Jihizar Oasis

This campaign is three sessions old now and is up to 4 players. The oasis seems a terrible place to the players - the ruler has perverted the local fertility cult with blood sacrifices to feed his lush gardens and rules with a legion of undead skeletons, ghouls and zombies.

Then there is his vizier who has seized the wares of the alcoholic elf wizard and has threatened the players with execution as spies if they do not spy for him on his master. The players are all in the monthly blood sacrifice lottery and three of them have just survived a fight in the arena to prove their worth as workers at the oasis, which earns them a crust and a bed rather than being cast out into the desert where sand-dwelling trollkin lurk, waiting for the unwary.

A 200-strong bandit force, which sacked the caravan that brought the players to the oasis, is about to attempt to take the oasis but must first content with the Undead Legion sent to settle things away from the palace. Stories of demonic possession of the caravan captain have been brought back by a cleric healer traded by the bandits for items held by the Jihizar priestesses - this does not bode well for anyone.

The people here - Scarabs - have a hard life and steal anything they can and the vizier's 70 year old secretary has developed a hankering for the elf wizard, much to his distress. The halfling paladin has continually to deal with ignorant Scarabs assuming he is a little boy while the thief/scout player has been cursed by a Scarab and his condition is deteriorating daily.

The one mitigating factor is that the Scarabs selected as oasis guards seem honourable and honest.

The players are about to attempt to spy on Boreas, the oasis ruler, in his Gardens as the vizier has demanded a report but they have only an hour before they must go out into the desert to seek to recapture stray camels.

Nothing is simple here. nothing happens which does not add a strand to the web of deceit that is being spun about them.

This game is a D&D game, a set of hybrid rules as each player uses a different edition and I know none! My T&T tendency has been brought to bear in one particular way - adding a LK attribute which is getting a good work out.

Here are the gardens they are entering:

And this is the commander of the Undead Legion, Leviticus:

 These are the sand-dwelling trollkin flesh-eaters:

This is the scheming vizier: