Hymn of the Hollow God – Book III of the Amberblight Quintet – is now live in digital format on the Dungeon Master’s Guild.
The adventure picks up a short time after The Hexen Temple. Ellarion and Lirael, the elves the elves on opposite sides of the race to the Temple, partners in life and in death – have both disappeared, taking the Heartspire seed with them.
It is known they have headed into Maralenth Fen – the great swamp north of Riverrock. Reports from rangers scouting the area say the swamp has come under the spell of an amber malady, and creatures horrific and unknown are now found in the deep parts of the region. It is the home to ancient elven ruins, the place where the Heartspire Tree once grew and spread its magic from.
Following the elves into the swamps is no small feat. It will take courage, and it will take the help of the dwarves and elves working together in an uneasy alliance. But what horrors lie in wait at the centre of the swamp, the forgotten Vael’shara, elven centre of Heartspire worship?
Here is the teaser text for the module:
The crypt is behind them. The artifact is no longer safe. And deep in the swamp, voices have started singing again.
Ellarion and Lirael have vanished, carrying the unstable Heartspire with them. To Vael’shara, the Sanctum of the First Root.
Pursuing them through the drowned temple and amber-laced ruins, something stirs beneath the muck and stone. Dreams bloom in unnatural patterns. The trees lean too closely. Reflections twitch when no one moves.
At the heart of it all, a pool of golden resin, perfectly still. And a song, as old as the stones, yet new as birth. Calling to you. Singing of doom.
The amazing folks over at Tyche books have sent out a cover teaser for their upcoming anthology, “Starship Librarians” edited by Shannon Allen and JR Campbell. The cover art is by Lorna Antoniazzi, according to Tyche’s Facebook post with this exact image.
The full reveal will be on June 17, but until then… here is a little teaser.
In other news, I have stepped once more into the shadow realm that exists behind every Dungeon Master screen and will be running a heavily modified 3.5e version of Tyranny of Dragons for my new group. It’s a mix of experienced Grogs and new 5e players, so there should be lots of help at the table.
We held a session 0 earlier this week and laid out some ground rules. Then we have a couple weeks off before our first game. I’ll keep you posted on this and other stuff as it happens. In all honesty, probably like a week or two after it happens 😉
In August, I’ll be heading down to When Words Collide in Calgary, and it’s been a while since I did that. I’m excited to see some friends I have missed, drink some beer, commiserate with fellow writers, drink some more, and possibly even learn a thing or two.
This year’s guest is Stephen Graham Jones, which is awesome because horror writers don’t often get a ton of love in the genre world – they are the creepy, deformed sisters that get locked in the basement and only come out when someone forgets to secure the lock after feeding them.
So that is going to be awesome! I’m also looking forward to possibly seeing some family while I’m down there, so if you are in the area the weekend of August 15, stop in and say hi!
In other news, I’m working on lining up some convention tables for my new releases this year – the re-release of my fiction collection A Quiet Place and a handful of D&D adventures that are slowly making their round. There is some little stuff up here. I’d love to get up to Yellowknife at some point, but to be honest, I don’t trust my car to drive for hours without a single gas station in sight.
In a short time, I am going to be running a Tyranny of Dragons campaign – my DM break is over! Since every single 5e campaign book is hot garbage (organizationally, the ideas are very good!) this means a ton of homebrewing on my part. It’s really one of my favourite things about D&D.
This campaign is going to be extra awesome because we’ve finally convinced our 5e players to try out 3.5 – the best version of D&D and if you disagree, well, in the words of Conan the Barbarian, “DEN TO HALL WITCHOO!”
I have a plan for this game that I think will really put it over the top for my players. More to come on that.
Did I mention it’s fuckin’ hot up here? Well, it is.
Just a quick note here announcing an adventure I wrote a few months ago – “The Crypt of the Four” is now available in print, for those of you – like myself – prefer the persistence of paper over the cold efficiency of pixels.
Also, and I may be a little biased here, but these little adventures look great on a bookshelf.
