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The cavern is so dark here that it absorbs light. It makes candles of your torches and lanterns, shadows diminishing even magical light. You can see no farther than your hands can reach. You slowly make your journey, the darkness playing tricks of vision and mind. The darkness retreats, reforms, taunts, and cajoles. It reaches into your mind, creating a parade of your fears, anxieties and humiliations.
As the shadow makes its presence known to you more and more frequently, you realize that you are inside a darkness that lives. It breathes shadow and speaks a cryptic dark speech. It is unintelligible at first, the language of darkness, but with horror you realize you are beginning to learn the darkness’ idioms, its tone, its meanings.
A thought eclipses all others: The Darkness wants you dead.
Summary: The party navigates through an area of living darkness that feeds off the life energy of all those that pass through. It seeks to trap them in a shadow maze and feed off of their life essence. The players must resist the lifedraining of the dark while navigating through the perilous dark of the Blackreach.
Complexity: 3 (6 successes before 3 failures)
Goal: Escape the clutches of the blackreach before accumulating three failures.
Encounter Level: PC level +1
Shadow and Light
Players attempting to move through the Blackreach can either resist it’s powers and illusions or merge with the shadow, “blending in”.
Before any skill check, a player must choose to fight the darkness or become one with the shadow.
When a player chooses to fight the darkness, if he succeeds in the roll, he gains 1 point of Light. You may give expend Light points to rid an ally of Shadow points. you remove one point of Shadow for each point of light spent. The ally does not receive your Light points.
When a player chooses to embrace the darkness, he gains 1 point of Shadow immediately, whether he fails or succeeds at the skill check. Whenever making a skill check , a player gets a +1 to the roll for every point of Shadow he has.
Any player who aids another character receives Light or Shadow as chosen by the character he is aiding.
Skills Used:
Arcana (hard DC, maximum two successes): It is obvious that this shadow is magical. You extract the shadows secrets just the shadow drowns you in yours.
- 1st roll: The shadow feeds of the negative energies of those it envelopes.
- 2nd roll: The Blackreach creates illusions that are partly real, so they cannot be completely ignored.
Insight(hard DC, maximum two successes): The darkness slowly reveals itself to you.
- 1st success: The shadow doesn’t want to destroy you…it wants you to join it.
- 2nd success: The shadow feeds off of your despair until you have no choice but to surrender to it.
Endurance (fighting the darkness, hard DC, maximum two successes): The darkness will not overcome you! Through pain and humiliation you will endure. You will never give in to the Blackreach. You will not become what it wants you to become.
Endurance (embracing shadow, easy DC, no maximum successes): You swallow all the painful memories and image the Blackreach projects until you can no longer stand it. Then you swallow some more. The shadow will keep hurting you until you give in.
Dungeoneering (moderate DC, maximum one success): In times like this, the pragmatic thing is to put one foot firmly in front of the other and navigate your way out of your mess. And that is exactly what you plan to do.
Religion (moderate DC, maximum one success): You steady your mind with prayer, pitting the words and energy of your god against the darkness
Failure: The PCs become lost for a time but eventually stagger out, harrowed by their experience.
If the players fail the skill challenge, each character loses an amount of healing surges equal to the twice the amount of Light points that they have gained. If a PC has no healing surges remaining, he lose hit points equal to the value of one healing surge for each healing surge he cannot remove.
Players with Shadow become afflicted with the curse of the Darksoul. Players afflicted with this curse gain vulnerable (5 + points of Shadow) all until they have had the ritual Raise Dead cast upon them.
Success: The character emerge from the Blackreach unscathed, but somehow changed.
A character with Light points gains a number of healing surges equal to the amount of Light she possesses. If she reaches maximum and still has Light remaining, she gains resist 2 + the number of extra Light until her next extended rest.
Players with Shadow gain vulnerable (5 + each point of Shadow) radiant and resist 5 necrotic until the next until the ritual Raise Dead has been cast on them.
