Three Villages of Cush - Preview of NOD 16

What an insane week!

I'm a day or three away from releasing NOD 16 and B1 - The Tumbled Towers, an intro module for Blood & Treasure with some pre-generated characters. B1 - The Tumbled Towers will be a free download, and probably a pretty cheap print product (cause it's short!).

Since things are so berserk lately (it's quarterly report time in my real job), I'm going with another Cush preview today. Enjoy!

15.41 Kaba: Kaba is a large village of 250 people set amidst large groves of butter trees, which produce a fruit favored by both humans and baboons. The village has tall stone walls with locked gates and narrow streets. During the day, people are out and about, tending the groves, hunting in the jungle, cooking their food, repairing tools, etc. As soon as the sun begins to sink, though, they lock the village gates and go inside, locking their doors and not opening them for anything. This is because a band of ghouls has found its way to their village, finding the secret places in the jungle where they have buried their dead and feeding on them. They have made incursions into the village and killed several men and women, turning them into ghouls as well, who are now obsessed with feeding on their relatives and loved ones. The village leader, a sage called Sambwa the Wise (Adept 3; 4 hp), has no idea what to do about the ghouls. The people will not allow him to dig up the bodies of their ancestors and burn them (though the newly died are burnt now, outside the village), and the graveyards are not safe to approach anyways. He has sent a few warriors out to other villages seeking help from monster slayers.

16.26 Nameless Village: On a hill overlooking the lazy Jamba River there is a village (pop. 230) surrounded by a palisade. All of the buildings in the village are narrow towers built of limestone quarried in the middle of town. The people of this nameless village are squat, thick, grey-skinned humanoids with toothless mouths who communicate with sign language and a clicking sound they make with their thick tongues against the roof of the mouth. The people are accomplished sculptors and surprisingly agile for their build.

The village supports several sculptors, a master mason and an inn. The inn has been built into an empty quarry, with people sleeping in deep, narrow alcoves dug into the walls. The innkeeper serves palm wine in crystal decanters and slugs and snails spiced with ground pepper. The town’s main protectors are a quartet of 1st level fighting-men armed with spears and falchions. The village has no apparent leader.

The village’s treasury contains a silver falchion, four golden-brown capes (worth 5 gp each), eleven tiny ivory flutes (worth 20 gp each), a pair of copper gauntlets with only three fingers (worth 100 gp), a brass-capped bone cane (worth 200 gp) and a lead (triple weight, AC 14) cuirass bearing the symbol of Atum.

18.02 Chimpanzees: A tribe of 100 intelligent chimpanzees dwells here in a collection of odd huts reminscent of the mud-nests of the termites, though larger. Each hut ranges in height from 15 to 30 feet, and can only be entered from above. Between the huts there are pens for the chimpanzee’s dogs – some for riding, others kept for food. The warriors of the tribe (there are 40) carry shields and wield long gnarled clubs. The chimpanzees are led by a grizzled male called Bobo, who smokes a long, iron pipe and wears a tattered purple cloak. A diamond stick pin worth 500 gp is hidden in the hem of the cloak.