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• Oct 8, 2023

  Hacking Without a Hacker

  

  Whether called a hacker, a decker, or a netrunner, the person who invades computer systems and makes them do things features prominently in the stories most cyberpunk RPGs take inspiration from, and so often ends up being a vitally important archetype in those games. However, they tend to have a very mixed track record when it comes to actually presenting you with a hacking system that’s fun and bug-free.

  This means there are many possible reasons for why you might find yourself planning a cyberpunk game but have no cause or wish to use its hacking rules. Maybe none of the players wants to be a hacker, or maybe the group just doesn’t like the rules of the game in question. In those cases, a popular suggestion is to include a NPC hacker, and in this post we’ll discuss a way to do so that keeps the rest of the group reasonably involved in the hacking. Rules are for GURPS, but the concepts can be easily translated to other systems.

  Work From Home

  The current best practice in games that include hacker PCs is to devise ways to keep the hacker together with the rest of the party, so that they can fully participate in the game even when it’s not hacking time. When your group’s hacker is an NPC, however, the best thing to do is the opposite. Hacker NPCs should always do their thing remotely.

  Managing NPCs who constantly accompany the party is a tricky affair. A character who’s much weaker than the party runs the risk of turning the adventure into a video-game-style escort quest, one of the most reviled types of mission in existence. One who is strong enough to protect themselves can end up becoming a GMPC, a label reserved for annoying characters who overshadow the players and make them feel like the support cast of someone else’s story.

  All of this is subjective, which makes it even trickier. Your group’s fun will be hurt if they feel either of those scenarios is happening, even if the math is well-balanced.

  A remote hacker removes most of the risk. They’re in communication with the group, and they can do the jobs covered by their niche, but any other challenge that can be handled by the PC’s own skills should be, even if it’s technological in nature. And there are things the hacker can only do with on-site support from the PCs, which keeps them involved in the actual hack even if you’re not engaging with those rules.

  The exact nature of these support tasks depends on how your specific setting handles computers and hacking. Most games either go the same Retro way of early Shadowrun and CP2020, or a more “Modern” way that uses more recent tropes such as the ones employed by Shadowrun 4th Edition or CP2077. We’ll look at how you can accommodate a remote NPC hacker in both.

  The Future of Another Timeline

  It’s not immediately obvious to us here in 2023, but the earliest iterations of Shadowrun’s Matrix and CP2020’s NET were based on a pre-Internet model of networked computing. Strip all the futuristic terms from their description and you’ll find out you’re dealing with 80s mainframes. This lies at the root of a lot of things there that can look a bit weird or silly to modern readers¹. Here’s a short and approximately correct explanation for how that works:

  Mainframes are huge (and hugely expensive) computers that are usually responsible for handling all data processing for an entire company or organization. They were the dominant form of institutional computing from around the 1950s to at least the early 1990s, and never really went away.

  A mainframe is operated through remote terminals, which can be in the same building or even off-site. Therefore, it must be ready to receive connections and requests from these terminals. And the way you do that in the 80s is through phone lines and modems. They do have internal security measures to authenticate users and prevent one user from seeing or changing other users’ data, but there is no such thing as a firewall because permanent Internet connections are not yet a thing for mainframes. The most security you can add to the connection step is to keep the numbers for your mainframe’s phone lines unlisted².

  And this is why both Shadowrun’s and CP2020’s descriptions of their “global nets” are so concerned about splitting them into geographical regions and assigning codes to them and the servers within them. That net is not the Internet, but a world-spanning phone circuit. The first step to hacking into that corporate mainframe is to dial the unlisted number of its modem³.

  Old-School Remote Hacking

  When you have a PC hacker in these more “retro” games, the number of the target’s modem line might be included with the mission briefing, letting them hack removely. It’s more likely that no number is included, then the hacker has to go in with the group and find an terminal in the target facility through which they could connect.

  With a hacker NPC and they have the number, the reason the adventure is happening at all is because the mission objectives have a physical component that must happen at the same time. The typical setup is that you need to steal the physical prototype while the hacker grabs the research files.

