CT09.3

Brightliver, Mordecai, and Valfina returned to the dead-gray mist, joined by Biff. This time they made it to the interior of the Mournland and proceeded to a fort on the northwest edge of Seaside, where Nick had reported being. The gates were wrecked, so they entered and followed Nick's voice to the northwest courtyard, where he was sorting through bodies.

Chip noted that Nick had been an anatomically typical warforged, but now appeared much bulkier as he had other body parts conglomerated on his torso. Nick said that it was his duty to carry the parts from the fallen congregants to the next meeting of the Godforged. Some seconds into the encounter, Nick and Chip suddenly attacked, saying something about "disassembling fleshborn," accompanied by several specters and, later, a ghast climbing from the well. (The party also noticed a warforged skull moving around on tiny legs, but it did not take an active part in the fight.) All of the aggressors were neutralized, and Valfina was willing to subdue the two warforged nonlethally. They were stored in the outpost's cells for the moment.

[Not wanting to build an entire new monster stat block that would likely only be playtested once (see my commentary in "CT09.2"), I based on him on my ordinarily boring warforged charger, plus some extra abilities. I only increased him to a challenge rating of the upper end of 4 so that you don't have to worry about whether or not to change his proficiency bonus. This meant that he didn't last long. I should have revealed the danger of Chip and the specters at the beginning rather than have everyone focus fire on Nick for much of the first round, but then the PCs could have just thrown a fireball on him and many of the others even as mingled as the group was.

One more common creature that could have been used more than once and was interesting enough to warrant its own stat block was the drowned. But as I was running this through Encounter Builder on D&D Beyond, I found that fifth-edition drowned ones had already been published in the official Wizards of the Coast book Ghosts of Saltmarsh. I'm not in the business of spending people's paper and toner (or bandwidth and memory) to give them things that they could be buying from the creators, and this adventure doesn't assume that the DM has bought this other non-Eberron hardback, so I just threw in a thematically similar aquatic ghast instead. As of the 2014 Monster Manual, this CR 2 creature is bad for using in groups, as you have to keep track of which ones' Stench you have and haven't overcome. (I guess each one stinks a little differently.) And it would have been unwieldy for multiples to crawl one by one out of the well. So I needed lots of specters to back up these weaklings against even four 9th-level PCs. But at least the ghast was weak enough that it didn't overshadow Nick.

I did remember to take a screencap at the height of the adventure this time, but apparently, I did something wrong, as it ended up showing only the terrain and not the tokens, as if the PCs had seen the layout of the area but could not see its current situation. So, instead, I've used this place to show my mock-up of how Map 4.5: Fortified Outpost (Eberron: Rising from the Last War) would look. I've tried to translate it literally, but how many of my mistakes can you find? (So far, I've noticed: the diagonal battlements are inconsistent, the southwest gatehouse is a different height from the southeast, and I forgot the southwest gate.)]