DM Guide to House of Revenance & House of Webs
- Towering Tales AB
- Jan 16, 2020
- 4 min read
SPOILER WARNING: Contains spoilers for House of Revenance and House of Webs.
The second adventure in the Spies Below the Moonsea series is a side-quest of sorts. In reprisal for foiling their slave-taking raid, the Lolth-worshipping House Ouss'Nassath assassinates a Tor'Erhyl sword dancer and leaves her body on the territory of a yet more evil house dedicated to the death goddess Kiaransalee. The characters are asked to negotiate with the death cultists to secure passage into their territory to retrieve the body.
This is a dark adventure that heavily features devotees of death and the opportunity to learn about the worship of Kiaransalee and her evil followers. Be sure to note the content warning and adjust accordingly for your table. If the theme of the adventure doesn't seem appropriate for your players, it's one that can be skipped without missing out on any threads of the main storyline.
House of Revenance has a number of highly challenging combat encounters and care should be taken to adjust them to party strength.
Tips for Running the Adventure
The main tip for this adventure be mindful of content types available and to steer the group accordingly. One of my all-time favourite social interaction sections takes place at Death's Prevalence, yet if the characters choose a different path, they may never experience it. Additionally, given a certain set of choices, the adventure may result in being almost entirely combat-focused, so it's important to be familiar with the types of gameplay available based on different choices throughout. If the party chooses to skip Death's Prevalence, I recommend focusing more on the exploration/climbing sections than the pure combat encounters (of which there are plenty anyhow!)
Timing tip: the final bonus objective of this adventure is an extra combat encounter that can easily be dropped for time. As a matter of fact, both of the bonus objectives in this one are very optional, though the first does provide for a very unique combat challenge!
House of Webs (forthcoming)
The third adventure in the series is House of Webs. This one brings with it a level of closure to the story thread of House Tor’Erhyl’s conflict with the slavers of House Ouss’Nassath. These first three adventures can be considered to form a sort of trilogy within the greater series.
This adventure is a little more open – if not entirely sandbox - in a variety of ways. The first bonus objective allows characters to explore more of Zethlentyn Prime by visiting a couple of its notable locations. The Food for Thoughts Tavern (and its unique proprietor) is one of my favourite places!
Once the party sets out on their mission, they have a series of choices which directly affect what content the characters experience. It’s possible to go through the main objectives on separate playthroughs and have vastly different experiences.
Finally, there is the second bonus objective. Once again, it is takes place at the end of the adventure and is designed to be easily droppable if other parts run long. While it doesn’t feature any information or critical to this adventure, it does have a couple of cameos of sorts.
For one, it takes place in the Cavern of Fallen Spikes, which some may remember as being home to the final confrontation of Six Summoned Swords - it's a cameo of geography! Unbeknownst to the party, a new mysterious new character is here investigating that very battle. This character is Talabaste Auvrmytor – an arcanist and researcher of a yet unintroduced house. She is secretive and more than happy to let the adventures go safely on their way, so long as they don’t poke their noses into her business. This is Talabaste’s only appearance in Spies Below the Moonsea, but she is destined to become a key character in the third series of adventures (if Tier 3 CCCs are ever opened up again!)
Tips for Running the Adventure
I definitely recommend running the 4-hour version of this one. There are parts toward the end of the adventure – in both the main and bonus objectives – that can be shortened for time and still make work well, so timing shouldn't be a problem.
The main piece of other advice has to do with the escort of the liberated mission. This section leaves a lot to the DM in terms of creating the experience. You have all the “DM discretion” in the world to make this fun and interesting for your players. Some of the random rolls on the madness table may not make for particularly engaging gameplay, so adjust them. The goal is to show madness and let the characters interact with it.
What’s Next?
House of Revenance is live on DMsGuild now, while House of Webs will be up in a couple of weeks. As of this writing, I’ve still not received approval to post the next two adventures (which had both premiered at the same event in October). I’m hoping that the approvals come soon, so that I can continue posting next parts of the series every 2-3 weeks.
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