeve, but he’ll use it only if his reconnaissance assures him that his enemies are foolish enough to fall for it: After securing his books, notes, and passwall scroll, he’ll throw off his robe, use prestidigitation to soil his clothes, and cast alter self to disguise himself as a household drudge. (As above, he’ll use the casting of this transmutation spell to change the effect of his Transmuter’s Stone to extra speed.) Swearing to the intruders that “the master” is out and imploring them to let him go, he’ll tell them where to find the lab, then run out the front door to the guardroom. From there, he and his guards will attempt to defeat the intruders on their way back out.

It’s possible, though, that he won’t have to fight. If his enemies seem amenable to talking, he’ll try to buy them off: first with money (“Whatever they’re paying you, I can pay more!”—which may or may not be true), with the potion of healing thrown in to sweeten the deal if need be; then with spell components, the alchemy jug, and/or the ring of mind shielding if they’re being hard-nosed. If these enticements aren’t enough, he won’t negotiate any further.

THIEVES’ DEN

Minimum recommended party: four level 11 or five level 9 PCs

The Affinity is a criminal organization in the town of Granwick, founded by a master thief named Kruno Skriven and a few of his associates.

ASSETS

See box, page 7.

DEFENSE

The Affinity’s first line of defense is concealment. Granwick is densely built, especially near the center of town, with row buildings being the dominant type. The Affinity operates out of a den that spans the cellars of four adjacent buildings, three of which contain legitimate businesses (a tailor shop, a general merchant, and a chandler) and one of which, a bread bakery, is a front. There are two main entrances used by guild members: one in the bakery, which is guarded by two thugs, and one a few steps below street level, in an alley at the end of the row. There are also two concealed emergency exits for use in the event of a raid or attack, but these can’t be opened from outside; they’re difficult to find even if one is actively searching for them.

The streets around the Affinity’s den are an uncontrolled area, but they’re watched by a passel of street urchins who are being trained in thieving by members of the guild. Anyone seen snooping around in the vicinity will find themselves surrounded by a crowd of three guttersnipes (see appendix B) per target, loudly begging for handouts. While two hold the attention of each target, the third attempts to make off with their purse (with advantage, since their allies are distracting the target). As soon as a target notices the theft, either during the attempt or afterward, the guttersnipes scatter, giving any adult Affinity member they run across a description of the nosy targets.

The guttersnipes aren’t hard to catch, but they lie freely: You should knock on the door twice, then once, then twice again. The password is “strawberry tarts.” You can get into the den from the tailor’s shop upstairs. The entrance the thieves use is on the opposite side of the building. The mechanism to defeat the poison dart trap on the main door (there isn’t one) is hidden behind a loose, discolored brick (the bricks are many different colors). Murat Demirji on Iron Street will tell you the password if you tell him you’re there to see Sergeant Bash (that’s what the orc blacksmith calls his largest hammer, and he’ll chase anyone who asks to see it out of his shop, with Sergeant Bash in hand). It takes a successful DC 20 Charisma (Deception, Intimidation, or Persuasion) check to elicit the information that the Affinity owns the bakery and that the cellar door in the alley leads into the organization’s den.

The cellar entrance is both locked—the lock is difficult to pick—and barred, and there’s always a door guard on duty behind it, who responds to any attempt to break down the door by preparing a net trap to drop on the first person through it. No one is admitted through the door without delivering the correct countersign, which varies constantly according to a simple but nonobvious formula: The door guard calls out a phrase containing a number (e.g., “Come back at eleven!”), and the reply must contain the difference of twelve minus that number (e.g., “I just have to take care of one thing”) and may not include the name of any member of the Affinity. Delivering an incorrect reply in thieves’ cant elicits a semipolite refusal (e.g., “Don’t know you, flash. Come back at eleven or don’t come back at all”), while any other reply is met with silence, and the members inside go on alert for the next 24 hours. If one takes the door phrase literally and goes back to the door at eleven o’clock, a different guard calls out a different phrase (e.g., “You want upstairs, three doors down”). The door then opens to any reply that contains the word “nine” and doesn’t name any member of the Affinity; any improper reply puts the den on alert.

The common room just inside the door is the den’s main battle area. Most hours of the day, it contains fifteen thugs and six prowlers (see appendix B). However, if one can stake out the street undetected for twenty-four hours, one can determine that the den is least active between dawn and noon. If intruders crash the gate during these hours, there will be only eight thugs and three prowlers in the common room.

One of the thugs is on door duty and has full cover from the door if a fight breaks out until they close it again. The many tables in the room provide half cover against ranged attacks across them; crouching behind a table confers three-quarters cover. The room offers an abundance of items that can be used as improvised weapons: heavy stoneware and iron mugs (1 bludgeoning damage), chairs and tables (1d4 bludgeoning), the door itself (1d4 bludgeoning), and hearth irons (1d6 bludgeoning). During colder months, hot coals from the hearth can be flung for 1d4 fire damage; on a critical hit, rather than take an additional die of damage, the target is blinded for 1 minute. One prowler in the room, seated at the table nearest to the ale casks, carries a dose of drow poison (see Dungeon Master’s Guide, chapter 8, “Poisons”); on their first turn after combat breaks out, they’ll crouch for cover and use their action to apply the poison to a crossbow bolt. The next turn, they’ll shoot at any easy-looking target, favoring ones who look like long-range spellcasters.

One member of the Affinity, Marcelline Anker, is a devotee of Grim, the god of thieves (use the priest stat block with the following spells: light, sacred flame, thaumaturgy, charm person, guiding bolt, sanctuary, mirror image, spiritual weapon, blink, dispel magic; she wields a baselard instead of a mace, dealing 1d6 piercing damage on a hit). She maintains a shrine to Grim in the inner vestibule at the bottom of the stairs from the bakery, outside the den’s meeting room. She deals with any intruders who wander down the stairs; if overwhelmed, she retreats into the common room for backup. She’ll also provide backup to the thugs and prowlers in the common room if she hears a fight break out there. Between dawn and noon, she’s elsewhere.

The door from the bakery cellar to the general store cellar is locked at all times, requiring the key and the knob to be turned simultaneously; only Kruno and his four lieutenants have copies of the key. The lock is difficult to pick (DC 20). This cellar and the one beneath the chandlery are a restricted area: No one goes back there except in the company of Kruno or a lieutenant.

The cellar of the general store is a training area, armory, and warehouse. Froki, the Affinity’s master lockpicker, and Rinald Suprim, its chief fence, spend most of their time in the training room (see appendix B for stat blocks). There are usually three thugs in the training room as well, receiving instruction from Froki. Gratien Querre (see appendix B) is in charge of the armory, where he keeps track of the equipment supply. He can see—and shoot—into the training room through a barred window. If a fight breaks out there, he’ll take cover alongside the window and snipe at targets through it. (The fourth lieutenant, a loan shark named Antlas the Purse, is never encountered on the premises.) Froki will crouch behind a table and shoot at intruders with her crossbow, while Rinald will try to slip unnoticed through a secret door and warn Kruno.

The door to the armory from the hallway is locked. Not only is the lock difficult to pick, a failed attempt triggers a needle trap. The character attempting to pick the lock takes 1 piercing damage and must succeed on a DC 15 Constitution saving throw or be poisoned for 1 minute; while poisoned, they’re also paralyzed. The character can make another saving throw at the end of each of their turns. On a success, they’re no longer paralyzed, but they remain poisoned for the duration. Also, outside the door to the warehouse, there’s a pressure plate trap that triggers a loud alarm. The plate requires a successful DC 20 Intelligence (Investigation) or Wisdom (Perception) check to spot, and a DC 15 Intelligence (Investigation) check to find the concealed slider switch that allows one to stand on the plate without setting off the alarm. (Affinity members always reset the switch after they’re done bringing loot into the warehouse.)

Ordinary loot is kept in the warehouse. At any given time, it amounts to about 200 gp worth of nonmagical martial weapons, fine clothes, artisans’ tools, musical instruments, trade goods, silver or gold trade bars, and art objects. If the den is raided, the members grab what they can on their way out the secret door in back, but they don’t make any particular effort to secure it otherwise. They can always steal more.

The door in the corner of the training room is a fake, opening onto a brick wall. To penetrate farther into the den, one must pass through a difficult-to-spot secret door that leads into a wide hallway. Two thugs stand guard in the hallway, unless the den is on alert, in which case the hallway is empty, but four thugs accompany Kruno Skriven (see appendix B) in his office.

In his desk, Kruno keeps the enciphered ledger of payoffs to local officials and city guards, businesses paying the Affinity for protection, and payments to individuals within or associated with the organization; the floor plan of the nobleman’s manor; and the intercepted letter. There are two secret doors behind his desk. The one in the corner, which leads to an emergency exit, is difficult to discover but simple to operate (no check required). However, the other is very hard to see, and its mechanism is hard to work out, involving several disguised latches that enable other disguised latches to be operated. It leads to the treasury where the Affinity keeps its ready money.

Marcelline has cast a glyph of warding on the floor where the double doors to Kruno’s office meet. The glyph is triggered by a bronze token that Kruno keeps on his desk. In case of emergency, he’ll toss it at the glyph. When the token makes contact with the glyph, it erupts with acid, dealing 5d8 acid damage to every creature within 20 feet that fails a DC 13 Dexterity saving throw (half damage on a success). Then, while his thug bodyguards—and Rinald, if he’s there—engage in melee, Kruno takes shots at his enemies with his crossbow. These thugs, handpicked for their loyalty, will fight to the death. Rinald won’t: He flees when reduced to 22 hp or fewer, and if prevented from fleeing, he surrenders. If even one of Kruno’s bodyguards goes down, or if he’s reduced 58 hp or fewer, Kruno makes his escape through the secret door in the rear right corner of the room.

At the rear of the treasury are two doors. The one in the right-hand corner appears as an ordinary door, with one exception: There are a handle and latch only on the inside. Once one goes out this door, one can’t come back in by it. The one in the middle of the wall is heavy iron, with sturdy hinges designed so that the pins can’t be removed. It has an intricately tooled, raised lock with a uniquely shaped keyhole and complicated wards; it’s very hard to pick. Kruno carries a key that fits the keyhole, but this key alone won’t open the door, because there’s a second keyhole hidden in the lock plate behind a sliding cover. The second keyhole is very hard to find and hard to pick; it’s opened by an additional key that’s kept in a hard-to-find secret compartment in Kruno’s desk. Behind the iron door is the vault where the Affinity keeps its most valuable treasures: its platinum coins, gems, and magic items, and the crate of orbs.

If the den isn’t on alert, Kruno will be wary of strangers but willing to listen to what they have to say, although for purposes of social interaction checks he’s hostile, and his bargaining position is strong. He holds a good hand with the local authorities; any threat to shut him and his guild down is empty, and he knows it. The one appeal to his self-interest that has a chance of succeeding is to note that the guild’s possession of such destructive objects as the one used at the Blind Squirrel tavern is sure to attract the interest—and envy—of more powerful organizations.

To change Kruno’s assessment of their relative bargaining positions, intruders will have to inflict significant damage upon the guild, e.g., killing more than half its members and killing or subduing at least one other member of its leadership (Froki, Gratien, or Rinald). As soon as he judges himself to be in the weaker position, however, he’ll trigger the glyph of warding, grab the payoff records, and skedaddle.

There is one possible way, however, to achieve a mutually agreeable outcome with Kruno: Froki is an artiste, a master craftswoman. She values skill and finds brute force distasteful. Maintaining respect is one thing, and so is having leverage, but blowing random people up for no good reason is something else entirely. Not only is it clumsy, it attracts the wrong kind of attention—from the authorities and from rivals. As long as outsiders play it cool and say or do anything to indicate that they’re just there for information about the orbs, Froki can flip. If Kruno is present, she can take the outsiders’ side in negotiations, giving them advantage or simply persuading him outright; if he’s gone, she can let them into his office and show them the intercepted letter. She’ll accept remuneration for this, but she won’t require it. It’s a matter of dignity.

There’s one room I haven’t mentioned: The one on the other side of the hallway that leads to Kruno’s office. That’s the interrogation room. It has a lockable door, but the door is only locked when the Affinity has a prisoner it wants to question. Gratien and Kruno are the only ones with the key. The lock is hard to pick. The room also has two chains with manacles, bolted to the far wall; a wooden chair; and a chamber pot. It’s unlit, and it smells bad. Kruno does the questioning.

UNICORN GROVE

Minimum recommended party: four level 10 or five level 9 PCs

Onhorn Wood is the legendary home of the unicorn Gorfoledd, although over the centuries, only a scant few can honestly claim to have seen him. In local folklore, Gorfoledd is said to have offered sanctuary to heroes when they needed it, but residents of nearby villages mostly avoid the forest today, and for good reason: Those who enter hoping to hunt or cut timber in the wood rarely make it more than a few hundred feet inside before becoming delirious and passing out, reawakening later back on the edge of the wood. A few old hedge witches, however, say the forest is only a threat to those of impure heart, and they sometimes bring the ill or injured into the forest for healing, claiming their spells and remedies work better there. They typically leave garlands of flowers as tribute to thank Gorfoledd for allowing these intrusions.

Both the old and new stories are true. Those humbly seeking wisdom, taking advantage of the grove’s healing properties, or fleeing unnatural evils are permitted to enter the wood for a short while, but neither Gorfoledd nor the other denizens of Onhorn Wood tolerate trespassing for self-centered reasons—and the whole wrath of Onhorn is unloaded on any evil creature that crosses its boundary.

ASSETS

- Onhorn Wood. The sanctity of the grove itself is inviolable (intrinsic value: 4, intangible value: 4). Gorfoledd allows only those of good nature and honest intent to set foot in it. Total value: 8.

- Gorfoledd. The other denizens of the grove are honored by the unicorn’s presence (intangible: 4) and serve faithfully as his scouts and guards. They defend his life as if it were their own (intrinsic value: 4). Total value: 8.

- Lives of the innocent. Gorfoledd, in turn, defends the lives of all those who come seeking his protection from evil creatures (intrinsic: 4). Total value: 4.

- Treasure. Gorfoledd has a small stash of material treasure, including a mithral breastplate; it’s of secondary concern to him, but occasionally it kindles the desire of thieves and opportunists (monetary value: 2, operational value: 1). Total value: 3.

Gorfoledd rests during the day atop a hill in the heart of the grove (A), where he also keeps his treasures, hidden under a layer of leaves. At night, he roams the wood, secure in the knowledge that the other denizens of the grove will deal with any trespassers long before they get anywhere near his treasures.

DEFENSE

Onhorn Wood is old-growth oak forest of varying density. The trees grow to a diameter of between 5 and 10 feet; the gently hilly ground of the grove is largely free of treacherous underbrush, so the terrain isn’t difficult. However, any lit torch brought into the wood is snuffed out instantly, and anyone who tries to light a campfire can’t get the tinder to catch.

In addition to Gorfoledd the unicorn, the grove is inhabited by pixies, sprites, dryads, faerie dragons, and centaurs, along with wolves and various other birds and small beasts. Thanks to the unicorn’s presence, all these creatures gain advantage on Dexterity (Stealth) checks in the grove. The wolves roam in a pack and play an incidental part in the defense of the grove: They’re friendly, even tame, with creatures that Gorfoledd considers welcome in the grove, but they stalk and attack unwanted guests, and the sounds of the hunt draw the attention of other denizens nearby.

Two mated pairs of centaurs dwell in the woods: Velox and Ventosa, Transiliens and Nitidus. As part of their everyday wanderings, they conduct aggressive reconnaissance, shooting at anyone they deem unwelcome. They don’t engage in melee; instead, if chased, they shout warnings in Sylvan while leading trespassers toward a less dense area of the wood (B), away from Gorfoledd’s hill, where the trespassers will find themselves caught out in the open and surrounded, and where there are straight, open lanes between trees through which Gorfoledd and the centaurs can charge.

Reconnaissance is also conducted by six dryads, ten pixies, and five faerie dragons. The dryads and faerie dragons move about individually; the pixies all move together in one flight. Unlike the centaurs, when they spot strangers, they remain hidden—the dryads casting pass without trace in order to get closer to the targets of their observation, the pixies and faerie dragons using their Superior Invisibility. If the strangers are welcome, they may either remain hidden and continue to watch, hurry off to let Gorfoledd know his help is needed, or appear to the strangers and lead them to Gorfoledd’s hill. If the strangers are intruders, they gather as much information as they can, then get the word out that intruders are present. The dryads, which can’t turn invisible, use Tree Stride to move rapidly through the forest until they encounter another denizen of the grove and report what they’ve seen. The pixies and faerie dragons cry out warnings in Sylvan, filling the air with shrieky, apparently sourceless noises incomprehensible to anyone who doesn’t speak the language.

Once the grove is on alert, the centaurs gallop to the intruders’ location and shoot at them, again attempting to bait them toward the desired battle area, while the dryads, pixies, and faerie dragons rush to get to their battle positions there first. Upon the intruders’ arrival, the centaurs give a shout, and the dryads and five of the pixies cast multiple entangle spells on the ground around and beneath the intruders, while four of the remaining pixies cast fly on the centaurs. From that point on, the dryads and pixies stay out of the fight as the striking force takes over: Eighty sprites, enveloping the main battle area in eight flights of ten, all appear out of invisibility and loose their teeny poisoned arrows at the intruders at once. (Get your Dungeon Master’s Guide open to the Mob Attacks table in chapter 8.) Meanwhile, the faerie dragons remain outside the ring of sprites to harass whoever tries to get away.

The sprites attack until the intruders are in complete disarray. At that point, the centaurs swoop in—literally, since they’re airborne thanks to the pixies’ fly spells—and deliver coups de grâce with their pikes. If the intruders are PCs, you can be merciful and make these melee attacks nonlethal; the PCs will wake up again just outside Onhorn Wood, full of contusions and regrets. If they’re evil creatures, the centaurs simply demolish them.

On the other hand, if even an eighty-sprite-plus-four-flying-centaur assault isn’t enough to subdue the transgressors, there’s one final option: Gorfoledd himself arrives, the beneficiary of a fly spell from the one remaining pixie that didn’t cast it. And he’s in no mood to play.

RANDOM ENCOUNTERS IN ONHORN WOOD

Roll once every 10 minutes once the party enters the wood.

d20

Encounter

1–6

1  dryad, under pass without trace (DC 30 to detect)

7–11

1  faerie dragon, hidden using Superior Invisibility (DC 22 to detect using hearing)

12

Pack of 1d6 + 3  wolves (DC 19 to detect)

13

Flight of 10  pixies, hidden using Superior Invisibility (DC 22 to detect using hearing)

14

2  centaurs

15

Flight of 10  sprites, hidden using Invisibility (DC 23 to detect using hearing), only if within 150 feet of main battle area; otherwise no encounter

16–19

No encounter

20

Gorfoledd, under pass without trace (DC 27 to detect). If the PCs’ intentions are proper, he emerges and hails them; if not, he leaves without revealing himself and notifies another denizen of the forest to raise the alarm. If this encounter is the first in the grove, roll again.

VAMPIRE MANSION

Minimum recommended party: four level 10 or five level 9 PCs

Lia Eigensinn never shows her face outside Herrenhaus Scharfberg, her mansion on the Diethersstrasse in the city of Weissenburg. Her neighbors attribute her reclusiveness to age, infirmity, and perhaps eccentricity. They’d be stunned to discover that Lia is, in fact, the very picture of youthful beauty, vigor, and sophistication.

Like many portraits, however, this one lies. Her neighbors have come and gone, but Lia has lived at Herrenhaus Scharfberg for the last 275 years, having inherited it from her late husband, Roman Scharfberg, the last of the Scharfberg line. Theirs was a curious pairing, since the Scharfbergs were sworn enemies of the Eigensinn family, and also since all of Roman’s living relatives met untimely and violent deaths over a relatively short span of time before he and Lia married. Few today remember those events, though: Memories are short, scandals are many, and Lia is now considered a curiosity, when she’s considered at all. Occasionally, someone has a “Wait a minute!” moment and realizes just how long Lia has lived at Herrenhaus Scharfberg. Invariably, the thought is followed by the conclusion that she must have a dash of elvish ancestry, then discarded.

The sinister truth is that Lia is a vampire—as was Roman. In fact, it was he who made her one, albeit unintentionally. Intending to deliver both insult and injury to the Eigensinn family, Roman turned Lia into a vampire spawn, but he never reckoned with the strength of her will. Seizing an opportunity, she shackled him while he was resting in his coffin, then fed from him, becoming a full-fledged vampire herself. She used her newly acquired power to exact revenge against the Scharfbergs, one by one. Then, forging marriage papers and staging an elopement, she “married” Roman. Finally, shortly thereafter, she dispatched him (she’d kept him chained the whole time) and inherited ownership of Herrenhaus Scharfberg.

ASSETS

- Grave. Every vampire needs one. Lia’s is in Herrenhaus Scharfberg. Because Roman kept Lia’s death a secret, she never received a proper burial, so she has to rest in the house where she was made a vampire spawn—and she lacks a large enough quantity of grave dirt to establish any other resting place elsewhere (operational value: 4). This fact makes her grave at Herrenhaus Scharfberg her most critical asset, even if it’s not her most valuable. Total value: 4.

- Trophies. For every member of the Scharfberg family she killed, Lia keeps a memento (intangible value: 4). Most of these trophies are pieces of jewelry or other artfully made personal items. Taken as a collection, they’re worth more than 30,000 gp; they’d definitely catch a burglar’s eye (monetary value: 3). Total value: 7.

- Herrenhaus Scharfberg. The mansion as a whole is an asset of considerable worth, but Lia can’t ascribe monetary or economic value to it, because as long as she resides there, it can’t be sold. It does, however, have both operational value (4) and, as her final trophy, intangible value (4). Total value: 8.

- Money. Both the Eigensinns and the Scharfbergs were wealthy families, and Lia has carefully husbanded their combined wealth, maintaining it by lending money at interest through intermediaries. It’s not quite enough to live like an aristocrat on, but it does allow her to continue to live in luxury. She keeps 18,100 gp and 3,370 pp in coin and forty-six gold bars worth 250 gp each in her house (monetary value: 3). Total value: 3.

- Contracts. Owning property and lending money require keeping records (economic value: 4, regulatory value: 4). These documents are sensitive, because a forger could produce convincing fakes and seize control of Lia’s assets. (She should know: It’s how she acquired Herrenhaus Scharfberg.) Total value: 8.

- Lia. Vampires have a powerful self-preservation impulse (intrinsic value: 4). Total value: 4.

- Vampire spawn. For the most part, Lia is coldly logical, but domination of others gives her a thrill; she also retains a love of music that becoming a vampire hasn’t taken from her. Consequently, over the decades, she’s made vampire spawn of several victims whose musicianship pleased her. She doesn’t consider their lives intrinsically valuable, but she enjoys both their companionship and her mastery over them (intangible value: 3). Total value: 3.

Conveniently, the asset with the greatest total value to Lia is also the one hardest to walk off with: the house. As long as Lia takes adequate measures to protect herself and her papers, no one can steal it from her. Inconveniently, however, it’s not difficult to destroy a house: All you have to do is set it on fire. Lia therefore needs a way to watch the exterior and make sure her property is secured against arson. For a vampire in the city, that’s easier said than done—but it has to be done.

Tied to the house are her contracts, followed by her trophies. These appeal to two entirely different groups of crooks: the latter to common thieves, the former to exceptional thieves. In both cases, one has to know about the asset to steal it, but it’s not hard to guess that a rich old lady in a 10,000-square-foot mansion might have something worth stealing. Neither of these assets is especially vulnerable, but the contracts are highly sensitive, and she can’t risk losing them—not if she wants to live in the manner to which she’s accustomed for the next three hundred years. She must allocate additional resources to their protection. The trophies aren’t critical, but given the circumstances under which she won them, Lia’s not just going to let them go. A balance must be struck.

Next come her life and her grave—not all that much difference between the two, when you think about it, except that she’s independently mobile and her dirt isn’t. The challenge is that, once she’s taken due precautions to protect Herrenhaus Scharfberg, her papers, and her trophies, she’s not going to have a ton of resources left with which to protect her grave or herself. She can take care of herself, but she’ll have to find resource-efficient ways to protect her grave.

Last come her spawn and her money, another pairing of something that can defend itself and something that can’t. She’ll leave her spawn to their own devices and use the simplest available means to protect her money.

DEFENSE

Any defensive plan must account for the fact that a vampire requires blood, and that blood has to come from somewhere. Anything over twenty murders per year in a city of roughly forty thousand people is going to be noticed… if the victims are people anyone cares about. So Lia is careful in her choice of victims: late-night revelers whose disappearances can be written off as drunken accidents, burglars, beggars, vagabonds, and strangers in town. Her steward and principal agent, Radu, who handles all her worldly affairs, keeps his ears open for news of political unrest in other lands, and occasionally lets it be known that Lia might sympathize with and even donate money to a rebel’s cause. Those rebels rarely cause any further trouble in their homelands. Still, one cannot live on revolutionaries alone, and occasionally Lia and her spawn must venture out to seek prey for themselves. Multiple deaths on a single night draw too much attention, so as a rule, only Lia or one of her spawn goes out to hunt at any given time. Lia wears a ring of imposture (see appendix A) so that she can slip under the radar of anyone trying to sense the presence of undead creatures.

Lia also has to be careful, as she hunts, that she doesn’t unintentionally create new vampire spawn. She’s selective in her choice of company and doesn’t need other predators competing with her. To clean up after herself, she keeps a semidomesticated otyugh in her cellar cesspit. Meticulously draining her victims to a point just short of killing them, she then gives them to the monster for efficient disposal.

Despite being rich, Lia has limited funds to work with when it comes to hiring help—and she can’t let any of her hirelings live off-premises, lest they blab about her to the wrong people. Thus, while she has the charisma to command a regiment, she has to make do with Radu, two trained guards, and five terrified household servants, intimidated into silence. (Her Charm ability is strong, but it’s not reliable enough for day-in, day-out use on an entire household staff.) The guards are veterans, and each one patrols the grounds with a well-trained mastiff. Otto, a human, patrols from dawn to dusk; Mesnik, a half-orc with darkvision, patrols from dusk to dawn. Otto and Mesnik will confront trespassers and demand to know their business, but their chief responsibility is to sound the alarm. In most cases, the mastiffs’ barking suffices for this purpose. Just in case, however, each guard carries a hunting horn. The servants (commoners) don’t take part in the house’s defense, nor does Radu (a noble), except to put out fires.

The property is surrounded by a 10-foot-high wrought-iron fence, topped with sharply spiked finials. The iron gate is locked at all times, although the lock is only moderately difficult to pick; its purpose is to deter casual trespassers, not determined ones. The gate is opened only for Lia or Radu—Radu whenever he comes and goes, Lia when she ventures out at night by carriage, driven by Radu—and Radu carries the only key. The vampire spawn of Herrenhaus Scharfberg simply climb over the fence.

Hidden across the grounds of the house (DC 20 to detect) are several simple traps (A) that deal damage to intruders (+5 to hit, dealing 2d10 damage on a hit) and restrain them (DC 10 Strength saving throw to escape). More important, whether or not the traps catch a trespasser, they’re loud when triggered, spoiling trespassers’ attempts at stealth—and causing the mastiffs, which have Keen Hearing and Smell, to start barking their heads off.

The lock on the front door of the house is a warded lock of higher quality than the one on the gate; it’s hard to pick. The windows are simple glass, but they don’t open. Breaking them is easy (AC 13, 4 hp) but, again, not quiet. Also, the draperies are animate constructs (use the rug of smothering stat block, two per window) that attack any stranger who touches them. That’s a mistake that intruders aren’t going to make twice—and it will discourage them from running around the house, throwing open all the curtains, and letting the sunlight stream in.

Nothing about Herrenhaus Scharfberg’s outward appearance or external defenses is significantly unlike the house’s neighbors along the Diethersstrasse (the regional effects around her lair are suppressed—they’re much too hair-raising for an urban location), and would-be intruders who are conspicuously skulking around and casing the joint—let alone picking locks, jumping fences, or breaking windows—will attract the same sort of attention as they would in Beverly Hills. The overall inadvisability of loitering in a rich neighborhood is yet another of the home’s amenities.

Which is good for Lia, because massing guard power isn’t an available option for her—and as previously mentioned, she has to worry about the possibility of being firebombed. It’s a low probability, but it’s one of the easiest ways an enemy could hurt her, so she has to head it off. To counter this threat, she keeps Regenmacher’s rainsticks (see appendix A) hidden in several key locations (B) around the first floor of the house; Radu carries one as well. Everyone in the house knows to grab one at the first whiff of smoke and use it to put out any incipient fire.

Other than that, she and her four vampire spawn make up the entirety of her active response to intrusion, and at night, either Lia or one of the spawn is generally out hunting, leaving only the four spawn or three of them plus Lia. If the house comes under attack while Lia is out, one of the vampire spawn, before joining the fight, runs up to the top floor and lights a lantern in an otherwise unused room (C) that’s visible from the front of the house. When Lia returns and sees that light on, she exits her carriage, turns into a cloud of mist, and enters through the chimney while Radu opens the gate and parks the carriage. While intruders react to the creaking and clanking of the gate, the vampire chooses where she’ll make her stand.

