Thông tin tài liệu
The Treasure Map The Trick: The adventurers come across the withered corpses of another adventuring party A treasure map is clutched in one skeletal claw The deceased party still has its gear and even some magic items, so obviously this is a real case of death by misadventure—the bodies weren’t even looted The Trap: The adventurers follow the map to an awful underground cavern complex full of perilous hazards and monsters, and many are killed The Finale: The zoogs drag out the newly-dead corpses from the caverns, perhaps eat one or two of the victims, scavenge the most useful magic items, and “re-seed” the trap with the new cadavers, placing the treasure map in the hands of one of the deceased party members They also make sure that the magic items they leave as bait are not useful in their cavern complex For example, if the complex contains undead, they might leave a wand of charm person, since that spell is ineffective against undead The trap is particularly cruel in the way it instills a false sense of security The Rotten Log The Trick: In an especially creepy and dense part of the forest, filled with fluttering zoogs, the trail is blocked by a huge rotten log Upon close inspection, the log is filled with poisonous spiders The Trap: All the adventurers have to to avoid the spiders is to leap gracefully over the log, so they Unfortunately, the log’s actual purpose is to conceal the deep pit just behind it The leaping adventures fall right into the hole, which is also filled with poison spiders, spikes, or whatever the zoogs’ inventive imagination came up with Sleep poison is particularly useful, as the first adventurer who falls into the pit may not be able to warn those coming second The Finale: Usually, only one adventurer jumps into the pit, but the others are likely to get bitten by 50 the spiders while they try to rescue their comrade Eventually, the poisoned, weakened party is vulnerable to other traps and tricks down the line Though the trap is designed to weaken rather than slay, unlucky or unwary parties might even suffer losses from it Relations Fundamentally, zoogs are pack ambush predators, and have no cultural or biological bias against eating sentient beings Because of this, they are often feared and avoided On the other hand, they are not relentlessly hostile, and have useful lore, magic, and artifacts, so their hard-won friendship can be quite valuable Folk who live near zoog woods naturally avoid the trees, and sometimes even try to erect fences against the forest Such efforts don’t keep the zoogs away, but they at least render it less likely that an animal or a child will wander by mistake into zoog territory No other civilized race is allowed to live as a group within a zoog wood Zoogs not typically “share” their forest with a tribe of elves, though a single dryad or perhaps a family of half-orcs might be tolerated, particularly if they are beneficial to the zoogs If it is a large forest, sometimes part of the area is the zoog wood, and the rest might be owned or dominated by some other group Adventurers Zoogs are curious and inventive and they value practical knowledge, so it’s not uncommon for zoogs to venture outside their woods in search of this When this happens, the zoogs, being small and physically weak, tend to join a party of the big people Given their size, even some gnomes and halflings are big by zoog standards Zoogs can prove highly useful members of an adventuring party Their delicate hands render them excellent magicians and rogues, and the ancient lore
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