Session 4 — the fight
The warehouse cellar · built for session 4, run in session 5
At a glance
- Who
- The Ino of Wat Fenner (×1), grown into the cellar, and two drowned mercenaries (×2). Casks can add specters. Four characters at 4th level.
- How long
- ~45 minutes. Everything is in the cellar from round 1.
- How it ends
- Wat drops, his body is destroyed, and the Cold Kiss falls where he was. His soul is loose until the end of the next round. Whoever holds the Cold Kiss can send him on. If nobody does, he stays in the cellar, claimed.
- The one rule
- How a cask is broken decides what comes out. Fire: it bursts. Slashing or anything else: a specter. A Speaker’s rite: the soul goes on.
This page holds the fight’s numbers. It was built for session 4 and never run; it is the middle act of session 5, between the main floor and the doors. The session 5 sheet links here, and so does the session 4 sheet. No read-alouds are written yet.
The roster
The Ino of Wat Fenner, called Low Tide
The Ino of Wat Fenner
Reskin of the Roper (MM) · Large undead, neutral evil · three house tweaks, below; AC and hit points retuned from the printed 20 and 93
Skills Perception +6, Stealth +5 · Senses darkvision 60 ft, passive Perception 16
False Appearance. While he stays still, he looks like a stack of casks lashed to a timber post by the drain grate.
Grasping Tendrils. Up to six rope tendrils at a time. Each can be attacked (AC 16; 10 hit points; immune to poison and psychic damage). Destroying one does not hurt him, and he grows another on his next turn. A creature can also break one with an action and a DC 15 Strength check.
Spider Climb. Climbs any surface, including upside down, without a check.
House tweak — The Cold Kiss in his mouth. It glows cold green in the water, brighter as the cellar floods. Nobody can take it from him while he stands.
House tweak — The reel shakes you loose. A paralyzed creature he reels is no longer paralyzed.
House tweak — Claimed, not gone. At 0 hit points his body falls apart into rope and staves. His soul is loose in that space until the end of the next round. Anyone holding the Cold Kiss can press it to the space as an action and send him on to the Wheel. After that round he stays claimed in the cellar, no longer mad, until a marked cask takes him or someone speaks the truth of his death there. The Cold Kiss sends a soul on only in that one round.
Actions
Multiattack. Four attacks with his tendrils, then Reel, then one bite.
Tendril. Melee Weapon Attack: +7 to hit, reach 50 ft, one creature. Hit: the target is grappled (escape DC 15). Until the grapple ends it is restrained and has disadvantage on Strength checks and saves, and that tendril can’t take anyone else.
Reel. Pulls each creature he is grappling up to 25 ft straight toward him.
Bite. Melee Weapon Attack: +7 to hit, reach 5 ft, one target. Hit: 22 (4d8 + 4) piercing damage.
- Who he goes for: whoever carries a light. The cellar is dark, so the light-bearer is hauled first.
- When he stops: never. No morale. He does not finish downed targets.
Wat’s crewmen
Not his old crew. They are two of the mercenaries Dita sent in to clear the cellar before the party came; Wat killed them and they came back as his. The rest of those two groups are bodies in the water (Jack, 2026-10-01). The tracker names stay “Wat’s crewman 1/2”.
Wat’s crewman (×2)
Reskin of the Ghoul (MM) · Medium undead, chaotic evil · one house tweak, below
Damage Immunities poison · Condition Immunities charmed, exhaustion, poisoned · Senses darkvision 60 ft, passive Perception 10
House tweak — Claws split casks. When a crewman misses with its claws, one cask within 5 ft of its target splits. See the casks.
Actions
Bite. Melee Weapon Attack: +2 to hit, reach 5 ft, one creature. Hit: 9 (2d6 + 2) piercing damage.
Claws. Melee Weapon Attack: +4 to hit, reach 5 ft, one target. Hit: 7 (2d4 + 2) slashing damage. A creature that is not an elf or undead makes a DC 10 Constitution save or is paralyzed for 1 minute, repeating the save at the end of each of its turns.
- Who they go for: whoever is nearest.
- When they stop: never. No morale. They fight on when Wat drops.
The casks
Many casks. About three in every dozen hold a soul. The empty ones have gone grey inside; the full ones have not. A light and a close look at the staves tells them apart: DC 12 Intelligence (Investigation).
- Broken with fire: it bursts. Each creature within 10 ft makes a DC 13 Dexterity save, taking 2d6 fire and 2d6 necrotic damage on a failure or half on a success. The soul is destroyed, never reborn.
