Castle Whiterock: The Thane and the World Outside

At the point where the party retreated fully from the dungeon, several things were happening.

Within the dungeon, the Thane had become aware of the threat presented by the party. He was also going through some troubling diplomatic issues with the stone giant clan living atop the mountain, though he was unaware that the party was in cahoots with the stone giants in order to keep the peace between them and the local villages outside Cillamar.

Thus, the Thane has put the word out through his web of affiliations that there is a price on the party's head. Grime, the dust mephit, has been taking notes on the party as they pass through the dungeon and collected fairly accurate descriptions of them. The following NPCs/factions within the megadungeon setting which can be leveled against the party are as follows:

• the aboleth and its servants on the Watery Way
• The troll band near the entry to the Immense Cavern (I've been rolling really badly at encounters so far)
• Vulgaris, the minyad druid
• the young stone giant band (unaffiliated with those atop the mountain)
• Gar and Nar (who doesn't trust the duergar AT ALL)

I've decided that the duergar have finally cleaned out the last holdout orcs from level 3. Drugila can go hang; it's not likely to be worth their while to get her out. The least of the orcs will be offered to the aboleth, while those of any worth will be taken to the Theater for sport, or as slaves. 

This will make the aboleth encounter a significant roadblock. Likewise, the troll band may be a good speedbump as the party re-enters the cavern. I don't see Vulgaris or Gar and Nar getting actively involved in fighting the PCs, as they have direct experience with them and don't have a vested interest in helping the duergar. 

The stone giant kids are likewise insufficient a threat, unless they do something sneaky like throw rocks and then summon a purple worm on the group, then run away. 

Adding something to spice up the trap at 9-11 seems likely, since the party would have to pass through that area to get to the Theater anyway. Maybe a few fire-friendly mercenary monsters, or at least something tough enough to weather the damage from Incendiary Cloud until the characters are dealt with. 

But what I really need here is an enemy character party. Another group of murderhobo are being paid by the Thane to track down the party and eliminate them; or better yet capture them! 

A rival or enemy party with abilities roughly equal to the PCs, and hopefully with a foil or two for the group's normal MO, would serve both to up the threat level and promote the kind of hate that motivates players to pursue enemies. I'll have to start working on that idea. I'm thinking a group led by a Lawful Evil cleric devoted to a god of oppression and slavery would be the perfect counterpoint to Fhaariys' Shellyn cleric. I'll have to come up with something suitably irritating for the rest of them, too. 

That pretty much handles the dungeon, but what's going on in town? The party has said they are returning to town and I'm going to use this visit to advance the plot a bit. 

Now, in the past, there's been a struggle going on between the local baronies and the far-away Duke Garth. Garth has been expanding his realm and gobbling up the little baronies along the royal road. He hasn't violated any of the laws governing the use of the road, but exploiting every opportunity to bring every neighboring land under his banner, one way or another. He has secretly been using dark magical items to build his power, items of a kind not seen in ages; mildly vampiric weapons that derive power from their victims, but also armor that feeds that power up the food chain. Thus his military units fight normally until they begin to take casualties, but then the remaining troopers become stronger. This makes his army greatly feared and he takes great care to ensure no one outside a small, necessary group knows about these items. 

He's also allied with a group called the Inquisitors of Nuln. The Inquisitors are an anti-magical cult. They operate mostly as fighters and members of the Inquisitor classes, but eschew magic use in any form. Their magic use has been supplanted by enhanced Counterspell ability, using special feats to increase their ability to stifle magic used by opponents. The Inquisitors may have started out as benevolent, but over time and through their affiliation with the Duke, they have warped into a ruthless, if not outright evil, organization. 

Their battlefield role is to listen for cries of "Witch! Witch!" and ride out to start dealing with magic, usually by countering spellcasters. If they get a chance they move in and apprehend or kill the offender, regardless of class or alignment. Staging mass witch burnings is a favorite past-time for them. 

On each return to Cillamar, the party hears tidbits of news from the "war in the North" about how this barony has been annexed, or that free town has been burned to the ground or occupied, as the Duke's reach slowly expands. By this time, his forces have reached almost all the way to Cillamar... it makes sense that these forces come into play soon. 

