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Help with one-shot involving TINY monsters and a house full of booby-traps


shaddonon

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Hi,

I'm hosting a game night in a week and my some of my friends have expressed interest in a dungeon crawl adventure. The others are more geared towards CoC and horror / investigative scenarios. I've run CoC a few times and I own BRP. I just purchased the Trollhunter adventure to get a feel for a simple BRP dungeon crawl--however, to keep myself and my horror-oriented friends entertained, I want to cannibalize that adventure for mechanics and do something completely different.

I basically am planning on running the hillbilly cannibal ogre house from the Pathfinder adventure The Hook Mountain Massacre, but I want to open the adventure in the woods, and herd the adventurers to the house by terrorizing them with monsters that stalk them through the woods.

Not sure if anyone's familiar with 'meenlocks' from D&D, but that's the monster I had in mind. Basically, they're intelligent, rat-sized humanoids that hunt humans etc. and telepathically torment their victims while stalking them. Eventually they trap / bind their victims and drag them off to subterranean tunnels, where they turn their captives into new meenlocks.

In the D&D rulebooks the meenlock tunnels are maybe two or three feet high, so the only way in or out for a normal person is to crawl around on your belly. Very claustrophobic, very creepy. I don't really need the PCs to go into the tunnels or anything; the meenlocks will be included for the primary purpose of driving the adventurers into the cannibal house for refuge. The meenlocks'll just pop out of the ground or drop down from trees, and they'll have snares and sleep-inducing poison dart traps hidden amongst the underbrush, etc. If cornered, the meenlocks will attempt to escape through secret trapdoors into their tunnels, etc. I'm hoping they pick off a few NPCs from the adventurer's party, and I'll try to work it out so they get one PC, who is saved in the nick of time before being sucked into a tunnel entrance.

Given my description, does anyone have any tips that might come in handy? Or have homebrew statistics I could use / cannibalize for the meenlocks or their traps / combat in their tunnels, etc? Any ideas are greatly appreciated. Thanks very much for your time!

Edited by shaddonon
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I basically am planning on running the hillbilly cannibal ogre house from the Pathfinder adventure The Hook Mountain Massacre, but I want to open the adventure in the woods, and herd the adventurers to the house by terrorizing them with monsters that stalk them through the woods.

No stats to suggest, but depending on the players to act in a certain way, or take a certain path, is problematic. They could decide to make a 'last stand' in the woods for example, so make sure they have a reason to view the house as a possible safe haven. Or is there something in the house the Meenlocks need the characters to retrieve for them? Perhaps they capture an NPC or two and hold them in exchange for some item from the house? Can they be trusted to make the exchange without betrayal?

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No stats to suggest, but depending on the players to act in a certain way, or take a certain path, is problematic. They could decide to make a 'last stand' in the woods for example, so make sure they have a reason to view the house as a possible safe haven. Or is there something in the house the Meenlocks need the characters to retrieve for them? Perhaps they capture an NPC or two and hold them in exchange for some item from the house? Can they be trusted to make the exchange without betrayal?

EXCELLENT idea! I was initially going to map out two dungeons; the farm house (which is already done, in the Hook Mountain book) and a series of tunnels in case the players side-track and try to take on the meenlocks in their lair. If the evening veers down the latter path, I'll have the meenlocks bind and drag off a PC and turn him into a meenlock. Then he'll come back and tell the PCs they need to retrieve something from the farm house, lest some NPC hostages suffer the same fate. He can even accompany them; one of my more horror-friendly players could regain control of his mutated character, which will accompany the other PCs on their trip. That way the player can explore the warped character's alien motives etc.

I'm actually lifting a bunch of ideas from another Pathfinder adventure, 'Howl of the Carrion King'. A caravan of merchants and soldiers are sent to a remote, monster-infested town to regain control of it, in order to open up an old but important trade route. The adventure starts with a short murder mystery / missing person event, which exposes the existence of some tiny gremlins, similar to the meenlocks. From there, the adventurers flush all of the monsters from an old monastery on the outskirts of the town. They use the monastery as a launching pad for forays into the town, etc.

Here, the adventurers will be making their way through some spooky woods to a similarly conquered city. They will have to deal with the cannibal ogres and can then use their home as a base of operations, etc.

For stats I suggest

CoCCG - Call of Cthulhu Creature Generator

The rat things sound like what you have described:

Rat thing #1 #2

STR (1D3) 3 2

CON (2D6) 8 8

SIZ (-) 1 1

INT (3D6) 14 9

POW (2D6) 8 6

DEX (4D6+4) 18 14

Move (-) 9 9

HP (-) 5 5

db (-) -1D6 -1D6

Another excellent idea, thanks! I actually have the CoC rulebook and the Malleus Monstrorum; the rat things are perfect, and somewhat fittingly they were right under my nose the whole time.

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