- Broken with slashing, or any other way: a hostile specter comes out.
- Opened by a Speaker’s rite: the soul goes on to the Wheel. Only Speaker Dol or another Animist can do it.
- An empty grey cask does nothing when broken.
Specters from the casks
Specter
Specter (MM), as printed · Medium undead, chaotic evil
Damage Resistances acid, cold, fire, lightning, thunder; bludgeoning, piercing, and slashing from nonmagical attacks · Damage Immunities necrotic, poison · Condition Immunities charmed, exhaustion, grappled, paralyzed, petrified, poisoned, prone, restrained, unconscious · Senses darkvision 60 ft, passive Perception 10
Incorporeal Movement. Moves through creatures and objects as difficult terrain. Takes 5 (1d10) force damage if it ends its turn inside an object.
Sunlight Sensitivity. In sunlight, disadvantage on attack rolls and on sight-based Perception checks.
Actions
Life Drain. Melee Spell Attack: +4 to hit, reach 5 ft, one creature. Hit: 10 (3d6) necrotic damage. DC 10 Constitution save or its hit point maximum is reduced by the damage taken until a long rest.
Every specter a split cask lets out, here and on the deck and grave fights, uses this block.
If the shed is burning
Only if the party light it.
- The party choose when to light it.
- Once lit, the shed burns. At the end of round 3 its floor falls into the cellar, and every full cask down there bursts. Those souls are destroyed. Anyone still in the cellar takes every burst in range.
- Lit at high tide, the cellar is flooded. The floor falls into the water, and the casks below survive under the ruins.
- What happens to Wat, if he is still down there, is not decided.
Scaling
The written roster: 2,200 raw XP × 2 for three creatures = 4,400 adjusted. Deadly for four at 4th is 2,000, so this is 220% of Deadly, and Deadly under both the DMG and Improved Initiative. Enemy damage is at most about 36 a round (bite 22, two claws 7) against a party pool of 156; the roster holds 163 hit points. None of it resists weapons. Wat was the printed Roper at AC 20 and 93 hit points; he is retuned to AC 16 and 119, still CR 5. At AC 20 a +5 attacker hits 30% of the time and a restrained one 9%, which stretched the fight past five rounds. At AC 16 those are 50% and 25%.
One more character: add one crewman. 2,400 raw × 2 = 4,800 against a Deadly of 2,500 (192%).
The ceiling: two cask specters make 5,200 adjusted (260%). Four make seven creatures, the multiplier steps to ×2.5, and it is 7,500 (375%). That is where it stops being survivable. Every missed claw can split a cask, so fighting away from the stacks is the brake.
Environment
- Light. None. The cellar is dark. The party carry whatever light there is.
- Footing. The water rises. Round 1: ankle-deep, no effect. Rounds 2 and 3: knee-deep, difficult terrain for anyone walking. Round 4 on: waist-deep, difficult terrain, and anything dropped goes under the water. Picking the Cold Kiss up out of it takes an action. Wat does not move. The crewmen walk, and the water slows them like anyone. Cask specters fly and ignore it.
- Cover. The cask stacks give half cover to anyone walking. Specters pass through them.
- Loose. The casks. See the casks.
- Below. The cellar drains through the wall into the pale oyster bed from cold open 3.
Environment prompt
Generate an image that is a D&D battle map in 16-bit pixel art, in the style of Chrono Trigger. A wide, zoomed-out overhead view of a long rectangular flooded stone cellar under a waterfront warehouse. A wooden stair coming down from a trapdoor at one end, timber posts in two long rows, standing seawater over a stone floor, a drain grate in the far wall, stacked casks and crates around the walls. Out in the water, five or six separate clumps of cargo — stacks of casks standing in the water, a collapsed stack with staves floating around it, a fallen beam, crates up on a stone plinth — each only two or three casks across, with clear channels of open water at least four casks wide between them. Keep the water below the stair open and the drain grate clear; about a third of the floor is still open water. No people. No grid lines, no text.
How it ends — Wat drops, and his soul is sent on or stays
Dropping Wat does not end the fight on its own. His soul is loose for a round, and whether the Cold Kiss sends him on is decided in that round.
- They win. Wat drops and someone holding the Cold Kiss sends him on, or leaves him claimed in the cellar. They climb out with the Cold Kiss and whatever unbroken full casks they choose to carry as proof.
- They half-win. Not decided.
- Nobody made it. Not decided.