[D&D3.5][VO][Scénario] U2 - Hangman's Noose, RPG (po angielsku)
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A 3.5/OGL ADVENTURE FOR LEVEL 1
U2
15
16
Level One
To Level
Tw o
9
9
7
9
9
T
6
To Basement
8
T
5
4
T
T
N
3
1
2
W
E
´
T
S
Beldrin's Bluff Courthouse
Basement
To Level One
17
10
11
12
Level Tw o
13
14
To Area 17
To Area 18
18
One square = 5 feet
15
16
To Level
Tw o
Level One
9
9
7
9
9
T
To Basement
6
8
T
5
4
T
N
3
1
2
W
E
S
Beldrin's Bluff Courthouse
Basement
To Level One
17
11
10
12
Level Tw o
13
14
18
To Area 18
To Area 17
One square = 5 feet
HANGMAN’S NOOSE
Gamemastery module u
2
urban adventure
CREDITS
Design:
Nicolas Logue
Development and Editing:
Jason Bulmahn, Mike McArtor, Jeremy Walker
Art Director:
Drew Pocza
Cover Artist:
Svetlin Velinov of Imaginary Friends Studios
Interior Artists:
Drew Pocza, Wayne Reynolds,
UDON with Joe Ng, Espen Grundetjern, Roberto Campus, Kevin Yan
Cartographer:
Rob Lazzaretti
Managing Art Director:
James Davis
Vice President of Operations:
Jef Alvarez
Brand Manager:
Jason Bulmahn
Director of Sales & Marketing:
Joshua J. Frost
Paizo CEO:
Lisa Stevens
Corporate Accountant:
Dave Erickson
Staf Accountant:
Chris Self
Technical Director:
Vic Wertz
Publisher:
Erik Mona
U2: Hangman’s Noose
is a GameMastery Module designed for four 1st-level characters. By the end of this module, characters should reach 3rd
level. This module is designed for play in the Pathfinder Chronicles
tm
campaign setting, but can easily be adapted for use with any world.
This module is compliant with the Open Game License (OGL) and is suitable for use with the world’s most popular fantasy roleplaying game.
The OGL can be found on page 31 of this product.
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GameMastery Modules are published by Paizo Publishing, LLC under the Open Game License v 1.0a Copyright 2000 Wizards of the Coast, Inc.
All other trademarks are property of Paizo Publishing, LLC. ©2008 Paizo Publishing.
Printed in China.
HANGMAN’S NOOSE
countless men, women, and children have met horrible ends in its darkened
alleys, shaded tenements, and abandoned buildings. They choke on their
own blood until their bodies surrender up their souls, but they never leave. Absalom’s dead
linger. They dance in shadows at the edge of lantern-light. They peer between the cracks
of creaking loorboards. Their phantom breath sends shivers down the spines of the living.
No home in Absalom is without its haunts, ghosts, and whispers. The sounds of a
weeping child from the attic in the dead of night, the moans of a tortured maid issuing from
the basement of a crumbling manor, and the croaking rasp of a strangled man just beyond a
bedroom window—all are heard for a moment amid a night’s storm and then swallowed up by
thunder or silence. Some dismiss them as fancy or imagination, but we know better. The dead
lurk all around us, in air and shadow, between the walls and right at your back. They watch
while you sleep, and wait, moaning in the dark, united in their tireless hatred of the living.
at the clifside collapse and planned to
continue residing near the abandoned
courthouse moved on in short order ater
the irst few disappearances. The details of
the strange events that precipitated their
light remain untold except for two words:
“The Croaker.” Ever since his hanging was
carried out, those who wander too close to
the courthouse can still hear Jarbin Mord
rasping through his crushed throat—the
sound of breath pushed over bone and rot,
a miserable inhuman echo of life.
Five years ater the trial, a famed cleric of
Sarenrae led a band of adventurers into the
moldering courthouse. Seeking glory and
hoping to prove they were Absalom’s great-
est heroes, they decided to banish the rest-
less soul of Jarbin Mord to the Abyss. The
expedition was much talked about among
all echelons of Absalom. Scullery maids
giggled and swooned over Father Kelgaard’s
blond locks and crystal blue eyes; guards-
men cheered on their captain, the imposing
Grisdom Twin-Axe; and nobles lauded one
of their favored scions, the highborn wizard
Sashrala Vortrum. The best and brightest
of Absalom marched into Beldrin’s Bluf
Courthouse at sundown on the anniversary
of Mord’s hanging.
At dawn the next day, only Grisdom
emerged. Blind, his eyes hulled from his
face, the guard captain cradled a lantern
with Sashrala’s decapitated head stufed
inside, a still-lit candle in her silently
screaming mouth. Demands for an account
of the night’s events only solicited sense-
less fragments from the tatters of Grisdom’s
mind: “The Hangman… a neck for a neck…
hate never forgets… show me the way out,
Sashrala! Show me the way!”