Castle Whiterock: The Immense Cavern, part two

In the previous installment, the party made a lot of noise and then camped on the spot where the combat occurred, drawing some attention to themselves while they snored away inside a Secure Shelter. Upon awaking, they found the front door almost glued shut by what turned out to be webs.

The webs were not so thick as to be unbreakable (they were placed there so the arachnids would be warned when the party emerged). But whoever had placed the webs was long gone. Kemp did some tracking and found many "small, light humanoid" and "claw or dagger-like" prints on the ground, circling the Shelter and leading off in two directions - one set of tracks toward where they buried Bear's body, and another off towards where they buried Bear's equipment. No tracks could be found leading away from the area, so after some deliberation, they determined that the robbers must have come from above.

<aside: the location of the banshee's clearing is precisely below the Inverted Tower, 400 feet or so above.>

After cobbling together a way for everyone to travel up, via a combination of levitation, flight, and using Reduce Person spells to make people tiny, the group ascended. Eventually they came within sight of the Tower, it's portcullis down and two humans (disguised drow spider riders) inside, desultorily grooming their mounts while a half dozen dog-sized spiders scurried about the place. The group entered via some quick thinking and Dimension Door and began a fight.

After the first round, however, things turned south. Two driders appeared from balconies above the spider stable and began raining down spells on the group, who had not gained much momentum in their efforts to secure the area. It was at this point that Paco, the hobbit, took a hard left turn into the land of unintended consequences.

Paco noticed two doors. One on the right, past the drow and their spiders, was standing open and apparently that is where the two riders had come from. The one on the left was closed. Thinking it might be a good way to get around behind the driders <edit: I'm giving him the benefit of the doubt here, I don't know that he thought it through any further than "Oh look! A door!" and ran to open it.

The door was, of course, a trap which released a Most Excellent Prismatic Spray, damaging pretty much everyone in the room, killing off all the spiders and both driders, but hurting the party as well. Paco himself was driven mad by a beam of green energy, while Kemp was driven off the material plane completely. His whereabouts is currently unknown.

This could have been a TPK if I'd decided to press the issue; the drow high priestess, the  fighter lord, the monk, the two sneaks and various other underlings were untouched at this point and only showed up after the Prismatic Spray. The behir hadn't even shown up. I decided instead to parlay with the group, and we proceeded to broker a deal whereby the drow would return Bear and his equipment, even returning him to life in return for performing a task and promising never to return to the Tower or speak of it to anyone.

This was acceptable to the party, of course, so the party left to spend several days recuperating and figuring out what happened to Kemp. Nothing conclusive was determined about Kemp's destination, and a Divination spell revealed to Fhaariys that "This is not the warrior you should be concerned about at this time..."

Meanwhile, the drow were as good as their word. Bear was sewn back together and Raised, and became the temporary plaything of Matron Cheliax, the high priestess. He got to see a bit more of what the drow had to hand, such as the behir, the gargoyle fighter and a number of other NPCs the party never saw, and learned that these were not people he wanted to toy with.

In three "days" time, the party returned, accepted the Geas spells from Cheliax, and departed.

At this time they decided to return all the way to town, feeling out of their depth in this cave and wishing to stock up significantly for the more serious effort required to travel onward.

Castle Whiterock game update: The Immense Cavern

When last I posted here, the party had finally won through to the Immense Cavern (level nine) after defeating the last derro slaver outpost on level 7.

This was really a landmark, because this was the first step beyond what my previous group accomplished. The old group stalled out at the derro slaver camp on 7 after 2 players moved away and one got a promotion. At that point we had to build up a new group and I let another player run games for a while before the current group finally spun up.

The party had done well for themselves up to this point, having handily beaten the derro slavers, the Wight Lady and numerous random encounters on level 7, but I was a tad concerned. I strongly dislike the flavor of levels 8 and 8A in Castle Whiterock, and had put in place a home-tooled replacement for it using various online resources and the excellent Dolmenwood setting as a template. However, the party wasn't interested in chasing down any leads to Fairyland, and so they returned to the derro camp, rolled aside the stone blocking the tunnel, and headed downward.