Here is the back cover for The Crypt of the Four:
They were heroes lost to time. But they bore a dark secret… Beneath the earth, where history is buried and forgotten, something stirs. The Crypt of the Four, once a monument to legendary heroes, has been defiled, twisted by a presence long erased.
The Fifth has returned.
Shadows stretch unnaturally, whispers claw at the edges of thought, and the past refuses to stay dead. A name, chiseled from stone, lingers. Waiting to be spoken. Mockeries of the past writhe in stitched flesh, torches flicker with spectral flame, and sorrow thickens the air. Uncover the truth. Face what was lost.
But beware… some names were meant to be forgotten.
I’ve recently released a new first-tier adventure on Dungeon Masters Guild, and will be releasing it soon as a print release on Amazon (stay tuned for news on that!)
Winter Hearts takes place near Mourningbridge, the same community I built for The Crypt of the Four, for those of you keeping track. If you can’t tell by the name, this adventure takes place during the winter.
In winter hearts, your adventurers can investigate the disappearance of a family on their way to Mourningbridge who were seemingly attacked and taken. An ancient elven keep that sits in ruins nearby is the likely location.
Some say the keep is haunted; of late, there have been strange lights seen in the upper reaches of the keep, and even stranger things heard.
Here is the teaser for Winter Hearts:
In the dead of winter, an ancient elven keep lies in ruin, its walls besieged by gnolls driven mad by visions of a sacred child hidden within. Inside, an elven couple guards their newborn, while a desperate human family lies captive beneath their feet. As hunger, bloodlust, and divine prophecy converge, the walls won’t hold for long… and what waits below hungers for more than just flesh. Break the siege, save the innocent, and cleanse the desecrated magic of the Bleeding Watch – before winter’s heart devours you…
Before you go any further, read this!!!
This story contains themes of imprisonment, childbirth under duress, starvation, siege warfare, religious zealotry, torture, and threats to families.
Readers may also encounter unsettling depictions of predatory violence, emotional manipulation, gnoll rituals, and moral dilemmas involving desperate survival. Please proceed with caution if you are sensitive to these themes.
For some of you, this is exactly why you have purchased this adventure. For others…
Things are finally starting to warm up in the north, meaning the snow is just about gone and I’m able to sit on my back deck again. We’re in that sweet spot between winter and bugs, and I’m taking full advantage of it.
It’s awesome my job recognizes WrestleMania as the universal centre of the wrestling world, and I’ve gotten a few days off work disguised as something called “Easter”… I have no idea what that is, but I imagine it’s just a fancy non-English word for WRESTLEMANIA BAYYYYY BEEEEEE.
So anyway, with four days off, I’ve had a chance to really dig into some of my catch-up work in terms of my 5e adventures. I’m expecting some proof copies of “The Crypt of the Four” from Amazon early next week, and my second installment of The Amberblight Quintet is in the books. I’ll be putting it up on Dungeon Master’s Guild in the next few days, but if you are waiting for a paper copy, I’ll probably have that ready to go on Amazon next week sometime.
So that’s good news! It means I’ll be working on some new adventures soon. I’ve been paying my daughter to colour some of the many, many Dyson Logos maps I bought commercial licenses for, and she’s decided to use that money to get shots for her dog. As you can imagine, that means I have a pile of them just waiting for something to come and take them over.
My reprint of “A Quiet Place” is in the middle of a soft release; I’m trying to line up some conventions for this year to get out and meet people and hawk my wares. I DO have a ticket for When Words Collide in Calgary in August, so at the very least, if you are headed that way, stop by and say hi! If I’m not checking out a panel, I will likely be in the pub. Writers write, and when they aren’t writing, they are usually drinking.
My plan here is to have each of these adventures include their own capstone feature that will make them feel very different from the other adventures in the series, while retaining the storyline and driving toward the ultimate goal. This means these adventures will all be very different from one another and may include mechanics you have never seen before in D&D 5e. I’m a homebrew addict from way, way, WAY back, and I can’t resist a chance to twist and mutate the rules. If you’ve played some of my other adventures, you might have a bit of an idea what I mean.
