Deep in the Spring Tide Sea Caves
A downloadable Heroic Chord adventure
It's the yearly Spring Tide Festival in the coastal city of Stageport, in the land known as Amylte.
On the shore and along the docks, vendors sell seafood, performers show off tricks, families go tidepooling and beachcombing together, and curious adventurers and treasure seekers descend into the sea caves whose entrances are only revealed when the tide is at this low point. Some caves are fairly well traveled each year and simple to navigate, with wall guide markings and smoothly trod floors. Locals sometimes hide items in one year so that they and others can search and scavenge for them in future years after the water has moved, reshaped, or further hidden what they left behind.
What brings your party to this lively and subtly dangerous place, and what will you find if you venture into the depths?
This adventure for the Heroic Chord system by Peach Garden Games contains plot/prompt suggestions for festival adventures in Stageport, multiple dockside locations and NPCs, and a map of a sea cave with custom encounters! Enjoy a colorful version with illustrations assembled from vintage line art, or download a plainer version for easy reading and printing.
All illustrations were assembled and edited using Canva.
Cover image uses free stock photography by anouar olh from Pexels.
The sea caves map was built using watabou's One Page Dungeon Generator.
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Deep In The Spring Tide Caves is a rustic oceanside adventure for the team-based, high fantasy trpg Heroic Chord.
It's 9 pages, with lovely art and a great, extremely readable layout.
Matching Heroic Chord's bright and pleasant tone, Spring Tide Caves doesn't take place in a particularly hostile part of the world. Stageport is a beachfront community with a variety of caves lining the shore, and locals and outsiders sometimes explore these caves during particularly low tides. People do occasionally die in the caves, but not often enough that anyone's behavior changes.
Hooking the party into an adventure in Stageport is extremely easy, as all it takes is for someone to get lost in the caves---which an NPC has conveniently done. However, Spring Tide Caves is also a great opportunity just to have a beach episode. The town is welcoming. The NPCs are genuinely nice. If your group needs a reprieve, this is a great choice.
If the PCs do go down into the caves, a full map is provided of one area of the network, and there's plenty of room in the lore for you to generate your own caves too. Like the town, the dungeon isn't especially dangerous---but there's still trouble to get into, and its NPCs are a delight to interact with.
There's only a few fights (which can be handled socially,) but they're detailed and engaging. A hostile party will get into a lot of combat. A diplomatic party will talk a bunch. The scenario matches the intentions of your group.
Spring Tide Caves' writing is lush and descriptive, and it gives you a very clear sense of the environment and characters. It isn't terse like an OSR scenario, but it doesn't feel like there's wasted words either.
Overall, if you're looking for an adventure for Heroic Chord (or Ryuutama, or DnD, or any other fantasy rpg with a rustic tone,) I'd strongly recommend checking this out. It's written for Heroic Chord, but it has such good bones that I'd absolutely recommend adapting it if you're currently running something else.