Seven Silver Spheres
A downloadable game
My friends, great treasure awaits at The Temple of St. Rylan, deep in the Forest of Dawn. The Seven Silver Spheres are long thought lost... but I found the clues proving their existence! I have researched the paths as well, but sadly I am too old to traverse them safely...
So reads the letter from your late acquaintance Marcos. All of you have received an identical letter and map - dare you brave the forest trails or the old road to reach the ruins of the temple? And what will you find once the door opens?
An introductory adventure for Cairn, Seven Silver Spheres is a short (2-3hr) point crawl adventure. It is intended to offer players multiple approaches to the problems in their path, along with characters to talk to and secrets to uncover. An array of treasures (and the consequences for taking them) are also provided.
Other Cairn adventures from Pointless Monument:
The Chamberlain's Chessboard
A Fistful of Feathers
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Fantastic one shot adventure. I ran it twice, with first time players, and it worked great. Since it's open-ended, I added a plot twist: Marcos is actually an evil sorcerer who wants the spheres for himself and is using the PCs for his purposes. Each sphere they take, in addition to increasing the evil in the forest, time passes faster, pushing them several years forward with. When they leave the temple they find a scene of devastation.
I translated the map, since one of the group were kids, and printed the letter from Marcos as a diegetic handout, to add flavor to the adventure kickoff.
Thanks for making this little fun adventure!
The time skip idea is fantastic, and that map/letter look great! Glad you all had fun!
Great module. superb information design. I highly recommend this concise point crawl. Ran it today for my osr open table (using Old School Essentials): we finished the module in about 2 hours. Fun encounters, one dead PC.
Wonderful! Thank you for the kind words, and pleased to hear it works just as well in OSE.
I played this with 2 groups, one is full of experienced players, and the other was complete newcomers to RPGs. Everyone had a great time with both Cairn and this adventure.
I wasn't prepared enough to make use of the religious flavourings unfortunately, so I played up the forest as much as I could through improv. The highlight is easily the tavern for me, I managed to play the thing in a very unnerving manner, and nobody dared to open the door!
Glad both groups had a good time! In particular I'm pleased that it still 'works' with experienced players. Did both groups take a similar route or was there some variation?
The experienced group hasn't finished the adventure yet (they are about to head out from the tavern after spending a night there). The other group did not have time to leave the forest so i wrapped it up in a montage after they snatched some orbs.
With that in mind, both groups went to Old Ford -> Tavern, then the newcomers went to Secret Well -> Temple.
Another caveat here is that, based on the expected nights-spent-in-forest in the text, I had to prepare travel times which I would be using consistently so my players can plan. I decided that there would be 4 times of day (morning, midday, afternoon, evening), and travelling to a nearby location would automatically advance the time of day (as well as other meaningful activities like resting). This meant that the shortest route would take the party to the temple on the night before the equinox (assuming the players spent their first evening with a rest).
Amazing adventure, yyesterday I DMed for a group of 3 new players, it was the first time they played any role game, and it was a blast, we had so much fun, the adventure is really well designed and the handout map Is such a cool idea, since they loved it and they are hooked to find out how it continues I'll have to make up a follow up adventure, but I hope to see a second part in the future, well job and great writing, 9/10 for me.
Thanks so much! Pleased you all had such a good time - delivering that kind of experience to completely new players is exactly what I was aiming for.