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A Jack of All Trades ,or if you prefer, an extreme example of multi-classing, Gamefiend, a.k.a Quinn Murphy has been discussing, playing and designing games straight out of the womb. He is the owner and Editor-in-Chief of this site in addition to being an aspiring game designer. As you would assume, he is a huge fan of 4e.
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I ATTACK THE DARKNESS!
lol.
I liked this skill challenge and may even use it tonight. I had a couple of questions about the intent of some lines, however…
1) “Before any skill check, a player must choose to fight the darkness or become one with the shadow.”
Do you mean this as a choice that is made once (‘before the first skill check’) or a choice that is made before each roll (‘before each skill check’). “Any” can be interpreted either way.
2) If the former option (choice is made once and cannot be changed) what happens when a character with shadow points aids a character fighting the darkness and thus gets a Light point (or vice versa)?
3) If the latter option (choice is made before each roll) what happens when a character with shadow points chooses to fight the darkness (or vice versa)? Do they still get bonus points to their roll (I would assume not) and do the Light points negate the Shadow.
My take is (simplest version) that the choice is made once and a character with Shadow points cannot aid a character attempting to fight the darkness (and vice versa). A slightly more complex approach would be to allow a character to switch approaches with a successful Endurance check, with any accrued Shadow or Light points acting as a negative modifier to that role (not a bonus).
Carl
This is a good skill challenge. It’s more than just pick and skill, explain how you want to use it, roll the dice, success or failure. Rinse and repeat until 6 successes of 3 failures. Giving the PCs options that can affect their rolls and applying long-term consequences for failure are great ideas.
I am weary about part of the failure being the loss of healing surges. Loosing healing surges is often the consequence for failing a roll or failing the overall skill challenge. Unless there is going to be an immediate fight after the skill challenge most PCs will just opt to take an extended rest and then they’ve overcome the failure. I know that the failure shouldn’t be so devastating that the PCs can’t complete the adventure, but if all you need to do is take an extended rest and suddenly the negative consequences are gone, that doesn’t seem like a bad down side to failure.
@sysuro Welcome to At-Will! The intent is to make the choice each roll. A character can make the choice to give in or to fight, thus accumulating Light and Shadow at the same time. The best way to think about it is in a roleplaying sense…A character could conceivably fight the darkness and then give up and give in. Part of the staging on this, which I will include in an edit to make clear, is that the GM wants to sell how much easier the way of the shadow is. The GM offers that temptation of the easy path at every check, at every opportunity, playing the role of the Blackreach. Ideally, you’d see a player or two fight it and then give in.
The Light and Shadow are definitely meant to live together, and characters can thus gain both effects if they live in this conflicted state.
Thanks for your comments! I’ll make an edit and clarify some of these points you asked about.
@Ameron glad you liked! RE: Healing Surges, I’ll confess: When I originally ran this skill challenge I used my rules for rations as one of the main punishments for failure (my PCs are currently on the verge of starvation as a result) I wanted results that weren’t dependent on people using those rules though.
What I tend to do with SCs where healing surges are lost are chain the SCs. If the players have to immediately do another SC, and then fight…they’re going to want to win this SC for sure.
But I do see your point.
Thanks for your comments!
Man, I wish I’d read this before our last session – instead of the PC’s blundering into a BBEG fight I wasn’t totally prepared for them to be in, I could’ve gotten them tangled up in this!
Also, reading these skill challenges is stoking a fire in me towards writing one of my own. (A set of challenges within a shared context, actually)
This is excellent. I plan on putting my players through this when the BBEG traps them in the Shadowfell very soon. Thanks for providing so many quality ideas!
Thanks guys! Glad you like!
As always, more in the pipe. I want to complement this one with an SC in the Feywild.
@kingworks SCs are an awesome way to kill time! My experience is that when you run them right, they can take between a half hour and an hour, and are really fun. Also, please share when you get your SCs written!
@Bill thanks for visiting At-Will! Please share here or on the forums when you run the SCs! I’m always interested in how they come out for groups in play.
Let me belatedly join the crowd and say: Very Cool!