However, the house does contain a number of passive response measures. For starters, the entire mansion is a restricted area, and each floor is more restricted than the one before it. Additionally, there are three sets of stairs: the “main” stairs, the servants’ stairs, and secret stairs that only Lia, Radu, and Lia’s spawn use. No one who lives in the house uses the ostensible main stairs, making them primo locations for traps. These traps are simple, triggered by pressure plates, and not difficult to detect (DC 15), but they’re dangerous: One shoots four bolts with the force of a heavy crossbow (+8 to hit, 1d10 piercing damage each), and one releases a spray of acid (DC 15 Dexterity save against 4d10 acid damage, half damage on a success). The real problem, though, is that the pressure plates are sized and situated so that one can’t easily jump over them or walk around them. They’re there to send intruders into a doom spiral of analysis paralysis while the undead inhabitants of Herrenhaus Scharfberg chase them down. Meanwhile, the servants’ stairs are hidden from view, as in any mansion of quality, and the secret stairs—shockingly enough—are behind secret doors, which are very hard to spot.

The fourth floor of the house contains only one room, which has no windows; from the outside, it’s disguised as an architectural feature, part of the third-floor façade. This room contains Lia’s grave. (The conventional wisdom holds that vampires’ coffins are hidden in underground crypts, so Lia keeps hers upstairs.) It’s accessed through a very hard-to-find secret trapdoor in the coffered ceiling of the room below; only the most discerning eye can tell that the former cathedral ceiling has been closed off. There’s no ladder: Lia either Spider Climbs to reach the trapdoor or slips past it in mist form. It isn’t airtight, but the design of the ceiling makes the gap invisible from below.

Lia’s trophy collection and study are on the third floor. Each is at the end of a wing of the mansion, behind a hard-to-detect secret door, and neither has any windows. Lia keeps her most sensitive papers in a very hard-to-find hidden compartment within a locked drawer of her desk; the lock is of the highest quality she could obtain, very difficult to pick. As a decoy, she’s coated a locked cabinet elsewhere in her study with lacquer of dissimulation (see appendix A) to make it appear to have evocation magic placed upon it. This cabinet also contains a hidden compartment, but the only thing in it is a dart trap—and this trap doesn’t mess around (DC 20 to detect, DC 20 Dexterity save vs. 10d10 acid damage, half damage on a success). She keeps her money in her study as well, in three locked chests—one for platinum coins, one for gold coins, and one for gold bars—which all have hard-to-pick locks and poison needle traps triggered by failed attempts to pick them (see Dungeon Master’s Guide, chapter 5, “Traps”).

Many rooms on the second and third floors (D) have doors with spring locks that can be opened only from the outside, with keys—like privacy locks, but in reverse. A large part of Lia’s self-defense strategy hangs on charming enemies and splitting them up; these rooms give her a way to keep them split up.

Aside from the front door, there’s only one other way in and out of the house: a second-floor casement window (E), used by the vampire spawn. A former kitchen delivery entrance has been blocked in with rubble.

Radu is awake during the day, and most days, when he doesn’t have business to take care of elsewhere, he’s available to keep an eye on things around the house and put out any fires (figuratively or literally). He also handles all messages and deliveries. He’s not equipped to fight off intruders, however. Instead, he uses his persuasive skills to talk them into relaxing and making themselves comfortable until “the lady of the house” is available to meet with them and discuss mutually agreeable arrangements that serve the parties’ respective interests, and he shows them to a nice first-floor parlor where they can sit and enjoy the hospitality of Herrenhaus Scharfberg and not get into any trouble.

If trouble starts, Radu runs to notify Lia (if she’s around) or one of the vampire spawn (if she’s not). As soon as she’s notified of a threat—or sees the light in the window, if she’s been out, and comes inside—Lia summons her Children of the Night as backup. Initially, however, she lets her vampire spawn do the bulk of the fighting for her while she confirms that her assets are still safe. The vampire spawn don’t bring overwhelming force the way a large mass of guards would, but they are extremely tough, and Lia would rather have them in harm’s way than herself. When she’s checked on her assets and verified that they remain in her possession, she returns—in mist form—to the scene of the battle to see where things stand. If they’re going poorly for her side, she sends the Children of the Night in as a distraction, then enters the battle herself, still not committing herself fully but seizing what opportunities present themselves.

Ideally, however, she’d prefer to win without fighting, and she’ll happily strike a deal to avoid a violent confrontation that she can’t win, as long as she’s left with her house, her wealth, and her freedom to feed. This attitude is both pragmatic and essential: Lia has no other resting place to retire to in the event of a rout, so if combat ensues, she has no choice but to fight to the bitter end in defense of Herrenhaus Scharfberg. Thanks to her Misty Escape trait, if her assailants can’t find her grave upstairs, she may yet recover to exact her revenge another day.

HAG COVEN COTTAGE

Minimum recommended party: four level 12 or five level 10 PCs

Locals say Griselda Sumphew was the first to take up residence in Blackalder Swamp, near the village of Ormood, but no one can remember a time when she wasn’t accompanied there by her “sisters,” Hilda and Matilda. (The prevailing opinion is that they aren’t actually related, but they’re referred to as “the Sumphew Sisters” nonetheless.) For as long as they’ve been around, Blackalder Swamp has been a gloomy and forbidding place that only fools venture into.

Whenever misfortune strikes Ormood, or one of its residents, fingers are pointed in the direction of the swamp. While the Sumphew Sisters may be convenient scapegoats for chance mishaps or the villagers’ own wrongdoings, in many cases the locals’ suspicions are justified, for Griselda, Hilda, and Matilda are a trio of green hags that have formed a coven to increase their power.

ASSETS

- Curiosities. The Sumphew Sisters are hoarders. Their cottage is full of stolen items of little beauty and less value that nevertheless possess some quality that piqued the hags’ interest for a moment. That moment is gone; their only value now lies in the fact that the jealous hags won’t relinquish anything they consider to belong to them (intangible value: 1). Total value: 1.

- Caged creatures. The lives of these poor beasts and birds don’t matter a bit to the Sumphew Sisters, except to the extent that they enjoy the creatures’ misery in captivity (intangible value: 1). They’re fed just enough to keep them alive and miserable. Total value: 1.

- Gems, jewelry, and art objects. By happenstance, the Sisters have managed to obtain some genuinely beautiful items: an ivory comb with mother-of-pearl inlay, a pair of silver statuettes, an artfully crafted golden pin, an understatedly elegant gold collar necklace, and eighteen semiprecious stones. If sold, these objects could fetch a fair amount of money (monetary value: 2). The hags assign no intangible value to these items themselves—in fact, they find the items’ beauty repugnant to look upon and keep them hidden away—but they know that mortals would find them appealing, and that’s reason enough not to let anyone else have them (intrinsic value: 2). Total value: 4.

- Money. Predation pays. Since teaming up, the Sumphew Sisters have managed to accumulate quite a stash: roughly 2,100 cp, 24,000 sp, 6,000 gp, and 330 pp (monetary value: 3). They don’t use it for anything, though, nor do they assign it any importance, except to the extent that it’s satisfying to them to keep it out of anyone else’s hands. Total value: 3.

- Common magic items. Every once in a while, some poor fool comes to the Sumphew Sisters thinking they might help with something. To string them along, the hags craft simple magic items, such as potions of healing, to offer as boons, the better to feed their supplicants’ delusion. In return, they demand either material payment or, more often, some knife-twisting favor. The items’ role in these bargains gives them a crude, minimal sort of economic value (1). Other common items are created solely for the Sisters’ own amusement (substitute intangible value for economic value); at the moment, these include a hat of vermin, a pot of awakening, and a staff of birdcalls (see Xanathar’s). Total value: 1.

- Uncommon magic items. Bigger problems call for more sophisticated lures. These items—a potion of animal friendship, a potion of growth, and a potion of hill giant strength—represent enough effort and application of power that they possess some value to the hags in and of themselves (intrinsic value: 1), increasing the prices the Sisters demand for them. These more tempting boons are one means by which the hags achieve much of the corruption that delights them so (operational value: 1). They could fetch a decent amount of money if sold (monetary value: 1), and if the common magic items have economic value by virtue of what the hags can get others to do for them, the uncommon items have more of the same (economic value: 2). Total value: 5.

- Spell components. Practical magic consumes a lot of material components. These could be sold wholesale to a magic shop (monetary value: 1), but for the Sumphew Sisters, they’re worth far more as raw materials (operational value: 4). Total value: 5.

- Trophies. As the Sumphew Sisters’ reach grew, each of them acquired a rare magic item that she cherishes. Griselda has a staff of withering. Hilda has a stone of commanding earth elementals. Matilda has a figurine of wondrous power in the shape of a cicada carved out of chrysoprase (works as an ebony fly). The magic in these items gives them intrinsic value (2) to the hags, while the combination of their power and their uniqueness—each item belongs to a Sister alone, and no one else—gives them even greater intangible value (4). Furthermore, these are items that could command high prices if sold (monetary value: 2), but they’re also useful, and in fact the hags do use them (operational value: 2). Total value: 10.

- Staff of the woodlands. This rare item is the Sumphew Sisters’ greatest find—so great that all three immediately coveted it and had to strike a bargain quickly to avoid coming to blows over it (intrinsic value: 4, intangible value: 4). One Sister at a time attunes to the staff and uses it exclusively for one cycle of the moon, while the other two watch her like a hawk; when the moon is new, she breaks her attunement and passes it to the next Sister. (At the moment, Hilda Sumphew is the lucky Sister; Griselda is on deck.) The staff is tremendously useful to the nature-oriented hag coven (operational value: 4). They’d never dream of selling it, but if someone else did, it could fetch a respectable price (monetary value: 2). Total value: 14.

- Lore. The Sisters have a small library of rare books, full of juicy, taboo knowledge of unwholesome magic, which they find downright delectable (intrinsic value: 4, intangible value: 4). They make use of this lore as they work to spread their corruption through Blackalder Swamp and beyond (operational value: 4). Ironically, while extremely rare, these books aren’t worth much money, because no reputable dealer would stock them, and no respectable customer would buy them (monetary value: 1). Total value: 13.

- The Sumphew Sisters. Each hag values her own life as highly as possible (intrinsic value: 4), and her nigh-immortality makes that life doubly worthy of protection (intangible value: 4). Total value: 8.

- The other Sumphew Sisters. Hags gonna hag. None of the Sumphew Sisters values the lives of the other two hags in the coven nearly as much as she values her own. To be blunt, none of the Sisters considers the other two hags’ lives to be intrinsically valuable at all. Their covenant, however, makes each hag useful to the other two, since their power is greater within the coven than without it (operational value: 2). That’s as far as it goes. Total value: 2.

Not many people would dare try to rob a single hag, let alone a hag coven, although there are knuckleheads out there offering living proof of the Dunning-Kruger effect. These hapless buffoons are easily dealt with, though. Of greater concern are powerful practitioners of magic. Protecting the coven’s assets means protecting them against arcane larceny.

There’s one other complication: The Sisters don’t trust one another. Not only must they take measures to secure their assets from outsiders, each of them must secure her personal trophy item from the other two! Moreover, if the coven should be broken, each of them will try to seize their shared property—the staff of the woodlands and the books of lore—and either make off with it or kill the others. As ambitious and greedy as they all are, they also recognize that this is a scenario fraught with risk for all of them. Therefore, out of enlightened self-interest, they’ll strive to ensure that the coven isn’t broken.

The Sumphew Sisters’ many mundane items, oddities, and caged creatures are somewhat vulnerable simply because there are so many of them, “putting them away” would involve too much work and too many containers, and the Sisters don’t care about them enough to bother. Having them inside the cottage is security enough for them. The same goes for the potions and other items the hags craft. They do at least bother to stow their respective shares of money, gems, jewelry, and art objects in locked chests in their bedrooms, with a few other small measures taken to discourage pilfering by the other Sisters. Their spell components, which they share, are safe enough within the cottage. That leaves their books, their personal trophies, and the staff of the woodlands. The books are kept in a room deep within the cottage and never taken out; the Sisters take the staff out only when they’re using it and always return it immediately afterward to a shared area where they can all keep an eye on it.

As for their personal trophies, well, that’s a conundrum. They’re too valuable to keep merely under lock and key when any of the Sisters can turn invisible at will. That gives them a strong incentive to keep these objects in their possession at all times; there’s no safer place for them. That’s fine for Matilda, whose figurine of wondrous power is lightweight and fits in a pouch. Hilda’s stone of controlling earth elementals weighs 5 pounds, which is a lot to carry around all the time, but green hags are exceptionally strong, so the burden is one she can bear. Carrying her staff of withering around all the time, however, would be an inconvenience for Griselda, especially when it was her turn to use the staff of the woodlands. She has to get creative.

Corrupting a whole swamp takes work, and the Sumphew Sisters must leave their lair from time to time to go about their business. That means having a plan in place to protect the cottage when they’re away, not just when they’re around. By extension, it means that the main battle area must be outside the cottage and that the Sisters themselves can’t constitute the bulk of the defensive force. They’re going to have to marshal some serious resources to defend their lair adequately.

Losing any of their loot would make them angry, and they’d want to exact revenge, but they could live without it—most of it. Losing their books or their rare magic items, however, would send them into a tailspin of fury and despondency. In particular, losing the staff of the woodlands would be such a blow that the coven probably wouldn’t hold together. They can’t let that happen. All the resources not directed to defending the cottage as a whole are directed toward protecting these particular assets.

DEFENSE

Griselda, Hilda, and Matilda Sumphew, a coven of three green hags, live in a crooked-looking wooden cottage on a patch of high ground in Blackalder Swamp. A path raised above the waterline, about 5 feet wide, connects the cottage to dry land outside the swamp; most of the rest of the ground is wet and squishy, with water as deep as 4 feet in many places. It’s passable terrain, but unpleasant and difficult, with lots of undergrowth, so travelers have a strong incentive to stay on the path. A tall fence of sharp stakes, passable only where the path crosses it, provides yet another incentive.

The hags take advantage of this fact to monitor the approach to their cottage with a hag eye. This device has a couple of drawbacks, however. First, peering through it is an intentional act; although the Sisters check it often, they can’t monitor it constantly. That means that if they were to aim it down the path, away from the cottage, someone could easily walk right past it before they knew anyone was approaching. Second, it’s a vulnerability: If anyone were to attack the hag eye, all the Sumphew Sisters would be blinded for 24 hours, and they’d take heavy psychic damage as well. Their solution is to conceal the eye in a wasp nest (A) that faces toward, rather than away from, their cottage, so that anyone approaching is highly unlikely to notice it. The wasp nest is 60 feet away from the cottage and 20 feet above the ground. There are also several inhabited wasp nests (B) around the Sisters’ cottage. Anyone who comes within 5 feet of one of them gets attacked by a swarm of wasps.

The Sisters’ presence has drawn some unseelie fey to Blackalder Swamp, mostly redcaps and meenlocks (see Volo’s). The redcaps are diurnal, the meenlocks nocturnal. They roam the swamp, attacking any trespassers they encounter. If the hags are within 600 feet, they may hear the commotion, but these fey creatures don’t feel any obligation to report what they’ve seen, so they’re not a reliable method of detection. More dependable are Davanally and Groark, an awakened giant spider and awakened giant toad, both with Intelligence 10 and obedient to the Sisters. If they happen across intruders, they watch for as long as they can (Davanally has expertise in Stealth and Hides; Groark just sits in the water, mostly submerged, and stares), then hurry back to the cottage to tell the Sisters what they’ve seen (Davanally may aim a Web attack at a vulnerable-looking target before she scuttles off through the trees).

The linchpin of the Sisters’ defense, however, is that the open area in front of their cottage—about 70 feet wide and 90 feet long—is watched over by fourteen awakened trees in the surrounding swamp. If anyone attempts to get close to the cottage in the hags’ absence, two of these trees move to block the door, one blocks the exit through the fence, and the rest assault the interlopers. (To add insult to injury, up to five opportunistic mud mephits may also decide to join the fracas—all on the side of the trees, of course.)

If the Sisters are present, they handle the fight in the main battle area themselves, using the Nature list of alternative coven spells (see Volo’s, chapter 1, “Hags: Dark Sisterhood”). Griselda leads by casting spike growth, causing a 40-foot-wide circle of sharp thorns to sprout from the ground in front of the hags’ dwelling. Next, Hilda casts plant growth centered on the same point (excluding the ground on which the Sumphew Sisters are standing) and causes all the undergrowth in the area to grow wild, making the ground extra-difficult terrain. Matilda follows up by casting entangle on the several most closely clustered trespassers. The following round, while Griselda and Matilda taunt their foes with vicious mockery (2d4 psychic damage on a failed saving throw), Hilda casts call lightning, jolting the pinned-down enemies. The effect of plant growth persists without concentration; if any Sister’s concentration on another spell is broken, she simply recasts it, up to twice more (except for call lightning, which Hilda replaces with insect plague after the second casting). Three of the awakened trees stand by to grab any opponent who tries to run and fling them back into the briar patch.

The death of any of the Sisters will break the coven, so as soon as any of them appears to be in mortal danger, or if they can tell in some other way that they’re outmatched, they retreat: Any remaining awakened trees delay their attackers as the hags withdraw into the cottage and slam the door. Griselda casts wall of thorns in front of the door to block it off; then the Sisters retreat through the mazelike house, full of odd angles and uneven doors. The Sisters have two helmed horrors as servants, at the locations marked C and D, and order them to delay any intruder who passes through. In the room marked E, Hilda uses her stone of controlling earth elementals to summon an earth elemental, which she commands to attack any intruder who enters (the cottage has a dirt floor, which the elemental can burrow through). Then the hags head for the room marked F, where they keep their unwholesome lore, and Matilda speaks the command word to fold up Pernilla’s private library (see appendix A), which the books are stored on, and which she then picks up. Finally, the coven retires to the courtyard.

If none of the hags is seriously wounded yet and the odds seem close or in their favor, they’ll make a last stand here. Each Sister positions herself in front of the door to her own room, turns invisible, and Hides, attacking when any enemy comes within reach. (Griselda grabs her staff of withering from her room and wields it two-handed rather than defend herself with her Claws.) On the other hand, if the odds are clearly against them, Matilda will throw down her figurine of wondrous power, turning it into a giant cicada (use the giant fly stat block). The three Sisters will leap on its back, Matilda will order it to Dash, and they’ll fly away on it, planning to return within 24 hours, under cover of night, for the staff of the woodlands—which is standing in the middle of the courtyard, in plain sight, disguised as an enormous alder tree. (A cockatrice roosts in it, aggressively attacking anyone who tries to fly over the cottage and land in the courtyard.)

If Hilda is seriously wounded while defending the courtyard, she’ll turn invisible and try to escape with the staff of the woodlands. With her next available action, she’ll return the staff to its normal form, then try to run back out of the cottage with it, still invisible. If she succeeds, she’ll use the staff to cast wall of thorns across the front door again (becoming visible when she does), then retire into the swamp. The other Sisters, furious, will abandon their defense of the cottage and pursue her. The cockatrice will drop out of the no-longer-present tree and go berserk on anyone who remains behind.

Griselda and Matilda aren’t attuned to the staff, so they can’t make it revert from tree form to staff form as long as Hilda is around. If either of these Sisters is seriously wounded while defending the courtyard, she has to make a snap assessment of the coven’s chances. If it seems like they can still win, the wounded Sister will keep fighting. If it seems like they’re going to lose but Hilda may die first, the wounded Sister will keep fighting—hoping to be the one to seize control of the staff when she’s killed! However, if it seems like they’re going to lose and the wounded Sister is going to die for nothing, she’ll abandon the coven to save her own skin. Matilda will flee on her chrysoprase cicada; Griselda may not be able to take the staff of the woodlands, but if Matilda is badly hurt, too, Griselda will turn invisible and try to snatch the private library from her on the way out.

Once any Sister breaks the coven, the other two Sisters will have nothing left to bind them, and they’ll surrender to their attackers—each one waiting and watching intently for an opportunity to betray the other and make off with the treasures of the faithless Sister and the coven, and swearing revenge on the Sister who ditched them.

Each of the Sisters protects her own private room with a weird magic item: Griselda has a set of knitting needles enchanted with the equivalent of a cordon of arrows spell (save DC 12); Hilda has a small wooden carving of a tubby goblin sitting cross-legged that screams loudly enough to hear up to 60 feet away, including through walls, whenever anyone other than her enters her room; and Matilda has placed a loop of weeping willow branch that functions like a snare spell (save DC 12), triggered by anyone other than her, in front of her personal treasure stash. In addition, Griselda keeps her staff of withering inside a large, tacky lidded beer stein, which functions as the long compartment of an efficient quiver and blends in with the rest of her wall-to-wall clutter.

RANDOM ENCOUNTERS IN BLACKALDER SWAMP

Roll three times as the party travels through the swamp. Reroll duplicate encounters.

d12

Encounter

1–3

No encounter

4–6

1d4 + 2  redcaps (day, not hidden) or 1d6 + 4 meenlocks (night, DC 17 to detect), which attack the PCs. They Dash away when seriously wounded.

7–8

Davanally (awakened  giant spider with Intelligence 10), who hides in a tree (DC 18 to detect), observes the party until noticed, then Dashes back to the Sumphew Sisters’ cottage.

9–10

Groark (awakened  giant toad with Intelligence 10), who sits submerged in the swamp (three-quarters cover from water), observes the party until noticed, then Dashes back to the Sumphew Sisters’ cottage.

11

1  swarm of insects per PC. Each PC is attacked by a separate swarm. The swarms fight to the death.

12

3  mud mephits per 2 PCs (hidden, undetectable because of False Appearance), which use their Mud Breath against the PCs. If all PCs are restrained, they attack; otherwise, they swim away.

GREEN DRAGON LAIR

Minimum recommended party: four level 13 or five level 11 PCs

Deep among the oaks, birches, and spruces of the hilly Felsiger Wald, by the rushing River Tok, the green dragon Zatrulas has made his home beneath a natural sandstone arch—much to the woe of the wood elves who once dwelled in the forest and the human villages that surround it. For nearly a century, the dragon’s influence has suffused the forest with malice and malaise, and his predations have plunged his neighbors into a state of misery.

ASSETS

- Loooooot. Do we even need to specify the contents? The point is that there’s a lot of it—about a quarter-ton altogether. Some of it would be very useful to someone, somewhere (operational value: 3). Some of it is of historic interest (intangible value: 2). All of it is worth a lot of money (monetary value: 4). And all of it is stuff—glorious, glorious stuff—which is reason enough for a dragon to want to possess it (intrinsic value: 4). Total value: 13.

- Oh, yeah, and Zatrulas. The dragon would like to keep living, of course (intrinsic value: 4). But that’s just one kind of value. You can’t compare that to the multifarious splendors of loot. Total value: 4.

Zatrulas must defend his loot against thieves; he must defend his life against not only thieves but do-gooders, glory seekers, and hunters with more ambition than sense. He also can’t defend his loot—or enjoy it—if he loses his life. But he’s a dragon, so he can’t bring himself to forfeit his loot to buy his life. Instead, he takes care to hide his hoard, to ensure that it remains unspoiled if he should be temporarily driven off.

There’s also the fact that dragons have to eat. Even in full health, he must range far and wide to feed himself, during which time he must leave his hoard unattended. All the more reason why his treasure must remain well hidden.

Fortunately, at least, he never needs to move it. He doesn’t use it. He doesn’t spend it. And while he calls attention to himself every time he picks off a couple of prize cattle, his dangerous reputation usually suffices to keep anyone from making a big deal about it. Every once in a while, though, someone decides that enough is enough, and he likes to be aware of those moments, because they usually mean he needs to expect a fight. (It rarely means he’s at any risk of losing that fight.)

Could he afford to lose some of his loot? Sure, he could—but the loss would sting him deeply. It’s not enough for him to keep most of it. He doesn’t want to part with a single coin. He’ll put all the resources at his disposal toward preventing anyone from touching it.

There’s one little problem with that, though: He’s a dragon, and not the kind of dragon that can pretend to be a person. This fact keeps him from participating in the local economy in any capacity except that of destroyer. The only means he can use to defend his lair are those he possesses himself: his strength, his wits, his presence, and the ancient draconic magic that shapes his lair and the landscape around it.

That being said, his presence alone is enough to attract a number of minions to his service. Most of these are monstrous humanoids, but a few of them are weak-willed humans and wood elves who spy for him in their nearby settlements. Their obedience to Zatrulas—whether it comes from fear, awe, or both—provides this cleverest of dragons with ample warning of any impending assault.

DEFENSE

The reach of Zatrulas, an adult green dragon, is broad. His presence in the forest makes it a murky, forbidding place, but even beyond the physical changes, it casts a shadow of fear for miles and miles around. Even the residents of the villages around Felsiger Wald who aren’t agents of the dragon are a suspicious, disconsolate lot, untrusting of one another and even more untrusting of strangers. They keep their mouths, their doors, and their hearts tightly shut. Partly this is because Zatrulas does have spies among them (use the snoop stat block, appendix B), and they snitch not only on strangers but also on their own neighbors if anyone dares speak a word against the dragon. They rendezvous with Zatrulas or his minions at predetermined locations in the forest, which he passes by on his daily rounds.

With the wood elves gone, goblins and ettercaps have the run of the forest. Zatrulas finds the goblins to be especially useful minions, since they’re both terrified of him and superb at stealthy reconnaissance. Each band of roughly twenty goblins—with half the band patrolling by day, the other half by night—is responsible for patrolling a section of the forest covering about a square mile and reporting on anything amiss. When they spot trespassers, they hide and observe, two goblins approaching for a closer look while the rest of the patrol hangs back. At night, if the trespassers seem not to be keeping adequate watch, they’ll sneak up and steal weapons, supplies, and anything else that seems interesting. The terms of their deal with Zatrulas require them to give him any money, gems, jewelry, magic items, or objets d’art they find; anything else they can take, they get to keep. At the end of their patrols, they share their information with neighboring goblin bands.

The goblins aren’t the dragon’s only scouts: Within 1 mile of Zatrulas’s arch, the squirrels, voles, and crows of Felsiger Wald spy for him during the day, the mice, bats, and owls at night. He has a mental connection with them and can choose to see and hear through their eyes and ears. The ettercaps don’t serve Zatrulas directly, but he finds it useful to let them prowl and attack trespassers as they will, and the webs that they and their herds of giant spiders weave occasionally catch something interesting.

Since the dragon arrived, a perpetual, pungent mist has settled over Felsiger Wald, lightly obscuring the entire area; the forest floor is difficult terrain throughout. In addition, the underbrush around Zatrulas’s arch has grown into an enormous, woody, thorny labyrinth, extending a mile in every direction from his arch. After a hunt, Zatrulas likes to scatter the picked bones of his prey across the labyrinth, in order to unnerve those who wander into it. Also, when Zatrulas spies on intruders through the eyes of the beasts and birds of the wood, he makes the creatures stare directly, conspicuously, unsettlingly, at the objects of their attention, for extra skin-crawling effect.

From time to time, the dragon lets out a roar, just to remind anyone listening that he’s there—but never when he’s near his lair. He doesn’t want to lead anyone in that direction.

Locals refer to the Tok as a river, but it’s more properly a shallow, rushing stream, no more than a foot or two deep. It’s easy to traverse—easier, in fact, than most of the forest. For this reason, and because it’s also a natural landmark in the misty wood, and because the forest has reclaimed all the beaten trails that used to lead through it, the goblins have built abatis across the Tok in various places and like to ambush trespassers who find their progress blocked by them. They’ve also placed hunting traps and snares in the stream, to catch those who aren’t paying attention to where they put their feet—or who can’t see clearly because of the fog. The Tok flows through the labyrinth around Zatrulas’s arch, but it doesn’t offer any way through the thickets; they’ve simply grown over and across it.

Most of the labyrinth is dense and tortuous, but in a number of places it contains open clearings, 30 to 60 feet in diameter. These clearings are battle areas: When Zatrulas is aware that trespassers are in the labyrinth, he keeps tabs on their progress through the eyes of his minion critters, then confronts the trespassers when they expose themselves. It’s a damned-if-you-do, damned-if-you-don’t situation, which trespassers will quickly realize, but which they can do little or nothing about: There’s no way to get to Zatrulas’s lair except to traverse the labyrinth or fly over it. And there’s even less cover in the air.

By the time they get that far, Zatrulas already has some sense of how dangerous the intruders are and what their goals are. Based on this intelligence, he may simply attack them, or he may choose instead to land and parley. Zatrulas likes to talk, and he loves to defeat his enemies by talking them into giving up—or, even better, into turning to his side. If the intruders show even the slightest irresolution, faintheartedness, dissension, or pliability, he zeroes in on it, employing a mix of matter-of-fact persuasion and slippery deception. He’ll make all sorts of promises, but one device he won’t resort to is monetary bribery. His hoard is his, and he won’t part with it.

If the intruders can’t be swayed, he takes off, then attacks them from range at every subsequent clearing in order to weaken them, deplete their resources, and demoralize them. Only once they reach the center of the labyrinth, where he has the additional benefit of his lair actions, does he engage with them in earnest and seek to finish them off.

There are several waterfalls along the course of the Tok, and here’s where Zatrulas plays perhaps his cleverest trick: He’s established a decoy lair in a cave behind the waterfall nearest to his arch, where the water forms a pond about 3 feet deep and 15 feet across before continuing on its way downhill. The cave isn’t large—to get through the opening, he has to squeeze, and in a few hundred years, he won’t even be able to do that anymore—and it goes back only about 80 feet before ending in a nest of five gricks, plus a grick alpha. Zatrulas tosses all the silver coins he collects in here, along with semiprecious stones and chunks of glittering pyrite: In torchlight, from a distance, the silver looks like gold. For extra plausibility, he’s left a scattering of bones around the pond and just inside the cave entrance. If intruders fall for the decoy, enter the cave, and survive their encounter with the gricks, they’ll find Zatrulas waiting for them outside.