Now, level 9 is a quantum leap in difficulty. The Watery Way (level 7) was designed for 8th level characters (the party consists of 5 7th level pcs) while the Immense Cavern was designed for 9th level characters (i.e., characters with access to things like Raise Dead and Teleport; game-changing mechanics that make life much easier in the harder levels).

In addition, there are at least two other sub-levels *within* level nine: the Inverted Tower, a secret hideout for a small drow enclave, and the Tomb of Ankhotep, a fairly traditional tomb-raider-style dungeon. The Inverted Tower is exceedingly hard to stumble on, since it hangs from the roof of the Immense Cavern hundreds of feet above the cave floor and well beyond the range of darkvision. The Tomb, however, sticks out like a sore thumb. Inadvertently dropped there by an improperly phrased wish centuries before, the giant, obsidian pyramid stands surrounded by a veritable mountain of sand, standing in stark contrast to the moraine and mucky humus of the surrounding cave.

My players were not to be daunted, though. They made their way down the tunnel to level 9 and promptly set their sights on the pyramid. After some noodling around the exterior and narrowly avoiding being crushed by the falling slab traps, they found their way inside and ran smack dab into the clay golem. They wisely beat a hasty retreat and watch from afar while the golem emerged to reset the slab trap.

They then went on to meet and befriend Gar and Nar, the lonely ettin. I'll admit I made him seem sympathetic, but I felt the need to provide more foreshadowing and local history for the cave system and how it relates to the duergar. The cavern began to take on shape and scale to the players...

They set off from the abandoned ettin lair to find the way down to the Bleak Theater, but wound off getting sidetracked in the fungus forest by the "old trail" leading off to the north. (NEVER follow the "old trail") The party wound up crossing swords with a drow banshee, which they dispatched, but at a cost - Bear died as a result of the banshee's wail.

Knowing they didn't have access to Raise Dead yet, but that a Resurrection could be performed back at their little secret lair in the Fane of Justicia, they prudently decided to cut off Bear's head and bury his body and equipment rather than slog all the way back up there with a corpse weighing them down.

Here's where my party's short-sightedness may have cost them. Gektas cast Secure Shelter right there in the banshee's clearing so the party could rest in relative safety, not bothering to consider whether the sounds of combat - much less the banshee's wail - might have drawn any attention. It's worth noting that there's a significant aerial component to this dungeon, as the party has been attacked by giant bats and frequently heard the distant, echoing growls and flutters of the eponymous Immense Cavern. Oh well.

While camped out, one of the folks on watch detected the sound of scuttling (feet? claws?) on the roof of the shelter, followed by timid scratching and clawing around the walls of the solid Shelter. The party chose to ignore the sounds and rest fully, so they could meet whatever threat presented itself when fresh in the "morning".

This they did, and had some difficulty opening the door, because it was being held closed by something stretchy. Webs.

Castle Whiterock: The Duergar, part 2

The second part of the exercise, understanding how duergar fight is the more difficult aspect, at least to me.

I tend to get muddled in combat, as a DM. I'm constantly forgetting special attacks my monsters have, their tactical tricks forgotten in the fog of war as I'm bombarded with questions. But for these fights it will be extremely important to understand how they should be played.

First off, they have the usual dwarven abilities; resistant to magic and stable. So they are slow but sturdy, getting +2 on their saves against magic and +4 on their CMD against bull rush attempts or the dreaded (and IMHO overpowered) trip attack. 

On top of that, they see in the dark. With 120-foot darkvision, they will see you coming in pitch darkness, probably before you are even aware of them. 

Likewise, they are immune to paralysis, poison and phantasms, meaning they can drop area of effect attacks with relative impunity, if they need to exert some crowd control. 

Lastly, and perhaps most especially, they have two spell-like abilities; invisibility and enlarge person (self), both once per day. While only useful once per day, they are real game changers, essentially giving them control over how fights begin or end. Let's review. 