  If they don’t have the number, then discovering the number becomes one of the physical mission objectives! The place the PCs are infiltrating might not even have any direct relation to the real, final objective, but it could be a place that also uses the same mainframe remotely. The number is going to be written down somewhere in there, either in an official manual, some employee’s personal notes or even a scrap of paper that was carelessly thrown away⁴. Some non-VR-dungeon hacking of a physical terminal to peek at its configuration might be necessary, which might be resolved by a couple of rolls since dumb terminals are less secure than the mainframe they talk to. Or you might need to find a way to scam the info out of an someone who works there (“social engineering”).

  This fact-finding expedition could be a whole adventure in itself, or it might just be an intermediate step in a more complex operation where the group must also infiltrate the final target facility at the same time as the hacker does their thing, as outlined above.

  Twenty Minutes From Now

  More recent cyberpunk games tend to base their networks on the real-world Internet and the technologies that support it. This means that every individual device attached to a network is effectively a full-feature computer, be it an employee’s workstation, a security camera, or a guard’s smartphone. Different departments have their own private servers and their own internal network that doesn’t necessarily connect to the others or to the outside world.

  Less sensitive facilities might allow employees to work remotely from their homes or from other buildings by letting them connect via virtual private networks. These connections to happen over the Internet, but they’re encrypted and protected from general snooping. Realistically, our dastardly hacker would need to steal valid credentials to be able to access a VPN.

  On the other extreme, a top-secret secure facility might be air-gapped, which means it’s isolated and sealed in such a way that no signal can enter or leave the building. None of its internal networks are connected to the outside world, and they are not connected to each other either unless this is absolutely necessary. The servers controlling the security system are isolated from the servers housing sensitive data. Each has its own independent set of protections.

  This is both realistic according to our contemporary understanding of network security, and an excellent way to make sure PC hackers stick with the group and have plenty to do once inside. Individual hacking attempts tend to be shorter but more numerous, and made against devices that are within the hacker’s immediate reach⁵. Shadowrun 4th Edition goes deep into this (5th and onwards go back to the retro model), and it’s also more or less how things work in Cyberpunk 2077.

  New-School Remote Hacking

  In an environment so full of incentives for the hacker to stick with the party, how can you accommodate a remote NPC hacker?

  If the target facility has a VPN that contains the data you want, then many of the same “classic” techniques for acquiring those old-school mainframe phone numbers might also work to acquire valid VPN credentials, allowing the NPC to hack the place remotely.

  If it doesn’t have a VPN or is completely isolated, then we need to resort to quantum bullshit. Below we’ll see GURPS stats for the bullshit in question, imported directly from Warframe. It’s easily usable in other systems, though.

  

  A datamass is a device similar in concept to the causality communicator in Ultra-Tech page 45, but much cheaper. It consists of an armored, briefcase-sized device that incorporates several kinds of data cable plus laser and IR micro-communicators and a small radio (GURPS Ultratech pages 43-44). All of these are connected to a sizable amount of quantum-entangled matter.

  Datamasses are made in entangled pairs that allow high-bandwidth communication and data transfer between elements of the pair through any amount of barriers or interference. They have DR 10, HP 8, cost $5000 for the pair, weight 5kg (10 lb) each, and are LC1 (AKA super illegal). They also include an emergency self-destruct switch that melts the internals of both elements of the pair and can be triggered from either side.

  In your typical cyberpunk setting, datamasses were first invented as super-secret espionage tools by a major government or computer-focused megacorp, and initially gave them a major leg up in one of the many ongoing cold wars between such entities. The secret of their existence soon leaked, however, and an enterprising independent engineer figured out they were quite easy to make with a properly modified home 3d printer. Yes, even the entangled matter. The plans for a home-baked datamasses were soon made widely available on the Net, and they keep popping up no matter how much effort the corps spend to squash them. That’s why they’re relatively cheap.

  Datamass technology is going to be really revolutionary when FTL travel is invented in the distant future, but for now it’s mostly used for its original purpose, and allows teams of plucky street mercs like the PCs to operate at the same level as crack corporate commandos when it comes to high-level espionage. If the PCs are hired to do a hacking mission, they will usually be provided a datamass pair. PCs can also buy their own through the usual illegal channels available to PCs in these games. It should be difficult, but not impossible.

  In a setting that has datamasses, hacking missions look a lot like the Warframe “mobile defense” missions these devices come from. The PCs need to sneak into the target facility carrying a datamass, and find a place where to connect it. A direct cable connection to a machine in the target network is best. A wi-fi connection will do in a pinch, but will make everything that follows take longer.