Zatrulas’s real hoard is hidden 160 feet away from his arch amid a mazelike wall of pitted sandstone pillars, 30 feet off the ground, in one of many look-alike indentations. (Despite their considerable value—and considerable weight—the precious metals and gems take up less than 10 cubic feet of space.) If Zatrulas is badly wounded in battle, he may “flee” (never far) or parley, but he won’t abandon his hoard. And if intruders discover its location, he pulls out all the stops to drive them away from it, including but not limited to grabbing them and hurling them into the forest or against the rocks, exhaling a whole lungful of poison gas into the indentation, and employing all his lair actions to prevent any intruder from reaching it.

DROW COMPOUND

Minimum recommended party: four level 14 or five level 12 PCs

Beneath the mountains called Ered Mund lies the underground city of Eienenn Don, where the Belegez Maela—priestess of a demonic spider goddess—rules over six thousand drow subjects, who in turn rule over nearly as many captive duergar and bugbears, forced to labor in their farms and mines. Not all her subjects are content with her rule, however. A group of dissident drow from Eienenn Don have come to the town of Nan Theli in possession of a bombshell rumor: Maela allegedly possesses a set of heretical scrolls that reveal the existence of an additional god in the drow pantheon, one who denounced the age-old practice of slavery and proclaimed other beings to be equals of the drow. They’ve come to the surface to seek the truth for themselves, and if they should discover this suppressed god to be real, they wish to seize the scrolls from Maela and make the truth known.

ASSETS

- Maela. The drow priestess sits at the top of the underground city’s social, political, and religious hierarchy. By virtue of her status, her life is more valuable than any other (intrinsic value: 4), and her connection to the demonic-divine elevates her further in the eyes of the drow (intangible value: 4). They’ll protect her if for no other reason than they fear supernatural retribution if they don’t. Total value: 8.

- Maela’s treasure hoard. What’s the point of being a theocrat if you can’t get rich off it? Maela’s treasury isn’t full to bursting, but it’s not growling with hunger, either (monetary value: 2). Total value: 2.

- Heretical scrolls. The rumors are true: Maela is in possession of the Levrennoù Loar, a set of scrolls that, among other chronicled events, mention the anathematized god and her repudiations of cruelty, slavery, and tyranny. As best anyone can guess, Maela holds on to them only so that drow inquisitors can familiarize themselves with unique phrases from the scrolls and ferret out anyone they hear using them. At best, this application makes the scrolls marginally useful (operational value: 1); their real value isn’t to Maela or the drow of Eienenn Don but to dissidents and heretics pursuing the secrets therein (intrinsic value: 4), who’d be emboldened by the discoveries (intangible value: 4). Total value: 9.

- Captives. The drow raid other civilizations, both underground and aboveground, and haul their captives back to be put to work as slaves. To the drow, their captives’ lives have no intrinsic value (the captives themselves would certainly disagree), but they keep the farms and mines running, without which Eienenn Don would quickly collapse (operational value: 4). Total value: 4.

- Drow civilians. Drow value the lives of drow, although not to the same extent that they value the lives of important drow (intrinsic value: 3). Total value: 3.

- Farms, food stores, and waterworks. Without these essential infrastructural assets, Eienenn Don can’t support itself (economic value: 4). Total value: 4.

- Mines. In addition to a variety of gemstones, the mines of Ered Mund yield iron, gold, copper, tin, lead, and rock salt. Most important, they also yield cinnabar and a mineral ore the drow call maen pounner (“heavystone” in Common), necessary for the manufacture of adamantine. They’re not as critical to the survival of Eienenn Don as food and water, but they come close (economic value: 3). Total value: 3.

- Poison brewery. An asset important both for its usefulness and for the sensitive information concerning the creation of drow poison kept therein (operational value: 2). Total value: 2.

- Armory. Another asset important to the security of Eienenn Don (operational value: 2). Total value: 2.

The most valuable—and most sensitive—asset in Eienenn Don is the collection of heretical scrolls. These need to be protected against anyone who’d make their contents known: heretic drow, of course, but also outsiders who might have dealings with the drow, either here or elsewhere. They also need to be protected against Maela’s political enemies, who might cynically use her possession of the scrolls to discredit her. Fortunately, they can be kept hidden and locked away nearly all the time; inquisitors need access to them only when they’re training a new recruit. However, if their contents became generally known, it could produce a schism that would disrupt drow society profoundly. Slavery wouldn’t disappear overnight, but many more drow might be swayed toward abolition, and the ruling powers would lose status and clout.

Maela is therefore highly motivated not only to keep the Levrennoù Loar safe but to keep their very existence secret. In this effort, she enjoys the assistance of her trusted counselor, her house captain, and select priests, but most of her forces know nothing about it.

All of them, however, are committed—at least outwardly—to the protection of Maela herself. Outsiders are the obvious enemy, but Maela also has rivals among other drow houses in other cities. For the most part, she doesn’t need to wander around Eienenn Don; her counselor and house captain do most necessary legwork and report back to her at the temple, where she appears in public only on ceremonial occasions. To protect Maela, therefore, her forces must first and foremost protect the temple. As in many tyrannies, Maela has no clear successor, so her death would result in chaos as various contenders made their plays for her seat—and that’s to say nothing of what catastrophes the spider goddess might bring down if she were displeased. Even those who dislike Maela have a vested interest in protecting her life.

Next come the food and water infrastructure of Eienenn Don, along with the slaves who keep the system running. The main risk to these assets is sabotage—by rival houses, dissidents, or rebellious slaves. They’re both vulnerable and critical to the city’s survival. They need to be watched continuously and intently.

These are followed by the mines and the civilian population. Sabotage of the mines would be a nuisance, but it wouldn’t put the city in immediate danger the way sabotage of the waterworks or food stores would; each mine also has a single entrance that’s easy to guard. The civilian population is unavoidably vulnerable—people need to go about their business and can’t shelter indefinitely—but is also an unlikely target, unless a rival house in another city declares war.

Here’s where defensive plans are going to have to start cutting corners, since we’re already seeing that Eienenn Don’s ability to defend its assets is getting overstretched. The last remaining assets—Maela’s treasure hoard, the armory, and the poison brewery—are going to have to make do with the simplest, lowest-cost precautions.

Fortunately for the drow, they live underground, largely self-sufficiently, and there are only a handful of entrances and exits to Eienenn Don. Simple and low-cost precautions can go a long way.

DEFENSE

With a population of only six thousand, Eienenn Don can’t raise a large guard force, but the one it has is very well trained. It’s commanded by Kadour, a drow house captain (see Mordenkainen’s; Kadour wears a breastplate instead of chain mail), who oversees six guard patrols. Each guard patrol consists of six drow; two drow elite warriors; and one drow diagon (see appendix B).

At any given time, three patrols are on active duty, one patrol is in reserve, and two patrols are at rest. In an emergency, one of the two resting patrols can be called up immediately; it takes the other patrol 5 minutes to become fully battle-ready. If encountered before then, the drow have AC 12, the drow elite warriors have AC 14, and the drow diagon has AC 11. In both resting patrols, the drow diagons have one fewer spell slot of each level, unrecovered from earlier in the day.

For half the day, Kadour is in command, accompanied by two drow acolytes (see appendix B). When Kadour is off duty, he yields command to his lieutenant, Kaertevel, a drow house lieutenant (see appendix B) also supported by two drow acolytes, plus one drow elite warrior as backup. As for Maela, she’s a drow priestess who wears a ring of mind shielding and is usually accompanied by her confidential adviser, Nolwenn, a drow mage.

Eienenn Don is mostly unlit. The only places that are lit are the temple, when Maela is conducting religious rites, and places where workers—or their overseers—need additional light to see clearly by. Even then, the lights are dim, because the drow don’t need more than that.

The temple of the spider goddess is deep within Eienenn Don, on a lower level of the underground city. Built directly into the rock, it’s a veritable fortress: Its entrance is a double door of iron, barred from within. Its front wall extends all the way from the bottom of the chamber to the top, and all the way from one side to the other. There are no windows. When Maela addresses her people, she speaks from a second-floor balcony (and wears gloves of missile snaring over a ring of evasion and her ring of mind shielding, in case of an assassination attempt); the lock on the balcony door is very hard to pick (DC 25).

Within the temple, she keeps the Levrennoù Loar in a coffer behind a secret panel in the sanctum. The coffer is protected further by a brass pin tumbler lock that’s very hard to pick, a poison needle trap (see Dungeon Master’s Guide, chapter 5, “Traps”) that deals 18d10 poison damage (none of that weak stuff the guards coat their blades with—Maela’s poisons are top-shelf), and an arcane lock spell that yields to no one but Maela and the chief inquisitor. While the spell is active, anyone else trying to unlock or pick the lock is driven to distraction by the vivid sensation of spiders crawling over their hand; attempting to turn the lock causes the phantom spiders to deliver an agonizing bite. The priestess keeps the key to the coffer in a hidden pocket of her clothing. If her life is ever in danger, she can flee the temple through a secret back way, a shortcut to an entry/exit passage that leads deeper into the realms beneath Ered Mund—and she’ll take the scrolls with her. She keeps her treasure in her bedchamber, in chests with hard-to-pick lever tumbler locks and simple, off-the-rack needle traps that deliver ordinary poison rather than her custom blend.

The armory and poison brewery (A, B) are unguarded except by iron doors with hard-to-pick locks. The mines (C) are watched over by civilian supervisors who yell for the guards if there’s any trouble. Guard patrols are assigned to critical and vulnerable infrastructure: the farms where the drow cultivate mushrooms and graze deep rothé on cave moss (D), the storehouse where the food is kept (E), and the pumps that provide drinking water and drainage (F). Each of these sites is paired with one of the three passages into and out of Eienenn Don. At any given time, the drow diagon who commands the patrol, the elite warriors, and four of the regular drow stand guard over their assigned asset, watching for hints of unrest, while the remaining two drow are sent off to keep an eye on the associated entrance.

Each entrance to Eienenn Don includes a straight passage at least 120 feet long and no more than 5 feet wide, in which intruders are in enfilade the whole way. At the beginning of the last 120 feet, a simple alarm is set: a bell on a wire stretched across the passage. It’s not much, but it’s easy to miss in the dark (DC 20 to spot it—with disadvantage if it’s not brightly illuminated), and the sound resonates down the passage. Disarming it is a piece of cake (DC 10 Dexterity check).

At the end of each entry passage is a 5-foot-wide, 10-foot-deep blind, from which the two drow assigned to sentry duty by their patrol can observe the passage from behind three-quarters cover and take turns standing up to shoot, then crouching down again. Ordinary darkvision has a range of just 60 feet, but the drow can see in total darkness up to 120 feet, allowing them to spot intruders before most intruders can spot them. This advantage negates the disadvantage they receive from using their hand crossbows at long range.

The sentries’ strategy is to shoot at intruders for as long as they appear bewildered. When the intruders gather their wits enough to charge or otherwise fight back, the sentries ditch the blind and withdraw through a doorway where a huge, circular stone can be rolled into place to block off the passage. The stone is 5 feet in diameter and 1 foot thick, and it weighs 600 pounds; even with the help of an iron lever, it takes both drow working together to roll it into place, and four to roll it out of the way and open the passage again. From the outside, it simply isn’t possible to get enough leverage on the stone to roll it out of the doorway, although one can push it inward far enough to get around it or topple it with a successful DC 27 Strength (Athletics) check; however, there’s room for only one person in the doorway arch, so that has to be a solo effort. Otherwise, reopening the passage requires destroying the stone (AC 17, 32 hp, damage threshold 18, immune to cold, fire, poison, and psychic damage, along with piercing and slashing damage from nonmagical weapons). Additional such stones exist at the boundaries between levels of the city.

Once the stone is rolled into place, the sentries hightail it back to their patrols, sending a dancing lights spell ahead of themselves to visually “sound” the alarm and to indicate, through the positioning of the lights, how many enemies have been sighted. Their drow diagon commanders in turn use sending stones to notify the commander on duty—either Kadour or Kaertevel. He activates the reserve patrol, whose barracks (G) are convenient to a central battle position from which it can move easily toward the farms, the food stores, the waterworks, or the temple, as needed. Then he and his acolytes go to join the guard patrol that’s dealing with the intrusion.

Meanwhile, that patrol reorients itself toward the entrance, on the reasonable assumption that whoever’s trying to force their way in right now poses more of a clear and present danger than a potential revolt. The commanding drow diagon and regular drow guards stay put while the drow elite warriors, experts in stealth, head toward the entrance to observe and, if the opportunity presents itself, harass. It’s possible that the would-be intruders will never get past the rolling stone door, in which case the drow come down from full alert after about an hour. The reserve unit relocates to watch that door for the remainder of its shift, and if nothing more happens, then everything goes back to normal.

If the intruders break through, the elite warriors listen and observe briefly, trying to discern the intent behind the intrusion. Not for too long, though, because they need to stay ahead of their targets. Before the intruders can advance past them, they fall back to a subsequent position, still hidden, still listening. (Exception: If the intruders send a lone scout forward, they allow the scout to pass them by. They tail the scout until they’re a safe distance from the rest of the trespassing group. Then they murder the scout.) When the intruders start to get close to one of the more critical areas of Eienenn Don—that is, when the drow elite warriors have fallen back to within 120 feet of their guard patrol’s battle position, or the battle position of a different patrol—they send their own dancing lights alert as a get-ready signal. Then they take up alternate positions from which they can hit the enemy force once their allies fix it in place.

It may be that the invaders’ intentions are immediately obvious and also that they pose a serious threat. In this case, the drow elite warriors may need to soften their foes up a bit before the main encounter. By no means do they want this fight to be a protracted engagement: It’s a skirmish, nothing more. They deal as much damage as they can, as quickly as they can, from as far away as they can, and then they withdraw, preferably before taking even a single hit. With one daily darkness spell each, they have two opportunities to lay into their foes before creating a magical blackout and slipping away, free from the danger of opportunity attacks.

When the intruders and the guard patrol come into contact, the drow diagon commander casts web in an attempt to literally fix the enemy in place while the elite warriors and regular guards shoot. If web fails to restrain the intruders, she switches to conjure animals, while one of the regular drow forgoes a crossbow shot to cast faerie fire. The main goal is to prevent the enemy from reaching the critical infrastructure asset, unless that asset is clearly not what the enemy is after.

It will quickly become apparent which side is on the right foot and which side is on the wrong one. If the invaders are in disarray, the guard commander and the elite warriors move in to deliver the decisive blow with their swords. If the invaders’ assault is too strong to withstand, however, then the guard patrol must fall back. This time it’s the diagon who casts darkness around the foes, while the guard commander falls back along with the regular drow and acolytes; the elite warriors fight to delay the invaders until their fellow drow are in the clear, then withdraw as well.

There should be little doubt by this point what the invaders are after, and by extension, which way they’re headed. As the defenders pass within range of the reserve patrol, they signal for assistance, coding the invaders’ objective into their dancing lights, and the reserve moves in stealthily to hit the attackers’ flank the next time they make contact with the defenders.

Disloyalty is punished severely in drow society, so the defenders must fight to the last, inflicting as much damage on their assailants as they can before they fall. If the intruders do somehow reach the temple, it’s hoped that the defenders will have weakened them enough that Maela and Nolwenn can finish the job. But if the intruders are still coming on strong, Maela attempts the bold gambit of stepping out onto the temple balcony and trying to talk them out of their objective. After all, she’s as strong in social interaction as she is in combat, if not stronger, and her Insight skill gives her an understanding of what her foes want and are motivated by, which in turn gives her bargaining power. She can zero in on their psychological Achilles’ heels—pity, ego, insecurity, curiosity, greed, grandiosity, complaisance, scruples—and present credible-sounding reasons why they should forget about what they came there for and do things that serve her interests instead.

The moment they balk, though, she heads for the door. Nolwenn stays behind to delay them—attempting to summon a shadow demon to help out—while Maela grabs the Levrennoù Loar.

Then the two make for the secret exit, Nolwenn dropping a cloudkill spell behind them in the temple and Maela summoning a yochlol to guard the exit as they flee.

ABOLETH GROTTO

Minimum recommended party: four level 13 or five level 11 PCs

The last anyone heard from Quiondesia Tranocre, she was searching for artifacts in the province of Zama. In her last letter, a year and a half ago, she mentioned making contact with some priests—cultists, really—who claimed to worship a god called Úuchben. She doubted the being’s godhood and declared her intention to discover its real nature.

Nohoch Úuchben Máako le K’áak’náabo’ is the full name of the aboleth that lives in the sea caves of Zama, which has transformed and enthralled Quiondesia along with many others. The locals worship Úuchben in a grotto they call Áaktun Úuchben. This grotto is at the bottom of a cenote—a karst sinkhole—where a solution cave system links up to the sea. These caves are Úuchben’s lair.

By befouling all the other water sources within a mile of its cave entrance but leaving the water in the grotto pure, Úuchben gradually drew the people of Zama into its sphere of psychic influence and earned their devotion. Feeding its ego off their worship, Úuchben uses them as a buffer, as sources of information… and, from time to time, as thralls.

ASSETS

The aboleth has no interest in material treasure. For that matter, it has little interest in defending its own life: Even if its body is destroyed, its soul will remain intact, reincorporating on the elemental plane of water. As for lore, it doesn’t keep its knowledge in written form, or in any material form, but rather in its boundless memory. What, then, does Úuchben have to protect?

Its psyche.

What’s most intrinsically valuable to the aboleth is having dominion over others. Being worshiped feeds its sense of self-importance. Stripping lesser beings of their freedom gratifies it. It doesn’t wield power out of any grandiose, world-conquering expansionist impulse. Just the opposite: Its ambitions are absurdly, unaccountably petty. The more insignificant the conquest, the more Úuchben craves it.

The arrangement it has right now is ideal: In an out-of-the-way corner of a lesser continent on an undistinguished world in a prosaic plane of existence, Úuchben rules supreme. It doesn’t want any part of this state of affairs to change. The one and only asset that the aboleth is protecting, therefore, is the status quo—and it will defend that with every means at its disposal.

Who threatens the status quo? Outsiders. Meddlers. Boat-rockers with weird alien notions of “freedom” and “autonomy,” whose overly narrow definitions of “god” fail to include a being that clearly possesses the ability to compel devotion. Better to keep all such interlopers far away, through secrecy and isolation if possible, through force if necessary.

DEFENSE

It’s worth reiterating that the aboleth’s goal is not to kill PCs but to protect its one asset: the way things are. Therefore, its security is heavily weighted toward deterrence. Specifically, if you’re planning on mucking around with Úuchben’s little cult, Úuchben wants you gone, now.

At this point, Úuchben has had enough time to charm everyone in Zama. Literally everyone: There’s no one left uncharmed. All the Zamans have relocated to within a mile of Áaktun Úuchben, on the aboleth’s orders, so that there’s no chance that its influence will wear off.

Because they’re under its control, they have no choice but to report anything out of the ordinary that they notice to the aboleth, and they can do so telepathically. Just in case there’s anything an ordinary villager might miss, however, there are several deep scions (see Volo’s; use mental ability scores and skill proficiencies from the plant stat block, appendix B) walking among the population, alert to the arrival of strangers and prepared to worm their way into their confidences. It’s going to be hard for anyone to slip into Zama without the aboleth’s knowing.

The Zamans’ unnervingly robotic conformity, and the sheer number of them who are enthralled, should suffice to make any ordinary interloper balk. If further dissuasion is needed, however, there’s the fact that Úuchben’s high priest (use the kraken priest stat block from Volo’s; Thunderous Touch deals psychic rather than thunder damage, and the Voice of the Aboleth speaks Deep Speech and is creepily sibilant rather than thunderous) commands the loyalty of 180 cultists, of whom 72 are present in and around the grotto at any given time during the day, 36 at night. If they’re attacked, they alert Úuchben telepathically, and the aboleth uses a regional effect of its lair to project an illusion of itself into the cenote to intimidate the assailants (while it remains safely hidden underwater). These devotees are fanatics and remain loyal to Úuchben even if they take damage and their charmed condition ends.

After the high priest and cultists have been engaged in combat for a couple of rounds, Úuchben swims into the grotto to support them with its lair actions; it mostly stays submerged during the fight, but if its opponents have destroyed its illusion once already, it pops up when they’re off their guard and attacks them with unexpected corporeality before diving back below.

The aboleth also sends forth additional reinforcements: several transformed adventurers (choose from the stat blocks in appendix B—Quiondesia is a transformed ranger) who emerge from the cenote to join the fight. Whether or not the odds are in the attackers’ favor, seeing this reminder of what fate could befall them as well should chill their blood and cause them to second-guess themselves. The transformed adventurers are not fanatics, and if they take damage and cease to be charmed, they stop fighting. They fear Úuchben, however, and are bereft of hope for their own futures, since they know of no remedy for the disease that shackles them to the water and makes them unfit to be anything but servitors of the aboleth. Only if the disease is cured will they have the nerve to join the fight against Úuchben.

The fanatical devotees are Úuchben’s main response force, which it counts on to handle all comers. If they’re defeated, or about to be, the aboleth will have already lost the one asset it cares about defending. Then the question will be whether it’s in any position to exact revenge. If it judges that its foes are weakened enough by the fight for it to transform, enslave, or otherwise punish them, it will stick around and take its best shot. If it knows it doesn’t stand a chance, it will abandon the fight and make a break for the sea. If the situation is ambiguous, it abandons the grotto and withdraws to a fallback position deeper in the sea caves (B).

To catch it, its enemies will have to penetrate its watery lair, which is a challenge all its own. Moreover, there’s one last unpleasant surprise to be found in the sea caves: The water in the cenote is fresh. The water beneath it, which comes from the sea, is salty. Trapped between the two, 100 feet below the surface, there’s a 10-foot-deep layer of hydrogen sulfide. Water breathing or similar magic protects against the deleterious effects of water pressure, but it doesn’t protect against this toxic substance. When a creature first enters the layer of H_2S or begins its turn there, it takes 10 (4d4) acid damage and must make a DC 15 Constitution saving throw. On a failed save, the creature is poisoned; if the saving throw fails by 5 or more, the creature is also blinded. In addition, any water-breathing creature that doesn’t hold its breath while passing through the H_2S layer immediately begins choking (see Player’s Handbook, chapter 8, “Suffocating”). Úuchben, aware of the layer’s presence and protected by its Mucous Cloud, is unaffected by it.

ESOTERIC SOCIETY MEETINGHOUSE

Minimum recommended party: four level 17 or five level 15 PCs

Nothing on the outside distinguishes the terraced house from its nearly identical neighbors on Croke Street in the city of Fairwind. However, while those other houses are owned by minor nobles and wealthy merchants, this one is owned by the Orbis Tertius Society, an exclusive fellowship of arcane cognoscenti with a particular interest in divination, interplanar communication and travel, and the altering of reality. Their ends are not known to be evil, especially—nor are they known to be good, lawful, chaotic, or anything else. Little, in fact, is known about them at all. That in itself is worrisome to certain worldly powers, who would prefer that their reality not be altered, at least not by anyone other than them.

ASSETS

- Library. Thanks to support from a couple of very wealthy members, the Orbis Tertius Society owns not only its own meetinghouse but also an extensive library, full of books on natural philosophy, epistemology, metaphysics, and the occult. The society’s members see knowledge, especially esoteric knowledge, as having value in and of itself (intrinsic value: 4), and this particular collection has been carefully curated to appeal to the members’ interests (intangible value: 2). The books are superb in both their quality and their rarity, but they’re not exactly general-interest, so anyone trying to sell them might have to settle for less than their full worth (monetary value: 2). Total value: 8.

- Magical library. Included within the library is a collection of grimoires describing concepts, forms, and applications of teleportation, divination, and summoning magic. A wizard perusing them for spells to copy would have access to banishment, dimension door, contact other plane, dream, far step, planar binding, scrying, teleportation circle, arcane gate (X), scatter (X), dream of the blue veil (T), etherealness, plane shift, teleport, demiplane, astral projection, foresight, gate, and wish. That’s a jackpot find, and the members of the society know it. They esteem these spellbooks not only for their own sake (intrinsic value: 4) and for their comprehensiveness and appositeness (intangible value: 2) but also for their sheer usefulness (operational value: 4). Although they themselves are not yet capable of casting all the spells within these books—their spellcasting ability tops out at 7th level—they’re keenly aware of what could be done with the most powerful of those spells and are determined to keep the knowledge in their own hands. They also know how much these rare tomes cost, and how much they could fetch if resold (monetary value: 4). Total value: 14.

- Well of many worlds. This legendary magic item (monetary value: 4) is most beneficial for the members’ explorations of other worlds and planes of existence (operational value: 4, intangible value: 1). Total value: 9.

- Amulet of the planes. While not quite as useful for methodical cosmic exploration as the well of many worlds, this very rare item (monetary value: 3) is still helpful for reaching planes of existence for which the society’s members lack rods tuned to their resonant frequencies—and for getting back from ones reached accidentally (operational value: 3, intangible value: 1). Total value: 7.

- Material components. Some of the magic performed by the society’s members requires costly components. These include the gem-infused inks and chalks needed in order to draw teleportation circles, powdered silver and iron for drawing wards, tuned rods for travel to various planes, gemstones for binding conjured creatures, and a silver scrying bowl. To a spellcaster of modest means, these might seem like a fortune’s worth of resources, but among the society’s assets, they represent a relatively middling expense (monetary value: 2). They are, however, quite useful (operational value: 4). Total value: 6.

- The meetinghouse. Real estate on a high-class street like Croke Street doesn’t come cheaply. The Orbis Tertius Society’s meetinghouse is more expensive than an ordinary guildhall (monetary value: 3), but the exclusive location comes with certain perks, including the presumption that its owners aren’t to be disturbed by the common rabble (intangible value: 1). It also offers comfortable space for study, discourse, and magical experimentation (operational value: 2). Total value: 6.

- Art objects. Most of the meetinghouse is comfortably, if soberly, appointed, but the society flaunts its wealth in the upstairs drawing room, where members gather to enjoy one another’s company in the evening. This room sports a number of elegant objets d’art, ranging in value from 250 gp to 2,500 gp apiece (monetary value: 2), chosen for their relevance to the members’ interests (intangible value: 1). The furniture in this room is exceptionally finely crafted as well. Total value: 3.

- Members of the society. The Orbis Tertius Society’s members value their own lives, and one another’s, to the extent you’d expect (intrinsic value: 4); they also enjoy a bond of loyalty and fellowship (intangible value: 1). They defend themselves and each other, but they’ll readily take an arrow to defend the group, its assets, and its secrets. Total value: 5.

The society’s ultimate goal is to conceive of a new world, then to turn the known world into it. It operates in secrecy, knowing the extent to which the powers that be would feel threatened by its activities. From a security perspective, however, dealing with an attack on the society’s assets by the crown or a religious sect is one problem; dealing with an attack by one or more rival wizards is another altogether. While any other attacker could steal the society’s assets, a more powerful wizard could not only steal them but use them, in particular the grimoires. Protecting the society’s assets against thugs or thieves is important, but protecting them against other mages is essential. Its defensive measures must be thorough.

The most potentially vulnerable of the society’s assets is its magic library. Magic items and spell components can be locked up, but the library is meant to be used, and members have the run of it when it’s open. The art objects are likewise out in the open, but protecting them is far less important; if a thief broke in and stole one, it would be more insult than injury. The defense of the meetinghouse itself should suffice to protect the curios that adorn it.

The library is, of course, most vulnerable when it’s open. The magic items are vulnerable only when they’re being used, and that consideration applies mainly to the well of many worlds, since the amulet of the planes must be carried by its user. None of the society’s assets ever needs to be transported anyplace. While its members’ social activities follow the same daily pattern as those of any other patrician club, its magical explorations happen when they happen. The society keeps its activities very hush-hush, so ideally, no one should have any idea what assets it possesses, let alone when those assets can be more easily targeted.

The society could survive the loss of the magic items, although it would hate to lose them—and in the wrong hands, they could be dangerous. The magic library is irreplaceable, essential, the society’s raison d’être.

DEFENSE

The Orbis Tertius Society has ten members (see the Orbis Tertius Society member stat block, appendix B) and employs a household staff of eight: a steward, a cook, a housekeeper, a hall porter, and a librarian (see the Orbis Tertius Society skilled hireling stat block, appendix B), plus two general domestic servants and a page (commoners). The members all have homes of their own elsewhere, but the staff live in the meetinghouse: The librarian has a room on the top floor, while the rest live in quarters in the basement. They rarely get days off, but they’re carefully vetted and very well paid. The members know you can’t keep a secret society secret if the servants are disgruntled. In addition, the society employs a spy (see the snoop stat block, appendix B) whose sole job is to sit at a tavern up the block from morning till night, watch the street, and inform the steward of anything suspicious through a set of sending stones.

A windowless façade would stick out like a sore thumb on Croke Street, so every window in the meetinghouse is lined with trespasser’s bane (see appendix A), which sounds an audible alarm when anyone attempts to break in (the society’s members and staff can reach through to open and close the windows without setting it off). The windows on the top story have all been bricked in, with a permanent major image spell laid over them to hide the work. Additionally, the library’s windows are enchanted with glyphs of warding with DC 16 hideous laughter spells stored in them. (The areaway beneath these windows is surrounded by a wrought-iron fence with spiked finials. Anyone who falls upon them takes an additional 1d4 damage from the 20-foot fall, and all damage is piercing rather than bludgeoning.)

