D&D Travelogue: The Lonely Totem Pole

I’ve always felt that one of the biggest challenges of running a Dungeons & Dragons game is managing travel. On the one hand, no one wants to bog their game down in travel exposition that is essentially outside the story’s major narrative. On the other hand, one of the reasons folks enjoy fantasy is for its ability to get us outside the real world. Travel is a big part of that.

Not for nothing did J.R.R. Tolkien subtitle his first book There and Back Again. The travel is the story in both The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings.

Fifth edition’s Dungeon Master’s Guide offers some advice on travel, of course, but I personally do not find the included tables particularly easy to use, especially on the fly. More to the point, if we look at the way Tolkien structured The Hobbit in particular, there is nothing random about the book’s events. Rather, each chapter is essentially a short story, what we might think of as a sub-quest, the accumulation of which builds to a whole. In D&D terms, we can build an entire campaign -- or even a whole adventure path -- simply by stringing together a series of connected quests.

My goal here is not nearly that grandiose.  I simply want to note a few unique locations ahead of time for use in travel scenes. This first one is called The Lonely Totem Pole.  I rolled all of the elements below at random out of the Dungeon Master’s Guide and then embellished them because I thought they were cool.

The Lonely Totem Pole

The party has wandered into the ancestral lands of the River People, once a proud nation of wild elves living in tribal groups along the banks of the Mirror River. The weather has become much hotter than normal -- fully thirty degrees Fahrenheit above what’s typical for this time of year -- leaving the air muggy and still. A thin, miserable rain falls intermittently, causing fog to rise off the over-warm ground.

Via Wikipedia

As the party crests a rise, they come in sight of a large grassy clearing. A single tribal totem pole stands in the clearing’s center, rising some thirty-five feet out of the ground. The pole itself is ancient, having long since boon bleached white by prolonged exposure to the sun. The totem pole’s faces are uniformly ghostly and indistinct. The one face that’s clear stands near the top. This shows an unmistakable beak alongside great spreading feathered wings.

• Intelligence (Nature) DC 12. The bird face belongs to a Crow.
• Intelligence (History) DC 12. Totem poles serve a variety of functions among tribal peoples. This one appears to have marked a specific clan’s territory.
• Intelligence (History) or Wisdom (Insight) DC 14. These lands once belonged to the Crow Clan.
• Intelligence (History) DC 15. Legend has it that the Crows vanished almost one hundred years ago. Scholars don’t know the exact location or what caused the clan to go extinct.

Closer inspection reveals the remains of a wooden tribal longhouse stretching across much of the rest of the clearing. The totem pole stands at the longhouse’s head.

As the party approaches the longhouse, the characters begin to feel an unreasoning dread. Any character with a Constitution score less than 12 finds it hard to breathe, and any paladin realizes that the ground before them has been desecrated by evil via their Divine Sense feature. Other characters may realize this as well with a DC 12 Intelligence (Religion) check or a DC 15 Intelligence (Arcana) check.

Any creature that walks directly past the totem pole and into the ruins of the longhouse is immediately transported into the Shadowfell via permanent portal. The structure of the longhouse still exists in the Shadowfell, but there are holes in its roof, and the building itself has long since fallen to ruin. Humanoid bones liter the ground in and around the longhouse on the Shadowfell side. A DC 10 Wisdom (Medicine) check or DC 15 Intelligence (Nature) check identifies these as the remains of many, many elves.

Optional Encounter (Night Only)

A vampiric mist rises from the ground around the adventurers and attempts to either consume them bodily or else drive them into the longhouse. The mist pursues the party into the Shadowfell, where night finds the longhouse occupied by three ghasts.

Aftermath. A DC 10 Wisdom (Medicine) check or DC 15 Intelligence (Nature) check identifies the ghasts as undead gnolls. Any Intelligence (Arcana) or (History) check reminds the characters that gnolls both worship demons and eat humanoid flesh.

With that knowledge, the fate of the Crow Clan is no longer a mystery.

Once the ghasts are defeated, any religious ceremony intended to cleanse or reconsecrate the area is successful. The portal to the Shadowfell, however, is permanent.