In Amberblight, the players are introduced to a sleepy little town known as Riverrock. The Town is a place where dwarves and humans live together peacefully. Of course, that is about to change, because if it didn’t, well, we wouldn’t really have an adventure, would we?
Here is the teaser for Amberblight:
Riverrock’s peaceful days are over. Villagers vanish, livestock roam strangely, and whispers of glowing veins in the hills spread like wildfire. Deep within the abandoned dwarven outpost of Rockshield, an ancient amber vein pulsates with life, harbouring grotesque parasites and an artifact of elven origin. As the corruption spreads, twisted creatures crawl from the depths. Will your party face the hive’s horrors and unravel its secrets… or fall to the amber’s insidious grasp?
Hang on to your butts, kids, it’s gonna be a ride.
My latest adventure up at Dungeon Masters Guild is a level 20 horror adventure called The Tower at the End if Time. I originally wrote it in 2024 for my annual Halloween Horror one shot.
At the time, we were coming to the end of our two-year Rime of the Frostmaiden campaign, and this sidetrek was a Ravenloft story with a few small changes. Most of the original story remains intact.
This adventure actually took two sessions to complete, as I didn’t anticipate my players getting lost in the labyrinth for as long as they did. I’ve changed some of the mechanics in this version with that in mind.
Adventuring at level 20
It’s pretty common wisdom among DMs that high level play is difficult to run. The players are basically demigods at this point, they never miss, nobody saves, and the amount of damage they can put out in a round is pretty staggering.
For my players, an illusionist wizard, an elven archer (fighter), paladin, rogue, and light cleric, they could put out anywhere from 75-200 points of damage each. Every round. EVERY. ROUND. Think about that range. an enemy with 400 hp could last 5-6 rounds or two rounds, depending on the luck of the dice. This makes combat very swingy in late stage play.
I noticed pretty quickly that adding HP was not the right answer here. The rounds can be agonizingly slow at this stage. Players with multiple effects, abilities, and turns. You have to account for a little bit of time for the players to still be weighing their strategies by the time it gets around to their turn.
And I know there is a lot of discussion out there about using minions, attacking player weaknesses, complicating combat – and yeah, those all have a place in your toolbox. They are just not the right tool every time. A lich will definitely be strategic about their attacks, but a giant purple worm? Nawwwwww.
My answer was to beef up the damage. Make combat even MORE lethal. Sure, they were going to paste my monsters in 1-2 rounds, but man, were they going to pay for letting me have a turn! And this seemed to add a level of panic to player actions. Drop 120 points of damage onto a paladin from a single arrow in the first round, and watch your players scurry for cover. It’s great fun. And the irony here is that this amount of damage was not far off from what my players were able to do themselves. Sauce for the goose.
Who Watches the Watchers? (Hint… it’s the players)
Circling back to The Tower at the Edge of Time, the adventure added a fun little bonus in the form of phantasmal creatures known as The Watchers. The Watchers do exactly as their name implies. They watch. Their only purpose in the adventure is to be there to witness the undoing of Creation with the release of Zar’Vul – an ancient god of unknown and forgotten things. Like I said, the stakes at level 20 are just that much higher, right?
I had a note in my original story about how The Watchers only watch The Obsidian Tower, unless a player commits an evil act in their presence or casts a necromantic or far-realm based spell (something I was using as “forgotten lore”). So of course, my Illusionist cast one of these spells, and was horrified to find one of The Watchers turn and look at him. That Watcher followed him through the adventure right up until the very end, when they returned back to the ruined Netherese city of Ythryn in Icewind Dale.
At this point, my Illusionist immediately asked, “Did that Watcher follow me home?”
