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 Hexen Temple, the second adventure in the Amberblight Quintet, is now live on Amazon – for those of you who prefer paper over pixels (like myself). If you are just getting caught up, here is where we sit at the beginning of The Hexen Temple:
An ancient Elven artifact has been discovered beneath the long deserted Dwarven outpost known as Rockshield. The artifact, once buried at the base of a great magical tree, unleashed a horrific blight upon the region when activated, and it was only the actions of a brave adventuring company that stopped the blight from spreading across the realm.
Now, the artifact is seemingly deactivated, but it has a strange habit of drawing in anyone near it with whispered promises of power, wealth, and potential.
The Elves are coming to reclaim the artifact for themselves, while the local dwarves have other ideas. On the eve of the arrival of two elven envoys, a group of Rockshield dwarves steal the artifact, determined not to let it fall into elven hands.
Enspelled by its power, they attack and kidnap the residents of a hunting village before retreating into a Dwarven crypt nearby, determined to reactivate the artifact and gain the wealth, and power the artifact has promised.
The elves are determined not to let this happen. They alone know what the artifact is, and what it is capable of, but they are not telling anyone.
All that is known is the artifact is important enough for the elves to be willing to die in service of retrieving it. And they are also willing to kill…
So that is the story. But you may be asking yourself, what do you actually do?
In The Hexen Temple, your players will be part of the discussions between the envoys and get a chance to decide for themselves which of the two competing groups of elves they join to reclaim the object. They will race into the mountains, trying to beat the competing elves to the site of the Hexen Temple, and then face off against dwarves, Skarnid mutations, and the competing elves who are now determined to claim the artifact at any cost. The adventure culminates in a battle between the horrific secret at the heart of the Hexen Temple, the dwarves, the Skarnid mutations, the competing elves, and the players themselves.
And you know, since this is book 2 of 5, you know it’s only going to get more dangerous from here on out…
Hope you enjoy it! And watch out for “The Hymn of the Hollow God” – Book III of the Amberblight Quintet – coming out on digital at the Dungeon Master’s Guild later this month!
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.
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…
My two shorter, earlier adventures, The Den and The Changelings, are about to be in print. The Den actually is in print on Amazon as we speak, laid out similar to the digital designs found on the Dungeon Masters Guild, but in that handy little 6X9 format. I’ve priced them lower than The Tower at the End of Time due to the size difference in the books – both are around 30 pages while Tower is 70.
Both The Den and The Changelings are rebuilds from my Rime of the Frostmaiden campaign and when I originally ran them, my players worked through in about 4 hours. I thought the same would be said for Tower, but they ended up doing that adventure over two nights and wrapping up one outstanding issue on the third night.
I have a couple more of these to do, The Crypt of The Four and The Temple of the Shrike, and then I should be all caught up in terms of digital adventures heading to print. In the future, I may launch print and digital adventures together.
Some news on that “Glimmering Plague” trilogy I was working on – It has expanded into a Quintet. Honestly, I get lost in these things sometimes. I was motoring along and suddenly hit 50 pages and realized I was only halfway through what I had planned. So after talking it over with a pal (and I seriously know two of the greatest D&D minds out there), He suggested a quintet might be in order. Yeah, why not? Maybe I’ll release it as five individual adventures as well as one big one. Could be around 200 pages of content by the time it is done. Hardcover? Maybe. I have to write the damn things first.
I have an interview coming up with the local paper – it was an easy pitch, since the reporter is a friend of mine. He’s always looking for good community news stories. And I mean, I do live in the community.
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 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…
As a palate cleanser between stories this year, I have been working on something I have been doing for fun for damn near 40 years, but have never put out in the world. Dungeons and Dragons adventure modules. The first two are live now on Dungeon Masters Guild, and I have a longer one I am just wrapping up.
These first two adventures were one-offs I wrote into a two-year Rime of the Frostmaiden campaign that we just wrapped up before Christmas. I probably added a dozen or so adventures to that game and an entire subplot involving time travel and Vecna, and I would like to get some of them down before they are lost forever. I probably have 1,000 or more commercially-licensed maps, and no end to ideas when it comes to one or two-night adventures.
The first of the adventures I’ve called The Changelings.
A Storm is brewing, and something hungry is here… Weeks of relentless storms have drenched the region, but the true danger lies beneath the surface. Deep in the woods, a forgotten megalith, once used for blasphemous rituals to an ancient, otherworldly being, has suddenly reactivated.
Lightning has pierced the veil between worlds, unleashing ghastly creatures from the far realm.
Now, the idyllic village of Applewood is under siege. The creatures are infiltrating, wearing the flayed skins of their victims and mimicking their lives. As fear grips the villagers, can anyone uncover the horrifying truth before it’s too late?
Enter the storm, unmask the terror, and face the unspeakable…
A Horror Story for levels 1-3
I have put it up on Dungeon Master’s Guild for $2.99 US (sorry, Canadians – gotta get that money before the tariffs come in!)
If you are interested in this sort of thing, and pick it up, I would love to hear how it goes.
For more information, please check it out over here:
J.W. Schnarr 