  Since the hacker is an NPC, you don’t need to roll anything for the actual hack - you just need to give the PCs a time frame for when it will be done. And then they must stay near the datamass and guard it until that much time has elapsed. If they snuck in, they need to find a way to maintain stealth and divert security attention from their access point. If they’re found out, it turns into a fight, but they still must stay until the hack is done or it will fail. For added Fun(TM), a difficult mission might require the party to do this several times from different access points.

  The self-destruct switch is useful for when the hack is done, as it allows the party to leave without having to lug the datamass back out. It can also prevent the hacker from being traced if the device is captured. Or it can be used in a double-cross that leaves the team stranded in enemy territory without network support. Use that last one sparingly!

  1. Alas, it’s not related to the whole VR Dungeon thing. That’s weird and silly for other reasons. ↩

  2. The real-world practice of wardialing consisted of dialing every number in a big list or an entire area code looking for accessible modems. ↩

  3. And you can absolutely go wardialiing there. The Genesis version of Shadowrun even implements it. ↩

  4. The real world hacking practice of dumpster diving consists in searching a company’s trash for discarded papers with valid passwords and credentials written down on them. ↩

  5. Anywhere from “directly plugged in” to “in the same local wi-fi network”. ↩

• Oct 6, 2023

  Let's Read Neverwinter: Mount Hotenow

  Mount Hotenow is a huge barely-dormant volcano on the southeast end of the Crags, in Neverwinter Wood. The heat it produces is the reason the region’s rivers never freeze, and therefore it’s at the root of Neverwinter’s prosperity. It was also the cause of its downfall 27 years ago, when a Thayan ritual caused it to erupt.

  Even before the cataclysm Mount Hotenow was already the subject of many rumors and legends. It’s an opening to Hell; it’s an opening to the Elemental Chaos; demons live here; giants live here; dragons live here; and so on. The most recent tale is that anyone who enters one of Hotenow’s many caves is fated to die within a year, even if they make it out.

  Fire Cultists

  Though the original mountain in the middle world is back to its pre-cataclysm state, its reflection on the Shadowfell has been spewing a slow and steady stream of lava since the cataclysm. Some people believe that this shadow eruption could cause one in the middle world if the barriers between planes wear thin enough. Such a state of constant eruption would spell doom for Neverwinter.

  Chief among these believers are the many elemental fire creatures that do indeed make Mount Hotenow their home. They’re led by the hunchbacked fire giant Gommoth, who has lived here since he was banished from his clan. The eruption 27 years ago was a major ecstatic experience to him and to every other fire creature who lived here, and since then Gommoth started a cult dedicated to making it happen again.

  The ecstatic experience happened because it was Maegera’s near-awakening that caused the eruption, and her power tugged at the elementals’ primordial nature. Gommoth doesn’t know this, but the cult’s latest rising star probably does. This is Qualthus, the shadovar outcast. Remember him? He was banished from Xinlenal after being blamed for the accidental sabotage of their mythallar. True to the general disposition of his former buddies, Qualthus has decided that the best way to remedy this injustice is to cause Mount Hotenow to erupt again and bury Xinlenal in lava.

  He’s confident he can do it. After all he’s an arcanist of the Netherese tradition (read: a megalomaniacal asshole). His actual chances are incredibly small, after all it took the full might of the Dread Ring to make it happen the first time. But he could get lucky, since Maegera’s bonds are weakened.

  To represent Gommoth, the book suggests using an ogre mercenary stat block with added fire resistance, increased Charisma, and with attacks doing fire damage. You could also level down a standard fire giant stat block to make him fit with the campaign’s level range.

  The River Of Flame

  Deep underground, beneath the territory of the fire cultists, there is a river of liquid flame. This isn’t poetic language or a metaphor for magma, but a literal description. The river follows a winding subterranean path, and the important thing for player characters is that it passes by a tunnel that leads directly to Gauntlgrym.

  PCs who know where to disembark could take some sort of fireproof boat or submersible through this river, and arrive at the lost city. Their main challenge here besides the hostile environment is Karrundax, the very territorial young red dragon who lairs in the area.