Invisibility

Perhaps the most overused and misunderstood spell of them all. Within the game, invisibility lasts a minute per level (based on the duergar's class level, in this case) and allows the target broad leeway in their actions so long as they don't directly attack. From the SRD: 

"Thus, an invisible being can open doors, talk, eat, climb stairs, summon monsters and have them attack, cut the ropes holding a rope bridge while enemies are on the bridge, remotely trigger traps, open a portcullis to release attack dogs, and so forth."

That's a lot of shenanigans you can get into while invisible. But it is far from all of what this spell gives you! Elsewhere in the SRD, it also gives you a +40 (if immobile) or +20 (if moving) bonus to your Stealth checks, good enough to override the massive Stealth penalties of heavy armor, and grants you a +2 non-typed bonus to hit another creature and ignore their dexterity bonus to armor class while invisible. While that ends your invisibility, it can be a game-changer, especially if the duergar in question possesses sneak attack capability. 

So you can choose to either begin combat invisible and get the drop on a foe, or save your invisibility for later to escape combat. Nice!

Enlarge Person

This one actually requires a little more of you, mechanically. It seems like doubling your height and octupling (if that's a word) your weight would increase your strength by more than +2, but the benefits still outweigh the drawbacks. The aforementioned Strength bonus, coupled with reach, outweigh the penalty to Dex and armor class. Your net delta is +0 to attacks, +1 damage, -2 to AC and -1 to Reflex saves, but your reach increases to 10 feet and your damage increment is upgraded due to size. In addition, your increased size gives you a +1 bonus on your CMB and CMD, which will be beneficial to the Stalwart Defender. 

I can see both these abilities playing out differently depending on the purpose of the encounter. 

A) Feeling out the abilities of the enemy - using invisibility to disengage from the fight.
B) Setting up a lethal ambush - an alpha strike in which invisibility and enlarge person are used in combination to control the first round of combat, hitting as hard as possible in order to capture or kill the opponent, or at the very least, prevent them from pursuing as the duergar escape.
C) Performing a holding action - using enlarge person to lock the enemy in place while the rest of the group falls back to a better position or escapes. 

Castle Whiterock: The Duergar, part 1

Duergar are an important part of the Whiterock campaign. Dominating fully three levels of the dungeon and driving the economy of interaction between the lower levels and the surface, they are truly the heartbeat of the campaign. Once you've cleared the Thane and his clan out, you will literally have the run of the dungeon.

That's why I think it's important to spend some time on converting them properly. As I see it, I need to study two particular areas:

A) Finding the best conversion path for the duergar in the module, and
B) Learning to use duergar properly in a tactical sense.

B is the much larger of the two, I think. Very little is required for A but some intelligent decision-making and number-crunching. But tactically using the duergar effectively is important. Just their racial abilities of invisibility and enlarge person open up a number of ways to manipulate things like reach, threatened spaces, and the ability to hit with surprise and then run. Fighting duergar should be annoying and exhausting!

The Theater/Narborg Roster

Let's start with A), above. Running down through the rosters of levels 10, 11 and 12, duergar NPCs can be broken into three categories: Specialists, Muscle, and Leaders. Leaders could be considered specialists, I suppose, but in all forms of D&D Leaders typically worth as both Specialists and Muscle.

Most of the top level NPCs of Narborg seem to represent the end-goal of a particular path. Thus the career path that starts with the duergar bouncers in the Bleak Theater seems to naturally end in with the Underdeep Veterans in Narborg. The Guards and Experts seem to be all of the same type across a pretty narrow band of class levels, so there isn't much of a progression there. Thus a rebuild of the basic fighters seems in order. I'll probably use the Defender of the Weak build from  Rogue Eidolon's excellent Fighter Guide as a template. (note:The original version seems to have disappeared, so I'm linking Zenith Games for the content. Thanks to RE and to Zenith Games!) Also of interest, the Stalwart Defender prestige class, with build guidance here.

The rest of the duergar, the Leaders, need to be redone. A LOT has changed for these classes overtime, especially for Unchained classes. The Impresario, the Thane and his family, the commanders, almost all of them need some work. I will probably adopt some linear Unchained rules for the rogues and monk - I don't need them to be complex, I just need them to be workable when I'm juggling a combat with multiple monsters.