Lamps throughout the meetinghouse are enchanted as lanterns of revealing, making invisible creatures visible in their light, and their fields of illumination overlap. The top two floors are protected by a custom-shaped private sanctum spell that suppresses divination magic (though not teleportation or planar travel) and a guards and wards spell, by which the society’s members and staff are unaffected. As part of the latter spell, the doors on the upper floors are disguised as plain sections of wall, and anyone unaffiliated with the society who passes through the 5-foot-square area just inside the library door is targeted by a DC 16 suggestion that they’re trespassing on private property and should leave the premises immediately and not come back. At night, the librarian uses Norton’s phantom sentry (see appendix A) to cast faithful hound in the library.

Another of the perks of a Croke Street address is access to some of the finest artisans—including locksmiths. The exterior doors, the library, and the top-floor rooms are all secured with difficult-to-pick locks (DC 20), enhanced further by arcane lock spells (on the upper floors, these are part of guards and wards). A journeyman wizard can easily bypass arcane lock with knock or dispel magic, but part of the society’s deterrence strategy is to force any trespassing wizard to burn through spell slots by casting these spells over and over. For the same reason, the meetinghouse contains a truly disgusting number of glyphs of warding, many of them containing higher-level spells that require intruders to spend scarcer spell slots to get rid of them. A couple of these are on the roof.

The front door is overseen by another of the society’s skilled hirelings, the hall porter, whose nominal responsibility is to receive all messages, packages, and visitors from outside but who is also a trained bouncer. If anyone tries to bluff or bully their way past the front door, the hall porter first calmly and politely asks them to leave. If they force their way in, the hall porter calmly but much less politely informs them that they’re trespassing on private property and need to go now, then moves to escort them all the way off the premises. If the trespasser doesn’t cooperate or, worse, seems about to turn violent, the hall porter Disengages and withdraws from the front hall. The first pursuer to step on the glyph of warding in the front hall (A)—the first of many—gets boxed in by a solid, box-shaped forcecage spell that also corks the hallway. (Did I mention that the Orbis Tertius Society is handsomely funded?)

Deliveries of food and household supplies are made at the back door, through an areaway entrance that leads down to the basement. This door is supervised by a third skilled hireling, the steward, who opens the door only for familiar faces. The glyph of warding inside this door (B) releases a fog cloud spell.

When members of the society become aware of a breach, they use Argraban’s specular gateways (see appendix A) to travel quickly from their homes to the meetinghouse. There are four gateways in the meetinghouse: one in the first-floor hall, one in the morning room, one in the drawing room, and one in the library; roll 1d4 to randomly determine which mirror each member enters the house through during an incursion. Since none of the members lives more than 6 miles away, those who aren’t at the meetinghouse when the breach occurs can be on the premises in 3 minutes or less, with the first eight arriving in 5 to 10 rounds (see table below).

ORBIS TERTIUS SOCIETY RESPONSE

Once a total of 10 Orbis Tertius Society members are already present or have subsequently arrived, no more join the encounter.

Round

Early to Midmorning

Midmorning to Early Evening

Evening to Midnight

Midnight to Early Morning

Already present

1d8 + 2 members

(in morning room and coffee room)

1d6 members

(in coffee room and library)

1d6 + 4 members

(in drawing room, library, portal room, and summoning room)

1d6 – 3 members

(minimum 0, in portal room or summoning room)

1–3

—

—

—

—

4

2 add’l members arrive

—

—

—

5

—

2 add’l members arrive

1 add’l member arrives

4 add’l members arrive

6

—

—

—

—

7

2 add’l members arrive

2 add’l members arrive

1 add’l member arrives

2 add’l members arrive

8

1 add’l member arrives

2 add’l members arrive

—

1 add’l member arrives

9

—

—

—

—

10

1 add’l member arrives

1 add’l member arrives

1 add’l member arrives

1 add’l member arrives

2 min

1 add’l member arrives

1 add’l member arrives

1 add’l member arrives

1 add’l member arrives

3 min

—

1 add’l member arrives

1 add’l member arrives

1 add’l member arrives

Until then, the skilled house staff do what they can to deceive, disrupt, and delay intruders without putting themselves directly in harm’s way, while the untrained staff run to their rooms and lock the doors. The house staff aren’t spellcasters, but each of the five skilled staff members carries a magic item and knows how to use it: The steward has a gem of brightness, plus a sending stone for communication with the tavern spy. The cook has a potion of fire breath. The hall porter has a deck of illusions. The housekeeper has a wind fan. The librarian wears eyes of charming, made to resemble normal spectacles. In addition, each has been provided with one bead of force.

When the members have arrived in force, the house staff withdraw and leave the defense of the meetinghouse to them, defending only themselves and the rest of the staff.

The members maintain as much distance from intruders as they can, take cover around corners, and ruthlessly exploit the fact that they’re not affected by the meetinghouse’s guards and wards spell but strangers are. Whenever they land a solid hit—literally or figuratively—they withdraw to alternate positions, staying spread out so that they’re not as easily targeted by area-effect spells and can cover one another in the event of unwanted melee engagement.

The members of the society aren’t interested in killing intruders, unless they appear to have no other recourse. Their chief strategy is to disorient, divide, and disable their opponents, knocking them—and keeping them—so thoroughly off-balance that they’re incapable of achieving their objective. Once all intruders are neutralized, the members pump them for what information they can; cast geas on them one by one, compelling them to zealously spread the word that the Orbis Tertius Society is a philanthropic organization worthy of the highest praise; and conclude with modify memory, scrambling their recollections of what they saw and experienced inside the meetinghouse. Only if this plan is clearly not going to succeed do they turn to overt violence.

There are glyphs of warding (save DC 16) at all the locations marked on the map, plus one at either end of the rooftop (both E):

GLYPHS OF WARDING

Glyph

Stored Spell

A

forcecage

B

fog cloud

C

resilient sphere

D

darkness

E

confusion

F

bestow curse (7th level, must succeed on Wisdom save to take action)

G

hold person

H

hypnotic pattern

I

banishment

GRANDMOTHER HAG DWELLING

Minimum recommended party: four level 15 or five level 13 PCs

The stories say that Baba Obmorozhenya awakened a whole forest, led the trees on a march to the mossy tundra a half day’s travel north of the village of Krivderevya, where summer lasts only a month, handed each tree an axe, and commanded them to cut one another down so that she could build the timber-framed house in which she lives. The stories say the bones that lie in front of her house belong to a mammoth that fell over dead when she looked it in the eye, and that she leapt upon it and feasted on its flesh without stopping until those bones were bare. The stories say a mob of villagers, angry and fearful, marched from Krivderevya to drive her from the district, and that she stepped forth from her house, laughed her blood-freezing laugh, waved her staff, and imprisoned every last villager in a block of ice.

The stories are told in whispers, for fear that she’ll overhear.

ASSETS

- Mirror of life trapping. While none of the stories people tell about Baba Obmorozhenya is entirely true, they’re all rooted in truth. More pertinently, though, they omit one of the most important facts: The grandmother hag is both nosy and spiteful, and when she doesn’t like what someone’s saying about her behind her back, she’s been known to kidnap the offender, spirit them back to her house, and imprison them in this magic item. It contains twelve extradimensional cells, which are always full. When a creature is freed to make room for a new abductee, Baba Obmorozhenya might let them go if they grovel at her feet profusely and sincerely enough. Most of the time, though, she just eats them. Mundane loot isn’t intrinsically valuable to her per se, but she both knows this item to be useful (operational value: 2) and considers it to be beautiful (intangible value: 4), and the fact that it’s beautiful and magical sets it apart from ordinary shiny baubles (intrinsic value: 2). As a very rare magic item, it would fetch a great deal of money if sold (monetary value: 3). Total value: 11.

- Graystaff. This arcane focus allows her to fly and to cast spells that she can’t cast without it; no other item she possesses is nearly as useful to her (operational value: 4). As a fey being, she prizes objects that are unique and magically powerful, and this particular object is essential to who she is and what she does, increasing the weight she places upon it (intrinsic value: 3, intangible value: 4). Its salability as a collector’s item is undercut by the fact that no one but Baba Obmorozhenya can use it (monetary value: 1). Total value: 12.

- Crystal ball. The paranoid hag uses this item to spy on anyone she thinks has her name in their mouth. It’s magical and beautiful but far from unique (intrinsic value: 1, intangible value: 1); Baba Obmorozhenya prizes it more for its usefulness (operational value: 2). To a treasure-seeker, it’s a very rare magic item and rates accordingly (monetary value: 3). Total value: 7.

- Zhiznivor. A unique, sentient nine lives stealer shortsword, Zhiznivor fell into Baba Obmorozhenya’s hands more than a century ago. She has no use for a sword, but she holds on to it because preventing the weapon from fulfilling its purpose pleases her; she thinks of it not as an object but as a prisoner. To anyone who discovered she had it, it would have substantial operational (3) or monetary (3) value; to her, its value is mainly intangible (3), although as a powerful magic item it has some intrinsic value to her as well (1). Total value: 10.

- Potions. What self-respecting hag doesn’t brew potions? Baba Obmorozhenya’s inventory ranges from the uncommon (monetary value: 1, operational value: 1) to the very rare (monetary value: 3, operational value: 3). Total value: 2 to 6.

- Money. Baba Obmorozhenya has a lot of money (monetary value: 2), but she doesn’t give it that much thought. Total value: 2.

- Baba Obmorozhenya. The legendary hag values exactly one life: her own (intrinsic value: 4, intangible value: 4). Total value: 8.

Anyone trying to take Baba Obmorozhenya’s graystaff will have to do so over her dead body. Only a fool would think they could take it from her while she lives, and only a world-class adversary might have the power to slay her. However, as far as her assets go, it’s extremely vulnerable—exactly as vulnerable as she is herself. That’s because she needs it both to fly and to cast many of her most powerful spells. She relies on it so completely, she can’t let it out of her hands. If she must flee, she flees with it—and she’ll flee before she’ll give it up, even if her own life isn’t in imminent danger, although the circumstances in which she might have to give it up when her own life isn’t in danger are few and far between.

Her next most valuable asset is her mirror of life trapping. As far as she’s aware, no one knows she has it, and she has no reason or need to take it out of the room in her house where she keeps it. Losing it wouldn’t hurt her in any way, but it would gall her to no end, and she’d never relent in her pursuit of vengeance. She’s not going to let it come to that, though: It goes behind the most powerful defenses she has at her disposal.

The same things are true of Zhiznivor, although it’s possible, she’ll grant, that there might be someone left alive who knows, or can guess, that the sword has fallen into her hands. Therefore, since it’s a little more likely that someone might come looking for the legendary sword than for the mirror of life trapping, even though she rates its total value slightly lower, she gives it the same level of protection.

As a legendary creature, Baba Obmorozhenya’s best means of defending her own life is by herself, through the use of her own powers and those of her lair. But she has a number of other tricks up her sleeve, and as long as she can retreat into her house, she can take advantage of all the protections she’s placed upon it and its contents. She’ll do that, therefore, as soon as it becomes apparent that her life is legitimately threatened.

As for her other assets, the crystal ball receives some small extra amount of protection, but the potions require no more protection than they’re afforded by being in the house to begin with. In fact, Baba Obmorozhenya will readily offer a potion or two to buy off anyone who seems like they might be dangerous but hasn’t yet made a move against her, as long as it gets them to stop sniffing around. She can always make more.

DEFENSE

The closest village to the house of Baba Obmorozhenya (see appendix B) is Krivderevya. In fact, it’s the only village near her house: The next closest village is a full day’s travel farther south. Unless they camp in the wilderness, approaching PCs will stay overnight at the “inn”—really, just a tavern that charges 1 sp a night for a more or less clean straw pallet in a back room, usually used by villagers too drunk even to walk home. Volimir Pokorny, a hunter, drinks at the tavern every night (use the snoop stat block with Strength and Dexterity 13, Nature and Survival +4, and a Shortbow attack with +3 to hit, dealing 1d6 + 1 piercing damage). His nerves shattered by a curse that Baba Obmorozhenya laid upon him long ago, he now spies for the hag, informing on his neighbors and alerting her to the arrival of anyone new. Whenever he has news to report, he hikes to the edge of the tundra and uses a pipe of smoke signals (see appendix A) to send a message up into the clouds. (The pipe is cursed: If Volimir drops it or attempts to give it away, it reappears in his possession 1d4 hours later.)

Whenever she’s aware that anyone’s heading her way—or when she’s just feeling malicious, which is often—Baba Obmorozhenya casts control weather, producing arctic cold, gale-force winds, and blizzards within 5 miles of her for 8 hours. These conditions impose the effects of extreme cold, strong wind, and heavy snow precipitation, as described in the Dungeon Master’s Guide, chapter 5, “Wilderness Survival.”

The weather in the area is pretty wretched even when it’s not under the influence of this spell, though: At the height of summer, daytime temperatures rarely reach above 50 degrees Fahrenheit, and nighttime temperatures are usually below freezing, while in the dead of winter, daytime highs of between 5 and 15 degrees below zero are common, and temperatures plummet to 30 below at night. The year-round average high temperature is 18 degrees; the average low, 10 degrees. When Baba Obmorozhenya controls the weather, her gales drive the wind chill down to 5 below zero at night during the summer, to 20 to 40 below for most of the year, and to 45 to 80 below in midwinter.

Blizzards strike daily within 1 mile of Baba Obmorozhenya’s house, halving travelers’ speed and reducing visibility to 30 feet while they’re occurring; the snows they leave behind accumulate, making the terrain difficult. That last mile of travel therefore takes 40 minutes at a normal pace when the skies are clear, an hour and 20 minutes in the midst of a blizzard. For every 20 minutes of daytime travel, roll on the encounter table below:

RANDOM ENCOUNTERS AROUND BABA OBMOROZHENYA’S HOUSE

All beasts are charmed by Baba Obmorozhenya and hostile to trespassers. They attack at an encounter distance of 6d6 × 10 feet and fight to the death. Reroll duplicate encounters.

d12

Encounter

1–2

8 swarms of lemmings (use  swarm of rats stat block) per PC. Each PC is attacked by 8 separate swarms.

3

2 swarms of common adders (use the  swarm of poisonous snakes stat block) per PC. Each PC is attacked by 2 separate swarms.

4

1  swarm of ravens per PC. Each PC is attacked by a separate swarm.

5

4  swarms of insects per PC. Each PC is attacked by 4 separate swarms.

6–7

1d6 + 3  wolves

8

7d12 caribou (use the  elk stat block, Medium size, Charge save DC 12, subtract 1 from attack bonuses and damage)

9–12

The party encounters a field of 1d4 + 10 human-size pillars of ice. Close inspection reveals that each pillar contains a frozen corpse. From each pillar, either the corpse (use the  zombie stat block, with immunity to cold damage, if PCs are tier 2) bursts out and attacks, or its angry spirit (use the specter stat block, with immunity to cold damage, if PCs are tier 3 or 4) drifts out and attacks.

At night, it’s too cold for many of these creatures to do anything but sleep. Use only the last encounter, but increase the number of pillars (and undead creatures) to 3d8 + 10.[I]

If Baba Obmorozhenya is flying around outside and visibility is clear, she observes these encounters, goes on alert, and hastens back to her house. Before the interlopers arrive, she activates the mirror of life trapping, then, if she has time, scries on them through her crystal ball to figure out the best ways to attack them. Making the connection takes 10 minutes, though, so if they’re already close to her house, she doesn’t bother.

Lying on the ground in front of Baba Obmorozhenya’s house is an immense skeleton: the mammoth from the stories. It’s not merely a pile of bones, though. It’s an actual undead mammoth. And when trespassers come within 50 feet of it, it rises to its feet and attacks them (see the mammoth skeleton stat box, appendix B).

That’s Baba Obmorozhenya’s cue to join the fight. She waits to attack until the second round of combat, when her enemies are thoroughly distracted by the enormous opponent in front of them. (If the PCs are tier 3 or higher, determine their average level, then throw in one pesky ice mephit for each level above 11 for good measure.) She flies around on her graystaff, keeping her distance from melee and using her blizzard lair action every other round, starting in round 2.

If the mammoth skeleton is destroyed and she herself is moderately wounded (reduced to 105 hp or fewer), she withdraws into her house. The front door is protected by a glyph of warding with a cone of cold spell stored in it, which blasts out when anyone other than Baba Obmorozhenya touches it. Meanwhile, the hag darts into the next room and causes all the open doors in the front room to slam shut and lock. Alternating between the lair actions that let her pass through walls and doors and close and open doors and windows, she turns her house into a maze that will lead intruders past her, past the rooms where she keeps Zhiznivor and the crystal ball, and into the room where she keeps the mirror of life trapping.

The path is a minefield, littered with glyphs of warding and symbols placed to wear trespassers down by cursing them, injuring them, and forcing them to cast dispel magic and remove curse repeatedly, depleting their spell slots:

MAGIC GLYPHS

Glyph

Effect

A

explosive runes (7d8 cold damage)

B

explosive runes (7d8 lightning damage)

C

bestow curse (5th level, disadvantage on Charisma checks and saving throws)

D

bestow curse (5th level, must succeed on Wisdom save to take action)

E

symbol of Hopelessness

Baba Obmorozhenya has to be very careful, though. Once her enemies are in the room with the mirror of life trapping—which has a chance of trapping anyone who sees their own reflection in it—she has to hurry back to the room and be prepared to finish the rest of them off. That’s because, while most of the victims trapped in the mirror are nobody special, one of them is Branyma Smyelaya, a knight who can cause the hag some legitimate difficulty if she gets loose. Whenever someone is trapped by the mirror, roll 1d12. On a roll of 7, they’re trapped in Branyma’s cell, and she’s set free. (Keep track of these rolls: They determine which of the mirror’s twelve cells a trapped victim is placed in. If someone’s number comes up again, they pop back out.)

Also, someone might get the idea of trying to break the mirror, which would free all the prisoners trapped in it. All the PCs, plus Branyma, plus a mob of possibly emboldened commoners, are more than Baba Obmorozhenya can handle if she’s already badly wounded, and if that’s what confronts her, she’ll flee the room and lead them on a wild-goose chase around the house, hoping they’ll stumble over a couple more glyphs of warding and give her a chance to regain the upper hand after downing a potion or two.

If Baba Obmorozhenya is seriously wounded (reduced to 60 hp or fewer) without any further way to get that number back up, it’s time for her to withdraw and escape. If she can manage it, she’ll retrieve Zhiznivor before flying away as fast as she can on her graystaff.

FEY COURT

Minimum recommended party: four level 16 or five level 15 PCs

Castle Everhold, at the heart of the fey forests of Clutch, is the home and palace of Greengrasp, ruler of that domain. Greengrasp is both domineering and greedy, his four gangly arms ending in long-fingered hands that clench and release as regularly as he breathes, and he demands opulent gifts from anyone who would enter Everhold or seek a favor from him. He hosts captivating festivities, though, and his court is a glittering marvel, which many are willing to pay the price of admission just to see firsthand. The richness of his treasure hoard is reputed to boggle the mind.

ASSETS

Greengrasp is unusually materialistic for an archfey: While all fey tend to be possessive of their belongings, it’s generally the significance of things, rather than their monetary value, that gives them perceived value. Not to greedy Greengrasp! Unlike most fey, he considers loot to be valuable in and of itself, which boosts the total value of all his treasure (intrinsic value: 4) relative to his other assets.

- Precious metals. Greengrasp’s treasury contains a fortune in not only coins but silver and gold bars (monetary value: 4). Each gold bar weighs 30 pounds and is worth 1,500 gp; each silver bar weighs 60 pounds and is worth 3,000 sp. Coins are common currency, but not everyone has access to whole bars of silver and gold—not even dragons!—so Greengrasp finds them particularly pleasing (intangible value: 1). Total value: coin 8, bars 9.

- Gems and jewelry. Aside from their monetary value (4), the labor and skill required to cut these stones and work these pieces increases their beauty and confers greater worth upon them (intangible value: 2). Total value: 10.

- Magic items. Greengrasp is particularly drawn to enchanted jewelry—rings, necklaces, brooches, circlets, and so forth—but uncommon magic items are unremarkable among the fey, and Greengrasp considers these beneath him. For a gift of a magic item to impress him, the item must be at least rare, and these are what end up in his treasury. The intangible value he assigns to them is commensurate with the monetary value they’d have to a thief—or the operational value they’d have to an adventurer (rare: 2, very rare: 3, legendary: 4). All these types of value contribute to the items’ total value: rare items 10, very rare items 13, legendary items 16.

- Loot in transport. Not all of Greengrasp’s wealth is secure in his treasury. Some of it is en route through his realm from the mines where it’s unearthed. While as coveted as his other treasures (intrinsic value: 4), any given load comprises only as much loot as can be piled into a cart or wagon (monetary value: 2). Total value: 6.

- Mines. Similarly, the mines themselves are scattered across his realm, distant from Everhold. Unlike the loot they produce, they’re not valuable simply because they exist; instead, their value lies in their productive capacity (economic value: 4), with some small additional weight given to the fact that he’s proud to possess them and their bounty (intangible value: 1). Total value: 5.

- Exclusivity. Not for any rabble to enter Everhold, oh, no. Access to Greengrasp’s court is a jealously guarded prize—a gift that requires repayment. And what Greengrasp expects in return is self-abasement and flattery, preferably coupled with a material gift. Party crashers who show insufficient deference may be able to avoid his wrath by kindling his greed with a tantalizing offering, but it’s a gamble: An insufficiently engrossing offering will only offend and enrage him. As a measure of Greengrasp’s status, the exclusivity of his court has both intrinsic (4) and intangible (4) value to him. Total value: 8.

- Greengrasp. Even though, as an archfey, he can’t really be killed, he still expects his guards to defend him as if he could be. He considers his own life to be valuable per se, of course (intrinsic value: 4), and he overrates it in proportion with his arrogance (intangible value: 4). Total value: 8.

- Other lives. “Oh, yes, those people [waves hands dismissively]. Yes, I suppose their lives have value as well; it would be distasteful to have their blood on my hands. Also, some of them owe me favors” (intrinsic value: 2). The upshot is, while Greengrasp himself may not care a great deal for his subjects, his guards will respond to wanton murder. Total value: 2.

Faerie is a roiling realm full of jealousy, envy, whimsy, and spite. The fey fall in swooning love and form brutal grudges as easily as changing clothes; rhapsodic compliments and caustic insults are exchanged like small talk, and social status is watched as closely as a stock ticker or the weekend’s sports scores. Who might try to steal from Greengrasp? Who might dare? Probably not whoever would have tried to steal from him last week, or who’ll try to steal from him next week—but someone. Rival archfey won’t ever come after his most coveted treasures directly, but they might well send agents, and fey thieves are an especially tricky bunch.

On top of which, Clutch has a pest problem. Somehow, a colony of xorn managed to cross the barriers between planes and found Greengrasp’s domain to be a smörgåsbord of tasty delights. Fey politics are distracting enough, but nothing vexes Greengrasp nearly as much as being informed that xorn have consumed an entire drift’s worth of future rubies. To ensure that those burrowing abominations can’t get into his treasury, he’s made sure that it’s enclosed above, below, and on all sides by thick walls of dressed stone—but additional measures are necessary to protect his more vulnerable mines and transport wagons.

Greengrasp’s ego won’t tolerate anyone stealing from his treasury. It wouldn’t injure him or disrupt his activities in any way, but the offense would be so great that he’d pursue vengeance as far as he could reach. Even the loss of a single mine cart enrages him to an extent that sends his retainers running. A dude with four arms can throw a lot of objects in anger.

Unfortunately for his ego, and despite his archfey status, Greengrasp’s defensive resources aren’t unlimited. His first priority is to defend his treasury, in particular his rarest magic items. His next priority is keeping the riffraff out of Everhold. Only after that can he afford to give thought to protecting his mines and transport wagons. Pragmatically, it would make much more sense to defend the mines and the wagons from bandits and xorn before defending his ballroom from hoi polloi, but alas, his fey vanity gets in the way.

DEFENSE

Greengrasp (see appendix B) has sharp eyes and a sharp nose, and he can see in the dark, but he doesn’t have any super-enhanced senses beyond those, and whatever other powers archfey may possess, nowhere is it written that they’re omniscient within their domains. Therefore, like any mundane ruler, he has to rely on guards assigned to security and reconnaissance tasks to handle the detection component of his security plan. However, he does have one advantage over his mundane counterparts: the Quickling Messenger Service, which utilizes the fleet-footed fey to carry news back to Everhold from all parts of Clutch.

Those who visit Clutch would be well advised to buckle their satchels and cinch their pouches and rucksacks tightly, because the whole domain is influenced by Greengrasp’s avarice. Anyone crossing into Clutch, whether from the material world or another fey domain, must pass through a trollgate and pay the troll. That is, one troll demands a gold piece from each traveler who wishes to enter, while two others stand guard at the gate with crossed pikes (reach 10 feet, 2d10 + 4 piercing damage, replaces Claw attack as part of Multiattack), and if the travelers refuse to pay, they get stabbed. If they don’t have a fey guide to lead them to Everhold, the winding path they tread is very likely to lead them to another trollgate—or even the same one again—but there’s still no passing through without paying the troll.

As in any fey domain, travel through Clutch is difficult and disorienting. Time and space dilate and contract, straight-seeming paths double back on themselves, and the land is in perpetual dusk, dimly lit at noon and midnight alike. Without a guide, travelers are much more likely to lose their way and stumble into trouble. Travelers might encounter any of the following within the borders of Clutch:

RANDOM ENCOUNTERS IN CLUTCH

Roll three times on the table on the way to Everhold. If the party has a fey guide, roll only twice, and the PCs have advantage on ability checks to influence the outcome of the encounter. Reroll any duplicate outcome.

d10

Encounter

1

The party must run a gantlet of 5  awakened trees and 6 awakened shrubs. Each PC must make a DC 20 Dexterity check. On a failure, an awakened tree snatches the PC’s pack.

2

The party is stalked by goblins, who wait for them to camp and rest. When just one PC is on watch, 36  goblins and a goblin boss waylay them, striking with their scimitars to deal nonlethal damage (use the Mob Attacks table in Dungeon Master’s Guide, chapter 8). The goblins then loot the PC’s unconscious body and steal as much as they can from the sleeping party. A successful DC 20 Wisdom (Perception) check by the PC on watch thwarts the ambush.

3

A  giant ant (see appendix B) approaches the party and attempts to take the pack of a PC carrying food. A successful DC 20 Strength check retains control of the backpack. The giant ant is determined, however, and continues to try to take the pack. In round 3, it’s joined by 2 more giant ants; in round 5, it’s joined by 3 more; in round 7, it’s joined by 5 more; and in round 9, it’s joined by 8 more (use the Mob Attacks table in Dungeon Master’s Guide, chapter 8). The giant ants can be stopped only by running from them, creating a strong smell that confuses them, or seriously wounding them. If attacked, they fight back, Disengaging and moving away if reduced to 5 hp or fewer.

4

12  vine blights encircle the party at a distance of 10 feet, then use Entangling Plants to try to restrain the PCs. If successful, they try to take any object attached to the restrained PCs’ belts—bags, pouches, weapon sheaths, quivers, etc. (use the Disarm optional action, Dungeon Master’s Guide, chapter 9, “Action Options”; the vine blights have advantage on their attack rolls against restrained targets). A vine blight moves away once it’s taken something from a PC. If attacked, the vine blights fight back.

5

The party must make a DC 20 Wisdom group check. On a group failure, they stumble into the midst of a flock of 12  harpies that try to lure them into a 20-foot-deep ravine, then strike with their claws and clubs to deal nonlethal damage. If a PC is knocked unconscious, the harpies try to take their belt pouches and packs and fly away with them. On a group success, the party avoids the harpies altogether.

6

The party must make a DC 20 Wisdom group check. On a group failure, 36  kenku, with the coloration of magpies, have surrounded the party and emerge with bows drawn, making the sounds of jingling coins. They leave if the PCs hand over all their money, fight if they don’t (use the Mob Attacks table in Dungeon Master’s Guide, chapter 8), and flee if at least 12 of them are seriously wounded. On a group success, the party spots the skulking kenku and avoids them.

7

The party crosses paths with one of Greengrasp’s treasure wagons. The wagon is accompanied by 8  deep gnome miners, 12 fey guards (see appendix B), and 1 quickling (see Volo’s). Roll 1d4 to determine the type of draft animals pulling it (1: mules, 2: draft horses, 3: elk, 4: giant lizards) and 1d6 to determine its load (1: silver bars, 2–3: gold bars, 4: corundum rough, 5: beryl rough, 6: quartz rough). The guards warn the PCs to keep their distance.

8

After passing through a section of forest where the leaves of trees appear to be edged in silver and gold, each PC must make a DC 20 Wisdom saving throw. On a failure, a PC begins to covet their allies’ treasure and to suspect their allies of planning to take their own treasure from them. While under this effect, their eyes turn green; if they’re green already, the whites turn green as well. The effect lasts until the PC completes a short or long rest.