I didn’t have any notes on this. I hadn’t really thought about it. But, generally being a “Yes, and!” DM, I immediately said, “Yes, and…” The “and” part was that The Watcher stayed with him for the rest of the campaign and into retirement. And my Illusionist tried EVERYTHING he could to rid himself of this creature. It never interacted, but anytime he looked out across the land, he would see a lone, robed figure standing off, watching him. Sometimes The Watcher was just a spec on the horizon. Sometimes it stood beside the table while my player sat in an inn trying to eat soup in peace.
After our campaign wound down, I asked the players where they saw their character a year after their adventure. It was part of an end of campaign session I learned about from Mike Shea of Sly Flourish fame. It’s a great idea, and if you don’t do this, you really should consider it!
The Watchers appear in this version of the adventure in the form they evolved into in that original Halloween game. Anytime they witness an act or spell that leaves a “taint” on a player’s soul, they will gain a new Watcher.
Forever.
Promo stuff
Here is the product teaser and promo video for The Tower at the End of Time. It’s about 42 pages long, so I’ve priced it a bit higher than my usual $2.99 USD for these. adventures – it’s priced at $4.99 USD. This just reflects the extra work that went into it. I hope this doesn’t dissuade you from dropping a couple bucks on it.
Not because it is forbidden, but because it was never known. The Tower stands at the edge of memory, waiting for those who were never meant to find it. Beyond its threshold lies a presence that should not exist, a being neither alive nor dead—only absent.
Step forward, and the world may change around you. Turn back, and you will always wonder what was waiting beyond the door.
Some things are meant to be forgotten.
But something is calling you to remember.
Before you go any further, read this!!!
This adventure contains themes of existential horror, reality manipulation, memory loss, and the unraveling of time. Players may also encounter themes of identity erasure, non-linear causality, and the consequences of altering fundamental truths. Readers and players should be aware that this is a story of inevitability and consequence, where choices shape the world in ways that cannot be undone. For some of you, this is exactly why you have purchased this adventure. For others…
I play in a couple D&D games; one weekly and one bi-weekly.
In one of my games, I’ve been playing a dwarf paladin destined to be a paladin of Moradin from the awesome Faiths of the Forgotten Realms book. And everything was progressing along nicely.
At level 2, I’ve been roleplaying little events in the game that are pointing towards his intended path. Intended, that is, until we visited a small town overrun with squid creatures from the Far Realm. Kade (Orcsplitter, in the finest Dwarven tradition) managed to get himself a parasitic squid parasite living in his head and spinal column. In a moment, he was turned from the hammer and anvil.
Later, when the party wizards and a handful of scraggily bandits managed to free everyone, Kade traded in his hammer for a battle axe. Filled with rage, he is now in the process of walking down and dismantling every infested squid-slave he can get his paws on. To the shock and dismay of some of my party members, of course.
The axe, the rage, the uncompromising judgement – they are all part of a plan that suddenly occurred to me while I was wandering around happily being a parasitic host and worshipping some old farming god. I was no longer going to be a paladin of Moradin. Instead, my experience has turned me toward a path of Vengeance. No longer would I be the hammer of justice for my god. I would be the clenched fist that wields it.
Now the real story begins. because as he is adventuring in these early levels, he is forming as a character. I’m getting a better sense of who he is and what he wants to accomplish. I’m getting to know what he likes and what he hates. And I’ve discovered that prior to level 3, “I haven’t taken my oath yet!” is a great way to shut down any criticism about Kade’s methods.
Sure, D&D is a game about rolling dice and collecting treasure. But where it truly shines, and will always shine, is as a group storytelling exercise. In my mind, the best way to do this is to live the world as your character.
Think about how your character might respond to things that are happening to them and around them. THAT is your real back story. Your background is just the bones. The meat, blood, skin, and organs grow out of those early levels.
Work stuff:
I recently heard back from the editors of a story I subbed back in October, and it turns out they liked it enough that they want to add it to their anthology. Great news! It’s always exciting to get that kind of information in your inbox. It helps that these editors are great people and very talented, and they live in my neck of the woods (internationally speaking).
