I posted a scenario to the Scion Wiki today (12/11/07), but am including the components here to preserve them from the editing hazards of the Wiki format.
Mundane Bat Chamber
This chamber is not part of the big room, instead it is accessed through openings in the ceiling above the natural entrance to the Caverns.
The Nemean Bat doesn't sleep in the same chamber as the mundane bats. He lurks much deeper. However, PCs don't automatically know that. Some rolls that could be used to clue them in:
Wits + Invest. or Awareness vs difficulty 3 to recognize (and be told by the ST) that if a Nemean lived here, people would have seen it by now. (Depending on how you let the PCs know the Bat exists in Carlsbad, they may still feel compelled to investigate this area personally.)
Int + Animal Ken or Occult vs difficulty 5 to learn that Nemeans are typically Cannibals. If it slept here, normal bats wouldn't.
Climbing up to the bat chamber to find out for certain would take an extended roll of Dexterity + Athletics. Individual roll difficulties is just 1, cumulative difficulty is 5, roll interval is 5 minutes. Feel free to skip this if a bunch of climbing rolls are uninteresting to your group, but it's included if you want to build some tension into the search, or in case a red herring sends PCs up there at an inopportune moment.
Suffice it to say, the chamber full of hundreds of thousands of mexican freetail bats is not where you want to be just after sunset or just before sunrise. While they won't attack humans, bats do spook easily. In the numbers you'll find them in, it's hard to maneuver around them, or even just hold your ground. It's like having 200,000 tennisballs thrown at you in rapid succession. This is an environmental effect with Damage: 1B/10 seconds(ticks), Trauma: 1. Chaos 1 or use of Animal (Bat) 1 render you immune.
Moving in such a "storm" requires rolls of Stamina + Athletics vs difficulty 3 every action. Success gets you 1/2 normal movement, +1m/threshold success (up to your normal movement rate). Failure means you move only 1 meter per tick for that action. Botching any of these rolls means you fall off a cliff - damage is 10 levels of Bashing with the Piercing quality. Unless you have Chaos 1 or the Animal (Bat) purview, you can't use Dex + Athletics to "roll with it".
The Big Room
The Big Room is a huge open chamber full of intricate detailed rock formations. It's 2,000 feet long and averages 600 feet wide and 200 feet tall.
It is 56 degrees year round. Air exchange occurs through the 1.25 mile natural entrance.
Man-made lights are scattered around artistically. They stay on 24 hours a day, but retain a subdued gloominess throughout the chamber. Clear vision ends at 1 yard, but murky vision extends 50 yards.
Finding signs of a flying monster's lair in such a large and poorly-lit area is not easy. This is an extended roll of Perception + Survival or Wits + Investigation. The difficulty of each roll is only 2, but the cumulative difficulty is 20 and the roll interval is 1 hour.
If you have the Instant Investigator or Predatory Focus knacks, you can make rolls far more quickly: Travel time results in the roll interval never going below a minute, and it takes 1 Legend per roll for Instant Investigator.
If any of the PCs lack Epic Stamina, it'll be worth the ST keeping track of how many hours they spend walking around and looking for clues. Rules for fatigue can be found on pages 181-182 of Scion: Hero.
Taking shortcuts off the clearly marked trails will result in massive property damage, and should take some heavy duty Athletics rolls.
Bottomless Pit
According to the Park Rangers, the pit only looks Bottomless. They say it's merely 140 feet deep. Even when that was true, it still would have been deep enough to do the full 25 levels of damage to those who fall in.
Recent seismic activity has opened the pit deeper, and thanks to the magic of the Titans, no mortals have noticed. The Nemean bat lives deep within this drop, in an area that also serves as a touchstone. The extended caverns of the underworld are left to individual StoryTellers to detail. The Nemean bat sleeps hanging over the touchstone.
No comments:
Post a Comment