Umbriel's Monitor

When most people think of the Malerie Dash series by Cynthia Gorm, the one that almost always comes to mind is Song of the Sunset. Which is by all rights a fantastic book, but the one that captured my young imagination the most was Umbriel's Monitor. It was less straight forward than the other entries in the series (23 in all!). It had a nuance that most readers didn't see coming. Almost every villain turned out to be a victim of circumstance more than anything. The spider people of Wunda were frightening at first, but came to Malerie's rescue when the apes attacked. Even the apes were dealing with the mutating radiation of the crystal mountains. And to top it all off the "evil" wizard was really a good guy who just happened to be screwing everything up by accident.

When I decided to adapt it for an rpg adventure, I thought it would be fun to capture a little of the old magic of wondering who the real bad guy was. So here, the GM gets to decide which wizard is the evil one. There's no stats in this adventure, so adapt it to your game of choice. And having a robot dog named Dottie isn't a requirement, but it sure helped in Malerie's case. 

This was made for Appendix N Jam. The book it's based on is entirely fictitious, so please don't lose sleep trying to find it. It's like Malerie Dash always says, "You don't really know a stone until you turn it over."

Cover art by Perplexing Ruins, used with generous permission. No AI was used in the making of this adventure.