Goodman Games

Hi there,

I'm looking at the Dungeon Crawl campaign modules, and trying to fit one into an existing campaign of mine, and I was wondering if someone could post a little adventure-story about the Sunless Garden. One of those wonderful little "we-went-here, -then-this-happened, and we did this" tales of adventure?

Maybe a summary of it from someone who's played through the mission, and can give me a hint who the big bad is, what the point is, who his henchmen are, and what kind of party the heroes might need?

Well, without giving too much away, I'll say that this is definitely one of the more entertaining DCC modules. The basic premise is "treant gone bad." The treant has built an underground lair (e.g., the sunless garden) and populated it with weird, mutated plants. He's in the process of turning the townspeople into trees by poisoning their water, so the PCs have to put a stop to this mess.

The main opponents fall into three categories: the treant's weird plant monsters; his bugbear allies; and the smugglers who used to occupy the cave before the treant took over. Nockmort, the treant, is the big bad guy, but the dungeon is fairly nonlinear, so there are other encounters after him. (There's a main cavern, the main garden area, with several smaller areas jutting off. It's possible to fight Nockmort before exploring other areas.) There are also a variety of other opponents, as well, including a mummy that the bugbears didn't know what to do with, so it's been locked in a pantry for years...

The fun part about this module is that the "treant gone nuts" theme is omnipresent. Some of the bugbears fight with exploding apples, picked from a mutant tree specially cultivated by Nockmort. The PCs can pick the apples, too, but if they're not careful, they explode in hand! There are lots of other cool plant effects, as well. Because of the focus on "nature gone wild," this is one of the few modules where a druid or ranger is particularly useful.

This module also has a special "easter egg" that not many people have picked up on. I won't give it away, but I will give two hints:

1. Why does the smuggler captain keep his super-secret room so secret? (You'll know the one I mean if you read the module.)

2. Where do the oversized clothes in his wardrobe come from?

If you figure it out, post here...

Whoops, that last post was from me...