Dubious Heroes

An Old-School Essentials adventure designed for 3rd to 5th level PCs. I ran this in Shadowdark for a group of four level 4 PCs, and made some changes to the adventure hook. My players seemed to enjoy it, referring to it as a Willy Wonka dungeon and honey heist afterwards.

Play Time: One 2-hour session.

General Thoughts: OK, I love weird, funky adventures. This was great for several reasons – the plot hook involves a noble who wants to eat a mellified monk for “virility”, there’s a zombie bear that breathes swarms of bees, a honey ooze. While not superb, it’s pretty darn good. Also, it’s short and sweet, playable in one session.

I adapted this OSE adventure for Shadowdark, which really was a simple port. From the beginning, Mellified Monks oozed flavor. Flesh eating vulture bees? Not your typical “goblin in a cave” adventure. Plus, the treasure the group is trying to retrieve are mellified corpses.

Making the conversion was super simple:

1. Vulture bees have DEX 15+ or 1d4 damage to all creatures within close, immune to weapon damage
2. Zombie bear had 1d6 claws, +4 to hit, 14 AC (I would probably knock the AC back down to 13 in retrospect)
3. Honey ooze’s vulture bees dealt 1d4 damage to all stuck creatures, STR 15+ to escape being stuck
4. Fumigators had a 2:6 chance of failing, which also extinguished the torch (cannot relight)
5. Reward is 150 gp per mellified monk.

Originally, the adventurers thought they were stealing corpses from a monastery, so were doubly surprised when encountering the zombie bear and swarms of flesh-eating bees. They rapidly figured out Lord Svenlac Wombo (the replacement name for Lord Prospero) was after something involving more than a little chat with some beekeeping monks.

I think my favorite part of my improved storyline was that Lord Wombo is throwing a midnight feast on the new moon for a collection of special friends, and wants to serve a delicacy to remember. I portrayed Wombo as a gourmand and glutton, eating constantly and voraciously. He even generously invited the adventurers to his feast, even though they’d have to sit with the servants and children.

One strong advantage of this was that not everything was a fight. Granted, there wasn’t extensive puzzle solving, but there were a few traps (the rickety bridges between areas provided some challenge), and the group made excellent use of the fumigators and beekeeper’s masks.

One interesting point of tension was that the group started rapidly running out of torches, which they needed for the fumigators. Between mid-combat DEX checks to light torches under pressure, figuring out how to drag crockpots full of mellified monk out of the caves, and struggling to fight honey-zombies and animated honey oozes, it was a great, short adventure. Recommended.

Formatting and maps are easy to read but layout is a bit weird for printing on 8.5×11 pages. Not a deal breaker.

Available on itch.com: https://eyesforteeth.itch.io/monastery-of-the-mellified-monks