Ghosts of Saltmarsh: Chapter 3 - Danger at Dunwater

Less than a day’s travel by ship, an abandoned lair has been reoccupied. The lizardfolk have returned to this place at the mouth of the Dunwater River. They are amassing weapons and the people of Saltmarsh are worried that they are the target of an eventual attack.

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Danger at Dunwater is the second linked adventure from the original Saltmarsh trilogy from the eighties. Originally published in 1982 and it was written by the same duo as Sinister Secret of Saltmarsh, Dave J. Brown and Don Turnball. It is designed for four to six players of third level. The adventure has been updated for 5e Dungeons & Dragons in Ghosts of Saltmarsh.

After the combat heaviness of Sinister Secret of Saltmarsh, Danger at Dunwater is mostly about role-playing. I approached this adventure more like a skills challenge and allowed the players to come up with ideas on how to befriend the lizardfolk. There are a couple of tables in the adventure that give DCs for earning trust along with a table to gauge the lizardfolk’s initial attitude toward the characters. This will give you a good barometer for setting the stage of how the interactions will play out.

During these interactions, the characters will learn that a force of sahuagin attacked the lizardfolk’s lair and defeated them forcing the lizardfolk to retreat to their old lair near Saltmarsh. The lizardfolk are putting together a coalition to fight the sahuagin and take back their home. They have not reached out to the humans of Saltmarsh, because they do not think that surface dwellers will be much help against the sahuagin. The players, through their actions, can gain the trust of the lizardfolk and show their worth. This can then ally Saltmarsh and the lizardfolk. This alliance, if done right, will improve the odds of success in The Final Enemy.

If you are using Danger at Dunwater without running Sinister Secret of Saltmarsh, there is a provided narrative to pull the characters into the adventure. I would not suggest this as an option, because the Sea Ghost is such a great addition to any sea-based campaign. If you have already created a situation where the characters already have a vessel or you do not like DMing low-level adventures, then there are suggested workarounds that you can use.

The capstone combat encounter is the crocodile, 1,000 Teeth. I will get into the details of this down below, but you should spend time to make this fight special. Whether this means buying special minis or creating a detailed battlemap. 1,000 Teeth should be a challenge for your characters and the fight will be memorable.

You will have to do your homework to make this adventure run smoothly. This is not a simple dungeon crawl and it has the potential to brew up into a total party kill, if the party goes in with swords drawn and spells blazing. The council at Saltmarsh can bring the temperature down by giving instructions that this is a recon mission, and by letting the characters know that knowledge is more important than body counts. If the lizardfolk on the Sea Ghost survived in Sinister Secret of Saltmarsh, then their survival will also provide a way to set the right expectations for your players.

As the DM, you will need to know the most important NPCs in the lizardfolk lair. Figure out how you are going to play each and how they will react to the characters. Players that are relatively new to the game will need some coaxing for how they can gain the lizardfolk trust. If your party is filled with the standard D&D players, then once they understand how the interaction will work, the ideas will start pouring out. Be generous and allow even the craziest ideas to have an effect for good or ill.

My biggest gripe is the wasted space describing each room in the lizardfolk lair. Having never seen the original module from 1982, I would assume that this is a remnant of that early adventure. There was a tendency to describe unnecessary areas in those modules (I’m looking at you Village of Hommlet). I have noticed that some of those old adventures do not translate well to the modern game, but the core of this adventure is perfect for 5e. The role-playing focus and the bait and switch of the lizardfolk going from possible threat to ally works well in how the game is played today. I would have liked an interesting map for 1,000 Teeth’s lair, but I did find a suitable map online.

This is a really good adventure and gives plenty of chances for players to think outside the box. There is enough combat to satiate your blood-thirsty players while giving your role-playing players enough to sink their teeth into. I strongly suggest that you use this in conjunction with Sinister Secret of Saltmarsh and not use it as a stand-alone adventure. It also sets up the next adventure in the trilogy, The Final Enemy, but not right away since Enemy is designed for 7th level characters.

How it Played

Without any persuading from me, my players decided to approach the lizardfolk in a non-threatening manner. They were in the proper mindset to start things off. They set sail from Saltmarsh in their newly christened Monkey’s Carnage (aka, Sea Ghost). The trip was uneventful and only took half a day to get to the mouth of the Dunwater.

My players didn’t kill the lizardfolk on the Sea Ghost, which gave them away into the lair without drawing their weapons. They also got a bunch of free money as the lizardfolk paid for the weapons that the players took from the smugglers. As per usual, D&D player characters get super-rich very quickly. I kept this in check by having them pay for the upkeep of the Monkey’s Carnage.

After the initial contact went well, the players came up with ideas to earn favor with the lizardfolk. One character intentionally lost with his loaded dice while gaming. They threw a party and served fish that they caught (one of the characters had the fisher background). It was at the party that the queen of the lizardfolk asked for the help of the players to kill 1,000 Teeth. The killing of the crocodile is the combat set piece of this adventure and is the first time that the characters encounter an enemy with lair actions.