  Seekers of the Way

  One thing that happens repeatedly in this book is that a theme description in Chapter 2 will give us the impression that the PC in question is the only one doing something, and then a faction or location description further down the line will give us a whole group of NPCs with the same goal, and that’s going to be the first time we hear of these NPCs.

  This might be a disconnect between different authors, or it might be a sort of soft “Player’s Guide/Campaign Setting” separation within the same book, since presumably you want PCs to choose a theme without seeing any spoilers about what they’ll encounter during the campaign. Whatever the case, we now run into the group that ties to the Heir of Delzoun, and it’s a genuine Dwarf Fortress expedition!

  The Heir’s description actively lied to the player: they’re not one of the last dwarves who are still looking for the lost city. In reality there are so many that after their disparate teams and groups joined together to coordinate their efforts they had to elect a government to keep them organized. Their newly elected leader decided that Mount Hotenow was their best bet, since there were many stories connecting it to Gauntlgrym and a few confirmed Delzoun outposts on its slopes.

  This extremely large expedition set out from Neverwinter before the Heir got here, and the litany of setbacks and tragedies they experienced along the way is what gives me that Fun (TM) Dwarf Fortress vibe.

  First they bought a letter of safe passage from Neverember in order to pass through Many-Arrows territory unharmed, but the dwarves and orcs just couldn’t resist provoking each other until hostilities broke out.

  Then they arrived at the Wood and lost yet more dwarves to eladrin arrows and miscellaneous monsters. Either Shandarar’s guardians were particularly trigger-happy or it was those old rivalries flaring up again.

  Then they got to the volcano and lost a bunch more dwarves to Gommoth’s cult.

  And now they’re stuck at the river of flame. Can’t forge ahead because no one packed a fireproof submersible, can’t retreat because the survivors aren’t sure they can make it back to Neverwinter alive. To say that morale is low is a massive understatement.

  Morale would be even lower if the expedition’s leader, Vandra Hillborn, revealed the terrible secret she’s keeping. Many of the dwarves “lost” to the elementals actually defected to them, and now work together to bring about the volcano’s next eruption. Hillborn believes they cracked under the strain of the trip and went insane, but the truth is even worse: they were intentionally driven insane by the Gauntlgrym mind-flayers through remote telepathy. The flayers believe that a volcanic eruption is just the thing to permanently block access to Gauntlgrym and prevent any meddlers from finding it.

  As we already know, the mind flayers are themselves being controlled by the aboleths, so we have a true conspiracy onion here.

  Impressions

  There are several ways to discover Gauntlgrym’s precise location elsewhere, but the River of Flame under Mount Hotenow appears to be the most viable path to actually go there. The fate of the dwarven expedition is a good blueprint of what an overland journey from Neverwinter to here would involve.

  It’s possible to have an entire party of PCs who would be more interested in pursuing this journey than dealing with the other hooks in the setting: not just one or more Heirs of Delzoun but also perhaps one of Oghma’s Faithful who’s really into archaeology, a Dead Rat Deserter who’s after the score of the century, and even a Neverwinter Noble in a campaign where finding Gauntlgrym will give them the popular acclaim they need to take the throne. If there’s an extended detour to deal with the eladrin, then perhaps the Iliyanbruen Guardian can get into the mix too.

• Oct 1, 2023

  Let's Read Neverwinter: Xinlenal and Related Locations

  This post covers the city itself and several nearby locations related to the Gray Wolf Uthgardt, who serve the Netherese.

  Content Warning: “Brutal Savages” nonsense

  There is a lot of Gray Wolf material in this section, and this is where the mounting inconsistencies in their portrayal start to get in the way. The stuff about them that I read so far gave me the impression of a people who were mostly minding their own business before the Netherese turned their leaders into fascist assholes. Most of the actual tribe members were not happy with the situation: a significant number of them had defected, and those who hadn’t were open to persuasion by a PC like the Pack Outcast.

  This section drops most of that and goes all in on the “brutal savages who disdain civilization” cliches, painting the Gray Wolf as being bad guys even before the Netherese got to them. After being co-opted, they got even worse. Anyone who’s still a member of the tribe at this point is either on board with the cruelty or too cowardly to ever stand against it. Even their guardian spirits are disgusted with them.

  I’m going to report what the book says below, but I personally would completely change it were I to run a Neverwinter campaign.