The casters from the above list really need to be redone. I find that most of the ancillary abilities of specialist wizards - not to mention the domain abilities of clerics - get lost in the shuffle. I've never had an NPC caster survive long enough to fall back on their X/day Elemental Ray attacks for a d6-plus-change, so why worry about it? Time to re-build!

I won't dive too deep into the rebuild itself but suffice it to say that it should allow for some interesting tactics during gameplay. The Defender build linked above should make it very hard for players to simply move past the front line of defense and force them to use their resources more intelligently.

Castle Whiterock: The Quest Continues, Volume Three

Buffing the Bleak Theater

Most of The Immense Cavern (level 9 of Castle Whiterock) can be played as is. You've got your troll squad with delusions of grandeur, the ettin, the mushroom forest, some drunk teenage stone giants... all of these can be played out with minimal hassle. 

The final room, though, is problematic, as I've mentioned before. Unless the party is caught totally unawares, without protection from fire, they will probably survive it. It's even possible they make it through taking only minimal damage. Indeed, even Energy Resistance (Fire) 10 turns the entire affair into a tedious exercise. So let's give it some snap! 

The Trapped Route to the Bleak Theater

So what do we have here? A password that gets you through the trap, disabling it for 5 minutes. A dead roper for color and continuity. And a big-ass fire trap. While 60d6 sounds like a lot, it's spread out over 15 rounds, at 4d6 per round. Also, there's a save, albeit a DC22 Reflex save. (why do you get a save against a cloud you are entirely engulfed in? No good reason!)

There's even a chance to avoid it entirely, at least for cautious players with a high Reflex bonus. If you are lingering near one of the doors when the trap is triggered, you can slip outside. Of course, that will split the party, which brings its own hazards. The sliding doors are tough (120hp, hardness 8) but blasting your way through or using stone shape is another option. 

Detection or Avoidance

Now it is likely the party will be looking for trouble in this place as it is a choke point and a fairly obvious transition to a deeper level of the dungeon. So Find Traps may be in effect or the rogue may actually scout ahead looking for traps, but the detection and disable DC is 33! So let's just assume that the rogue doesn't find it, or can't defuse it. Likewise, a 7th level caster is not likely to be able to Dispel the magical portion of the trap, as the DC to overcome it is 26, meaning they would have to roll a 19 or 20 to bring the spell down. 

Once Triggered

Now let's look at the damage. Over 15 rounds you are looking at 210hp, assuming average damage per round (14 hp) and you fail every Reflex save. But over the course of 15 rounds, you're likely to make at least one of those saves even if your Reflex bonus is only +3 or so, so let's call it 200hp. Energy Resistance 10 drops that total to 50 points; bad, but not generally lethal at 7th level. 

Assume your party is going to be casting spells during this time. Concentration checks against continual damage will be 18+ half the damage dealt, or 25 on average. And again, if Energy resistance is involved, that will probably be reduced to a 20. Not terribly difficult, given that the average Concentration check bonus in this group is +12. 

That means the party wizard or cleric will probably be able to get debuffs off. Either communal energy resistance or at least a few Channel Energies to keep people from hurting too bad; in fact a 7th level cleric's channel healing is 4d6, the same as the DPS of the trap. 

So while the cleric is healing or casting prayer for the party-wide +1 buff to Reflex saves and keeping people standing, what are the other folks doing? Standing around on fire, mostly. The wizard might have some utility spells to fire off that may help, but the fighters and rogues have time to burn (nyuk nyuk nyuk!), so this becomes an exercise in waiting. BORING. 

Snorefest or Gorefest

So let's introduce some more threats.

Let's add this guy: https://www.d20pfsrd.com/bestiary/npc-s/npcs-cr-7/wrath-priest-half-orc-cleric-8/

He's got a nice set of combat buffs, energy resistance and, once fully prepped, will accomplish two goals: A) giving the fighters something to do and, B) force the party healer to make decisions every round (heal the party or heal the fighters or deal with the threat directly), keeping things interesting. 

