Tengel Manor Session Report II - All In The Family or the Connection With The Stairway of V'dreen.

The PC's encountered several young adventurers tonight by the time they made it too Tegel Manor. Young adventurers hellbent on avenging their royal families. They were based on a classic  September 17, 1983 cartoon  you might have heard of called Dungeons & Dragons. The party helped  the youglings from a very hungry room.


Tegel manor was a bit of a test tonight for the players as the haunted halls of the manor called the players back to itself. The ghostly legacy was put to the test with the attention of Rump Rus Witch Queen & Priestess of Nyarlathotep. The party managed to thwart a sacrifice of some mind controlled victims whose vitality was going to become a part of the soul of the witch queen. There were several reminders of the importance of watching their backs within the haunted halls of the manor itself.

They lead the fools back through the garden & into the lands surrounding the haunted manor. The grounds were teaming with ghostly revellers but the party snuck past them with little incident. Through twisting halls and overgrown gardens the whole party managed to actually use some caution getting the kids outta of harms way. They returned to the manor to face down the vengeance of their old nemesis. She's set up several traps before the PC's can even encounter her.

I revamped my campaign notes for Tegel Manor & pulled James Mishler's Ghosts – The Incorporeal Undead  The book provides some excellent resources for upgrading the undead & ghosts within an in OSR campaign.

The PC's are not even aware that vampiric agents are scattered across the lands that they've visited. Several are now on their trails & connected with the Rump family. The family tried to lock up the horrors of the manor but these ghostly horrors don't ever give up. They have their own agendas & now with the party within the hallowed halls of the manor the players are only now starting to remember their brush with the  Stairway of V'dreen. This  this adventure quickly drops the party into this ever-shrinking land, provides a couple set encounters, a couple of adventure sites, and a handful of factions the party can interact with. But Tegel Manor's alien agenda is very strange & dangerous but the players are completely in the dark of this adventure location. But the Rumps are very aware of the Stairway of V'dreen

 Rump Rus Witch Queen & Priestess of Nyarlathotep has deep ties to  the  Stairway of V'dreen. But what magic item or artifact does the witch queen want with that weird plane?! What does this have to do with the megadungeons of Cha'alt? Well only time will tell. 

Why does Cha'alt have such strange connections with lots of other OSR setting well according to some recent comments from Venger Satanis; "So, when I began Cha'alt... I had no idea exactly how it would look when it was finished. That's half the fun for me. A lot of people can't do that because they'd just flake out on the project and leave their backers with nothing.

Obviously, I didn't know the book would end up at 218 pages (what did I say originally 100? 125?)... or else I could have gotten more backers and funding, I'm sure. If you look back, you'll see that I had a totally different idea for The Black Pyramid dungeon (5 separate levels). Similarly, I had every intention of drawing more from the 5e rule-set... but the more I ran it during playtests, the more I realized that this was veering quite a bit closer to OSR than 5e. Presenting Beneath Kra'adumek was my way of testing the waters to see if that would be acceptable to the majority of backers. Two separate books with different mechanics / stat blocks was never an option for a project of this scale what with printing and the fact that I do all of this myself, with the help of Glynn on layout.

So, for those 5e gamers who reject Cha'alt because it's hardly 5e at all, I'm sorry. It wasn't my intention to mislead. Things just flowed a certain way and I managed to keep my head above water."