  Xinlenal From the Outside In

  As we saw before, Xinlenal wasn’t just a Netherese flying city, it was the first ever built. It fell here in the Wood when Netheril’s magic stopped working. Today, when viewed from the outside, it looks like an out-of-place 60-foot tall plateau jutting up from the ground in an otherwise flat area of the Wood. The structures atop it are hidden from view by the Wood’s vegetation, which grew over it in the two millennia since the city crashed. The Shadovar led by Prince Clariburnus use Xinlenal as their main base of operations in the region, and are hard at work trying to make it fly again.

  The Forest of Hides

  The Gray Wolf recognize this is the center of Netherese power even though they don’t know what goes on in here. So when they declared war on the Forsworn, they started hanging up the skins of their “traitorous kinfolk” in a clearing outside the plateau. This acts as both a warning to enemies and as a show of support for their new masters.

  Ironically, the sheer brutality of this practice has led many rank-and-file Gray Wolf to question their leadership, and the horrible smell of dead werewolf lingering about the place acts as a cover for Forsworn spies and makes it easier for them to scout the plateau.

  The act of building the Forest of Hides outraged and horrified many of the primal spirits who used to be friends of the Grey Wolf. If the Pack Outcast, Uthgardt Barbarian, or any other PC who uses primal powers dismantle the Forest of Hides, those spirits will reward them with a daily power named Wrath of the Fallen, which can be activated after an attack hits and makes the target vulnerable 5 to all damage (save ends), including that of the triggering attack. Once the target saves, they take another 10 damage.

  Here you see the first instance of what I talked about in the intro paragraphs above. There’s more below.

  The City and the Web of Stone

  The walls of the plateau are a sheer climb, but they look natural after two millennia of weathering. Some flying monsters even made lairs there. The city at the top looks completely ruined when viewed from the plateau’s edge.

  Those moving towards the center will soon spot a massive suspended “web” made of stone looming over the skyline. This acts as a gigantic crane and construction tool used in the Shadovar’s renovation efforts. It can lift whole city blocks for relocation, or remove an equivalent quantity of soil and vegetation to reveal the structures buried beneath. Workers both organic and artificial are constantly swarming all over it.

  This web was built by the shadar-kai witch Korvina, who realized she could use residual energy from the city’s old protection rituals to power it. Later she would find out she was actually drawing power from the city’s broken mythallar and delaying its repairs. When her bosses found out about the oopsie, she managed to pin the blame for it on her colleague Qualthus, whose fate we’ll learn in a future post.

  The Womb of Stone

  Gee, these Netherese sure have a knack for naming things, don’t they?

  This building is an ancient construct factory reactivated by the Shadovar. This is where they build all the thaalud constructs they’re using as a workforce. The ones they build today aren’t as powerful as the ones from ancient Netheril (using the thaalud constructor stat block from earlier in this book), but they can do their job just fine.

  The Womb of Stone is run and operated by a shade named Ulrukan (stats as a human slaver with shade traits). His left arm and leg are animated prosthetic constructs, which I think is awesome. Ulrukan discovered the problem with the Web of Stone before anyone else, decided to keep it to himself until he could gain something by revealing it, and lost the chance to do so when other people found the issue and reported it immediately. Now that it’s public he’s trying to figure out how to extract some advantage from the fact that he knew it before anyone else did. I don’t think he knows it’s Korvina’s fault, or he’d already be blackmailing her.

  Cathedral of Night

  This is a ancient building repurposed as a temple to the goddess Shar. The exterior is still ruined and worn, but the interior is very fancy and all done up in onyx and jet. It’s also protected by enchanted hungry shadows, a very interesting hazard that can temporarily remove PCs from play and cause ongoing psychic and necrotic damage to them while they’re gone. This security protects the usual temple treasures and also a portal to the Shadowfell, which is used by the Shadovar to access their supply routes.

  Orthinos Eln is the priest in charge of both the temple and the restoration project. He can be found here either meditating or communing with his boss Prince Clariburnus, who leads the faction as a whole.

  Xinlenal’s Heart

  The city’s mythallar is located at its very center. The tower that houses it was the first building to be completely restored, and a small army of Shadovar artificers is now busy restoring the artifact itself.

  The restoration process is simple to describe but very hard to execute. It consists of mixing melted glass with large quantities of residuum, carefully pouring the resulting substance over the mythallar, and molding it so that it slowly recovers its original spherical shape. Right now it looks like a partial sphere, already over 100 feet (30 meters!) in diameter.