9

A  xorn rises out of the ground next to a PC and points to the PC’s pack with one claw, to the top flap with another, and to its mouth with a third. It gets increasingly agitated if it isn’t fed coins or gems, and it eventually tries to snatch the pack away (use the Disarm optional action, Dungeon Master’s Guide, chapter 9, “Action Options”). If successful, the xorn begins tearing the pack apart, looking for treasure to consume.

10

The party comes across a patrol of 6  xorn hunters (see appendix B), who have set out a pile of silver coins as bait to attract a xorn and are crouching hidden in a ring 70 feet from it. They’re initially indifferent but become hostile if their presence is given away. If 2 minutes pass without disturbance, such as making loud noises or walking through the xorn hunters’ circle, a xorn mouth opens up in the ground beneath the silver, and three xorn arms emerge to scoop the coins into it. The xorn hunters then cast misty step and rush in to attack the surprised xorn before it gets away.

The road to Everhold passes through a town-size settlement called Copperpinch, which the castle overlooks, and leads uphill through several switchbacks to the castle gate. The wooden door is just wide enough to accommodate a wagon but high enough to impress visitors with its proportions—and to allow the 18-foot-tall Greengrasp to walk through without ducking—and it’s flanked by two towers with arrow slits in them.

Gate guards demand that visitors state their names and business and (if festivities are taking place) show their invitations; if visitors bear gifts, the gate guards inspect them, to the extent that they’re able to. Quickling messengers ferry this information to the palace door guards, who double-check it when the visitors arrive—and alert other guards if the visitors don’t arrive in a timely manner. Inside the pal241ace, the door guards require each visitor to sign a guestbook with a quill of authentication (see appendix A). (Why wait until intruders are inside the palace to determine whether they’re who they say they are? Because if they’re still at the gate, it’s too easy for them to get away. Once they’re inside the wall, it’s easier to capture them.)

The battlemented castle wall is 10 feet deep and rises 30 feet above its stone foundation, with towers at the corners rising another story high. Rather than a dreary old keep, Everhold surrounds a magnificent palace where Greengrasp holds court; a variety of outbuildings, supporting and housing the guard force, are built into the walls and connect directly to the towers. There are no dirt floors anywhere in the castle: The palace, the outbuildings, and the entire bailey are tiled with tightly fitted paving stones, to prevent xorn from burrowing up from beneath.

The palace is giant-size, built to Greengrasp’s proportions, although it does contain a network of humanoid-scale doors and passages for servants and guards, as well as a number of guest rooms suitable for visitors of every size from Tiny to Large. At the center of the palace is a large courtyard surrounded by a columned gallery. This gallery connects to the castle wall and to various other areas in the palace accessible only to guards, including alternate and fallback positions. Since there’s always someone around to open them, all exterior doors are secured on the inside with sturdy sliding bolts rather than key locks.

At the back of the courtyard rises a stout tower with a giant-size door: Greengrasp’s treasury. The side and rear walls of this tower are 45 feet thick, to prevent anyone from getting through by casting passwall or transmute rock, and the uppermost 45 feet are solid stone as well. The only windows—arrays of tiny light shafts too narrow to fit a coin through—are on the front wall, facing the courtyard. The lock on the door is a living lock (see appendix B).

Behind this door, stairs lead up to the first of the two rooms of the treasury. Greengrasp’s gold and silver bars and coin are kept on the lower floor, the bars stacked on racks, the coin in chests. A spiral stair leads up to another locked door—this one with an ornate puzzle lock that’s very hard to crack, requiring successes on both Intelligence (Investigation) and Dexterity (thieves’ tools) checks and taking at least 1 minute to defeat—behind which the remainder of his treasure is kept. Gems, jewelry, and rare magic items are kept here in glass-topped display cases.

Greengrasp’s very rare magic items are stored inside a cabinet with a nearly impossible-to-pick puzzle lock that requires Intelligence (Investigation) and Dexterity (thieves’ tools) checks, two sets of thieves’ tools to jimmy tumblers that must be turned simultaneously, and at least 10 minutes to defeat. The lock also contains a poison needle trap triggered by a failure on the Dexterity (thieves’ tools) check (see Dungeon Master’s Guide, chapter 5, “Traps”; this trap deals 4d10 poison damage rather than 2d10). Greengrasp’s legendary items are secreted in a very hard-to-spot hidden compartment at the bottom of the cabinet.

Greengrasp could theoretically command a regiment of 1,300 troops (one-tenth his own experience point value), but that would exclude the many subjects he has making trouble for trespassers across his domain. Figuring that wandering monsters count for one-third of his experience point budget and regular troops the other two-thirds, Greengrasp can have at most one battalion of CR 1/2 troops, along with some higher-CR commanding officers and elite forces. These troops are divided into three companies of one hundred fey guards (see appendix B) and six quicklings (see Volo’s) guarding Everhold, one company per duty shift; one company of eighty fey guards and six quicklings assigned to defense of treasure wagons; another such company assigned to guarding the mines; and one company of eighty fey guards and four quicklings assigned to guarding the borders of Clutch. Each company is led by a captain (see appendix B) with Dexterity 14 (+2), Charisma 15 (+2), 60 feet of darkvision, Defensive Glamour, and Fey Nature (see the fey guard stat block).

In addition, Greengrasp has ordered the creation of a special unit of twenty-four elite xorn hunters (see appendix B). The expense of equipping them with adamantine weapons pains Greengrasp, who dislikes spending money in nonconspicuous ways, but it doesn’t pain him as much as having his lands infested with xorn does. Finally, at any given time, he has two trolls as personal bodyguards, two standing guard outside the treasury, and two resting.

There are several potential battle areas in the palace, but the most salient are the bailey, the courtyard, and Greengrasp’s audience hall. The palace guard has a primary position at each of these locations and dedicated passages by which it can easily move from one to another, as well as from primary positions to alternate positions.

Of the one hundred fey guards guarding the palace at any given time, sixty make up a response force, normally stationed in their primary position overlooking the bailey (A) but ready to rush to the courtyard or audience hall at a moment’s notice, while twenty guard the wall and the gate. Several of the wall guards are posted at supplementary positions. Two quicklings stay near the gate to run messages, while the other four conduct reconnaissance in pairs. Finally, the remaining twenty fey guards are kept in reserve in a ready room on the ground floor (B). When the main force manages to rout a group of intruders, the reserves move in to subdue, capture, and imprison them.

As much as possible, Greengrasp tries to stay out of combat himself, engaging only if attacked directly. Even then, he lets his two troll bodyguards run interference for him. If that fight starts to go badly, he withdraws, attempting to join up with the fey guards, while his bodyguards delay the attackers for as long as they can. If he can’t rendezvous with his guards, he locks himself in the treasury and prepares to make a last stand there. The longer it takes his foes to catch up with him, the more he’ll have healed up whatever damage he’s taken, until he’s as fresh as a king-size, four-armed daisy.

Qal’at as-Saḥāb

Milā.

GENIE’S PALACE

Minimum recommended party: four level 20 or five level 19 PCs

If you see a roiling thundercloud approaching, it may be an ordinary natural phenomenon—but then again, it may be Qal’at as-Saḥāb, the sky palace of the noble djinni Milāḥ, who travels the world in search of new knowledge and undiscovered beauty. In her palace, the kindly, gracious, and witty djinni hosts an everlasting salon, enlivened by the presence of several mortal shu’arā’: poets, musicians, and weavers of magic, on whom she’s bestowed a small portion of her own magical faculty in gratitude. Greater in power and stature than most djinn, though not on par with the rulers of her kind—and, therefore, not burdened by their responsibilities—she has the freedom to wander and follow her desires, a freedom she holds dearer than any possession.

ASSETS

- Money. Milāḥ is rich, albeit not as rich as many noble genies. Her treasury contains about 18,000 silver coins and 2,300 gold coins—but these are djinni coins, three times the diameter and ten times the weight of normal silver and gold pieces, so each silver coin is worth 1 gp, and each gold coin is worth 1 pp (monetary value: 3). Total value: 3.

- Gems. She also has a cache of gemstones: fifteen altogether, each worth 1,000 gp (monetary value: 2). Gems are prettier than money (intangible value: 1), but Milāḥ’s attachment to them doesn’t go any further than that. Total value: 3.

- Magic items. The djinni has a collection of magic items acquired in her travels or received as gifts. A thief would ascribe both monetary and operational value to them in proportion to their rarity (uncommon: 1, rare: 2, very rare: 3)—probably more value than she ascribes to them, since she has no intention of selling them and uses them only rarely. They’re pleasant curiosities to her, nothing more… with two exceptions. Total value: uncommon 2, rare 4, very rare 6.

- Al-Hawjā’. One exception is Milāḥ’s djinni-size scimitar of speed, which for Medium and Small creatures is equivalent in size to, and has the properties of, a greatsword. She’s fully cognizant of this enchanted weapon’s usefulness as a tool of self-defense (operational value: 3) and doesn’t underrate it, nor does she underrate the value it might have to someone looking to steal and sell it (monetary value: 3). She also likes how it feels in her hand (intangible value: 1). Total value: 7.

- Oud al-Mawsū‘ī. The other exception is this enchanted musical instrument (equivalent to a Canaith mandolin). To a thief, it’s not the biggest prize in Milāḥ’s collection (monetary value: 2, operational value: 2), but it’s special to her: She’s a lover of music, and while it’s too small for her to use herself, from time to time she takes it out and allows one of the bards in her court to play it just so that she can listen and enjoy the sound of it (intangible value: 2). Although the djinni isn’t materialistic by nature, she believes strongly that this oud, an object that not only is beautiful in and of itself but also brings even more beauty into the world, deserves to be handled with particular care and respect (intrinsic value: 2). Total value: 8.

- Pact gifts. From time to time, Milāḥ grows fond enough of certain mortals that she offers to confer special knowledge and power upon them. Customarily, they indicate acceptance of the offer and show their gratitude by presenting gifts in return. Milāḥ keeps a collection of these gifts—all the ones she’s received over the centuries—as mementos. They have material worth, to be sure (monetary value: 2), but to the djinni, their real importance lies in the memories they bring back (intangible value: 4). Total value: 6.

- Milāḥ. The djinni’s own life matters to her (intrinsic value: 4). Total value: 4.

- Shu’arā’. But the lives of others in her palace matter to her more! She considers their lives equal to her own in intrinsic value, and on top of that, she prizes the company of the shu’arā’ in her court (intangible value: 2). As the most powerful being in Qal’at as-Saḥāb (save one), she’ll readily and willingly take an arrow for any of them. Total value: 6.

- Freedom. However, more than her own life—more, in fact, than the lives of her shu’arā’—Milāḥ cherishes her liberty (intangible value: 4, intrinsic value: 4). Many genies are willing to perform magic as part of an exchange of favors, or as a gift freely given, but no genie wants to be used. Unfortunately, some people would rather go to the trouble of capturing a genie and forcing it to serve them (operational value: 4) than go to the trouble of making friends with one. (You may have met people like that. If so, I’m sorry.) Total value: 12.

Every genie dreads being captured and subjugated by an unscrupulous shā‘ir. To be forced to use one’s magic in servitude to another is humiliation; to be imprisoned in between such occasions is torment. Milāḥ’s freedom is her most valuable asset, and the threat she must protect it against is anyone who’s discovered how to ensnare a genie. She’s most vulnerable when she walks the earth; as long as she remains in Qal’at as-Saḥāb, she’s relatively safe, but her liberty is still not something to take chances with. While she’s willing to stand between a foe and the guests in her palace, she expects in turn that all the power of Qal’at as-Saḥāb will be brought to bear against anyone who shows up with an iron flask.

As for the rest of her assets, aside from her own life and the lives of her favored guests, no one’s likely to have any interest in them but thieves—and they’d have to know there was something to steal in order to steal them. That’s still a risk, however, since a certain kind of mind hears the phrase “genie palace” and immediately turns to thoughts of burglary. Out of all Milāḥ’s material assets, the oud al-Mawsū‘ī is both the most valuable and the most vulnerable, since she brings it out to hear it played. On these occasions, she has to change up her security a bit—not significantly, but enough that the oud performances are private affairs. She would grieve the loss of that instrument.

After the oud comes her sword, al-Hawjā’. She carries it on her person whenever she’s out and about; while it’s out in the open most of the time, it also serves as its own warning against attempting to swipe it. Her attachment to it isn’t sentimental (mostly), but if she were to lose it, it would be a sign that a whole lot more was about to go very wrong.

Next it’s a three-way tie: the lives of her court favorites, her collection of pact gifts, and her finest and rarest magic items. If intrinsic value is used as the first tie-breaker, the shu’arā’ come out in front. Whom might Milāḥ need to protect them against? For starters, anyone who’s come to threaten her, because they’ll be in the way. Beyond that, however, not much comes to mind. Envious rivals? Unlikely, frankly. Enemy djinn? Why would they care? Still, the shu’arā’ are vulnerable, since they have free run of the palace, at least the parts that aren’t restricted, and Milāḥ would grieve their deaths as well. On the flip side, they can, to an extent, take part in their own defense.

The value of the pact gifts is mainly intangible; the value of the very rare magic items is half monetary, half operational, and more a function of a thief’s estimation than her own. So Milāḥ is going to put more emphasis on defending the pact gifts, the loss of which would hurt. She’ll spend a little more effort protecting the very rare magic items than she does protecting herself, but only because of how tempting a lure they are.

Now comes another tie: her own life vs. rare magic items. Well, that’s a no-brainer. She’s going to protect herself. She can’t enjoy the magic items if she’s dead—and she can also replace them if they’re taken. There’s no special attachment here, and in fact if she’s genuinely worried for herself or her guests in the palace, she’ll offer up the rare magic items to buy an enemy off—although she’ll offer uncommon items and money first. (Not the gems, though. Why not? Because a 1,000 gp gem is the material component needed for the spell planar binding. Why in Gehenna would she give one of those to a known threat?)

DEFENSE

Qal’at as-Saḥāb is a marvel: a palace and surrounding walled garden built on the back of a living storm (use the elder tempest stat block from Mordenkainen’s; the living storm is lenticular rather than serpentine in shape, is 600 feet across, and can’t attack upward). The storm cruises at an altitude of 10,000 to 30,000 feet, never descending to earth. Milāḥ alights and returns by casting wind walk, which speeds her travel and disguises her as she flies. The magic of the castle allows all within its walls to breathe normally, but the air outside is dangerously thin and cold (see Dungeon Master’s Guide, chapter 5, “Wilderness Survival”; treat altitudes above 18,000 feet as frigid water). The skies above the castle are always clear and calm, with the exception of a number of small, fluffy white clouds that drift across the grounds, providing areas of shade when the sun beats down.

Within 5 to 10 miles (it varies) of the living storm, visibility is always lightly obscured, gusting winds mess with ranged attacks, and the sound of rain interferes with hearing. Within 1 mile, the living storm can use its Screaming Gale legendary action to batter would-be intruders. Within 120 feet, it can strike them with lightning. Unauthorized visitors will have to get above the cloud layer fast—faster than the living storm can rise to match altitude with them—if they want to make it to the wall in one piece.

The 20-foot-high walls surrounding Qal’at as-Saḥāb are octagonal, as is the palace proper. They’re a boundary marker rather than a security feature, since anything that can fly to the height of a castle in the sky can easily ascend another 20 feet to get over a wall. However, each corner of the wall is topped by a slender, 120-foot-tall watchtower, where a lesser djinni (see appendix B) stands guard. Through clear skies, they can spot approaching creatures from 40 miles away; they can also see up to 300 feet into the storm below them.

The palace grounds are a lush formal garden full of flowering plants, fruit and nut trees, pools and fountains (the water pumped up from the storm clouds below), grassy lawns, pergolas, and gazebos. These grounds are enjoyed not just by the occupants of the palace but also by an assortment of animals. These animals possess more than normal intelligence (add 6 to the Intelligence scores in their stat blocks and +3 to their Intelligence modifiers) and will run to Milāḥ if they encounter trespassers. Although they lack language, their behavior will clue her in that something’s awry.

RANDOM ENCOUNTERS IN QAL’AT AS-SAḤĀB GROUNDS

Roll 1d20 each time a PC enters a new section of the garden.

d20

Encounter

1–10

1 male gazelle (use the  goat stat block, Small size, with Armor Class 11, Strength 10, and Dexterity 12), which Dashes away if approached

11

10 female gazelles (stats as above), which Dash away if approached

12–15

1  poisonous snake, which Bites once if approached to within 5 feet, then Dashes away

16–19

1  fox (AC 13, 2 hp, speed 30 feet/burrow 5 feet, Perception +3, Stealth +5, darkvision 60 feet, passive Perception 13, Keen Hearing, and a Bite attack with +5 to hit, dealing 1 piercing damage—see the adventure Icewind Dale: Rime of the Frostmaiden for other stats), which observes from hiding (DC 16 to detect), Dashing away if approached

20

1 ostrich (use the  axe beak stat block, changing Beak attack to Kick), which Dashes away if approached

The grounds are a controlled area, but because of the impossibility of channeling those who approach through a single gate—if they can get to Qal’at as-Saḥāb in the first place, they can certainly fly—the lesser djinn that guard the walls go on immediate alert as soon as they see anyone or anything approaching that they haven’t been told about in advance. They hold their posts, sounding the alarm if a suspected intruder approaches within 240 feet (at night, 120 feet—the maximum range of their darkvision) but not taking further aggressive action unless an intruder crosses the wall. At that point they move to cut off the intruder’s approach, placing themselves between the intruder and the palace, and demand to know the reason for the intrusion.

Each lesser djinn guard has a horn and a specific call, so that all the others can identify which one is sounding an alarm. When one blows its horn, the two to its left and the two to its right fly over to join it; the three on the far side of the castle stay where they are, just in case there’s a second incursion from the other direction. There’s a ninth lesser djinni, which usually guards the palace door, that may be available to provide backup if needed, but when Milāḥ has the oud al-Mawsū‘ī out and is listening to a performance, that lesser djinni is posted outside her audience chamber instead. If this lesser djinni does join the fight at the wall, it relieves the most badly wounded lesser djinni there, which Disengages and rushes into the palace to report to Milāḥ.

The palace is marginally more controlled than the grounds, but only by virtue of having only one entrance and exit, which is guarded by lesser djinni No. 9. Guests of Milāḥ can move about the grounds and most of the palace freely, with tabs kept only on whether they’re inside or outside. Milāḥ even keeps the doors to her audience chamber open most of the time. However, her own rooms and her treasury are in a restricted area accessible only from her audience chamber and with her permission—which she generally doesn’t give.

The door to the restricted areas of the palace is accessed from a gallery overlooking Milāḥ’s audience chamber, 40 feet up, to which there are no stairs; it can be reached only by flying. The door can’t be opened from the outside, only from the inside. Its three-pointed arch shape features a fine tracery pattern at the top that allows Milāḥ or one of her lesser djinn to pass through by casting gaseous form. Nothing else larger than an insect can fit through the holes.

Beyond that, both her rooms and her treasury are reached from the same hallway. The door to the treasury has a hard-to-pick lock. Inside the first room of the treasury, where she keeps her gold, silver, gems, and uncommon magic items, there are also several hardwood chests, 2 feet wide and deep, 3 feet long, and weighing just shy of 300 pounds apiece. Each of these chests contains one of her rare magic items and is protected by a four-dial combination lock that’s very hard to pick.

Past Milāḥ’s apartments and the first room of her treasury, there are two more secure rooms, protected not only by very hard-to-pick pin tumbler locks but also doors of axebreaker wood that weigh 1,200 pounds each (DC 25 Strength check to open—proficiency in Athletics doesn’t help). The one adjoining her rooms is where she keeps her collection of pact gifts; the one adjoining the outer treasury is where she keeps her very rare magic items. In the latter room, the oud al-Mawsū‘ī is stored in a sturdy ebony cabinet with an extraordinarily intricate pin tumbler lock that’s nearly impossible to pick—and there’s no key. Other than the fabled master locksmith who made it, no one but Milāḥ has ever seen the key. Whenever she wants to open the case, she casts creation and makes the key anew out of adamantine. One minute later, the key melts into shadow.

When Milāḥ receives warning of an assault in progress, she immediately tells all but two of her four to eight shu’arā’ (see shā‘ir, appendix B) to seek shelter in the upstairs library and begins casting conjure elemental, just in case she’s going to need an extra bodyguard. The spell takes 1 minute to cast, so she needs to act quickly. When she’s finished, she stands guard in her audience chamber outside the entry to the restricted areas of Qal’at as-Saḥāb. If she was enjoying an oud performance, she orders the lesser djinni outside the door to take the oud and put it away before she begins casting the spell. After performing this task, the lesser djinni heads back outside to fulfill its reserve function.

If and when a fight ensues, Milāḥ tries to stay in front, interposing herself between her enemies and her shu’arā’, while the shu’arā’ stay several steps behind, supporting Milāḥ by trying to neutralize any enemy or enemies engaging her in melee. At the same time, the conjured air elemental wheels around, taking out more distant threats to the shu’arā’ (first) or Milāḥ (second). But Milāḥ isn’t going to start that fight: When her palace is invaded, her first inclination is to try to talk the invaders into leaving by buying them off, seeking a bargain that serves both her own interest and theirs. That parley ends only when it comes to a satisfactory resolution, the invaders insult her beyond forbearance, or it becomes clear that the invaders’ goal is to capture her. In the final case, Milāḥ, her shu’arā’, and her air elemental all focus their attacks on whichever of her enemies has the means to imprison her; if she can manage it, she’ll plane shift that enemy someplace they won’t enjoy at all, where they’ll pose no further threat to her—Carceri, maybe, or Pandemonium.

It’s not terribly likely that anyone will invade Qal’at as-Saḥāb solely to come after a shā‘ir, but if they do, and if that shā‘ir isn’t one of the ones aiding Milāḥ in her defense, she and her elemental will pursue them, attempting to run them down and subdue them before they reach their target. These attacks will be nonlethal; punishment in earnest will come later, following a trial. That trial will be something of a kangaroo court, but she’ll at least give the intruders a chance to explain themselves before deciding what to do with them at last. The same is true if she catches anyone in the act of breaking into her treasury, with one exception: If they’ve come for the oud al-Mawsū‘ī, they’ve made a huge mistake.

If the defense of Qal’at as-Saḥāb fails—or if attackers kill the living storm, causing the whole castle to fall—Milāḥ will order all lesser djinn within earshot to sound a special call on their horns, one that announces evacuation of the palace. Upon hearing that call, all her shu’arā’ will retire to her audience chamber as fast as they can, while the surviving lesser djinn do their best to delay the attackers. If she’s not seriously wounded, Milāḥ will join the delay operation long enough to give the shu’arā’ time to reach the chamber, then withdraw there herself. Upon arriving, she’ll slam and bar the door, then begin casting wind walk, including all the shu’arā’ in the effect of the spell. When the spell is complete, she’ll abandon Qal’at as-Saḥāb and whisk her shu’arā’ off to a safe location. Then she’ll start gathering resources with which to retake the castle in the sky, provided it still flies.

BLUE DRAGON LAIR

Minimum recommended party: five level 20 PCs

The joining of East and West along the Saffron Way brought new delights to both—and abundant riches not just to the merchants who plied the road but to the cities that sheltered them. Of the latter, Shahr-e Kariz, situated over an aquifer that made it a reliable and plentiful source of water in the otherwise arid land, was one of the most magnificent. But its magnificence attracted the attention of the blue dragon Shokuhetarsnak, who slew the khan and his family and took over the city and the surrounding lands. Her reign of terror has placed the merchant caravans of the Saffron Way in an impossible position: If they avoid Shahr-e Kariz, they run a severe risk of running out of water in the vast Desert of Red Sands. If they pass near and they don’t pay obeisance—and tribute—to Shokuhetarsnak, they’ll get eaten. However, even those who do acknowledge her authority occasionally get eaten anyway. She’s unpredictable like that.

ASSETS

- Looooooooooot. Shokuhetarsnak was already an adult dragon with a respectable hoard when she took over Shahr-e Kariz. Since then, she’s increased it with tribute extorted from traveling merchants and the city’s nobility and citizenry. The gold, platinum, and gemstones alone amount to nearly a ton (monetary value: 4). The very rare and legendary magic items would possess enormous operational value to anyone who wrested them away (operational value: 4), and the gems and art objects are both magnificent and historically important (intangible value: 4). The vain and greedy dragon would never dream of parting with a single coin of it (intrinsic value: 4). Total value: 16.

- Dominion. Almost as important to Shokuhetarsnak as her loot is the fact that she holds Shahr-e Kariz—and, by extension, the entire Saffron Way—in a death grip. Her command over the city brings her not only tremendous wealth (economic value: 4) but also the clout to summon people of interest to her court to entertain her and carry out her commands (operational value: 2). It also feeds her insatiable ego (intangible value: 4). A manifestation of her innate territoriality, Shokuhetarsnak’s dominion over Shahr-e Kariz is an abstract asset that doesn’t neatly fall into the category of loot, lore, or life but nevertheless has major intrinsic value to her (3). Total value: 13.

- “Pets.” The lives of the bards, magicians, sages, and artists who grace Shokuhetarsnak’s court are in no way comparable in value to her own, but they are worth something (intrinsic value: 1), because they please her (intangible value: 3). She’ll take steps to ensure that they aren’t inadvertently killed… or rescued. Total value: 4.

- Shokuhetarsnak. The now-ancient blue dragon values no other life as highly as her own (intrinsic value: 4), and her narcissism only inflates that value further (intangible value: 4). Total value: 8.

Shokuhetarsnak is vain but not foolish. Other creatures as powerful as she is might imagine that they had no rivals capable of challenging them, but she has enough sense to know that threats don’t always come from the powerful. Her sway over Shahr-e Kariz is so strong—and dragons’ terrain preferences so ingrained—that she doesn’t need to worry about whether another dragon might try to knock her off her throne. No blue or brass dragon within a hundred miles can match her strength, and no ancient dragon of any other color is interested in what she’s got. The far likelier threat to her hoard is a band of master thieves; to her dominion, an organized rebellion; to her collection of “pets,” a rescue mission mounted by self-styled heroes; to her life, a champion wielding some ancient weapon of legend. She therefore hungers for information as much as for gold and maintains a far-reaching network of spies and assassins to uncover and eliminate threats before they can ever get near her.

Of her various assets, her captive savants are the most vulnerable: She must roam far to feed herself, and these hunting trips are obviously the best time for them to try to escape, or for others to try to free them. She won’t chance that, so while she’s gone, their quarters in the castle are locked down.

Shokuhetarsnak’s wealth and power are immense, and while she’ll never let so much as a copper fals out of her clutches, she allows her tax collectors to replenish the city’s treasury first before giving her her cut—a shrewd choice, since it not only keeps the city shining but also buys a legion of civil servants, soldiers, spies, and assassins for her to command. It also lets her build a velvet cage around her “pets,” lessening their determination to escape.

DEFENSE

The lair defense of Shokuhetarsnak, an ancient blue dragon, begins far beyond the limits of Shahr-e Kariz, in the other cities along the Saffron Way where she has spies—both snoops and plants (see appendix B). Her snoops blend in as marketplace beggars and performers, inn staff, and handlers of draft animals. When their suspicions are raised, they pass word along to plants, who insinuate themselves into the suspect characters’ travel plans. Interesting company on a long journey through the desert is hard to find, and travelers are usually grateful, if not outright desperate, to find it. Any given caravan on the Saffron Way also contains a couple of snoops and at least one plant. Of course, these spies send word to their dragon mistress of the strangers’ arrival—and everything else about them—as soon as they arrive in Shahr-e Kariz.

Shokuhetarsnak hunts by day (her darkvision doesn’t reach far enough for her to hunt in the dark with it), ranging far and wide, and she can spot approaching caravans from as far as 40 miles away with her own keen eyes. When she does, she often flies toward them to test their reactions. Experienced caravaners know to keep moving forward and not to panic: Those who’ve sworn their allegiance to the dragon are expected to humbly accept her will, and freaking out is a sign that you haven’t done that. So is drawing weapons at her approach. If a caravan proceeds calmly, she may move on, satisfied, or she may land, sniff around, ask questions, and demand various pro forma shows of submission. If it speeds up, stops, or scatters, she’ll attack, relenting only if someone in the caravan has the presence of mind to offer surrender.

The dragon has more spies in the city itself, mostly snoops who report to Shokuhetarsnak’s spymaster. He, in turn, passes the intelligence he receives to the commandant of the city guard, who relays instructions to the troops through a system of horn calls. Every guard patrol in Shahr-e Kariz includes a bugler, whose calls convey information to other patrols within earshot.

The Desert of Red Sands is actually more rocky than sandy, but there’s more than enough particulate matter around for a strong wind to kick up a vision-obscuring dust storm. The sands are also deep enough to conceal predatory ankhegs. They rarely approach caravans, but they pose a serious danger to small groups cutting across the desert, as do giant scorpions, bands of nomadic tlincallis (see Volo’s), and tribes of thri-kreen. On the plus side, the tlincallis and thri-kreen are implacable enemies and fight each other whenever they cross paths, giving victims of one or the other a window of opportunity for escape; on the minus side, if Shokuhetarsnak is out hunting, their clashes draw her attention.

The deterrents increase in number as one approaches Shahr-e Kariz. Lightning crisscrosses the thick, dark storm clouds that perpetually blanket the skies within 5 miles of the city; stray bolts strike the ground at random from time to time. Beneath these skies, dust devils whirl, and the sandy, rocky ground is riddled with hidden sinkholes. Except during dust storms, a troop of guards mounted on riding horses conducts reconnaissance patrols outside the city walls and intercepts any person or group of people spotted approaching the city separate from a caravan.

