A lighthouse keeper possessed by an ancient imprisoned elemental is turning Saltcliff’s beacon into a weapon — and a merchant fleet worth more than the town itself arrives in three days.
Welcome to “The Lighthouse Shadows” 5E adventure! Within these pages, you’ll discover everything necessary to embark on this thrilling quest, complete with detailed descriptions of locations, encounters, NPCs and stat blocks, maps, and handouts.
This adventure also features a versatile and scalable system, allowing Game Masters to easily adjust the difficulty and complexity of encounters to suit their players’ preferences and skill levels. Whether you have a party of advanced players or beginners, you can tailor the challenges to ensure an exciting and engaging experience for everyone involved. The scalable system guides modifying creature statistics, making it simple to customize the adventure to fit your party’s level.
In “The Lighthouse Shadows,” a party of 3-5 characters (levels 3-5) is hired to investigate a rash of mysterious shipwrecks in the coastal town of Saltcliff. The lighthouse keeper, Kalli Vale, has been possessed by an ancient water elemental imprisoned within a black pearl she unknowingly disturbed. As her madness grows, supernatural storms and flooding escalate across the town. Saltcliff’s daughter, Sarah, begs the party to save her mother — while the Merchant Guild cares only about saving the ships. A three-day countdown drives every decision, with escalating supernatural events punishing delay and rewarding urgency. The adventure is divided into three parts.
Part 1: Welcome to Saltcliff
The party arrives in a coastal town gripped by unease — seabirds attacking in the market, wells behaving strangely, unnatural fog rolling off the harbor, and the lighthouse beam flickering an eerie blue in the distance. Three townsfolk set the competing stakes: a daughter desperate to save her possessed mother, a harbormaster counting down to the arrival of a merchant fleet, and a ship’s captain searching for her missing crew. Several locations reward a thorough investigation, from shipwreck logs that reveal a pattern in the lighthouse failures to a keeper’s journal and her unsettling sketches of a black pearl. And the town itself reacts to the party’s pace — a series of supernatural events fire based on their timing and choices, each one rewarding action and penalizing delay.
Part 2: The Lighthouse Path
The mile-long cliff path north of Saltcliff is treacherous even under ordinary conditions — a narrow track two hundred feet above the sea, battered by salt wind and driving rain. Three distinct stretches each demand their own care, including a harrowing ledge where a single bad step means a long fall, and the danger is constant: possessed wreckage, a water weird waiting to drag the careless off the edge, and ethereal whispers luring travelers toward the sea. Rising tides and a sudden lightning storm add their own pressure, and a few key locations along the way reward exploration with supplies, intelligence, and the first carvings that reveal where the black pearl truly came from.
Part 3: The Lighthouse Tower
The corrupted lighthouse spans three levels, each with its own hazards and enemies, and all of them overlaid by dangers that worsen the longer the party lingers — a collapsing staircase, a blinding supernatural beam, and steadily rising floodwaters. The ground floor and service level lead the party past water weirds, animated ropes and chains, ice mephits, and frost-rimed workshops, while careful searching turns up the keeper’s logbooks, her final notes, and a crucial item the party will need to end the threat for good. At the Lantern Room summit waits the final confrontation: the possessed Kalli fights amid the rotating lens housing, and when the battle turns, the black pearl tears free, summoning elementals as the room floods around the party. A constantly shifting set of hazards — surging waves, lightning through shattered glass, drowning mist, watery duplicates of the heroes themselves — keeps the fight from ever settling. The pearl can be undone in more than one way, and the outcome decides everything: complete success restores the beacon, saves Kalli, and earns the town’s gratitude; partial success clears the storm but costs Kalli her life and drives Sarah away; failure sends the lighthouse into the sea and devastates Saltcliff for years.
Release Date: 2024 Format: Digital (PDF)
Items Included
- The Lighthouse Shadows 5E (PDF)
- A B&W Printer-Friendly Version (PDF)
- Maps
- Illustrations (Generated with Midjourney)
- Monster Stat Blocks
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