  This is why the Netherese are scouring the region’s many ruins and dungeons for magic items and other ancient enchanted relics, and also why they’re poised to begin raiding Neverwinter. All of that loot is going to get destroyed for its residuum. The Shadovar are burning the legacies of others to rebuild their own.

  The central tower is also where their main war room is located, as well as Clariburnus’ quarters and throne room. He can either be found here coordinating the faction’s overall strategy, or somewhere out in the world leading another raid for magic items. He also sometimes brings members of the Gray Wolf leadership here for briefings.

  Vellosk

  This is the main “settlement” of the Gray Wolf tribe, located in the Wood away from Xinlenal. The quotes are there because they are mostly nomadic, and this is just where a few more permanent structures are built - pack leader’s homes, a feast hall, and some other communal buildings. You can also find a number of tents and lean-tos scattered around the area, belonging to other tribe members who are currently staying there.

  The book says the Grey Wolf have the technology to make weapons and tools as sophisticated as that of Neverwinter, but that they have no real culture to speak of beyond an obsession with behaving like D&D’s idea of a wolf pack. It could be that this is what the current leadership thinks, but the way the book phrases it kinda makes me think this is what they were like even before.

  Vellosk’s central feature is a sloped pit whose bottom is coated in dry bones, and also contains a totem pole decorated with animal skulls. This is their center of worship, dedicated to Uthgar and the tribe’s guardian spirits. It’s also where ritual combats and duels happen.

  One of the permanent structures here is the home of Ormshas, a dark creeper necromancer who is here officially as a Netherese ambassador and in reality as a spy placed to make sure the Grey World remain under control. She has a large group of wraiths under her control, which she uses to uncover secrets and silence dissenters.

  The Gray Wolf and the PCs

  A lot of the rank-and-file Grey Wolf are very unhappy with the direction the tribe is taking, but they also believe their leaders’ commands are absolute and those leaders have been completely bought the Netherese party line. Many tribe members would rather leave than try to challenge their leaders, but these days those who express a desire to leave are executed on the spot.

  PCs such as the Pack Outcast or the Uthgardt Barbarian would have an easier time convincing the Grey Wolf to reject their leadership, but they would still need to challenge those leaders to ritual combat and win (or convince/help a friendly Gray Wolf to do so). Ritual combat is, of course, to the death.

  Making a legitimate challenge would also require convincing a majority of the tribe that their leaders are being bamboozled by the Netherese. Just going for the leaders at once is a sure way to get the whole tribe to declare war on you no matter what they think about those leaders, so it’s not a good option for most groups.

  Conyberry

  Conyberry is a small village at the edge of the Wood that became quite scenic during the Spellplague when a populated slice of Abeir was isekaied there. It gained a new lake, a bunch of floating earthmotes, and a mixed population that learned to live well together after some initial friction.

  Unfortunately you don’t get to see that version of it, because the Grey Wolf killed everyone long before the Netherese even got to them. According to the book they believed the people from Abeir to be hostile invaders and the people of Conyberry to be their co-conspirators.

  The Gray Wolf used the now empty village as a storage area for a time. No one else went there because everyone (rightly) assumed it had been destroyed after news stopped coming, and when someone did stumble into the place they were killed.

  When the Netherese recruited them they started using the village to, in the words of the book, “practice civilized behavior” so that they would blend into the communities they were ordered to infiltrate. Now when outsiders end up there by accident they’re received by a bunch of Gray Wolf in sheep’s clothing eager to test their acting skills. Only after the actors are satisfied, or when they’re found out, do the murder attempts start.

  Impressions

  Xinlenal itself seems like a good dungeon location. A final battle against Caliburnus in the mythallar chamber would look awesome.

  But everything about the description of the Gray Wolf kinda ruins it. The text is filled with the exact set of racist tropes that draw so much criticism to D&D. I’m left with the distinct impression that the Gray Wolf are described as being bad because they’re tribal, in contrast to the “civilized” people they disdain and victimize. Yikes!

  That’s definitely something I’d completely rewrite if I ever ran a campaign in this setting. It actually kinda tainted the good memories I had of this book, and made me stop writing new Let’s Read material for it for a while.