The city, which climbs up the side of a hill, is surrounded by an octagonal curtain wall of dressed stone, 40 feet high and 10 feet thick, with battlements along the top and bartizans at the corners. The entrance zigzags and contains three portcullises and three pairs of stout wooden double doors. The main roads through the dense city are broad and straight, but none of them leads directly from the gate to the castle, which has an additional curtain wall of its own. In addition, the only access route to the castle (other than a couple of posterns that must be opened from inside) leads through a barbican that extends forward 150 feet from the inner wall. When Shokuhetarsnak learns of an incursion attempt, she perches atop the castle wall, facing down the neck of the barbican, and prepares to zot her canalized enemies as they enter.

The city guard is commanded by a commandant (see appendix B for garrison officer stat blocks) and divided into four companies, each commanded by a captain: two companies of regular guard troops (armed with scimitars and light crossbows), one company of mounted guard troops, and one company of elite Dragon Guards (see appendix B). The Dragon Guards protect the castle, the regular guards protect the city, and the mounted guards patrol outside.

At any given time during the day, thirty guards, overseen by a lieutenant, in three groups of ten, each led by a sergeant, keep watch on the walls and at the gate, while another one hundred twenty patrol the several quarters of the city, ready to respond to any incursion. The day is divided into two shifts—dawn to noon and noon to dusk—with one guard captain on duty during each shift, and an equal number of off-duty guards can be mobilized as a reserve to assist those on duty, under the command of their own captain. The same number of guards are on duty at night, but the day shift guards must sleep then and can’t come to their aid, and a lieutenant gives the orders.

In similar fashion, each day shift sees thirty Dragon Guards on duty in the castle: eighteen around the bailey, six guarding Shokuhetarsnak’s “pets,” and six in reserve, with another thirty awake but off-duty guards available to assist. The guards on night shift are on their own. The captain of the Dragon Guards gives orders during the day; a lieutenant is in charge at night.

A mounted recon patrol comprises ten guards (armed with scimitars and shortbows) on riding horses; there are four such patrols outside the city at any given time during the day, each assigned to a different area. They approach suspicious characters to a distance of about 80 feet and issue a command to halt. Two approach halfway to question the new arrivals about their business while all but one of the rest draw their bows and make ready to attack at any sign of hostile movement. The last one readies their horn.

If the answers they get don’t add up, they’ll move to surround and apprehend the suspects, escort them to the city, jail them, and interrogate them. However, if the suspects fight back in a manner that shows they’re a real threat, the mounted guards gallop back to the city, sounding the alarm, which is picked up and repeated by the guards on the city wall.

When they hear horns sound, the civilians of Shahr-e Kariz get off the streets: No one wants to be struck by a stray crossbow bolt or get fried by a ruthless lightning discharge. Patrolling guards mobilize toward whichever quarter of the city intruders have been spotted in, with constant updates provided by horn call, and mass together. If the intruders are hiding amid the narrow streets, the guards spread out along the main streets, no more than 160 feet apart, to surround the quarter and apprehend them when they emerge. Meanwhile, if it’s daytime and reinforcements have been called up, they set up at the nearest battle position to where the intruders were seen last, between them and the castle, and function as a reserve—moving in as a hard-hitting melee unit when defense transitions to offense, or delaying the enemy if the main force must withdraw.

The castle is a restricted area. The bailey inside the castle gate is the Dragon Guards’ main battle area, where they shower intruders with crossbow bolts from the walls above and from embrasures in the front wall of the palace. Their reserve is stationed in the palace courtyard. The entrance to the palace is a wooden double door, barred on the inside, and the front-facing wing consists of guardrooms and barracks. The quarters and workrooms of servants are on one side of the interior courtyard; guest quarters, including the heavily guarded quarters of Shokuhetarsnak’s “pets,” are on the other.

The “guest wing” is built around a T-shaped hallway. The double door from the palace courtyard to this wing is barred from outside when it’s not open; the doors from individual quarters onto the hallway have elaborate warded locks, which were made by skilled locksmiths at Shokuhetarsnak’s command and are difficult to pick. When the dragon is around, her “pets” are permitted to wander the palace at will during the day, but at night and when she’s away, they’re locked in their rooms, and the door to the wing is closed, barred, and guarded.

Opposite the palace entrance is a large iwan—once the court of the khan, now the court of the dragon, where she basks while her officers deliver reports and her prisoners entertain her with their erudition. The Dragon Guards, who fight to the death, make their last stand in front of it.

Not Shokuhetarsnak, though. No one dares intrude on the dragon’s space, so no one gets close enough to examine the demolished living quarters of the former khan, left unrepaired as a reminder and a warning. If they did, they might see through the permanent major image spell, cast by one of her now-deceased “pets,” that conceals a 20-foot-wide hole in the floor with an illusion of collapsed walls and splintered furniture (DC 16 to see through the illusion). This hole, dug decades ago by laborers who were devoured after they completed their work, leads to Shokuhetarsnak’s true lair, in an abandoned gallery of a turquoise and copper mine in the hills behind Shahr-e Kariz. The adit that runs between the palace and the mine has two segments that meet at a slight angle; each segment is a straight passage that, again, allows the dragon to aim her breath weapon directly at intruders, who have nowhere else to go. It also leads to the top of the gallery, so anyone who follows the dragon in is confronted with a two-story drop at the end.

The gallery, mined out by the room-and-pillar method, is a checkerboard network of 30-foot-wide passages separated by 90-foot-wide square pillars. The ceiling is 45 feet high, giving Shokuhetarsnak plenty of clearance to fly around inside. The dragon likes the feeling of bedding down on sand, and the floor of the gallery is covered with a thick layer of it. It serves to hide her hoard, but beyond that, she can also summon up clouds of it to protect herself; in addition, she can cause lightning to leap between the mine pillars (which are marvelously conductive, thanks to their copper content), and the ceiling is pretty close to failing.

One side of the gallery—the side leading to the rest of the mine, which is still in operation—is caved in. In a pinch, she can burrow through the rubble (A) and escape through the active part of the mine. Any such retreat is temporary, however: She’ll circle back around to the castle and ambush her foes on their way out.

RANDOM ENCOUNTERS IN THE DESERT OF RED SANDS

Roll 1d20 for every hour of travel. On an 18 or higher, roll 1d8 if more than 5 miles from Shahr-e Kariz, 1d8 + 5 if within 5 miles.

1d8/1d8 + 5

Encounter

1–2

1d4 + 1  tlincallis, hostile

3–4

3d4 + 10  thri-kreen (weapons variant), indifferent; they won’t approach closer than 30 feet unless social interaction turns them either friendly or hostile

5–6

1  giant scorpion

7

1  ankheg, buried under 5 feet of sand

8

A strong wind picks up, creating a dust storm. For the next 1d4 hours, all creatures have disadvantage on Wisdom (Perception) checks that rely on sight.

9–10

Recon patrol of 10  guards on riding horses (see text)

11

1 dust devil (use the  air elemental stat block, speed 50 feet, no flying speed, Intelligence and Charisma 1 [-5])

12

Lightning strikes uncomfortably close. Roll 1d4. On a 1–3, the bolt strikes about 30 feet away; all characters are deafened for 1 minute. On a 4, the bolt strikes in the middle of the party. All characters are deafened for 1 minute, and each creature within 5 feet of the lightning strike must make a DC 15 Dexterity saving throw, taking 4d10 lightning damage on a failed save, or half as much damage on a success.

13

If PCs are traveling with a caravan, no encounter. If they’re traveling independently, they encounter a hidden sinkhole. The sinkhole is detected with a successful DC 20 Wisdom (Perception) check. If it isn’t detected, the first creature to step on it must succeed on a DC 15 Dexterity saving throw or fall 1d6 × 10 feet into it.

LICH’S CRYPT

Minimum recommended party: five level 20 PCs

For ages, rugged Mount Jesaret has been thought of as orc territory—specifically, the territory of a tribe of brutal raiders called the Howling Storm. A few years ago, however, the raids suddenly ceased, and those daring enough to investigate the reason reported back, incredulously, that the orcs were building. A stone fortification of some kind, with a tower. Strange, since no one would ever think of pursuing the Howling Storm up the mountain to attack them.

Eventually, once the structure was finished, the orcs’ raids did resume, albeit with less frequency… and more apparent calculation. Were the Howling Storm orcs now deferring to the will of a chief, one with a more strategic mind? Yes, but not in the sense that people initially thought. The glory-seeking orcs had fallen under the sway of a ruthless, scheming, egomaniacal wizard named Zviad Uk’vdavi, a necromancer exiled by the pious empire of Propontis and ostracized by his fellow wizards in the College of Anacalypsis.

No… not a wizard. A lich. With many goals, but one inconceivably ambitious and yet wondrously petty: to pay back the pontiffs of Propontis by killing their god.

ASSETS

- Research library. Zviad considers information to be valuable in and of itself (intrinsic value: 4), and he’s been gathering research material for decades. His library includes texts on every school of magic, but most of all on necromancy, his focus of study. The texts contain all widely known and practiced illusion and evocation spells up to 3rd level, divination spells up to 6th level, and transmutation, conjuration, abjuration, enchantment, and necromancy spells up to 8th level. Additional notebooks and unbound manuscripts include the 9th-level spells astral projection and imprisonment. At one time, this library was indispensable to Zviad’s work, but having internalized much of the information it holds, he relies on it slightly less now (operational value: 3). However, Zviad shelled out a lot of money to assemble his collection. If looted, the books in the library would command somewhere in the neighborhood of 1 million gp altogether, with the rarest texts accounting for 80 percent of that price (monetary value: 4). Total value: 11.

- Spellbooks. Not “spellbook”: Zviad filled his first one completely some time ago and had to start a second book for his 8th- and 9th-level spells. Some of the spells in these books (e.g., major image and simulacrum) aren’t in his library; they were copied from scrolls. He doesn’t care about the theory behind them, only their applications. Unlike most wizards, Zviad doesn’t have a strong personal attachment to his spellbooks (intangible value: 1): He considers them a mere tool, albeit a necessary one (operational value: 4), as well as a slightly irksome reminder that even he still has to study every day to remain in control of his arcane powers. But, like all lore, he considers their contents inherently important (intrinsic value: 4). Total value: 9.

- Personal notes. In pursuit of his psychopathic aim of killing Morrow, the Lord of Dawn, Zviad has been conducting independent research into high-level necromancy, abjuration, and conjuration magic. These notes are an important part of his work, but they’re the product, not the tool, and he still has a way to go; the time to use them will come later (operational value: 2). He apprizes them as he does all lore (intrinsic value: 4), even more so because they’re the fruit of his own effort and will (intangible value: 4). Total value: 10.

- Maps to arcane sites. Sometimes you have to travel for work. Many writings refer to lore whose whereabouts are no longer known with any certainty, because the fates that befell its authors or owners kept it from passing into other hands. But with enough time and determination—both of which Zviad has in spades—even a cold trail can be followed, and when you reach the end of it, a broken chain of custody usually means “finders keepers.” Especially if you’re willing to, you know, commit murder. Zviad is very willing to commit murder, and it’s paid off for him a few times, making these maps good investments (operational value: 3). Even when they haven’t paid off, knowing stuff—especially stuff other people don’t know—is still cool (intrinsic value: 4). Total value: 7.

- Material components. The stuff of magic, the matrix that shapes magical energy, for which a nice staff or wand sometimes suffices, but not always. Zviad keeps a stockpile of diamond dust for nondetection and glyph of warding, incense for glyph, bottles of leaded ink for illusory script, gold dust for arcane lock, and such a large hoard of black onyx for create undead that it’s actually caused inflation in the semiprecious stone’s price across the continent. He also has a padded case containing forked rods tuned for interplanar travel to Morrow’s home plane, Elysium, along with the Astral Plane, the Penumbral, the Abyss, Acheron, Gehenna, Hades, and two other phantasmagorical, heretofore unheard-of planes, plus several tuned to the material plane; a scrying font; and a large cache of adamantine ingots, with which he’s experimenting in the hope of discovering the secret to personal invulnerability. The cost of all these materials is in the neighborhood of 50,000 gp (monetary value: 3). An arcanist of Zviad’s caliber needs this stuff like a glassblower needs sand (operational value: 4). Total value: 7.

- Alchemy supplies. Zviad used to use these tools a lot in his research, but he’s moved on to other topics. Now he only uses them occasionally, to brew potions he likes to keep on hand (operational value: 1). Total value: 1.

- Potions. Speaking of which, Zviad’s potion cabinet generally contains a few potions of greater healing, a few potions of heroism, lots of potions of clairvoyance, and a single potion of invulnerability that he brewed in the process of his experimentation. Useful (operational value: 2), mainly because they let him enjoy the benefits of magic without burning spell slots on it, but not valuable in any other way. Total value: 2.

- The Tome of Atrocity. A unique artifact that contains, among other loathsome lore, the secret formula for gaining eternal unlife through lichdom. Zviad, of course, has made use of this knowledge and continues to follow other recipes in the book as well (operational value: 4). Valuable for the knowledge it contains (intrinsic value: 4) and for—well, you always remember your first foray beyond the veil of mortality, not to mention your final and irrevocable divorce from reason and decency (intangible value: 4). Total value: 12.

- Money. Magic is a lucrative line of work. As of this writing, Zviad’s treasury contains 74,000 gp and 54,000 pp (monetary value: 4). Total value: 4.

- Zviad. He’s so into himself, he’s made sure he’ll be around forever (intrinsic value: 4, intangible value: 4). Total value: 8.

- Soulward. And this is how he did it: a pyramidal box of blackwood, inlaid with silver runes and topped with a clear, flawless, 10-carat diamond in an orichalcum setting, which houses Zviad’s soul (intrinsic value: 4; intangible value: 4). As long as it exists, Zviad is deathless. Destroy his body, and the soulward will cause a new one to coalesce before it a few days later (operational value: 4). The only way to rid the world of Zviad Uk’vdavi for good is to destroy his soulward, which requires a tricky, obscure combination of spells, not to mention possession of the soulward itself. Even so, the fact that it can be destroyed at all is the lich’s greatest vulnerability. Total value: 12.

Zviad’s soulward is his most valuable and critical possession, but the Tome of Atrocity is a very close second, because it contains sensitive information that he doesn’t want to let fall into any other hands—including not just how to become a lich but also how to destroy a soulward. Zviad has a lot of enemies, foremost among them the religious authorities of Propontis and the wizards who once numbered him among their colleagues, but also rival necromancers who’d love to steal his secrets. He even has to protect the much-coveted Tome of Atrocity from theft by scheming extraplanar entities. He has his work cut out for him.

The soulward he can keep hidden away by a variety of devious means, but Zviad needs to refer to the Tome of Atrocity—more and more often these days, it seems—which means he can’t just keep it in storage all the time. It has to be as secure when he takes it out as it is when he puts it away. That’s a major constraint. The other problem is that the tome defies attempts to hold on to it. Place it in a wooden box, and the wood rots. Entomb it in stone, and the stone cracks and crumbles. Seal it under glass, and the glass shatters. Zviad keeps it in a case made of an alloy of nine parts platinum to one part gold, which seems to be doing the trick (and, as a bonus, protects against locate object as well as lead does).

Zviad’s research library is his next most valuable asset. It’s more vulnerable than the Tome of Atrocity, because there’s so much of it—six large cases, every shelf full—and when he does still need to look something up, he wants to be able to find the relevant text right away. Unlike some things one might steal from a wizard, these books would be laughably easy to fence: There’s a huge demand for the knowledge they contain, at every level, and no one’s going to be hung up on where they came from. Now, granted, you have to have a lot of confidence to try to steal from a lich, and that confidence has to be justified; no garden-variety larcenist is going to get anywhere near Zviad’s library. But that simply means that any thief who comes for Zviad’s books is going to be a master thief, and he has to protect them accordingly. That being said, he can afford to lose the more common ones; they’re easy to replace, and he almost never needs to look things up in them anymore anyway. The rarer ones… yeah, it would be a problem if he lost those. Here’s the poser: Does he place them under extra protection, knowing that this will call attention to their presence and their value and attract a thief’s interest, or does he scatter them among his other books, counting on the books’ uniform appearance to camouflage the rarest ones and force a thief to spend precious time assessing the value of each one?

After the library come Zviad’s research notes. The considerations around these unbound papers are the same as those around his rarer books, with one difference: They’re not going to be mistaken for textbooks of magic, so they can’t be hidden in plain sight. Illusion magic can pull some weight here, but a spellcaster strong enough to risk a lich’s wrath will have ways of seeing past that, so other means must be found.

Next are Zviad’s spellbooks. These have to come out for 1 ½ to 2 hours every time he needs to memorize a new set of spells for the day, and they’re vulnerable when he does—albeit less vulnerable than they’d be if he weren’t right there. Still, they need to be kept locked away when he’s not using them. Anyone who’d come at Zviad or his property for any other reason will also be interested in his spellbooks, so they’ll require considerable protection, too.

After these, Zviad’s most valuable asset is himself. We’re not talking about his life, strictly speaking, because that’s already gone. We’re talking more about his convenience (being wrecked and reconstituted is unpleasant, and it takes days to recover from, and who knows what shenanigans any invaders formidable enough to take down a lich might get up to in his absence?) and his capacity to act. To be more specific, he might return from his temporary nonexistence to find that his attackers have occupied his crypt and are standing around him waiting to clap him into magical restraints. This scenario is well worth preventing.

Beyond these items, Zviad’s assets are significantly less critical. Maps to arcane sites? He’s already visited and ransacked many of them. If someone gets to one he hasn’t been to first, that will be extremely annoying, and he’ll want to retaliate against them, but it probably won’t be a catastrophe. Material components? Expensive, but mostly replaceable. Money? He’s got a lot of it, he likes having it, but no one’s busting into a lich’s crypt just to clean out the coffers. Potions? He made them; he can make more. Alchemy equipment? Might as well itemize the bucket in the well while we’re at it.

DEFENSE

Zviad Uk’vdavi’s defense of his assets begins far beyond the boundaries of his lair—and long before his enemies even begin to plot against him. It begins with spies.

Grimaldo Rialto, a diviner, is Zviad’s spymaster. He oversees a network of more than three hundred snoops (see appendix B) in Lygopolis, the capital of Propontis, and other cities with prominent colleges of magic. These snoops are under orders to inform him of the emergence of powerful individuals—in particular mages, clerics, paladins, and worldly political figures—and keep him apprised of their doings, so that he can assess what kind of risk they might pose to Zviad.

Any PC who reaches level 11 or above pops up on Grimaldo’s radar. As soon as he starts to believe their power may eventually rival Zviad’s, he sends an undercover agent to get close to them. But Grimaldo’s plants aren’t ordinary plants, as described in appendix B. They include Ephialte, a night hag, and Millevolti, a doppelgänger. If Grimaldo thinks the notable personages are susceptible to corruption and might be turned to Zviad’s cause, he sends Ephialte. If he believes they’re likely to become enemies of Zviad, he sends Millevolti. If he’s unsure, or if the personages vary in their corruptibility, he may send both agents and order them to instigate divisions in the group. The best outcome is if he can get the rising stars to undermine one another before they ever pose a danger to Zviad. (Ephialte and Millevolti won’t hesitate to point fingers at each other—“Are you sure you can trust that one?”—if the tactic seems likely to tip the scales. Even if one of the agents gets burned, the targets will trust the other one that much more.)

By the time the PCs are level 15 or 16, Grimaldo will have made up his mind about them already and begun sending assassins to take them out, one per target, if he’s decided he can’t win them over. If one attempt fails, he’ll try again. And again. It’s war now.

Meanwhile, when the potential rivals’ attentions are focused elsewhere, Grimaldo’s plants will swipe personal items from them—or, better yet, locks of hair or fingernail trimmings—and send them to Grimaldo, who’ll pass them along to Zviad for scrying purposes. From time to time thereafter, Zviad will look in on them himself to see what they’re up to. The first time he hears his name in their mouths, he’ll start preparing to destroy them himself, examining them for weaknesses and studying and memorizing spells that target those weaknesses. Through Grimaldo and his agents, he’ll sprinkle phony clues to lead his foes to their destruction.II

Zviad’s thoroughness in neutralizing future threats doesn’t mean he’s indifferent to present ones. When he was exiled from Propontis, he took refuge on Mount Jesaret. From there, he combined shock and awe with mass suggestion to impress the Howling Storm orcs and win their loyalty. Having secured the lower reaches of the mountainside, he then did the same with the goliath clans closer to the peak and a tribe of duergar who dwelt within the mountain. Together, these groups of minions built his stone redoubt at an elevation of nearly 13,000 feet, well above the tree line.

The Howling Storm orcs continue to control the slopes of Mount Jesaret between 5,000 and 10,000 feet of elevation. In patrols of ten orc scouts (see appendix B), they’ve established several dozen observation posts that overlook the trail leading up the mountain, ranging from simple dirt embankments and piles of boulders to brush-pile blinds to solid two-story watchtowers of stone and timber. From these posts, they watch for trespassers, tail them if possible, and occasionally engage in aggressive reconnaissance—especially after trespassers have set off one of their noisy traps. When a creature steps on one of these traps, it makes a loud rattling sound along with an attack roll at +8, dealing 2d10 piercing damage and grappling the target on a hit; breaking free requires a DC 15 Strength check. The orcs know there’s no reason for merchants or pilgrims, for instance, to be ascending the mountain, so in the event of a parley, most cover stories won’t fool them. If climbers rest overnight at any of the most promising campsite locations (marked on the map at 6,000, 8,000, and 10,000 feet), an orc patrol will be sure to spy them and assault them during the night.

Zviad’s tower is surrounded by a 40-foot-high battlemented curtain wall with watchtowers spaced every 120 feet. Although a trail leads to an area of flat, open ground in front of the wall, there’s no gate. On the rare occasions that Zviad’s goliath guards come and go, they use a postern on the upper side of the wall. Zviad and his lieutenants (the spymaster Grimaldo plus an illusionist, an evoker, and a necromancer who all reside at the fortified tower, along with Merilistra, an arcanaloth hired to collect magical components and items for Zviad) use a teleportation circle both for travel and to receive supplies.

The outer, aboveground portion of Zviad’s lair is a controlled area that includes the day and night guard barracks (A); a smithy (B); the residences of Zviad’s lieutenants (C); and the teleportation circle, the treasury, and rooms where the lich meets with his agents and minions (D). The doors to these buildings have arcane locks that open for Zviad, his lieutenants, and (in the case of the barracks) the guards. In addition, the door to the treasury has a symbol of Pain inscribed upon it, triggered when anyone unauthorized touches it. Sixteen goliath guards are on duty at any given time during the day, commanded by a goliath captain (see appendix B for stat blocks), with sixteen more guards back at the barracks, available to be called up if needed; at night, the wall and bailey are guarded by eight wights.

The rest of Zviad’s lair is a restricted area, accessible only through a barbican-like gate that leads into the mountain. A windowless tower rises above the mountain within the walls; it has no aboveground entrance.

Beneath the mountain, at the end of the barbican’s neck, is a wide-open chamber, 160 feet long and 30 feet wide, with a 30-foot-high vaulted ceiling, which must be crossed to enter Zviad’s crypt. Eight braziers fill the air with toxic fumes: When a creature enters the chamber for the first time or starts its turn in the fumes, it takes 6d10 poison damage on a failed DC 15 Constitution saving throw or half as much damage on a successful one. A strong wind disperses the fumes until initiative count 20 of the next round, but unless a brazier is extinguished, it keeps producing more, in 5-foot-radius increments round by round. The area within the fumes is lightly obscured.

On each side of the chamber is another battlemented wall, beneath which are barred cages. The battlements are lined with twelve wights, six on each side; the cages are packed with zombies, forty-eight on each side. Hovering above the door at the far end of the chamber is Naax-Razaralk, a death tyrant that Zviad dominated, then placed under a 9th-level geas, compelling it to come with him and guard the door to the restricted portion of his lair. (Defying the geas wouldn’t cause Naax-Razaralk anything worse than a bad headache, but Zviad has promised the death tyrant a part in his future conquests, and because the death tyrant is charmed indefinitely, it finds the promise persuasive.) All of these guardians are immune to the poison fumes.

No one gets through this chamber except Zviad. If anyone enters without an escort from the lich, the death tyrant attacks with its eye rays, and the wights start shooting; moreover, as soon as anyone reaches the midpoint of the chamber, the wights pull levers that open the cages below them, and the zombies start pouring out. Naax-Razaralk’s Negative Energy Cone projects over an elliptical area, hitting the floor 10 feet in front of the death tyrant, the side walls 15 feet in front of it, and the far wall up to 10 feet above the floor. The undead aberration never leaves its post, 10 feet above the exit door.

The guardians of this chamber can’t see invisible creatures, but Zviad has hung hooded lanterns above the battlements 30 feet, 80 feet, and 130 feet inside the door, brightly illuminating the whole chamber—and the middle pair of lanterns are lanterns of revealing, so anyone who tries to ghost their way past Naax-Razaralk gets made 60 to 70 feet in. When the intruders are in disarray, the wights throw ropes over the battlements and slide down to the floor below to engage in melee. The guardians fight until they’re destroyed; they never retreat.

If trespassers survive their encounter with the chamber’s guardians, they find not only that the door to Zviad’s crypt is locked (with a very hard-to-pick lock) and sealed with an arcane lock but that it’s also inscribed with a glyph of warding containing a 5th-level fireball spell. Sometimes the classics are the best. (All the spells protecting Zviad’s lair have saving throw DCs of 23.)

The door leads into the windowless tower that stands above the mountain. The tower is round, with stone stairs ascending around its interior wall. It’s 25 feet in diameter, the ceiling is 100 feet high, and there’s a sphere of annihilation hovering in the center of the tower, 60 feet above the floor.

The entire tower is a complicated trap. At the center of the tower’s floor is a glyph of warding containing reverse gravity. At the center of its ceiling is a glyph of warding containing black tentacles. Fifteen feet from the top of the stairs is a proximity-triggered glyph of warding on the wall (E), containing a 5th-level thunderwave.

The payoff for making it to the top of the stairs in one piece is… an empty room. Nothing up there at all. Zviad is tickled by the knowledge that intruders will waste incalculable time scrutinizing every corner of this room for invisible objects and creatures, secret doors, mechanisms, anything that might give this room some purpose or meaning. It has none, other than to mess with them. Once upon a time, before he completed the ritual by which he became a lich, this was Zviad’s bedchamber. Now that he no longer sleeps, it amuses him to leave the room completely vacant.

While every visual cue in the tower points upward, Zviad’s crypt is downstairs—behind a secret door at the base of the tower that’s very hard to find, enhanced by an arcane lock that allows only the lich to pass, and hidden behind a permanent major image that disguises it as just another part of the wall. Every part of Zviad’s lair beneath the floor of the tower is protected by a permanent private sanctum spell that prevents divination magic and teleportation, although it allows planar travel, and by a guards and wards spell that seals and hides every door.

Zviad spends most of his time in the underground portion of his lair, accompanied by his bodyguard, Atzaparrak, a bound glabrezu. Atzaparrak (not its true name) is no dumb brute, though. It acts as a troubleshooter for Zviad, interceding when it looks like combat is about to ensue and attempting to talk would-be attackers into accepting a payoff to walk away. The glabrezu is a skilled negotiator and will (at least ostensibly) make earnest efforts to satisfy the intruders’ interests, provided that they pledge not to harm or interfere with Zviad any further.

Atzaparrak is patient and disciplined, but it doesn’t like being bound any more than any other demon does, and if attackers make it a better offer—one that includes dispelling the planar binding spell upon it—the glabrezu will take their side against Zviad. Zviad knows it, and if that’s where negotiations seem to be heading, he’ll bamf away to someplace safer.

The first basement level of Zviad’s lair comprises his potion lab, conjuring chamber, necromancy workshop, and component repository. Three bodaks (see Volo’s) dwell in this last room, under permanent geasa not to leave.

The second basement level includes the lich’s research library and scrying room. The scrying font isn’t protected, but it’s solid silver and weighs 200 pounds. The library, on the other hand, is tricked out with all sorts of unpleasantry. The door to the library is inscribed with two glyphs of warding, both triggered when anyone but Zviad touches the door. One of the glyphs contains the spell hold monster; the other contains maddening darkness (see Xanathar’s, chapter 3). Inside, the library is haunted by three allips (see Mordenkainen’s), the lingering spirits of votaries that Zviad used up and threw away. One block of basic enchantment textbooks for absolute beginners—of interest to no one who’s raiding a lich’s library for advanced arcane secrets—are all stuck together by their covers. When slid out from the library shelves, they reveal a panel with a hard-to-pick warded lock, enhanced by an arcane lock spell that inflicts excruciating pain upon the hand of anyone who tries to open it without authorization. Behind this panel is a recess where Zviad keeps his research notes and spellbooks. The notes are written in illusory script, rolled up, and kept in pigeonholes. If either the spellbooks or the papers in the recess are touched by any creature other than Zviad—or by a mage hand spell—a glyph of warding is triggered, releasing the sickening radiance spell stored within.

