Basilisk Cult - Play Review
I was down a player so once more into the breach. The Shadowdark breach! I ran Basilisk Cult, one of 9 adventures from Cursed Scroll 4 that I divorced from the larger hex crawl context. Basilisk Cult was written and published by Kelsey Dionne of the Arcane Library.
Basilisk Cult is a single spread in Cursed Scroll 4. It follows the format of the mini-adventures — like Eroding Isle of the Executioner and Wavestone Monolith — with a short setup paragraph, encounter table, a keystone item/effect and a map on one page and the dungeon key on the second page.
At the Table
The blurb for this one sets up the basilisk cult as preparing a raid somewhere else in the hex crawl. Not using the hex crawl, I skipped this hook and instead gave the crawlers a rich patron looking for a basilisk egg. The pre-game table talk that evening actually centered around the basilisk egg. For whatever reason, Foundry has the egg in the gear section and the players all commented on it. It gave me an odd segue into the adventure!
This is a combat focused site, as befits a location held by a hostile faction. There's an ambush in the first chamber with two basilisk cultists. From there my crawlers confronted a pair of sentries who summoned their friends from another room. Those friends eventually ambushed the crawlers as they investigated the statue of a basilisk. The crawler's release some prisoners, claim a basilisk egg and we end our session there.
There wasn't a lot to interact with here or explore. The basilisk statue had some potential but was poorly defined. There's an egg in the mouth but how far down? Can you climb in? On the spur of the moment I made it too easy. My players missed the Basilisk cult's leader and the talking skeleton. That skeleton looked really fun so that the piece I'm the most bummed by. I love a goofy NPC and the skeleton was definitely that.
Shockingly, I rolled 2 random encounters, more than the last 3 mini-adventures combined. These were fine. After the first room the crawlers run into one an escaped prisoners from a keyed location. They also met some roosting giant bats. These provided some interest and complexity to the adventure but 1d4 giant bats is pretty unexciting.
Final Thoughts
My crawlers didn't get a chance to fully explore this dungeon and I think they missed some of the best parts: the Skeleton Friend and the submerged sarcophagus. The pottery expert prisoners and the stone shaman stand out as underexplained and are the weakness of running this adventure out of context but I'd assess that as a minor thing. Basilisk Cult was a fine space to explore. Not my favorite but not the worst of these small spaces.