• Sep 28, 2023

  Let's Read Neverwinter: The Dread Ring

  In the gloomiest and darkest part of the Wood, there’s a perfectly circular clearing whose ground is ash. None of the Wood’s animals dare enter this place. This is where the Dread Ring was built. It was both a fortress and a ritual tool for a grand spell that would have turned Szass Tam into a god. Though the spell failed, the ruined fortress now serves as the main base for the Thayans in the region.

  The entire area of the Ring, both indoors and outdoors, is super cursed. Check it out:

  • It counts as both defiled and necrotic ground, the rules for which are found in the DMG 2. Basically, undead are boosted and HP gains from spending healing surges are halved.

  • Powers with either the arcane or necrotic keywords crit on 19-20. Powers with both keywords crit on 18-20. This is one of the only instances of “critical range” boosting in the entire game, it’s an extremely rare bonus.

  • Creatures take -1 to Will against powers or effects with the fear keyword.

  Since this is also Lorragauth’s grave, some smaller areas in here might also count as acid-based fonts of power or elemental spouts, making them even more hazardous.

  The Ring from the Outside In

  Frequent clashes between Shadovar and Thayan forces have turned the outer areas of the clearing into a blood-soaked battlefield littered with corpses.

  Inside the ruined outer walls is the Flesh Factory, where corpses, body parts, and sometimes living victims are stored and used as materials for Thayan necromancy and flesh-shaping projects. The place’s design lets it raise undead at a much faster pace and a much larger scale than usual, effectively mass-producing them. This is where most of the Thayan undead are made, and also the facility in charge of repairing the fortress’ walls. Instead of bothering with the logistics of procuring and shipping stone, they decided to patch the walls with slabs of undead flesh. These walls get a stat block as a trap, because they can sprout grabby hands that deal damage.

  Past the Factory are the halls of the fortress, which follow no plan a living mind would consider sane since their main purpose was to act as a ritual tool.

  The center is open, and it’s the current site of the Thayan excavation that’s trying to reach Lorragauth’s resting place. They’ve managed to reach his bones and partially unearthed them already, but there’s plenty of work to do before they’re free of the soil. The excavation pit is deep and hazardous, and the book has rules for navigating it and for operating the many cranes installed here during combat to either drop rocks on enemies or slam the crane arm into them.

  The undead workforce here doubles as the Dread Ring’s garrison, so they get depleted to a, er, skeleton crew when the Netherese attack. They’re overseen by Praddak, an battle wight (stats in DMG 2). Also here as protection is the sacred totem of the Thunderbeast tribe, which as we saw before was a fossilized thunderbeast skeleton. It’s been animated by necromancy, with the stats of a rotclaw (an undead monster from the Draconomicon). This of course is a horrible blasphemy, particularly to the Uthgardt Barbarian PC.

  Somewhere near the pit is the Dread Spire, the tallest surviving tower of the Ring. It houses the Thayan war room, the entrance to Valindra’s sanctum, and a perpetually dark room that contains a portal to the Shadowfell. It also contains the Chapel of the Dragon, where Kroskas’ cultists research how to raise Lorragauth as a dracolich.

  The Shadowfell portal is what lets the Thayans bring corpses from Neverdeath Cemetery for reanimation, and to receive caravans that come from Surcross via the Shadowfell Road.

  Valindra’s Sanctum houses her library and an arcane observatory that lets someone scry remote locations and perform astrological divination. It’s operated by Lurrens, one of her lieutenants, who watches it 24/7. Lurrens is a former wizard who was turned into an undead Brain in an Armored Jar (from Open Grave).

  The observatory’s grinding machinery is hazardous terrain, should a fight break out here. PCs might find information on Gauntlgrym and other campaign secrets by either researching Valindra’s library or learning how to operate the observatory.

  Impressions

  Contrary to my earlier expectations the Dread Ring cannot rise as a floating battlestation or giant undead mech, though the possibility of them raising a dracolich is a decent substitute. The place is perfectly usable as an endgame dungeon, though it could also end up being “just” an important stop on the way to Gauntlgrym depending on the campaign’s focus.

  And I have to say “Brain in an Armored Jar” is the best monster name ever.