The side adventures are the key to Danger at Dunwater. The actual lizardfolk lair is a red herring, if the characters are storming those caves, then they have already lost. The encounter with the lizardfolk is a role-playing encounter and does not require combat. If your party wants to roll initiative while playing, then that is where the side adventures come in.

After getting on the good side of the lizardfolk, I built the rest of the adventure around the travel to and from 1,000 Teeth. On their way to fight 1,000 Teeth, the party encountered the bullywugs from The Bullywug Ambush section. I then used the Marsh Random Encounters (GoS p. 85) to create encounters during their journey. The random encounter table for the Marsh is excellent and gave great ideas for what my players encountered in their trek to 1,000 Teeth. Such as, they ran into two lost ogres with large sacks full of interesting items (see below) and they ran into Wander Root being attacked by an evil druid and his rats. The two lost ogres became a role-playing encounter (even though one of the players wanted to find out what was in the ogres’ sacks). Saving Wander Root was both a combat encounter and role-playing opportunity for the players and it also tied into the Saltmarsh Region section in Chapter 1.

The fight with 1,00 Teeth turned deadly. The old croc rolled a crit while attacking Tidal, which killed her. Amar used his channel divinity to put all that damage back against the crocodile, which was a major hit in killing it. Tidal was healed before she had a chance to roll a death save.

What I Changed

I kept the bullywug encounter in despite having the players sail to the lizardfolk lair. It was important to me that the players had a chance to pick up the Helm of Underwater Action. It played like a random encounter while they traveled from the lizardfolk lair to 1,000 Teeth’s fetid pool. On the return journey, I had planned on ambushing the characters in the same location with a band of trolls feasting on the corpses of the bullywugs and their giant toad. I skipped this encounter since we were at the end of a long session and I decided that another combat was not needed.

Oceanus disappeared from the campaign. The players rescued him and were happy to do so, but no one (including myself) had any interest in running the sea elf as an NPC. He provided good information to the characters, then just sort of vanished. Oceanus is an artifact from the original 1981 version of Sinister Secret of Saltmarsh. It made sense to give the players access to an NPC that could breathe underwater, but in the modern game, his inclusion is superfluous. Smart players will build characters in session zero that are made for a water environment and there are enough magic items to make up for any other shortcomings.

The party stayed in the upper left-hand corner of the map of 1,000 Teeth’s lair. I should have flipped the map so that there was not a broken bridge in front of them. They were too afraid of falling into the water to move farther into the area, which bunched them up in the corner of the map. I placed some treasure on the body of one of 1,000 Teeth’s victims as a reward for defeating the monster. It was a relatively short combat encounter, but it was filled with drama.

Aftermath

The characters were on the good side of the council. Amar’s brother, Remir, continued to abuse his newfound fame and power. Despite this, he was still able to get himself elected to the town council. This placed him right in the middle of trouble.

 Before the fight to take the Sea Ghost, I had put together a plan on how I would run the election to replace Gellan on the council. I had a neutral person (Aubrek Drallion), a loyalist (Kraddock Stonehorn), and a traditionalist (Kiorna Kester). I was going to let the party decide who they wanted to back in the election and I knew that the Scarlett Brotherhood would back Kraddock. Although, the brotherhood would not mind if Aubrek won the election. This all was scrapped as soon as Remir delivered the killing blow to Sigurd. This was more interesting than the other options and provided plenty of role-playing as Amar dealt with his brother.

 Mac kept writing and performing songs based on the party’s adventures. Although, Spirit of the Whale was still the most popular, his new works Haunted Mansion and Knotty Songs were starting to get requested more.

 Wind, the tabaxi rogue, decided to multi-class and became a warlock, which caused some tensions later on as the adventure unfolded. The player was looking to add magic to their character and the change did not add much to the story. As the DM, I should have tied the change to the story, but it came as a surprise to me since the character was very effective as a rogue/assassin.

 I introduced the deep scion of Bloody Bjorn, the first mate that was tossed overboard in Sinister Secret of Saltmarsh. He waved at Amar from Crabber’s Cove as the paladin left Procan’s temple. I was hoping to draw the characters to investigate Crabber’s Cove to uncover the Scarlet Brotherhood’s secret meeting place and to have them meet Xolec. This is a perfect example of laying evidence at your players’ feet and having them completely ignore it. The party had learned that one of the tabaxi was found dead in Crabbers Cove and Amar had lived there as a child where he had dreams of a man asking for his help. There was enough evidence of there being something mysterious happening there, but it did not draw the players’ attention.

 After the events of Danger at Dunwater, Amar’s former employer sent his butler to give Amar a message. The Emperor of the Waves had been spotted…