I also heard back from a second place I had subbed to, and they let me know they would not be taking the story I sent them. I still have hope for this one. This is the second market it’s been turned down from, so we are still in single digits. I’m still optimistic, in other words.
I haven’t released a new adventure in a couple weeks, but I have a handful of them sitting at the moment waiting for a couple final pieces. I’m working on a process to get my maps coloured, because that would be more cool. Good work takes time (and money).
I’ll post an image from my latest WiP, a near perfect reconstruction of a Halloween adventure I ran for my 2-year Rime group. Perfect, as in it is almost exactly how I ran it back then. You’ll have to decide for yourself if it’s any good 😉
I finished up a new adventure over the weekend and submitted a story to an open call anthology. I’ve been on a bit of a folk horror kick lately, so there will probably be a few more in me over the next few months.
Anyway, this new adventure is called the Temple of the Shrike. Shrikes, as you may know are little birds with an awesome tendency to impale their food on thorns so they can save it for later. Butcherbirds. There was a time in my life when I didn’t know these birds existed, and my world was poorer for it. Slowly, from that seed, grew a story idea.
I’ll try to explain some of this without spoiling it, in case you want to hop over to DMs Guild and grab a copy for yourself. My adventures are cheap – I’d rather people were playing them than make money off them.
So let’s start with a village on the edge of a large forest. And the village is really just a group of homesteaders whose ancestors threw their lots in together and made a go of things. Hundreds of years ago. And things were good, for most of those years. But now, things are not going so well.
The crops are spoiling, animals are being dragged off in the night, and thorny vines have begun taking over the old outbuildings on the edge of town. Everything is pointing to the woods just outside the village.
This is where the adventurers come in. It’s a straight forward mystery/save the village/go fight a big bad and collect some treasure.
At least, it seems like that at first. As they poke about, things start to look a little slanted. after a while, the players may start to wonder what side of this they are actually on.
I’m happy with how this adventure turned out because it highlights two things I love to do in D&D. First, I am a huge fan of turning things that shouldn’t be monsters into monsters, and finding good reasons for them to do so. A lot of my horror fiction deals with good people suffering under the yoke of whatever bullshit the universe throws at them. This bleeds into my D&D adventures as well. I think the world not giving a damn about you is kind of a universal feeling. especially in these dark times. But I’m rambling now.
The other thing I love in D&D is trying to come up with new ways to do things. So I can tell you this adventure has a labyrinth in it – a notoriously difficult thing to run and keep interesting. We’ve all been in games where the maze went something like, “You walk ahead 10 feet and come to an intersection where you can go left or right.” the party, as one: “Always go right!” “You go right. You walk ahead 10 feet and come to an intersection where you can go left or right.” Etc.
So this adventure has something different. I gave DMs the option of running it the usual way, or running it cinematically. The form it takes is kind of a mini-point crawl in the middle of the story. Does it work? I think so. I’ve done similar things in my games, and thought they turned out well. Hopefully someone will let me know how it goes for them. Hopefully, they’ll enjoy it.
Anyway, here is the adventure link, and I’ll post the cover on this entry, up at the top, where they always are.
And we’ll se you back here soon. Same bat time. Same bat channel.
Deep in the wilds, the Temple of the Shrike lies in ruin, overgrown and haunted by vengeance. Once a druidic sanctuary, it became a grave when settlers slaughtered its guardians, impaling their bodies and burning their children alive.
A single child, horribly disfigured, survived. Now, she has returned, her wrath woven into a labyrinth of thorns and the unfinished Wicker Behemoth. The land does not weep. It does not mourn.
It simply waits.
Before you go any further, read this!!! This story contains themes of vengeance, destruction, and generational guilt. Readers may also encounter unsettling depictions of massacres, human sacrifice, impalement, and the haunting weight of past atrocities. Please proceed with caution if you are sensitive to these themes. For some of you, this is exactly why you have purchased this adventure. For others…
J.W. Schnarr 