But even this might not be enough to stress the group. So I'm adding another potential threat:

https://www.d20pfsrd.com/bestiary/npc-s/npcs-cr-6/bloodfire-sorcerer-half-orc-sorcerer-7/

Now we have a real fight on our hands. A small NPC party of 2 casters, buffing each other, attacking the party while they are on their heels, all while the room erupts in fire around them. Beautiful!

Conclusion

This setup gives me three options: the base encounter as written; a medium nasty fire trap in case the party is already taxed, and two upgrade positions in case the encounter goes to easily or they somehow manage to disarm/avoid the trap. It might seem mean, but in the end I actually hope this will deter any foolishness on the part of the group and make them take the Thane and his minions very seriously!

Also, the party has managed to get to this level with very little in the way of magic (they've been avoiding high risk-reward encounters like the plague), and the two NPCs will at least provide them with a number of basic magical equipment they will need later on. 

Castle Whiterock: The Quest Continues, Volume Two!

Now What?

The following factors have been lined up: 

• The Thane and his clan are now Aware Of The Party and are Taking Steps To Mitigate, as described in the module. 
• The derro are all but wiped out, the Iron Manacle and the mountain troglodytes are but a distant memory. 
• The Whiterock Orcs have held on to their little postage stamp of territory, against all odds. 
• The stone giant clan is a new factor, as yet unaligned in this struggle. 

The party's plan is to trundle down to the Bleak Theater and rescue the old character party. Heroically!

This leaves me with a number of things to do: 

First and foremost, I need to convert the duergar up from 3rd edition to Pathfinder. There has been some power creep over the years since CW was published, both within D&D 3.5 and Pathfinder, which is now closing in on it's second edition. Things which were dangerous to base classes are now laughable in this later edition of the game, and they need some hardening. I'll try upgrading the NPC-classed duergar to PC classes and keep both version on hand, just in case I've overestimated the party's abilities. 

Next, I need to figure out what to do with the trapped entry to the Theater on level 9. A sealed room with an incendiary cloud trap sounds rough, but I anticipate it being a cakewalk as written. Honestly, 15 rounds of 4d6 - even with the DC 22 reflex save for half - sounds awful for a bunch of 7th level characters, but really that's just a few Resist Energy spells and Channel Energy buffs. It's entirely possible they can walk away from that room unscathed, and I can't have that. 

If they keep sailing through these deeper levels without a serious check to their advance, they won't take the threats seriously until they are in way over their heads and I have a full TPK on my hands. Case in point, while the party handily dealt with bands of kamikaze derro backed up by an ettin and hell hounds, they were utterly crippled by a single Confusion spell. 

No, I need them to feel it. 

The Plan

With regards to the incendiary cloud room, I think I have an answer. I found two fire-wielding NPCs online that would fit nicely in that room; a priest of Wrath and a sorcerer, both half-orcs. The aforementioned 4d6 a round is not troubling on its own, but when backed up with a fully buffed beat-face war cleric and a direct damage and debuff-casting sorcerer augmenting the threat, it should keep the group nicely occupied and force them to be more cautious in their advance.

It works thematically, as well, since Thane Vejik is notorious for outsourcing talent to solve problems for him. 

Again the goal isn't to exhaust them utterly but to make them play smarter. 

Bleak Theater Upgrades

Converting the duergar NPC classes is problematic. The simplest solution is to up-convert them: basically this means adding +1 to their base attack bonus, but that option carries neither flavor nor punch. Ditto applying the "advanced" template; adds a little punch, but doesn't give them any flavor at all. 

Castle Whiterock included a custom NPC class called the Guard, sort of a mixed duty sentry and fighter. These Guards patrol the duergar domains keeping an eye out for trouble. A straight conversion to Fighter would make them better combatants, but at the cost of other skills. Likewise, a straight Thief would sacrifice combat ability in favor of  skills. So maybe I'll do a mix of both.

Thus the duergar "ushers" (Guards) become Fighter/Thieves 3/3 or 4/4, while the "bouncers" (Warriors) become straight up Fighters.

I'll leave the "stagehands" as Experts. Someone has to know how to make the sausage. 