The third basement, the stairs down to which are behind another very hard-to-find secret door, contains the vault where Zviad keeps the Tome of Atrocity. The platinum-gold alloy case in which it’s stored is inscribed with no fewer than six magical booby traps. For rival wizards, there are glyphs of warding that release blindness and flesh to stone (Zviad’s sky-high spell save DC gives the latter spell a halfway reasonable chance of success) whenever the case is touched by a spellcaster. For extraplanar intruders, there are glyphs of magic circle (reversed, to keep celestials, fey, and fiends trapped within) and banishment, triggered whenever any aberration, celestial, fey, or fiend enters the room. And for holier-than-thou wannabe heroes, there’s a glyph containing disintegrate, triggered whenever a holy symbol is brought within 3 feet. Finally, if anyone but Zviad opens the case, they and all their companions are treated to a symbol of Fear.

But what about the lich’s soulward? Pssh. Zviad Uk’vdavi would never be such a fool as to leave it where anyone else could even find it.

The moment his life ended and his undeath began, Zviad cast sequester on his soulward, making it invisible and untargetable by divination spells. Then he cast arcanist’s magic aura to make it appear nonmagical to detect magic. Finally, he cast instant summons so that he could recall it to his hand at will. With those basic tasks out of the way, he set about fabricating a forked brass rod tuned precisely to a highly specific vibrational frequency. When it was complete, he cast demiplane, creating a secret, private dimension far out along the w-axis from Mount Jesaret, with a hylic resonance matching that of the rod. The following day, he used that rod to plane shift to his new demiplane and cast demiplane again from there to create yet another demiplane, in which, finally, he deposited his soulward.III

To distinguish the demiplanes clearly, the first, transitional demiplane has walls of conventional dressed stone, while the second demiplane, where his soulward is stored, has walls of black onyx. Neither is lit. In case of emergency—that is, involuntary discorporation—Zviad has left a “go bag” in the onyx demiplane. This large satchel, which is stashed inside a lead-lined chest that also has sequester cast upon it, holds a backup spellbook containing his most-often-prepared spells, plus teleport and magnificent mansion; a forked rod tuned to the material plane, for use with plane shift; a little velvet pouch containing the material components of magnificent mansion; a nonmagical crystal ball; a no-frills wand; a potion of greater healing; paper, ink, and quills; 300 gp and 30 pp; and an extra set of evil-overlord clothing, along with a deep-hooded traveling cloak. He’s also left braziers burning in all four corners of both demiplanes, consuming all the oxygen in them so that anyone who has to breathe begins suffocating immediately upon arrival in either.

1. I. Around the summer solstice, the sun never sets at this latitude; around the winter solstice, it never rises. In between, for simplicity’s sake, assume either 8, 12, or 16 hours of daylight, unless you have an almanac handy.

2. II. Yes, this fact means that from here on out, the lich plot is going to take over your campaign. Isn’t it just like a lich to make the story all about him?

3. III. Credit for these extravagantly devious measures goes to fellow DM Ian Wickles (https://www.reddit.com/r/DnD/comments/7t1xa7/the_actual_best_way_to_hide_a_phylactery).

APPENDIX A: MAGIC ITEMS

The following items are designed for use in fifth edition Dungeons & Dragons. They can, of course, be adapted to other game systems as well.

ARCANE IMAGING SCANNER

Wondrous item, rare

This latticework arch made of lightweight metal, 8 feet tall, 5 feet wide, and 3 feet deep, requires bright light to function. It may be placed in sunlight (either direct or diffused), or a bright light source may be mounted in a sconce on each side. When this light shines through the quartz crystals held within the lattice, a faintly glowing aura is projected around any visible creature or object beneath the arch that bears magic. The color of the aura indicates the school of magic, if any; magic unassociated with any school glows white. The scanner reveals objects hidden beneath clothing, leather, or most other materials, but an object enveloped in lead, gold, platinum, adamantine, or 1 inch of any other common metal does not exhibit any aura.

School of Magic

Aura Color

Abjuration

Blue

Conjuration

Yellow

Divination

Green

Enchantment

Magenta

Evocation

Red

Illusion

Violet

Necromancy

Smoky gray

Transmutation

Orange

ARGRABAN’S SPECULAR GATEWAY

Wondrous item, very rare

This full-length, silver-framed mirror doubles as a portal into and out of a network of unearthly roads. As an action, a creature can speak the command word and open the portal until the beginning of its next turn. While the portal is open, any Large or smaller creature may enter or exit through the gateway. Each gateway has its own unique command word that must be spoken to open it. When an invisible creature passes through an open gateway, it creates a momentary visual phenomenon that reveals its passage, although it doesn’t become fully visible.

A creature moving between gateways crosses normal space twenty-one times as quickly as it moves normally and sees a warped, blurry vision of the world in which physical landmarks are visible but neither creatures nor details can be discerned.

BEACON OF ATTRACTION

Wondrous item, legendary

Each beacon of attraction works against a specific kind of intelligent creature. Its enchantment causes creatures of this kind to feel an intense urge to approach the beacon while within 60 feet of it or able to see it, as if affected by an antipathy/sympathy spell. Wisdom saving throws against the magic of the beacon are made against DC 18.

CIRCLET OF MAGIC SUPPRESSION

Wondrous item, very rare (requires attunement)

This circlet is made of wrought iron, with an unevenly shaped piece of weather-worn limestone set into it like a jewel. It has 3 charges. While wearing it, you can use an action and expend 1 charge to cast antimagic field from it. The circlet regains 1d3 expended charges daily at dawn.

LACQUER OF DISSIMULATION

Wondrous item, uncommon

This clear, viscous coating, when applied to an object, makes the object give off an apparent aura of evocation or necromantic magic (your choice at time of purchase, or DM’s choice at time of discovery) to spells that allow a creature to see magical auras around creatures or objects, such as detect magic. The lacquer takes 1 minute to apply and must dry for 24 hours before giving off the false aura.

One bottle of lacquer of dissimulation contains enough to fully coat a Tiny object. It takes twice as much lacquer of dissimulation to coat a larger object as it takes to coat an object one size category smaller. Where an item is coated incompletely, the true, original aura will show through.

LENS OF OVERWATCH

Wondrous item, rare

This faceted lens, 12 inches across, is usually mounted on a gimbal at eye level in a location with a panoramic view. The lens makes invisible and ethereal creatures and objects visible to anyone who looks through it. Few are made except for royalty and major nobility who post guards on their castle walls.

LENSES OF DISCOVERY

Wondrous item, uncommon

These wire-framed eyeglasses with faceted lenses contain 3 charges. When you speak the command word and expend 1 charge, looking through the lenses allows you to see invisible and ethereal creatures and objects for 1 hour. They regain 1d3 expended charges daily at dawn.

NORTON’S PHANTOM SENTRY

Wondrous item, rare (requires attunement)

This 2-inch-wide round disc of quartz, often mounted on a leather bracer for the sake of convenience, is etched with an image of a mastiff surrounded by twelve arcane glyphs. It contains 3 charges. You can use an action to run your finger around the glyphs three times and expend 1 charge to cast faithful hound from it (attack bonus +7). It regains 1d3 expended charges daily at dawn.

PERNILLA’S PRIVATE LIBRARY

Wondrous item, rare

This object appears as a hardwood bookshelf, 13 inches deep, 30 inches long, and 87 inches high, with six shelves, two of which can hold books up to 9 inches tall, two up to 12 inches tall, and two up to 19 inches tall. It has two command words, each one requiring you to use an action to speak it.

When the first command word is spoken, the bookshelf folds down into the shape of a book, 6 inches wide, 9 inches long, and 2 inches thick, with a strap that snaps into a buckle with a key lock. The key can be removed. In book form, the library weighs 1 ½ pounds regardless of the weight of its contents, which are held in an extradimensional space.

When the second command word is spoken while the key is inserted into the lock and turned, the library unfolds to full size, with its contents arranged on the shelves exactly as they were when it was folded down. However, if any creature turns the key in the lock without speaking the command word or rolls 20 or higher on an ability check to pick the lock, the covers spring open, spewing out a stream of books. The creature must make a DC 16 Dexterity saving throw, taking 10d4 bludgeoning damage on a failure, half damage on a success. The covers, spines, and pages of the ejected books are blank; the bookshelf’s contents remain in the extradimensional space until the book is closed and locked again and unfolded properly. The ejected books crumble to dust after 1 minute.

Folding the bookshelf after placing a bag of holding, handy haversack, portable hole, or similar item on one of its shelves, or placing the folded bookshelf inside any of these items, instantly destroys both items and opens a gate to the Astral Plane (see descriptions of these items for further details).

PIPE OF SMOKE SIGNALS

Wondrous item, uncommon (requires attunement)

A creature smoking this carved wooden pipe can spend an action to cast skywrite (see Elemental Evil Player’s Companion). The pipe translates the user’s message into Auran, making it hard to distinguish from ordinary clouds to anyone who doesn’t know the language.

QUILL OF AUTHENTICATION

Wondrous item, uncommon

A creature using this quill pen can write only true statements. If a creature attempts to write a false statement, or to sign a name other than its own, it must make a DC 13 Charisma saving throw. On a failed save, it writes a true version of the false statement or signs its own name. On a success, the creature is aware of the enchantment and can refrain from writing anything at all.

REGENMACHER’S RAINSTICK

Rod, common

This rod has 3 charges. While you hold it, you can use an action to cast create or destroy water from it (Create Water, rain option only). The rod regains 1 expended charge daily at dawn. If the rod is reduced to 0 charges, roll a d20. On a 1, the rod falls to dust.

RING OF IMPOSTURE

Ring, uncommon (requires attunement)

When you attune to this ring, choose a creature type. While you are wearing the ring, spells and other magical effects that detect creature types treat you as if you were a creature of the chosen type.

TALISMAN OF INVIOLABILITY

Wondrous item, varies (requires attunement)

This piece of jewelry makes the wearer immune to enchantment magic, mind-reading, and scrying up to a certain spell level.

Talisman of…

Rarity

Highest Spell Level Protected Against

Inviolability

Uncommon

1st

Greater inviolability

Rare

3rd

Superior inviolability

Very rare

6th

Supreme inviolability

Legendary

8th

TALISMAN OF REPULSION

Wondrous item, legendary

Each talisman of repulsion works against a specific kind of intelligent creature. Its enchantment causes creatures of this kind to feel an intense urge to leave the area and avoid the talisman, as if affected by an antipathy/sympathy spell. Wisdom saving throws against the magic of the talisman are made against DC 18.

TRESPASSER’S BANE

Wondrous item, uncommon

This shimmering ribbon, ⅛ inch wide, comes in a 240-foot spool. When you apply it to the perimeter of a door, window, or other aperture and speak the activating magic word, you designate which creatures won’t set it off and determine whether its alarm will be mental (heard only in your mind) or audible. From that moment until you deactivate it, you gain the benefits of the alarm spell. Once deactivated, it becomes inert. This item is popular among minor nobles and merchants.

APPENDIX B: STAT BLOCKS

GARRISON OFFICERS

SERGEANT

Armor Class 16 (chain shirt, shield)

Hit Points 13 (2d8 + 4)

Speed 30 ft.

Str 14 (+2), Dex 12 (+1), Con 14 (+2), Int 11 (+0), Wis 12 (+1), Cha 12 (+1)

Skills Intimidation +2, Perception +3

Senses passive Perception 13

Challenge ¼ (50 XP)

ACTIONS

Spear. Melee Weapon Attack: +4 to hit, reach 5 ft., one target. Hit: 5 (1d6 + 2) piercing damage.

LIEUTENANT

Armor Class 17 (breastplate, shield)

Hit Points 39 (6d8 + 12)

Speed 30 ft.

Str 14 (+2), Dex 12 (+1), Con 14 (+2), Int 12 (+1), Wis 12 (+1), Cha 13 (+1)

Skills Insight +3, Perception +3

Senses passive Perception 13

Challenge 1 (200 XP)

Superior Maneuver (2/Short or Long Rest). The lieutenant can use the Commander’s Strike, Precision Attack, or Rally maneuvers, as described in the Player’s Handbook (chapter 3, “Fighter”). Their superiority die is a d8.

ACTIONS

Longsword. Melee Weapon Attack: +4 to hit, reach 5 ft., one target. Hit: 6 (1d8 + 2) slashing damage.

CAPTAIN

Armor Class 17 (breastplate, shield)

Hit Points 65 (10d8 + 20)

Speed 30 ft.

Str 15 (+2), Dex 12 (+1), Con 15 (+2), Int 13 (+1), Wis 13 (+1), Cha 14 (+2)

Skills Insight +4, Intimidation +5, Perception +4

Senses passive Perception 14

Challenge 3 (700 XP)

Superior Maneuver (2/Short or Long Rest). The captain can use the Commander’s Strike, Precision Attack, or Rally maneuvers, as described in the Player’s Handbook (chapter 3, “Fighter”). Their superiority die is a d8.

ACTIONS

Multiattack. The captain makes two melee weapon attacks.

Longsword. Melee Weapon Attack: +5 to hit, reach 5 ft., one target. Hit: 6 (1d8 + 2) slashing damage.

COMMANDANT

Armor Class 18 (chain mail, shield)

Hit Points 112 (15d8 + 45)

Speed 30 ft.

Str 16 (+3), Dex 12 (+1), Con 16 (+3), Int 14 (+2), Wis 14 (+2), Cha 15 (+2)

Skills Insight +6, Intimidation +6, Perception +6

Senses passive Perception 16

Challenge 5 (1,800 XP)

Battalion Command. The commandant can command up to 25,000 XP of allied subordinates.

Superior Maneuver (2/Short or Long Rest). The commandant can use the Commander’s Strike, Precision Attack, or Rally maneuvers, as described in the Player’s Handbook (chapter 3, “Fighter”). Their superiority die is a d8.

ACTIONS

Multiattack. The commandant makes three melee weapon attacks.

Longsword. Melee Weapon Attack: +7 to hit, reach 5 ft., one target. Hit: 7 (1d8 + 3) slashing damage.

GENERAL

Armor Class 18 (plate armor)

Hit Points 212 (25d8 + 100)

Speed 30 ft.

Str 16 (+3), Dex 12 (+1), Con 18 (+4), Int 16 (+3), Wis 16 (+3), Cha 18 (+4)

Skills History +10, Insight +10, Intimidation +11, Perception +10

Senses passive Perception 20

Challenge 12 (8,400 XP)

Indomitable (3/day). The general can reroll a saving throw they fail. They must use the new roll.

Legion Command. The general can command up to 150,000 XP of allied subordinates.

Superior Maneuver (2/Short or Long Rest). The general can use the Commander’s Strike, Precision Attack, or Rally maneuvers, as described in the Player’s Handbook (chapter 3, “Fighter”). Their superiority die is a d10.

ACTIONS

Multiattack. The general makes three melee weapon attacks.

Greatsword. Melee Weapon Attack: +10 to hit, reach 5 ft., one target. Hit: 10 (2d6 + 3) slashing damage.

Invincible Formation (Recharge 6). All creatures under the general’s command gain 2 temporary points of Armor Class until any creature that has received this bonus moves.

LEGENDARY ACTIONS

The general can take 3 legendary actions, choosing from the options below. Only one legendary action option can be used at a time, and only at the end of another creature’s turn. The general regains spent legendary actions at the start of its turn.

- Provoke. The general targets an enemy they can see within 300 feet of them. If the target can see and hear any creature under the general’s command, the target must make a DC 16 Wisdom saving throw. On a failed save, if the target attacks any creature under the general’s command before the end of the target’s next turn, any other creature under the general’s command gains advantage on one attack roll against the target before the end of its next turn.

- Shift Forces. The general targets up to 250 XP of allies they can see within 300 feet of them. If the targets can see and hear the general, they can immediately move up to their speed.

- Forceful Attack (Costs 3 Actions). The general targets up to 250 XP of allies they can see within 300 feet of them and rolls 1d10. If the targets can see and hear the general, they can immediately move up to their speed and make one attack, adding the number on the die to their damage rolls. A target of one or more hits must make a DC 16 Strength saving throw. On a failed save, that target is pushed up to 15 feet, and its attackers may use any movement they have remaining to move in the same direction.

- Precision Attack (Costs 3 Actions). The general targets up to 250 XP of allies they can see within 300 feet of them and rolls 1d10. If the targets can see and hear the general, they can immediately make one attack, adding the number on the die to their attack rolls.

SPIES

PLANT

Medium humanoid (any race), any alignment

Armor Class 12 (unarmored)

Hit Points 27 (6d8)

Speed 30 ft.

Str 10 (+0), Dex 14 (+2), Con 10 (+0), Int 15 (+2), Wis 14 (+2), Cha 16 (+3)

Skills Deception +7, Insight +4, Investigation +4, Perception +6, Persuasion +7, Sleight of Hand +4, Stealth +4

Senses passive Perception 21

Languages any two languages

Challenge ½ (100 XP)

Ear for Deceit. Whenever the plant makes a Wisdom (Insight) check to determine whether a creature is lying, treat a roll of 7 or lower on the d20 as an 8.

Keen Memory. The plant can accurately recall anything they have seen or heard within the past week.

Watchful Eye. The plant has a +5 bonus to their passive Wisdom (Perception) score.

ACTIONS

Multiattack. The plant makes two melee attacks.

Shortsword. Melee Weapon Attack: +4 to hit, reach 5 ft., one target. Hit: 5 (1d6 + 2) piercing damage.

BONUS ACTIONS

Cunning Action. On each of their turns, the plant can use a bonus action to take the Dash, Disengage, or Hide action.

As PCs increase in level, scale up the plant’s abilities using the sidekick rules in Tasha’s, chapter 4. Treat the plant as an Expert, Spellcaster, or Warrior depending on what kind of person they’re pretending to be, but give an Expert plant only three additional skill proficiencies, rather than five, at level 1. Their skill set is potent enough already.

SNOOP

Medium humanoid (any race), any alignment

Armor Class 10 (unarmored)

Hit Points 9 (2d8)

Speed 30 ft.

Str 10 (+0), Dex 10 (+0), Con 10 (+0), Int 14 (+2), Wis 14 (+2), Cha 10 (+0)

Skills Deception +4, Insight +4, Perception +4, Sleight of Hand +2, Stealth +4

Senses passive Perception 19

Languages any language

Challenge ⅛ (25 XP)

Keen Memory. The snoop can accurately recall anything they have seen or heard within the past week.

Watchful Eye. The snoop has a +5 bonus to their passive Wisdom (Perception) score.

ACTIONS

Improvised Weapon. Melee Weapon Attack: +2 to hit, reach 5 ft., one target. Hit: 2 (1d4) bludgeoning damage.

THIEVES’ DEN

GUTTERSNIPE

Small humanoid (various), neutral

Armor Class 13 (unarmored)

Hit Points 3 (1d6)

Speed 25 ft.

Str 8 (-1), Dex 14 (+2), Con 10 (+0), Int 10 (+0), Wis 8 (-1), Cha 12 (+1)

Skills Acrobatics +4, Deception +3, Sleight of Hand +4

Senses passive Perception 10

Languages Common

Challenge ⅛ (25 xp)

Innocent. The guttersnipe has advantage on Charisma (Deception) checks made against adults.

Slippery. The guttersnipe has advantage on Dexterity (Acrobatics) checks made to escape a grapple.

ACTIONS

Knife. Melee or Ranged Weapon Attack: +4 to hit, reach 5 ft., range 30/120 ft., one target. Hit: 4 (1d4 + 2) piercing damage.

BONUS ACTIONS

Agile. On each of their turns, the guttersnipe can use a bonus action to take the Disengage action.

PROWLER

Medium humanoid (various), neutral evil

Armor Class 14 (leather armor)

Hit Points 27 (6d8)

Speed 30 ft.

Str 10 (+0), Dex 16 (+3), Con 10 (+0), Int 12 (+1), Wis 14 (+2), Cha 10 (+0)

Skills Acrobatics +5, Deception +2, Investigation +3, Sleight of Hand +5, Stealth +5

Senses passive Perception 12

Languages Common, Thieves’ Cant

Challenge 2 (450 XP)

Sneak Attack (1/Turn). The prowler deals an extra 7 (2d6) damage when they hit a target with a weapon attack and have advantage on the attack roll, or when the target is within 5 ft. of an ally of the prowler that isn’t incapacitated and the prowler doesn’t have disadvantage on the attack roll.

ACTIONS

Multiattack. The prowler makes two attacks with their dagger.

Dagger. Melee or Ranged Weapon Attack: +5 to hit, reach 5 ft., range 30/120 ft., one target. Hit: 5 (1d4 + 3) piercing damage.

Light Crossbow. Ranged Weapon Attack: +5 to hit, range 80/320 ft., one target. Hit: 7 (1d8 + 3) piercing damage.

BONUS ACTIONS

Cunning Action. On each of their turns, the prowler can use a bonus action to take the Dash, Disengage, or Hide action.

FROKI

Medium humanoid (dwarf), neutral evil

Armor Class 15 (brigandine)

Hit Points 39 (6d8 + 12)

Speed 25 ft.

Str 11 (+0), Dex 16 (+3), Con 14 (+2), Int 11 (+0), Wis 11 (+0), Cha 12 (+1)

Skills Deception +3, Investigation +2, Sleight of Hand +7, Stealth +5, Thieves’ Tools +7

Damage Resistance poison

Senses passive Perception 10

Languages Common, Thieves’ Cant

Challenge 3 (700 XP)

Dwarven Resilience. Froki has advantage on saving throws against poison.

Sneak Attack (1/Turn). Froki deals an extra 10 (3d6) damage when she hits a target with a weapon attack and has advantage on the attack roll, or when the target is within 5 feet of an ally of Froki that isn’t incapacitated and Froki doesn’t have disadvantage on the attack roll.

ACTIONS

Multiattack. Froki makes three attacks with her baselard.

Baselard. Melee Weapon Attack: +5 to hit, reach 5 ft., one target. Hit: 6 (1d6 + 3) piercing damage.

Light Crossbow. Ranged Weapon Attack: +5 to hit, range 30/120 ft., one target. Hit: 7 (1d8 + 3) piercing damage.

BONUS ACTIONS

Cunning Action. On each of her turns, Froki can use a bonus action to take the Dash, Disengage, or Hide action.

REACTIONS

Uncanny Dodge. Froki halves the damage that she takes from an attack that hits her. She must be able to see the attacker.

GRATIEN QUERRE

Medium humanoid (human), neutral evil

Same as Froki except:

Speed 30 ft.

Skills Athletics +2, Deception +2, Leatherworker’s Tools +5, Persuasion +3, Smith’s Tools +5, Stealth +5

No resistance to poison damage or Dwarven Resilience.

RINALD SUPRIM

Medium humanoid (human), neutral evil

Same as Froki except:

Speed 30 ft.

Skills Deception +3, Investigation +4, Persuasion +5, Stealth +5

No resistance to poison damage or Dwarven Resilience.

KRUNO SKRIVEN

Medium humanoid (human), neutral evil

Armor Class 16 (brigandine)

Hit Points 65 (10d8 + 20)

Speed 30 ft.

Str 11 (+0), Dex 18 (+4), Con 14 (+2), Int 11 (+0), Wis 11 (+0), Cha 12 (+1)

Skills Acrobatics +7, Athletics +3, Intimidation +7, Perception +3, Sleight of Hand +7, Stealth +7

Senses passive Perception 13

Languages Common, Thieves’ Cant

Challenge 5 (1,800 xp)

Evasion. If Kruno is subjected to an effect that allows him to make a Dexterity saving throw to take only half damage, Kruno instead takes no damage if he succeeds on the saving throw, and only half damage if he fails.

Sneak Attack (1/Turn). Kruno deals an extra 14 (4d6) damage when he hits a target with a weapon attack and has advantage on the attack roll, or when the target is within 5 feet of an ally of Kruno that isn’t incapacitated and Kruno doesn’t have disadvantage on the attack roll.

ACTIONS

Multiattack. Kruno makes three attacks with his baselard.

Baselard. Melee Weapon Attack: +7 to hit, reach 5 ft., one target. Hit: 7 (1d6 + 4) piercing damage.

Light Crossbow. Ranged Weapon Attack: +6 to hit, range 30/120 ft., one target. Hit: 8 (1d8 + 4) piercing damage.

BONUS ACTIONS

Cunning Action. On each of his turns, Kruno can use a bonus action to take the Dash, Disengage, or Hide action.

REACTIONS

Uncanny Dodge. Kruno halves the damage that he takes from an attack that hits him. He must be able to see the attacker.

DROW COMPOUND

DROW ACOLYTE

The drow acolyte is an acolyte with the following changes:

- She has Armor Class 11 (unarmored).

- She has Dexterity 12 (+1) and Charisma 12 (+1).

- She has Perception +4 and Stealth +2.

- She has 120 feet of darkvision and passive Perception 14.

- She has Fey Ancestry, Innate Spellcasting as described in the drow stat block, and Sunlight Sensitivity.

- She has the following cleric spells prepared: poison spray, resistance, thaumaturgy; bane, cure wounds, ray of sickness.

- She wields a dagger (+3 to hit, 1d4 + 1 piercing damage) instead of a club.

DROW DIAGON

The drow diagon is a priest with the following changes:

- She has Armor Class 14 (chain shirt).

- She has Dexterity 12 (+1) and Charisma 14 (+2).

- She has Perception +7 and Stealth +2.

- She has 120 feet of darkvision and passive Perception 17.

- She has Fey Ancestry, Innate Spellcasting as described in the drow stat block, and Sunlight Sensitivity.

- She has the following cleric spells prepared: poison spray, resistance, thaumaturgy; cure wounds, guiding bolt, ray of sickness; lesser restoration, web; conjure animals (2 giant spiders), dispel magic.

- She wields a shortsword (+3 to hit, 1d6 + 1 piercing damage) instead of a mace.

DROW HOUSE LIEUTENANT

The drow house lieutenant is a drow elite warrior with the following changes:

- He wears a breastplate and carries a shield (his Armor Class is the same).

- He has 117 hp (18d8 + 36).

- He has Intelligence 12 (+1) and Charisma 13 (+1).

- He has Stealth +7.

- His Challenge Rating is 7 (2,900 XP).

- He has the drow house captain’s Battle Command bonus action.

- His shortsword attack deals an additional 1d6 poison damage on a hit.

ABOLETH GROTTO

TRANSFORMED ADVENTURER

Medium humanoid (any race), lawful evil

Each of the transformed adventurers below has speed, languages, and racial traits appropriate to their race, along with the following additional traits:

Enthralled. The transformed adventurer is charmed by Úuchben, can communicate telepathically with the aboleth over any distance, and can’t take reactions. Whenever the transformed adventurer takes damage, they must make a DC 14 Wisdom saving throw. On a success, the transformed adventurer loses this trait. This trait is also lost if Úuchben dies or is transported to another plane. The aboleth can reimpose this trait with a successful use of its Enslave action.

Foul Transformation. The transformed adventurer’s skin is translucent and slimy, they can’t regain hit points unless they’re underwater, and when they’re outside a body of water, they take 6 (1d12) acid damage every 10 minutes that moisture isn’t applied to their skin.

TRANSFORMED BARBARIAN

Armor Class 13 (unarmored)

Hit Points 26 (4d8 + 8)

Str 16 (+3), Dex 12 (+1), Con 14 (+2), Int 12 (+1), Wis 12 (+1), Cha 12 (+1)

Saving Throws Str +5, Con +4

Senses passive Perception 11

Challenge 1 (200 XP)

Class Features. The transformed barbarian has the Danger Sense, Frenzy, Reckless Attack, Rage, and Unarmored Defense class features, as described in the Player’s Handbook.

ACTIONS

Greataxe. Melee Weapon Attack: +5 to hit, reach 5 ft., one target. Hit: 9 (1d12 + 3) slashing damage.

Handaxe. Melee or Ranged Weapon Attack: +5 to hit, reach 5 ft., range 20/60 ft., one target. Hit: 6 (1d6 + 3) slashing damage.

TRANSFORMED BARD

Armor Class 13 (leather)

Hit Points 16 (3d8 + 3)

Str 12 (+1), Dex 14 (+2), Con 12 (+1), Int 12 (+1), Wis 12 (+1), Cha 16 (+3)

Saving Throws Dex +4, Cha +5

Skills Acrobatics +6, Deception +5, History +3, Persuasion +5, Performance +7, all other skills add +1

Senses passive Perception 11

Challenge 1 (200 XP)

Class Features. The transformed bard has the Bardic Inspiration and Cutting Words class features, as described in the Player’s Handbook. The transformed bard can’t use Cutting Words while Enthralled.

Spellcasting. The transformed bard is a 3rd-level spellcaster. Their spellcasting ability is Charisma (save DC 13, +5 to hit with spell attacks). The transformed bard has the following bard spells prepared:

Cantrips (at will): vicious mockery

1st level (4 slots): charm person, detect magic, faerie fire, healing word, thunderwave

2nd level (2 slots): blindness/deafness

ACTIONS

Rapier. Melee Weapon Attack: +5 to hit, reach 5 ft., one target. Hit: 6 (1d8 + 2) piercing damage.

Dagger. Melee or Ranged Weapon Attack: +5 to hit, reach 5 ft., range 20/60 ft., one target. Hit: 4 (1d4 + 2) piercing damage.

TRANSFORMED FIGHTER

Armor Class 18 (chain mail, shield)

Hit Points 19 (3d8 + 6)

Str 16 (+3), Dex 12 (+1), Con 14 (+2), Int 12 (+1), Wis 12 (+1), Cha 12 (+1)

Saving Throws Str +5, Cha +4

Skills Athletics +5, Intimidation +3

Senses passive Perception 11

Challenge 1 (200 XP)

Class Features. The transformed fighter has the Action Surge, Improved Critical, and Second Wind class features, as described in the Player’s Handbook.

