The Dark Tide of Damodan is a short adventure by Crit Academy, for characters of 5th to 8th level.

The players find themselves in the town of Havenwood during a massive storm, when a merrow named Damodan and his minions attack and kidnap several people. The party is then approached to find the missing people and end the constant attacks by the merfolk, so they set off to find Damodan’s base of operations.

In order to do that, you have to interrogate a captive from the raid, who eventually points you to the right direction – so with the assistance of a captain, they get on a ship and brave the storm to get there. For these parts, you use Skill Challenges rather than simple skill checks or random encounters, which i think is a good use of them (CritAcademy wrote a whole supplement on Challenges). When they reach Damodan’s Keep, the main combat part of the adventure takes place – which might get a bit complicated.

Part of the dungeon is underwater, so you have to keep track of breathing as well as combat in 3 dimensions. Besides that, it’s a fairly standard dungeon crawl, moving from room to room and rescuing the captives one by one, though there’s an extra bonus: Each captive has information on where to find one or two others, so as the players progress and save them, they have more concrete directions instead of checking every single room – especially since time is a concern. The captives (and players too, probably) have used vials of aboleth mucus to be able to breathe underwater, but they have a limited duration – and another limitation is that they prevent them from breathing air. You you have to rescue the townspeople before they drown, but take care not to let them suffocate on dry land. When they finally leave the keep, Damodan himself appears for a climactic fight, with his own lair actions.

Ultimately it appears as a quite straightforward plot, but there are quite a bit of additional details behind the scenes. Damodan is working for an aboleth, gathering an army of mer, kuo-toa, and other servants in order to gain power. While not something that has too much direct impact on this one shot, it can be used as a jumping off point for later adventures, especially if Damodan survives the encounter.

Overall, Dark Tide of Damodan is a fun, relatively short underwater dungeon crawl that can grow to a full campaign, with not only some intense combat but also plenty of exploring and interacting with various NPCs.

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