Most of the monsters in the theater can be directly converted. I'm considering tossing out the Grimlocks, because grimlocks are just stupid. I mean, what the hell? They're blind orcs with blindsight. No special attacks or abilities, nothing to differentiate them from other horde-type assailants. Out they go. I'll throw something else cool in there to take their place if I need to. 

Last, but by no means least, I will have to determine what happened to the old character party after their arrival. Since I don't have copies of most of those characters, I'll have to recreate them based on notes I have from before. Or at least the ones that survived. That should be fun! 

So this is me, planning three or even four sessions ahead. That's the game! 

Castle Whiterock: The Quest Continues!

I'm worried about my players. I am.

My current group has been playing around - and in - Castle Whiterock and its environs for a year or two now. They've become cursorily familiar with the area, the nearby town of Cillimar, and various and sundry NPCs important to the plot of the supermodule. They've also introduced some variances to the setting. 

For instance, after wiping out a group of gnolls who had moved into the spot previously occupied by the Slavers of the Iron Manacle, they ran into a group of stone giants (random encounter), and directed them (unintentionally) to the ruins of the castle. Upon their next return, a clan of 20 or so of the giants had moved in and started remodeling the upper keep. The giants are friendly, for now... 

They've met Lorus Swiftquill and arranged a quid pro quo deal with him; information for information. 

They've located and restored the Hidden Fane of Justicia on level 7 and cleaned out both the chapel of Bobugbubilz and the Wight Lady!

They've made friends with the folk of Stone Pig's Crossing, in a tiny hamlet half way between Cillimar and the Castle. 

They've forged a business relationship with Chauntessa, and guessed more about her nature than I'm comfortable with as a DM. 

The one thing they haven't done, though, is the first job that Chauntessa gave them: find the "other group"... 

You see I had another group once. This group of adventurers swept through the upper levels of CW, murder-hoboing their merry way down to level 7, when the group sort of fell apart all at once. A few players moved away, another one got a job that didn't allow for much downtime, and that was all she wrote. 

Fast forward a year or two and I have a new group with no connections to the old! Their game started out in the same world but relatively remote from Castle Whiterock, but I introduced one plot thread that lead to Whiterock, and that was the one they chose to follow.

I decided to keep some continuity going; this group would follow on where the other group ended; Chauntessa would offer them the same deal as to the other group with a caveat; they should also try to determine what happened to the party that came before. 

At the point where the old group broke up, their party had a nasty scrap with the skum and, impaired with lowered resources and damaged boats, came to the derro slaver's outpost and (I deemed) were finally overwhelmed, captured, and taken down below. 

All Roads Lead To Narborg

Now it was up to the PCs. This was not their first rodeo and not even the first time they had to deal with duergar, even within Whiterock. They did a bit of sleuthing as they explored the now semi-repopulated dungeon. They have pieced together that the previous party was (mostly) captured by the slavers and shipped down to the Bleak Theater. In the interim several other things have happened.

1. Having wiped out most of the derro on level 7 and interrupted the flow of slaves, the party has faced increased resistance from the duergar and their lackeys upon each return to the Castle. The pattern has been established: an ambush involving troublesome cannon-fodder monsters supported by the duergar, who flee as soon as the battle turns against them. 
2. The party has pieced together the fate of the previous party and passed that on to Chauntessa. Chauntessa was gravely concerned about the party's ability to infiltrate the Bleak Theater and warned them against doing so - noteworthy because this is the first time she's ever advised caution. (And she has now thrown THREE parties into the maw of Whiterock!)
3. And most recently, they learned that the stone giants had been visited by the envoy of Thane Vejik and offered them payment in return for slaves. 

The giants are ambivalent, neither trusting the duergar to honor their agreement nor leave the clan alone, but not wanting to deal with the hassle of having an angry clan of duergar under their feet. They have handed the problem off to the PCs, as they have helped the clan out before. But if they do accept, the town of Stone Pig's Crossing could be wiped out by the giants virtually at one blow, and quite easily.

Thus here we are; the characters stand at the brink of level 9, the Immense Cavern, facing a determined enemy that is growing hungry and desperate to restore its economy.

(to be continued)