ACTIONS

Battleaxe. Melee Weapon Attack: +5 to hit, reach 5 ft., one target. Hit: 9 (1d8 + 5) slashing damage, or 10 (1d10 + 5) slashing damage if used with two hands.

Handaxe. Melee or Ranged Weapon Attack: +5 to hit, reach 5 ft., range 20/60 ft., one target. Hit: 6 (1d6 + 3) slashing damage.

TRANSFORMED RANGER

Armor Class 14 (leather)

Hit Points 16 (3d8 + 3)

Str 12 (+1), Dex 16 (+3), Con 12 (+1), Int 12 (+1), Wis 14 (+2), Cha 12 (+1)

Saving Throws Str +3, Dex +5

Skills Stealth +5, Perception +4

Senses passive Perception 14

Challenge 2 (450 XP)

Class Features. The transformed ranger has the Hunter’s Prey (Colossus Slayer) class feature, as described in the Player’s Handbook.

Spellcasting. The transformed ranger is a 3rd-level spellcaster. Their spellcasting ability is Wisdom (save DC 12, +4 to hit with spell attacks). The transformed ranger has the following ranger spells prepared:

1st level (3 slots): detect magic, fog cloud, hunter’s mark

ACTIONS

Multiattack. The transformed ranger makes two Shortsword attacks.

Shortsword. Melee Weapon Attack: +5 to hit, reach 5 ft., one target. Hit: 6 (1d6 + 3) piercing damage.

TRANSFORMED ROGUE

Armor Class 14 (leather)

Hit Points 16 (3d8 + 3)

Str 12 (+1), Dex 16 (+3), Con 12 (+1), Int 14 (+2), Wis 12 (+1), Cha 12 (+1)

Saving Throws Dex +5, Int +4

Skills Acrobatics +7, Deception +3, Sleight of Hand +5, Stealth +7

Senses passive Perception 11

Challenge 2 (450 XP)

Class Features. The transformed rogue has the Cunning Action, Fast Hands, Second-Story Work, and Sneak Attack (2d6) class features, as described in the Player’s Handbook.

ACTIONS

Shortsword. Melee Weapon Attack: +5 to hit, reach 5 ft., one target. Hit: 6 (1d6 + 3) piercing damage.

Dagger. Melee or Ranged Weapon Attack: +5 to hit, reach 5 ft., range 20/60 ft., one target. Hit: 5 (1d4 + 3) piercing damage.

TRANSFORMED SORCERER

Armor Class 14 (unarmored)

Hit Points 15 (2d8 + 6)

Str 12 (+1), Dex 12 (+1), Con 14 (+2), Int 12 (+1), Wis 12 (+1), Cha 16 (+3)

Saving Throws Dex +4, Cha +5

Skills Arcana +3, Deception +5

Senses passive Perception 11

Challenge 3 (700 XP)

Class Features. The transformed sorcerer has the Draconic Resilience, Font of Magic, and Metamagic (Empowered Spell, Quickened Spell) class features, as described in the Player’s Handbook.

Spellcasting. The transformed sorcerer is a 3rd-level spellcaster. Their spellcasting ability is Charisma (save DC 13, +5 to hit with spell attacks). The transformed sorcerer has the following sorcerer spells prepared:

Cantrips (at will): light, prestidigitation, ray of frost, shocking grasp

1st level (4 slots): expeditious retreat, magic missile

2nd level (2 slots): alter self, misty step

ACTIONS

Dagger. Melee or Ranged Weapon Attack: +3 to hit, reach 5 ft., range 20/60 ft., one target. Hit: 3 (1d4 + 1) piercing damage.

Light Crossbow. Ranged Weapon Attack: +3 to hit, range 80/320 ft., one target. Hit: 5 (1d8 + 1) piercing damage.

Natural Weapons (Alter Self). Melee Weapon Attack: +4 to hit, reach 5 ft., one target. Hit: 5 (1d6 + 2) slashing damage.

ESOTERIC SOCIETY MEETINGHOUSE

ORBIS TERTIUS SOCIETY MEMBER

Medium humanoid (any race), neutral

Armor Class 12 (unarmored, 15 with mage armor)

Hit Points 72 (16d8)

Speed 30 ft.

Str 9 (-1), Dex 14 (+2), Con 11 (+0), Int 20 (+5), Wis 14 (+2), Cha 16 (+3)

Saving Throws Int +8, Wis +5

Skills Arcana +7, History +7

Senses passive Perception 12

Languages Common, Celestial, Deep Speech, Infernal, Primordial

Challenge 5 (1,800 XP)

School of Magic. Choose one of the following options:

- Conjurer. The Orbis Tertius Society member has the Benign Transposition trait, as described in the conjurer stat block in Volo’s.

- Diviner. The Orbis Tertius Society member has the Portent trait, as described in the diviner stat block in Volo’s.

- Transmuter. The Orbis Tertius Society member has the Transmuter’s Stone trait, as described in the transmuter stat block in Volo’s.

Spellcasting. The Orbis Tertius Society member is a 14th-level spellcaster. Their spellcasting ability is Intelligence (spell save DC 16, +8 to hit with spell attacks). They have the following wizard spells prepared:

Cantrips (at will): message, mind sliver (T), minor illusion, prestidigitation, true strike

1st level (4 slots): expeditious retreat (trans.), mage armor (already cast), magic missile, shield

2nd level (3 slots): hold person, misty step (conj.), scorching ray (psychic damage, subtract one ray)

3rd level (3 slots): blink (trans.), counterspell, slow (trans.)

4th level (3 slots): arcane eye, banishment, dimension door (conj.)

5th level (2 slots): far step (conj.), geas, modify memory, telekinesis (trans.)

6th level (1 slot): mass suggestion

7th level (1 slot): etherealness (trans.)

ACTIONS

Multiattack. The Orbis Tertius Society member makes a spell attack and uses Shape Reality.

Warp. Ranged Spell Attack: +9 to hit, reach 5 ft., one target. Hit: 5 (1d6 + 2) slashing damage.

Light Crossbow. Ranged Weapon Attack: +4 to hit, range 80/320 ft., one target. Hit: 6 (1d8 + 2) piercing damage.

Shape Reality. The Orbis Tertius Society member creates one of the following effects, which lasts until the start of their next turn:

- Space stretches between the member and another creature they can see, increasing the distance between them by up to 60 feet.

- Space contracts around a creature that the member can see, narrowing the distance between walls on either side and requiring the creature to squeeze through the space.

- The ground or floor in a 30-foot radius around a creature that the member can see ripples and heaves, becoming difficult terrain.

- If a creature that the member can see is holding a nonmagical weapon, that weapon is stowed, and a different item in their possession appears in their hand(s).

- If a creature that the member can see is wearing armor, that armor becomes fine clothing. If the creature is wearing clothing but no armor, that clothing becomes ring mail.

- Sound is amplified in a 30-foot radius around the member, imposing disadvantage on Stealth checks and saving throws against being deafened.

A creature affected by this action can make a DC 16 Wisdom saving throw at the start of its turn, ending the effect on a successful save. The Orbis Tertius Society member can’t use the same effect two rounds in a row.

ORBIS TERTIUS SOCIETY SKILLED HIRELING

Medium humanoid (any race), lawful neutral

Armor Class 11 (unarmored)

Hit Points 22 (4d8 + 4)

Speed 30 ft.

Str 11 (+0), Dex 12 (+1), Con 11 (+0), Int 14 (+2), Wis 14 (+2), Cha 14 (+2)

Skills Insight +4, Perception +4

Senses passive Perception 12

Languages Common

Challenge ½ (100 XP)

Competent. Choose one of the following options:

- Cook. Has Constitution 12 (+1) and proficiency with cook’s utensils.

- Hall Porter. Has Strength 14 (+2), Constitution 12 (+1), 26 hit points, and proficiency in Athletics (+4) and Intimidation (+4).

- Housekeeper. Has expertise in Perception (+6).

- Librarian. Has proficiency in Arcana (+4) and with calligrapher’s supplies.

- Steward. Has Charisma 16 (+3) and can take the Motivate action.

ACTIONS

Throw. Ranged Weapon Attack: +1 to hit, range 20/60 ft., one target. Hit: 2 (1d4 + 1) bludgeoning, slashing, or piercing damage.

Use a Magic Item. The Orbis Tertius Society skilled hireling uses a magic item in their possession.

Motivate (Steward only). One other Orbis Tertius Society skilled hireling within 30 feet who can see or hear the steward receives 3 temporary hit points.

GRANDMOTHER HAG DWELLING

BABA OBMOROZHENYA

Baba Obmorozhenya is a legendary bheur hag (see Volo’s), with the following differences:

- She has 150 (20d8 + 60) hp.

- She has Strength 14 (+2), Dexterity 18 (+4), Constitution 16 (+3), Intelligence 13 (+1), Wisdom 14 (+2), and Charisma 18 (+4).

- She receives a +7 bonus to Wisdom saving throws.

- She receives +9 to Dexterity (Stealth) checks, +6 to Intelligence (Nature) checks, and +7 to Wisdom (Perception and Survival) checks.

- She has resistance to bludgeoning, piercing, and slashing damage from nonmagical attacks.

- She has 120 feet of darkvision.

- Her challenge rating is 15 (13,000 XP).

- She has the following additional traits:
Cold Absorption. Whenever she is subjected to cold damage, she takes no damage and instead regains a number of hit points equal to the cold damage dealt.

Legendary Resistance (3/Day). If she fails a saving throw, she can choose to succeed instead.

Magic Resistance. She has advantage on saving throws against spells and other magical effects.

She Who Rides the Wind. Strong wind does not force her to land at the end of her turn or fall.

- Her spell save DC is 17, and she has +9 to hit with spell attacks.

- She can innately cast the following additional spells, requiring no material components:
At will: animate dead, clairvoyance, locate object, tongues

3/day each: arcane eye, awaken, bestow curse (as a 5th-level spell), freezing sphere*, glyph of warding (as a 5th-level spell), locate creature

1/day each: circle of death* (deals cold damage), eyebite, power word kill, symbol, true seeing

- She has +7 to hit with her Slam attack, which deals 11 (2d8 + 2) damage.

- Her Maddening Feast save DC is 17.

- She can take 3 legendary actions, choosing from the options below:
Boreal Step. Enveloped in a gust of wind, she moves up to her speed without provoking opportunity attacks. Each creature she passes within 5 feet of takes 4 (1d8) cold damage.

Frostbite. One creature within 60 feet that she can see must make a DC 17 Constitution saving throw. On a failure, the target takes 14 (4d6) cold damage, and it has disadvantage on the next attack roll it makes before the end of its next turn.

Panoply of Ice (Costs 2 Actions). A protective layer of ice forms around her, giving her 20 temporary hit points. If any creature hits her with a weapon or spell attack while she has these hit points, each creature within 5 feet of her takes 9 (2d8) cold damage.

- Within 120 feet of her house, she can take either of the generic grandmother hag lair actions described in Volo’s, chapter 1, “Hags: Dark Sisterhood,” as well as the lair action specific to bheur hags.

- The regional effects of her lair include a profusion of small animals, along with other charmed and aggressive beasts native to the area; undead creatures bursting from blocks of ice; and sudden blizzards, as described in “Hags: Dark Sisterhood.”

If you’re using the bheur hag stat block from Monsters of the Multiverse, her Horrific Feast save DC is 17, and spells marked with asterisks above require her to be holding or riding her graystaff.

MAMMOTH SKELETON

Use the mammoth stat block, with the following changes:

- Its creature type is undead.

- It has Armor Class 11 (natural armor) and 93 (11d12 + 22) hp.

- It has Constitution 15 (+2), Wisdom 8 (-1), and Charisma 5 (-3).

- It’s vulnerable to bludgeoning damage, immune to poison damage, and immune to exhaustion and the poisoned condition.

- It has 60 feet of darkvision and passive Perception 9.

- Its challenge rating is 5 (1,800 XP).

FEY COURT

FEY GUARD

Medium fey, chaotic neutral

Armor Class 15 (chain shirt)

Hit Points 11 (2d8 + 2)

Speed 30 ft.

Str 13 (+1), Dex 14 (+2), Con 12 (+1), Int 10 (+0), Wis 11 (+0), Cha 11 (+0)

Skills Stealth +4

Senses darkvision 60 ft., passive Perception 10

Languages Common, Sylvan

Challenge ½ (100 XP)

Defensive Glamour. When the fey guard is viewed from more than 20 feet away, the air blurs, warps, and shimmers around them, imposing disadvantage on attack rolls against the fey guard unless an opponent can target them without using sight, as with blindsight, or can see through illusions, as with truesight. When viewed from more than 120 feet away, the fey guard is invisible.

Fey Nature. The fey guard has advantage on saving throws against being charmed, and magic can’t put them to sleep.

ACTIONS

Glaive. Melee Weapon Attack: +4 to hit, reach 10 ft., one target. Hit: 6 (1d10 + 1) slashing damage.

Bow of Shadows. Ranged Weapon Attack: +4 to hit, range 80/320 ft., one target. Hit: 5 (1d6 + 2) piercing damage, and the target must make a DC 12 Wisdom saving throw. On a failed save, the target is unable to see anything farther than 5 feet away until the start of the fey guard’s next turn.

GREENGRASP

Greengrasp is a dire troll (see Mordenkainen’s), with the following differences:

- His creature type is fey.

- His alignment is chaotic neutral.

- He has Intelligence 10 (+0) and Charisma 15 (+3).

- He has proficiency in Intimidation (+8) and Persuasion (+8).

- He speaks Common, Giant, and Sylvan.

- His challenge rating is 15 (13,000 XP).

- He has the following additional traits:
Fey Rebirth. If he dies in Clutch, he revives with all his hit points 1d4 days later in a safe location in that domain.

Grasp of History. He can spend an action to place his hand upon a creature or object and learn everything that has ever happened to it. To use this trait on an unwilling creature, he must hit it with an unarmed strike, which deals no damage.

Legendary Resistance (3/Day). If he fails a saving throw, he can choose to succeed instead.

Greengrasp doesn’t have legendary or lair actions.

GIANT ANT

Medium beast, unaligned

Armor Class 15 (natural armor)

Hit Points 13 (3d8)

Speed 30 ft., burrowing 10 ft., climbing 30 ft.

Str 16 (+3), Dex 10 (+0), Con 11 (+0), Int 1 (-5), Wis 10 (+0), Cha 1 (-5)

Senses tremorsense 60 ft., passive Perception 10

Languages—

Challenge 1 (200 XP)

Hive Mind. When at least two giant ants are engaged in the same task or attacking the same target, they have advantage on their ability checks or attack rolls without having to take the Help action.

It’s Not a Problem, Ants Are Strong. The giant ant can carry up to 480 pounds and push, drag, or lift up to 960 pounds. While pushing, dragging, or lifting more than 480 pounds, its speed drops to 5 feet.

Keen Smell. The giant ant has advantage on Wisdom (Perception) checks that rely on smell.

Pheromone Communication. The giant ant can communicate simple ideas, emotions, and images to other giant ants within 60 feet of it in a manner akin to telepathy and can read scent messages left by other giant ants up to 1 hour earlier. It can’t use this trait while its sense of smell is overwhelmed, such as by thick wood smoke or a stinking cloud spell.

ACTIONS

Bite. Melee Weapon Attack: +5 to hit, reach 5 ft., one target. Hit: 7 (1d8 + 3) piercing damage plus 3 (1d6) acid damage.

LIVING LOCK

Tiny construct, unaligned

Armor Class 19 (natural armor)

Hit Points 20 (8d4)

Speed 0 ft.

Str 4 (-3), Dex 18 (+4), Con 10 (+0), Int 3 (-4), Wis 3 (-4), Cha 1 (-5)

Senses blindsight 30 ft. (blind beyond this distance), passive Perception 6

Languages—

Challenge 2 (450 XP)

An Actual Lock. The living lock is a lock that’s hard to pick (DC 20). While the living lock is not incapacitated, any creature trying to pick the lock has disadvantage on Dexterity (thieves’ tools) checks to do so, and the living lock has advantage on Bite attacks against it. Even if the lock is willing to be picked (for example, if it’s charmed), ability checks to pick it are still made with disadvantage, because the lock is ticklish.

ACTIONS

Bite. Melee Weapon Attack: +6 to hit, reach 0 ft., one target touching it. Hit: 7 (1d4 + 4) piercing damage.

XORN HUNTER

Medium fey (any race), lawful neutral

Armor Class 15 (chain shirt)

Hit Points 45 (6d8 + 18)

Speed 40 ft.

Str 18 (+4), Dex 16 (+3), Con 16 (+3), Int 12 (+1), Wis 15 (+2), Cha 10 (+0)

Skills Perception +6, Stealth +7, Survival +4

Senses darkvision 60 ft., passive Perception 16

Languages Common

Challenge 2 (450 XP)

En Passant. When the xorn hunter makes a melee attack against a creature, it doesn’t provoke opportunity attacks from that creature for the rest of the turn, whether it hits or not.

Fey Nature. The xorn hunter has advantage on saving throws against being charmed, and magic can’t put them to sleep.

ACTIONS

Multiattack. The xorn hunter makes two Adamantine Glaive attacks.

Adamantine Glaive. Melee Weapon Attack: +6 to hit, reach 10 ft., one target. Hit: 9 (1d10 + 4) slashing damage. All hits against objects are critical hits.

BONUS ACTIONS

Fey Step (1/Short or Long Rest). As a bonus action, the xorn hunter can cast misty step.

GENIE’S PALACE

LESSER DJINNI

The lesser djinni is a djinni, with the following differences:

- Its challenge rating is 10 (5,900 XP).

- It can’t cast conjure elemental, creation, or plane shift.

- It lacks the Create Whirlwind action.

MILĀḤ

Milāḥ is a djinni, with the following differences:

- Her Intelligence is 18 (+4), and her Charisma is 23 (+6).

- Her Dexterity saving throw modifier is +7, her Wisdom save mod is +8, and her Charisma save mod is +11.

- She speaks Common and Auran.

- Her challenge rating is 14 (11,500 XP).

- Her spell save DC is 19, she has +11 to hit with spell attacks, and she can innately cast the following additional spells, requiring no material components:

- At will: disguise self (duration 8 hours, can appear as Medium humanoid)

- 1/day: true seeing, power word stun
Her Scimitar attack is +12 to hit and deals 14 (2d6 + 7) slashing damage plus 3 (1d6) lightning or thunder damage (her choice) on a hit. In addition, she can make one attack with it as a bonus action on each of her turns, with the same attack bonus and damage.

- She has the following additional trait:
Wish Bestowal (1/Year). Milāḥ can grant one wish to a creature within 60 feet of her that isn’t a genie. The creature must state what effect it desires. Milāḥ then casts wish to bring about the effect, in literal accordance with the creature’s choice of words. Milāḥ can grant up to three wishes to a creature during its lifetime, after which she can’t grant another wish to that creature.

Milāḥ doesn’t have legendary or lair actions.

SHĀ‘IR

Medium humanoid (any race), any alignment

Armor Class 12 (unarmored, 15 with mage armor)

Hit Points 71 (13d8 + 13)

Speed 30 ft.

Str 10 (+0), Dex 14 (+2), Con 12 (+1), Int 18 (+4), Wis 15 (+2), Cha 18 (+4)

Saving Throws Dex +4, Wis +4, Cha +6

Skills Arcana +6, Deception +6, History +6, Medicine +4, Performance +6, Persuasion +6

Senses passive Perception 12

Languages Common plus three other languages

Challenge 4 (1,100 XP)

Innate Spellcasting. The shā‘ir’s innate spellcasting ability is Charisma (spell save DC 14, +6 to hit with spell attacks). They can innately cast the following spells, requiring no material components:

- At will: eldritch blast (2 beams, 1d10 + 6 thunder damage per hit), mage armor, message, minor illusion, vicious mockery (2d4)

- 3/day each: detect evil and good, dissonant whispers, healing word, heroism, misty step, protection from evil and good

- 1/day each: calm emotions, dispel magic, phantasmal force

ACTIONS

Scimitar. Melee Weapon Attack: +4 to hit, reach 5 ft., one target. Hit: 5 (1d6 + 2) slashing damage plus 2 thunder damage.

Captivating Words (1/day). The shā‘ir chooses a point within 30 feet. Every humanoid of the shā‘ir’s choice that they can see within 15 feet of that point must make a DC 14 Wisdom saving throw. If a target fails, they’re charmed by the shā‘ir until the shā‘ir or their allies do anything harmful to them. At the end of each of their turns, the target can repeat the saving throw. On a success, the effect ends.

BONUS ACTIONS

Disquieting Words (3/day). As a bonus action, the shā‘ir can choose one creature they can see within 60 feet of them and roll 1d8. The creature must subtract the number rolled from the next saving throw it makes before the start of the shā‘ir’s next turn.

BLUE DRAGON LAIR

DRAGON GUARD

Medium humanoid (any race), lawful neutral

Armor Class 18 (scale mail coat with breastplate, shield; 16 when wielding light crossbow)

Hit Points 26 (4d8 + 8)

Speed 30 ft.

Str 14 (+2), Dex 14 (+2), Con 14 (+2), Int 12 (+1), Wis 11 (+0), Cha 11 (+0)

Skills Insight +2, Perception +2

Senses passive Perception 12

Languages Common

Challenge ½ (100 XP)

Accustomed to Awesomeness. The Dragon Guard has advantage on saving throws against being frightened.

Crossbow Specialist. The Dragon Guard ignores the loading property of light crossbows.

ACTIONS

Multiattack. The Dragon Guard makes either two melee weapon attacks or two ranged weapon attacks.

Scimitar. Melee Weapon Attack: +4 to hit, reach 5 ft., one target. Hit: 5 (1d6 + 2) slashing damage.

Light Crossbow. Ranged Weapon Attack: +4 to hit, range 80/320 ft., one target. Hit: 6 (1d8 + 2) piercing damage.

LICH’S CRYPT

GOLIATH GUARD

Medium humanoid (goliath), lawful neutral

Armor Class 14 (hide armor)

Hit Points 30 (4d8 + 12)

Speed 30 ft.

Str 16 (+3), Dex 14 (+2), Con 16 (+3), Int 10 (+0), Wis 15 (+2), Cha 10 (+0)

Skills Athletics +5, Perception +4, Survival +4

Senses passive Perception 14

Languages Common, Giant

Challenge 1 (200 XP)

Mountain Born. The goliath is acclimated to high altitude, including elevations above 10,000 feet.

Powerful Build. The goliath counts as one size larger when determining their carrying capacity and the weight they can push, drag, or lift.

ACTIONS

Multiattack. The goliath guard attacks twice with their spear.

Spear. Melee Weapon Attack: +5 to hit, reach 10 ft., one target. Hit: 6 (1d6 + 3) piercing damage, or 7 (1d8 + 3) piercing damage when used with two hands.

Longbow. Ranged Weapon Attack: +5 to hit, range 150/600 ft., one target. Hit: 6 (1d8 + 2) piercing damage.

REACTIONS

Stone’s Endurance (1/Short or Long Rest). When the goliath guard takes damage, they reduce the damage taken by 9 (1d12 + 3).

GOLIATH CAPTAIN

Same as goliath guard except:

Armor Class 16 (breastplate)

Hit Points 75 (10d8 + 30)

Str 18 (+4), Dex 14 (+2), Con 16 (+3), Int 13 (+1), Wis 15 (+2), Cha 14 (+2)

Skills Athletics +6, Insight +4, Intimidation +5, Perception +4, Survival +4

Challenge 3 (700 XP)

Rally (2/Short or Long Rest) As a bonus action, the goliath captain can choose a friendly creature who can see or hear them. That creature gains 1d8 + 2 temporary hit points.

Multiattack. The goliath captain makes two attacks with their greataxe.

Greataxe. Melee Weapon Attack: +6 to hit, reach 5 ft., one target. Hit: 10 (1d12 + 4) slashing damage.

ORC SCOUT

The orc scout is an orc with the following changes:

- Their Armor Class is 14 (hide armor).

- They have 22 (3d8 + 9) hp.

- Their Dexterity is 16 (+3), their Intelligence is 11 (+0), and their Wisdom is 14 (+2).

- They have Perception +6, Stealth +7, and Survival +6.

- They have 60 feet of darkvision, and their passive Perception is 16.

- Their Challenge Rating is 2 (450 XP).

- They have a Multiattack action, which lets them make two melee or two ranged attacks.

- Instead of the Greataxe action, they have the following attack actions:
Battleaxe. Melee Weapon Attack: +5 to hit, reach 5 ft., one target. Hit: 7 (1d8 + 3) slashing damage, or 8 (1d10 + 3) slashing damage if used with two hands.

Shortbow. Ranged Weapon Attack: +5 to hit, range 80/320 ft., one target. Hit: 6 (1d6 + 3) piercing damage.

ZVIAD UK’VDAVI

Zviad Uk’vdavi is a lich attuned to three magic items: a robe of the archmagi, a staff of the magi, and the Tome of Atrocity. These affect his stats as follows:

- His Armor Class is 19.

- His Intelligence is 22 (+6), and his Intelligence saving throw modifier is +13.

- His spell save DC is 23.

- He has resistance to psychic and radiant damage.

- He has advantage on saving throws against spells and other magical effects.

- His spell attack modifier is +15, which is also his to-hit bonus for Paralyzing Touch.

- He can memorize twenty-four spells at a time. (The additional spell is usually teleport, but it varies.)

- The staff of the magi grants him an additional action: Retributive Strike (see Dungeon Master’s Guide, chapter 7, “Magic Items A–Z”).

- To use the Command Evil or Dark Speech action, he must use a bonus action to draw blood from a willing or incapacitated creature within his reach, using a piercing or slashing weapon. The subject takes 2 (1d4) damage of the appropriate type. Zviad carries a dagger for this purpose.

The Tome of Atrocity has other detrimental properties (it causes the attuned individual’s body to rot, and the attuned individual has disadvantage on saving throws against poison, takes on a cadaverous appearance, and must eat and drink six times the normal amount every day), but because Zviad is a lich, these properties don’t affect him.

CARTOGRAPHERS

If you like the maps in this book, find more of the illustrators’ work at:

Chloe Bolland: https://twitter.com/ChloeTheCartog

Dungeon Baker: http://dungeonbaker.com

George Mason: https://www.thereclusivecartographer.com

Fernando Salvaterra: https://fernandosalvaterra.carrd.co

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

As always, I owe thanks first and foremost to my wife, Jen C. Marshall, and to my devoted readers. I also want to express my gratitude to various people who’ve contributed to this book by providing information and inspiration: J. Eric Smith (coastal defense); Christopher Kulander (cave geology, mining, and underground engineering); Andrew Eaton (dive trauma); Dael Kingsmill (thieves’ cant); Ginny Loveday, Michael J. O’Connor, and Ken Walter (drow compound); Thomas Nesges (vampire mansion); Ahmed Aljabry (genie’s palace); Justice Arman (blue dragon lair); and Ian Wickles (lich’s crypt). Thanks also to my editor, Jeremie Ruby-Strauss, and editorial assistant, Molly Gregory, for their patience with how long it took me to finish writing.

More from this Series

The Monsters Know What…

Book 1

Live to Tell the Tale

Book 2

Moar! Monsters Know What…

Book 3

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

KEITH AMMANN has been a Dungeons & Dragons player and DM for more than thirty years. He has been writing his fifth edition D&D-focused blog, The Monsters Know What They’re Doing, since 2016. He lives in Chicago.

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SimonandSchuster.com/Authors/Keith-Ammann

SimonandSchuster.com

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@SagaPressBooks

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ALSO BY KEITH AMMANN

The Monsters Know What They’re Doing

MOAR! Monsters Know What They’re Doing

Live to Tell the Tale

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Copyright © 2022 by Keith Ammann

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First Saga Press hardcover edition December 2022

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Jacket design by Emma A. Van Deun

Jacket illustration by Lio Pressland

Author photograph by Jen C. Marshall

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available.

ISBN 978-1-9821-7135-3

ISBN 978-1-9821-7137-7 (ebook)

Table of Contents

Title Page

Epigraph

Introduction

Chapter 1: Principles of Defense

Assets

Detection, Deterrence, and Response

Concentric Defense

Weak Points

Castles

Chapter 2: Terrain

Grassland/Hill

Urban

Coastal

Forest

Desert

Swamp

Mountain

Arctic

Underground

Underwater

Chapter 3: Defensive Magic

Detection Spells

Deterrence Spells

Response Spells

Chapter 4: Humanoid (and Nonhumanoid) Resources

Chapter 5: Budgeting

Chapter 6: Battle Strategy

The Lay of the Land

Perimeter Defense

Reconnaissance and Security

Visibility

“Plan B”

Avoiding the Wood Chipper

Chapter 7: Taking Prisoners

Approaching an Interrogation Subject

Asking Questions

Chapter 8: Sixteen Lairs

Grung Village

Wererat Nest

Wizard’s Tower

Thieves’ Den

Unicorn Grove

Vampire Mansion

Hag Coven Cottage

Green Dragon Lair

Drow Compound

Aboleth Grotto

Esoteric Society Meetinghouse

Grandmother Hag Dwelling

Fey Court

Genie’s Palace

Blue Dragon Lair

Lich’s Crypt

Appendix A: Magic Items

Appendix B: Stat Blocks

Cartographers

Acknowledgments

About the Author

Copyright