GM Note: This short encounter set is designed to act as a loose framework for you to tweak & toss into your current campaign and everything listed here is a suggestion for use only. Several details, especially those on this page, are deliberately vague in order to make integration easier.

Basic Encounter Set-Up

Who: Village elders, upset that the local militia is unwilling to venture into the deep forest.

What: A rare pest has become quite common, with sightings and attacks becoming more brazen and frequent.

Where: Some caves a bit more than two miles NE of town.

When: Late spring to mid-summer.

Why: The rather mild and dry winter has led to an abundance of last years hatchings of Mosquito Bats surviving when they would normally perish from the trifecta of cold, lack of game, and strong hunting pressure from the caverns Orc population, which usually relies on the bats as a winter survival food source. The overpopulation has caused a parasitic fungus to spread rapidly among the swarm, driving them to ever increasing bolder activity.

How much: The elders are reluctant to put a bounty on the Mosquito Bats, but they are willing to turn over the remains of last years harvest. Theyll even ferment and distill the surplus to make it more potable and portable. The elders will negotiate for goods and services using the Young Vodka and Whiskey as payment.

Credits:

Exterior Art: Tadeusz Ajdukiewicz (Title Unknown, 1883)

Everything else: Christopher Stogdill (www.frugalgm.com)

The Mad Mosquito Bats

Of Clarkesburg Caverns

An OSR Encounter Set

scalable for any-Level PCs

By Christopher Stogdill

https://www.patreon.com/frugalgmhttps://plus.google.com/+ChristopherStogdill/posts

Please visit this Patreon page for a larger cavern map

1) The frontier town of Clarkesburg, with a small fort on the hills to the East.

2) There are four main entrances to the caverns, all of which open up to the shores of small ponds or lakes. The two Southern entrances border Demon Lake, so called because of the two tribes of Orcs that call the caverns home. The Southern cave entrances are large enough to drive three wagons side-by-side, while the Northern entrances are one third that size.

3) There are actually two tribes of Orcs that inhabit the caverns and there is an unsteady truce between them thanks to three rock walls that separate the Southern caverns into Eastern and Western halves. The Orcs are not openly hostile to each other, but only in the lower caverns.

4) The Northern Orc clan is known, in their language, as the Broken Axe Clan, after a great Chief who slew a cave bear with only a broken Axe. This is the more dominant of the two tribes and subsequently has access to the drier caverns and better hunting grounds. Broken Axe Orcs have been known to harass Clarkesburgs militia, but generally only does so when their younger warriors need to prove themselves.

5) The Southern Orc clan is known as the Deathblow Clan, after their leader died while slaying a fierce cave bear. This is the same leader the Broken Axe Clan is named for, but the Chiefs death split the clan into two rival factions, which have maintained strained relations due to some measure of kinship. The Deathblows camp was decimated this winter by Mosquito Bats, which normally remain dormant during the winter. The bats made several invasions into the Deathblow camp, feeding on adults and even dragging young Orcs back to their lair.

6) This is the remaining cavern connection between the two Orc camps. The main corridor extends roughly South to the Deathblow Orcs while a small side passage near the floor level winds its way to the Broken Axe Orcs. Both tribes use this passageway when gathering Mosquito Bats during the harshest of winter conditions.

7) This is the Mosquito Bats main breeding chamber. The end of this passage is deep underground and easily 30 foot tall. The ground is littered with bent, bloody, and broken corpses of small animals and humanoids. The bats inject living hosts with their eggs and then fly to the top of the chamber to drop the host to the floor, hopefully laming it in the process. At any time there are 4x the larval young as party members, and they attack at half the stats of the adults.

8) The Mosquito Bats can be heard far down their chamber as their wings reverberate and echo through the caverns. The bats all show signs of an unusual white fungal growth on their proboscis. Because of their sheer numbers, the swarm is slow to notice any intrusions, but will fiercely attack once alarmed. They fight fiercely and madly to the death (bonus to attack and damage with penalties for defense).

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