Slave Ship Adventure - Level 11 - Tentacles, Angels and the Rescue

Treena Ro'jah, who has gotten very close to Arcamedies since the last couple of adventures, returns with supplies from The Rock of Bral (an asteroid based city) with information about a new arena. She has the route and the name of the planet, which is named Azathoth. It's a hollow planet with little or no life on the surface. She says the payout is great, being in pure Residuum.

The trip takes three weeks of travel through the Astral Sea. Treena, being a talented Arcanist, is able to utilize the Spelljammer Helm to open the portals necessary for the trip. Upon arriving to the right area the Drudge phases into normal space with a small planet filling the forward view. Azathoth’s lifelessness on the surface is immediately obvious; however you ignore that fact due to the gargantuan tentacles that explode up from the ground. After you pull your eyes away from the writhing appendages, you notice two huge bulbous circular areas in the upper part of the planet, and a huge chasm with mountain ranges on each side. You hear a Half-Orc whisper ominously, “By Gruumsh, it’s alive. There, he points to the upper portion, the eyes, and then points to the chasm, its mouth. You then see the fissure close and reopen slowly as a grotesque giant tongue emerges and withdraws.

You feel some of your sanity melt away, and you’re snapped out of your shocking nightmare by three tremors shaking the ship. You see that a tentacle is wrapped around the bow and another surrounds the stern. A third one has forced its way through the side of the ship. You fearfully observe that the tips of the tentacles have six-foot diameter holes with big teeth surrounding them, like a Sand Worm from the planet Arrakis. Just before the tentacle smashes into the side of the ship you see rows of creatures within the mouth, looking hungrily at the immobilized Sludge and its crew.

From below decks you hear screams as the creatures begin emerging from the tentacle maw, and begin their ghastly onslaught. Captain Magra draws his red-bladed Longsword and leads the charge down to the hold. As he heads down he says to your team, stay on deck and defend the Spelljammer Helm, and don’t let anything on my ship. He risks a quick endearing glance to Camella Ann and vanishes into the bowels of the Sludge.

As the rest of the crew heads below decks you see creatures burrow out of the tentacles and begin to spill out on to the deck.


Amongst all of you rolling nature checks you gain this information:
---------------------------------
Creature Description:
This hunched humanoid has scabrous, gray skin that is covered in mold and grave dirt. Its feet end in hooves and its head and face are oddly canine, yet disturbingly human. A foul reek of death and decay surrounds the frightful ghoul.

Ghouls, despite sharing a name with a certain odious undead, are not undead themselves. They are a race of subterranean humanoids that subsist almost completely on the rotting carcasses of other humanoids.

GHOUL LORE
Nature DC 15: Ghouls are subterranean humanoids that dwell in ancient graveyards and dungeons where their preferred food source is readily available. Ghouls eat nothing but the rotting, putrescent flesh of other sentient humanoids, often raiding crypts and mausoleums to get it. Ghouls live in communal burrows of up to fifty individuals, with each burrow overseen by a burrow king. Ghouls often come into conflict with members of their own race over prime feeding grounds, and a large graveyard may be home to up to five competing burrows of the disgusting creatures.
Although they appear to be undead, ghouls are very much alive, and reproduce much the same way other humanoid species do. However, some legends state that the first ghouls were in fact normal humans that worshipped the Great Old Ones with grotesque, cannibalistic rites and were transformed into ghouls for their blasphemy.

Nature DC 20: All ghouls are surrounded by a terrible odor of death and decay that is all but intolerable to other living creatures. In addition, ghoul saliva carries an awful disease known as necrophage that can transform other humanoids into ghouls.


Feel free to research information on the Internet. If you have any questions ask them now, otherwise we’ll start rolling initiative to start the game off.