• Sep 24, 2023

  Let's Read Neverwinter: The Ruins of Shandarar

  Historical Errata

  Before I continue, I feel a correction is in order. This one’s on me, not on the book, since it was a detail from that long and detailed timeline at the start that I missed. I’m correcting it here because it will be important later.

  As we already know, Shandarar was the former capital of Iliyanbruen, an elven/eladrin empire that existed in this region thousands of years ago. It coexisted with the human empire of Netheril, and witnessed its fall when the flying city of Xinlenal fell on the Neverwinter Wood.

  The bit I got wrong was this: the fall of Xinlenal did not also cause the end of Iliyanbruen. The crash site was far from the city, and though the elves explored it soon after the event they decided to declare it off-limits after the first few explosions and carried on with their lives.

  Iliyanbruen would last for a few centuries longer. They’d manage to repel a massive orc invasion that covered the North, but their kingdom would collapse from the effort it spent to kick those same orcs out of the human city of Illusk (located where Luskan is today). From here on out things proceed as previously detailed, with the empire’s population scattering and some of them deciding to take refuge in the Feywild.

  Present-Day Shandarar

  The middle world ruins of Shandarar cover a sizable area in the Wood but were mostly hidden by the passage of time and the growth of vegetation. Sometimes a farmer at the edges of the forest would find shards of pottery as they plowed a field, or some village builders would end up unearthing a ruined structure. These rumors helped the Netherese find the core of the ruins and steal a bunch of ancient relics from it, which has the eladrin in a tizzy as we already learned.

  Most of the ruins are still, well, ruins. They’re overgrown and weathered enough to be hazardous. The oldest part of them, however, is being rebuilt and renovated by the eladrin, since that’s where they crossed over from the Feywild.

  The biggest news here is that there are still several shielded vaults in the ruins that haven’t been found out by anyone yet. They contain extensive troves of ancient Iliyanbruen artifacts and works of art, of immense cultural value even when they aren’t magical, all protected against the ravages of time by stasis spells. The eladrin themselves don’t remember their locations, and this is the first time the book itself mentions them.

  Here is also where it goes into a little more detail on the Feywild side of the crossing. That’s where the military outpost of New Shandarar is. It was also built on top of ruins, after the eladrin force kicked out the evil fey that had been living in them.

  New Shandarar’s fortifications are living vegetation shaped by magic, and the portal opens into a courtyard kill zone. Aside from all the military defenses you expect, built of out living and magically reinforced wood, the fort also has plenty of facilities for long-term habitation. This includes a temple to Corellon.

  The Hidden Serpent

  As we saw before, Merrisara Winterwhite, the force’s commanding officer, is part of their moderate faction. She spends most of her time in the middle world overseeing the restoration of the city. Her second-in-command is an extremist, and spends all of his time in the Feywild. Addemios Three-Dawn, the secret Asmodeus worshiper, also spends all his time in the Feywild. He has a hidden shrine to his god underneath Corellon’s temple. The evil fey who were supposedly kicked out of the area have a hidden camp not too far from the fort, and they cooperate with Three-Dawn because their interests align.

  A side box here explains that Asmodeus presents himself in the Feywild as a trickster god of a “better class” than the usual archetypes found there. Instead of lying and cheating for the lulz, he encourages and teaches his followers to do so in order to advance their own power and influence.

  The Fey and the PCs

  Another box discusses the possible attitudes of the eladrin towards PCs. As we already known even the moderates are standoffish and aggressive to outsiders by default. However, they are likely have a more diplomatic stance towards a party which includes the Iliyanbruen Guardian.

  Which of the two sub-factions wins out depends largely on the actions of the PCs. The moderates win and might become valuable allies if the PCs can offer them evidence that the Shadovar are responsible for the relic thefts, or if they can prove Addemios Three-Dawn is a traitor who is manipulating them.

  On the other hand, if the PCs steal from the ruins, fight the eladrin or attack Three-Dawn before proving his guilt, the Fey will adopt the extremist stance and launch a full-scale invasion of the region, likely starting a major open war with the other factions.

  Impressions

  How important the fey of New Shandarar are depends entirely on what the group wants for their campaign. They could be anywhere from isolated and irrelevant to a potential region-wide threat that needs to be defused as soon as possible. Even groups who aren’t interested in spending a lot of time dealing with these elves might still get an adventure or two out of a visit to their camp, perhaps as they’re traveling the Wood on the way to some other location therein.

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