No one has crossed the courthouse
threshold since. Fear spread from the place
like a sickness, until even the most stub-
born holdouts to keep their quarters in
Beldrin’s Bluf departed or died of. Once
Absalom’s most vibrant district, the bluf is
now a ghost town. The silence of its streets
is broken only by the rasping wind.
Now the tenth anniversary of the Mord
hanging approaches, and few have forgot-
ten the case or the horriic events of ive
years past. Citizens mark their calendars
and children at play sing eerie songs.
Adventure Background
Beldrin’s Bluf was once the shining cen-
ter of Absalom’s wealthy elite. Resting atop
the Precipice District, the district ofered
patrons of high-end restaurants, gentle-
men’s clubs, and ladies’ teahouses a breath-
taking view of a glittering sunset on the
water and, if the clouds cooperated, a mag-
niicent green lash as the horizon swal-
lowed the sun.
Now the bluf is a smattering of ramshackle
manors, open lots of twisted weeds, and
broken cobblestones. The district courthouse
is a decrepit four-story gothic relic of the
bluf’s bygone days. Several years ago, erosion
sent two blocks of Beldrin’s Bluf crumbling
from their clif-top perch, sloughing like
dead skin from the city’s peak into the
crashing tide of Absalom’s harbor below.
Residents led the once-charming district
of shops, teahouses, and theaters for fear the
entire Precipice Quarter might follow suit.
During the chaotic, fearful days following
the collapse, many strange events transpired
in Beldrin’s Bluf. Fortunes disappeared,
murderers slaughtered innocents, and
families splintered, all in the grips of anarchy
and terror. Of all these wild transpirations,
perhaps none is more steeped in impiety
than the swit trial of Jarbin Mord and his
subsequent execution by hanging.
The Mord Murders, a double homicide
of mother and son, shocked the city. The
gruesome axe-slayings are still discussed in
hushed tones around hearth ires ten years
later. The trial that followed was a virtual
circus of accusation, conspiracy, innuendo,
and slander. The eventual conviction
of executioner Jarbin Mord, father and
husband of the victims, was one of the
grossest miscarriages of justice in the entire
history of Absalom’s jurisprudence. The
instigators of the farce doctored evidence
and buried their sins in the bedlam of the
bluf’s evacuation.
Mord’s trial was peculiar in more ways
than just its inequity. It is the irst and
only murder case held in the very building
where the victims were killed. Jarbin was
the groundskeeper and executioner of the
courthouse, and his lovely young wife and
six-year-old boy were hewn to pieces in his
attic apartment above the courtroom where
he stood trial. Every week, on “Noose Weal-
day,” Mord put on his black wool hood and
carried out executions for the court. Ater
his trial, he was hung from the very gallows
he once tended.
The case of Jarbin Mord was the last
to see the bar in the district courthouse.
The doors were locked tight the next day,
its windows nailed shut with boards, as if
the crime against justice could be covered
up and forgotten. Ever since, on windless
nights, the old courthouse creaks and
passersby catch a glimpse of a pale form
skulking beyond the boarded windows.
Those few neighbors who scofed bravely
“Wealday, Wealday, Hangman comes for you,
Ole Broke-Neck Mord, gonna hang you too.”
2
module u2
A
bsalom is an old city and no stranger to murder. Throughout its history,
Adventure Summary
Either by their own volition or through some
conluence of fate, the PCs ind themselves
trapped inside the Beldrin’s Bluf Courthouse
on the eve of Noose Wealday ten years ater
Mord swung from his gallows. Mord brought
them there along with eight other citizens of
Absalom who played roles in his wrongful
conviction. Within an hour, the irst juror
turns up dead, and it soon becomes obvious
the rest (including the PCs) will follow. The
tormented spirit of Jarbin Mord, now a
hideous strangled undead called the Croaker,
stalks the jury.
Jarbin is innocent of his family’s murders
and he wants the true criminals to face the
justice they so neatly avoided by pinning
the crime on him. The evidence needed to
convict the man who murdered Mord’s wife
and child, and those who conspired to see
Jarbin swing, is spread about the courthouse
interior. The PCs race against the Croaker’s
hunger for deadly vengeance, probing the
darkest corners and murky depths of the
haunted courthouse in search of pieces
of the puzzle. As they search, their fellow
jurors meet grisly ends at the end of the
Croaker’s noose.
With the night halfway spent, two men
arrive at the courthouse, lured by forged
blackmail letters. One is the true murderer
of Mord’s family and the mastermind behind
his mistrial. If the PCs fail to discover who
killed Jarbin’s family and directed the
mockery of a trial, they swing at sunrise just
as the innocent hangman did ten years past.
veins. The doors sag in their archway like the
drooping eyes of a madman. The surrounding
structures long ago fell in upon themselves
in supplication to the creaking courthouse.
A salt wind blows up the precipice and
rakes across the tangled weeds of Beldrin’s
Bluf. The whole building groans as the wind
blows, its tortured lamentation fading to a
rasping hiss as the wind ebbs. This croaking
murmur never completely fades away. The sun
sets in the west, the last slivers of twilight
painting the courthouse blood red as darkness
creeps closer.
Designer
The horror,
The horror
Let’s face it: fantasy RPGs
don’t lend themselves
well to survival horror. It’s difficult to run
a truly terrifying adventure in any system,
truth be told, and the secret has very little
to do with mechanics and everything to
do with atmosphere and narration. For
optimum fear-factor, turn down the lights
and play by candlelight alone when you
run
Hangman’s Noose
. Gather a collection
of music to shiver the soul with dread
(the
Bram Stoker’s Dracula
soundtrack is a
favorite of mine). Consider banishing the
battle mat to ensure tactics take a back
seat to immersive terror. Practice your
best imitation of the horrible rasping
sound made by the antagonist of
The
Grudge
for when the Croaker makes his
appearance. Take dramatic pauses where
you will (silence is often more terrifying
than any sound), and refuse to give the
PCs solid information about what they see
and hear. Remember that it’s dark, and a
wind is blowing through the courthouse.
Uncertainty is terrifying in and of itself,
so don’t always describe things as if the
PCs are in a well-lit room with a perfectl
understanding of their surroundings.
Choose a gaming environment that lends
itself to the game if possible (a basement,
an attic, or an old building close to your
house—no trespassing please). Get the
group together early for your game and
watch the scariest movie you can think of,
or play an hour of
Resident Evil
or
Silent
Hill
to set the mood-dial to trepidation
and terror. Oh, and definitely play late at
night when the rest of the world is still:
there is no better time than the witching
hour to run a survival horror game.
A truly potent introductory adventure
can paint the entire tone of a campaign and
forge unique relationships between party
members. In
Hangman’s Noose
, each of the
PCs is related by blood to one of the original
twelve jurors present at Mord’s trial. For this
reason, you should work with your players to
crat backstories for the PCs that it with this
adventure. The actual four jurors have already
passed away or are no longer in the city, and
so the four PCs are chosen in their place to sit
the jurors’ box on the gruesome anniversary
of Jarbin’s death. The
en media res
introduction
begins with a montage of fragmented
nightmares before the PCs suddenly awaken
in the jurors’ box in area
2
. Sveth, the “juror”
aiding Mord in his terrible retrial, drugged
and kidnapped the PCs, bringing them to the
courthouse in a drug-induced stupor.
Ater they see the exterior of the haunted
courthouse in their mind’s eye (given in the
text above), the PCs each experience one more
vision—a diferent one for each character.
Each vision holds clues to unraveling the
mystery of the Mord murders and mistrial, but
these clues are not particularly useful unless
the PCs share them with one another. This
is a mechanism for bringing four disparate
PCs together. To increase the drama of the
adventure, take each PC aside and reveal his
dream to him separately. Every PC relives an
expanded version of the nightmare vision
at some point during his exploration of the
courthouse (like a lashback in a movie) to
help him put the pieces together.
Introduction
A leaning monument to the district’s pain,
this four-story courthouse is a crumbling
marvel of cracked plaster and chipped
marble. Once a testament to justice wrought
in shining white stone, the courthouse is
now a crushed dream, its wretched exterior
corrupted by a bloated evil festering within.
Rainwater from a recent downpour mixed
with mulch oozes from ruptures in the
rock like pus bubbling from a wound. The
structure of the eastern wing of the upper
loor buckled long ago, and now the bell tower
tilts perilously, appearing as though it might
careen to the ground below at any moment.
Two massive pillars frame the heavy oak
doors of the court. The pillars’ surfaces run
with cracks and issures like so many burst
to pity, but there is no forgiveness in their
faces. The magistrate slams down his gavel
repeatedly and snarls for silence. The murmur
of the crowd relents as the stocky magistrate
draws up to his full height, smoothing a silver
beard with one hand as he sets down his gavel
and focuses on you with shining green eyes.
“Jarbin Mord. For the brutal and savage
slaying of your own wife and six-year-old boy,
it is the verdict of this jury, with which I concur
Vision 1
The courtroom buzzes with nervous anticipa-
tion. Dozens of eyes, from the crowd behind
you and the jurors’ box across the aisle, focus
on you. The expressions range from contempt
3
Notes
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